Cuts through fog, exposes lies, and helps unravel the Media-Industrial-Military-Financial complex. These posts are meant to inform, enlighten, enable, and make you laugh, cry, do the right thing, etc.
Has Sweden offered any assurances that Julian Assange will not be extradited to the U.S.A? Sweden has already shown itself to be a big secret supporter of U.S. foreign policy. And now for the first time someone has been extradited for sex charges in the European Union. Peacenik doesn't trust Sweden in this matter, nor Britain, nor the U.S.A. Peacenik hopes Julian Assange will have his own security. Meanwhile has anyone noticed a lack of news from Wikileaks. The efforts to marginalize and intimidate and bankrupt Wikileaks seem to be having an effect. Peacenik says release the Doomsday File now. Lets see the Bank of America documents. And free Julian Assange.
Supporters of the founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange hold placards as they wait for his arrival for his extradition hearing Feb. 24.
LONDON — Julian Assange can be extradited to Sweden in a sex crimes inquiry, a British judge ruled Thursday, rejecting claims by the WikiLeaks founder that he would not face a fair trial there. Assange's lawyer said he would appeal.
Judge Howard Riddle said the allegations of rape and sexual molestation by two women against Assange meet the definition of extraditable offenses and said the Swedish warrant had been properly issued and was valid.
Assange, 39, a key figure in the release of tens of thousands of secret U.S. government and military documents, has been out on bail during the extradition fight. He has seven days to appeal the ruling in British courts.
After hearing three days of testimony this month, Riddle concluded “there is simply no reason to believe there has been a mistake” about the European Arrest Warrant issued by Swedish authorities.
When Peacenik reads this Peacenik can only shake Peacenik's head and wonder why is Canada mixed up in this. Why is NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organzation, involved in a war in god knows where.
Where is Afghanistan anyways?
Has Harper read the Wikileaks leaks? What does he think? Does anyone care? This is insane. Bring the troops home now.
by Ray McGovern
Perhaps President Barack Obama should give himself a waiver on the ban prohibiting U.S. government employees from downloading classified cables released by WikiLeaks, so he can better understand the futility of his Afghan War strategy.
For instance, if Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has hidden from him Ambassador Karl Eikenberry's cables from Kabul, he might wish to search out KABUL 001892 of July 13, 2009, in which Eikenberry reports that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is "unable to grasp the most rudimentary principles of state building."
And, while he's at it, he should dig out the September 2009 cable from the U.S. Ambassador in Pakistan, Anne Patterson, in which she warns: "There is no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced assistance ... as sufficient compensation for abandoning support to these [Taliban and similar] groups in Pakistan."
Fer crying in the sink. Is there any way that the Obama administration is different from the Bush administration? Peacenik thought the Obama Justice Department might prosecute some criminals. Instead the financial terrorists walk free, and guys like Manning are harassed like he was the American Taliban. And now Obama is trying to cook up some charges against Assange. It is time for the Doomsday File.
by Glenn Greenwald
In The New York Times this morning, Charlie Savage describes the latest thinking from the DOJ about how to criminally prosecute WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. Federal investigators are "are looking for evidence of any collusion" between WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning -- "trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped" the Army Private leak the documents -- and then "charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them." To achieve this, it is particularly important to "persuade Private Manning to testify against Mr. Assange." I want to make two points about this.
First, the Obama administration faces what it perceives a serious dilemma: it is -- as Savage writes -- "under intense pressure to make an example of [Assange] as a deterrent to further mass leaking)," but nothing Assange or WikiLeaks has done actually violates the law.
Moreover, as these Columbia Journalism School professors explain in opposing prosecutions, it is impossible to invent theories to indict them without simultaneously criminalizing much of investigative journalism. Thus, claiming that WikiLeaks does not merely receive and publish classify information, but rather actively seeks it and helps the leakers, is the DOJ's attempt to distinguish it from "traditional" journalism...
This will be a popular story in the blogosphere today. Peacenik is getting a sense that the slow dribbling out of the secret U.S. cables is lessening the impact of them. Each shocking cable is now greated with a shrug. What kind of cable would it take to get the media and the public excited. Instead this becomes a sex case, played up for the masses. Peacenik is beginning to suspect that even the Doomsday File will be greated with little more than, Ugh????
A British judged decided Thursday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will be freed on bail with conditions, rejecting the Crown's appeal to an earlier court's decision to grant bail to the public face of the secret-spilling website.
Mr. Assange is to return to court Jan. 11 for an extradition hearing. The judge said if he absconded, Mr. Assange would make supporters, including director Michael Moore, look "naive, foolish and deceitful."
Mr. Assange has been in prison since Dec. 7, following his surrender to British police over a Swedish sex-crimes warrant. He denies wrongdoing but is refusing to surrender to Sweden's request to extradite him for questioning.
Mr. Assange arrived in a prison van at the High Court in London, where judge Duncan Ouseley heard the appeal by British prosecutors acting on behalf of Sweden.
The U.S. must be very frustrated that they cannot simply rendition Assange to Egypt or somewhere, where he can be tortured and possibly disappeared. That is their usual modus operandi. Yes the rule of law can be messy. So the U.S. will try for some secret grand jury charges, that might get Julian into their hands. And of course Sweden is slobbering to comply, if they can first get their hands on Julian with some trumped up sex charge. But this extradtion from the UK could take a while. It may have to follow the rule of law. The world is watching. Peacenik thinks it is time for Julian Assange to unlock the Doomsday File.
London -- A secret grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, is meeting to consider criminal charges in the WikiLeaks case, an attorney for the site's founder, Julian Assange, told the Al-Jazeera network in an interview.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange surrendered to British authorities last week. He is set to appear in court Tuesday.
"We have heard from Swedish authorities there has been a secretly empaneled grand jury in Alexandria ... they are currently investigating this," Mark Stephens told Al-Jazeera's Sir David Frost on Sunday, referring to WikiLeaks. The site, which facilitates the disclosure of secret information, has been slowly releasing a trove of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables since November 28.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said last week he had authorized "significant" actions related to a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks' publication of the cables, but has declined to elaborate. Read on...
Scanning the news lately, punditman is beginning to wonder if things aren't starting to come apart at the seams. It's not quite 1968,[1] but you never know where things are going to end up, especially in Europe. Government austerity packages being implemented across the board in Europe should be viewed for what they are: class warfare aimed at making the middle and lower classes pay for the unpunished corruption and incompetence of an unregulated financial class.
Thanks to the meltdown of 2008, and the criminal greed of Wall Street and their cohorts and minions abroad, citizens of the world have been left with a sputtering "recovery" whose salient features include massive unemployment, deep cuts to pensions, and social services—all overseen by the same political class who oversaw the disaster in the first place. Apparently they have no proper ideas of how to fix things. Time for a change.
Moving on to free speech and government transparency, the so-called hallmarks of democracy; those freedoms we are told that our soldiers are fighting and dying to uphold in Afghanistan, it's now official: the emperors truly have no clothes. Thanks to Wikileaks, and the dumping of just a fraction of 250,000 diplomatic cables and the earlier spilling of hundreds of thousands of files from the Iraq and Afghan Wars, the world is being exposed to a good sampling of some of official duplicity, hypocrisy and state crimes behind American diplomacy and warcraft. To list just a smidgen: the unaffordable, depressing Iraq and Afghan wars with their massive collateral killings and the actual thoughts of cynical state apologists and propagandists who often know a war is hopeless but pretend otherwise; gossipy diplomatic spats between so-called mature nations; and, of course, the attempt to kill the messenger Julian Assange (figuratively in some quarters, literally in others) and those who do business with Wikileaks. Assange, for his part, recently wrote the following:
People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.
Do governments have a legitimate concern to protect sensitive diplomatic information and lives, when it comes to matters of diplomacy and security? As a general principle, most would say of course they do. But what we have seen from Wikileaks ranges from bland and embarassing to revealing and disturbing, rather than endangering. Indeed Assange recently pointed out the following:
US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn't find a single person who needed protecting...
Punditman says going after Assange rather looks and feels like it is part of the more generalized trend to intimidate citizens and squash free speech by going after the messenger, rather than genuine concern for safety and security. Punditman reserves judgement regarding the allegations of sex crimes against Assange.
It comes as no surprise that we are being lied to or misled, but the extent of manipulation, intrigue, and "things not being as they appear" is startling. They would have us all played for fools. But a pox on all their houses, because it matters not what country we cite, be it "free" or unfree. Saudi Arabia asked the US to attack Iran; Sweden is a secret NATO member and US intelligence sharing is kept from their Parliament; Britain's so-called Iraq War inquiry was fixed to protect US interests. Fifteen thousand more Iraqis have been killed than was publicly acknowledged. The list goes on and on.
As for US foreign policy, with its murderous drone strikes, torture chambers, secret prisons, and GIs who shoot innocent civilians from helicopters like fish in a barrel, we can now add to these the fact that the US "asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties." The descending superpower's paranoia astounds. Decades of supposed multilateralism and this is what we get?
Modern statecraft laid bare. Time for a change.
And what of Canada? Well, as revealed by the Wikileaks diplomatic cables, back in 2009, Jim Judd, the former director of the CSIS, met with senior advisor to US Secretary of State Secretary Condoleezza Rice, Eliot Cohen and discussed security matters. He said that Canadians had an "Alice in Wonderland" worldview and Canadian judges, "have tied CSIS in knots, making it ever more difficult to detect and prevent terror attacks in Canada and abroad." Judd doesn't seem to have much time for civil rights. Nor did the Toronto police force or the Ontario government during the G20 back in June.
Actually, the civil liberties file is in deep trouble across the Western world, with routine violations of basic human rights, police brutality, and taser deaths occurring on a regular basis. With repression on the rise, there's bound to be some payback from those with nothing left to lose.
As punditman says, things may take a turn off the rails hither and yon. At the core of all this is a profound distrust of the will of the people on the part of elites.
Precient lyrics come to punditman's mind as we see the massive injustices that dominate our age:
"One day you're going to rise from your habitual feast, To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast, They call the revolution."[2]
Hear, hear, Bruce Cockburn. Now there's a great Canadian. Or this portentous passage from the American singer-song writer Natalie Merchant:
"Soon come, soon come the day, this tinderbox Is gonna blow in your face, I don't have the gift of the prophecy, Telling everybody how it's gonna be, But you go passing wrong for right and right for wrong, People only stand for that for just so long."[3]
Indeed. Indications are that people will only stand for this for "just so long." For students in London facing a tripling in tuition fees (see video below), the pot has officially boiled over. Where it all goes from here is anybody's guess. Time for a change.
1. At around 3:04 of the video, Professor Chris Knight of the University of East London is introduced. He says it's just like 1968, noting that back then it started with the students. Time will tell. 2. Bruce Cockburn. "Call it Democracy." World of Wonders. True North Records, 1986. 3. Natalie Merchant. "This House is on Fire." Motherland. Elektra, 2001.
Sounds like World Info War I is heating up. Has there ever been such an effort by international police agencies to pursue an apparently obscure sex crime. And the mainstream media continues to march lock step with governments and their intelligence agencies. I guess all the mainstream pundits would be happy to have the CIA and the White House press office vet their work. Wait a second. They already do. Peacenik continues to eagerly await the key to the Doomsday File. Free Julian Assange now.
Raphael G. Satter
WikiLeaks supporters struck back Wednesday at perceived enemies of founder Julian Assange, attacking the websites of Swedish prosecutors, the Swedish lawyer whose clients have accused Mr. Assange of sexual crimes and the Swiss authority that froze Assange's bank account.
MasterCard, which pulled the plug on its relationship with WikiLeaks on Tuesday, also seemed to be having severe technological problems.
The online vengeance campaign appeared to be taking the form of denial of service attacks in which computers across the Internet are harnessed — sometimes surreptitiously — to jam target sites with mountains of requests for data, knocking them out of commission.
The online attacks are part of a wave of online support for WikiLeaks that is sweeping the Internet. Twitter was choked with messages of solidarity Wednesday, while the site's Facebook page hit 1 million fans.
Peacenik thinks it is time for Wikileaks to launch its Doomsday File, which has been available for download since August. It is heavily encrypted. If anything happens to Julian Assange the key to the encryption will be released. This is really getting weird.
by Jerome Taylor
Renewed cyber attacks on Wikileaks servers in Sweden closed down sections of the whistle-blowing website today as the information war over the State Department cables escalated dramatically.
The attacks came as the Swiss post office announced it had frozen a Wikileaks bank account containing 31,000 euros, leaving the website with limited ability to raise money.
Using the moniker "I Am Wikileaks", supporters are using social network sites to publicize new outlets for the State Department cables when old ones get closed down or taken offline. They have also now created more than 570 mirror versions of the Wikileaks website and have called for a boycott of Paypal, Amazon and EveryDNS, three US-based websites that recently severed ties to Wikileaks.
It is World InFo War I. The world against Wikileaks, and Wikileaks supporters. Apparently the Wikileaks servers were being attacked at the rate of 10 gigabytes of information per second in an effort to shut it down. Here is a just released op-ed piece from Julian Assange who was arrested several hours ago. Peacenik wonders what the anti-Wikileaks crowd are afraid of. Peacenik hopes Peacenik will find out.
Julian Assange
WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.
IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win."
His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.
Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.
I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.
Watching companies cave to U.S. pressure and to the banks pressure is making Peacenik sick. Corporations, mainstream media, politicians, etc. are all in it together. Has there ever been such a blatant display of how fearful they are, of the truth? In this case, the truth will come out. Nutbars like Joe Lieberman will want to shut down the Internet. Julian Assange is not a one man operations. The truth will come out.
Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks has been forced to change its web address after the company providing its domain name cut off service.
EveryDNS.net said it had terminated services because Wikileaks.org had come under massive cyber attacks. But Wikileaks has already reappeared using a Swiss web address.
Wikileaks has also used micro-blogging site Twitter to urge its fans to redistribute its "raw" net address so it can be viewed at any time.
This numerical internet protocol (IP) address remains live and accessible even when web domains - the normal "www" addresses used to access most sites - are unavailable.
Experts say it is likely that Wikileaks has done deals with lots of web hosting companies, although many are likely to back away from dealing with the controversial site in the light of recent web attacks.
The casual call for the murder or assassination of Julian Assange shows how far society has collapsed. How corrupt it is. Why does the mainstream media give these psychopaths airtime? Christ, the interviewers were yukking it up like it was a big joke, like they had a scoop. And this guy is an adviser to Harper. Will Harper disavow him? Will he be forced to come on tv and say he misspoke himself? Probably not. Peacenik is worried about the welfare of Julian Assange. Peacenik hopes he is somewhere safe.
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/01/2010 10:41 -0500
It is not a good week for Wikileaks. Following yesterday's Interpol arrest warrant, also yesterday, Tom Flanagan, a senior advisor and strategist to the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, called for the assassination of Wikileaks director Julian Assange. On CBS News. On Live TV. As the video notes, "it is believed to be the first ever televised "fatwa" since the edict by the Iranian leadership of the late Ayatollah Khomeini against British writer Salman Rushdie in February 1989." It's a good thing western society, where due process used to mean something, is so much more evolved than that of Iran. Additionally, although news anchor Solomon afforded Flanagan the opportunity to retract his statement, Flanagan balked at doing so and instead reiterated that U.S. President should put out a "contract" on Assange or use "a drone" and that he would not be unhappy if Assange "disappeared." Flanagan who is a trusted member of PM Harper's inner circle of Tory strategists joins Sarah Palin in calling for the death of the Wikileaks director as retribution for the website's release of confidential diplomatic and intelligence "chatter" this week. How long before any senior political advisor has the freedom to issue fatwas on national TV on anyone who dares to utter or publish something that they consider offensive?
punditman says...One can still be distrustful and indignant towards the Iranian regime and its buffoon-leader while also recognizing that a) there has been a campaign of US-led hysteria and distortions of known facts surrounding their nuclear program, including the supposed complicity of North Korea; and b) these tall tales are aided by the big media. Here is a clear example of how the mainstream media distorted a key Wikileaks document. They hope we wouldn't notice. Fortunately, Gareth Porter did.
Wikileaks Exposes Complicity of the Press
By GARETH PORTER
Adiplomatic cable from last February released by Wikileaks provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the U.S. suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or intends to develop such a capability.
In fact, the Russians challenged the very existence of the mystery missile the U.S. claims Iran acquired from North Korea.
But readers of the two leading U.S. newspapers never learned those key facts about the document.
The New York Times and Washington Post reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles - supposedly called the BM-25 - from North Korea. Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the U.S. view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence for the BM-25 from the U.S. side.
The Times, which had obtained the diplomatic cables not from Wikileaks but from The Guardian, according to a Washington Post story Monday, did not publish the text of the cable.
Yep, the mainstream media by and large is coming out against Wikileaks. Interpol is trying to arrest Assange on sex charges. Bill O'Reilly thinks Assange should be executed. The White House is discombobulated. But. Will there be any consequences? Probably not. George Bush confessed to approving torture and the mainstream media yawned. What does it take to get someone, other than a whistleblower, arrested in the US? Peacenik continues to hope for some leaked bombshell that justice cannot ignore. But that hope is fading.
In a national broadcast exclusive interview, we speak with world-renowned political dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky about the release of more than 250,000 secret U.S. State Department cables by WikiLeaks. In 1971, Chomsky helped government whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg release the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret internal U.S. account of the Vietnam War. Commenting on the revelations that several Arab leaders are urging the United States to attack Iran, Chomsky says, "latest polls show] Arab opinion holds that the major threat in the region is Israel, that's 80 percent; the second threat is the United States, that's 77 percent. Iran is listed as a threat by 10 percent," Chomsky says. "This may not be reported in the newspapers, but it's certainly familiar to the Israeli and U.S. governments and the ambassadors. What this reveals is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership." [Rush transcript below]
This article provides all the rationale that is needed for the Wikileaks leaks. Peacenik is still hoping for something embarrassing for Harper to come out. But Peacenik knows Harper has never been and will never be embarrassed about anything. Least of all war crimes and war mongering.
It is for governments -- not journalists -- to guard public secrets, and there is no national jeopardy in WikiLeaks' revelations.
Is it justified? Should a newspaper disclose virtually all a nation's secret diplomatic communication, illegally downloaded by one of its citizens? The reporting in the Guardian of the first of a selection of 250,000 US state department cables marks a recasting of modern diplomacy. Clearly, there is no longer such a thing as a safe electronic archive, whatever computing's snake-oil salesmen claim. No organisation can treat digitised communication as confidential. An electronic secret is a contradiction in terms.
Anything said or done in the name of a democracy is, prima facie, of public interest. When that democracy purports to be "world policeman" – an assumption that runs ghostlike through these cables – that interest is global. Nonetheless, the Guardian had to consider two things in abetting disclosure, irrespective of what is anyway published by WikiLeaks. It could not be party to putting the lives of individuals or sources at risk, nor reveal material that might compromise ongoing military operations or the location of special forces.
Peacenik is scanning some of the Wikileaks documents. So far, apparently no significant mention of Canada. What is predictable and disappointing is the reaction of the U.S. mainstream media. They are saying the leaks are irresponsible, dangerous, outrageous, etc., etc. So much for transparency. The link below is to the British Guardian newspaper which is doing a good job providing access to the leaks.And just to illustrate how hopeless the U.S. has become read this pathetic quote from John Kerry: "This is not an academic exercise about freedom of information and it is not akin to the release of the Pentagon Papers, which involved an analysis aimed at saving American lives and exposing government deception. Instead, these sensitive cables contain candid assessments and analysis of ongoing matters and they should remain confidential to protect the ability of the government to conduct lawful business with the private candor that's vital to effective diplomacy." Wanker.
Reaction and updates following the release of more than 250,000 classified US diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks. Tomorrow, revelations about North Korea and the UK.
6.15pm: It is, without a doubt, the biggest leak of secret diplomatic missives in the history of international relations – a total of 251,287 cables from more than 250 US embassies and consulates around the world, many of them frank, a number of them shocking and all of them previously secret.
Over the coming days the Guardian will publish extracts from the cables, obtained by the whistleblowing website Wikileaks, along with its international partners, the New York Times, Le Monde, El PaÃs and Der Spiegel.
Even today there's a lot to read through so here's a brief precis of the initial revelations:
• The US has relentlessly pressured other countries, including close allies such as Italy and France, to distance themselves from Iran and assist American efforts to isolate Tehran
• There's plenty more to come, including "claims of inappropriate behaviour" by a British royal and allegations of links between Russia's government and organised crime.
The Wikileaks has already shown the wars were promoted with lies. Wikileaks has already confirmed indiscriminate killing. War Crimes. Torture. And nothing shook Harper's solidarity with the Obama/Bush warmongers. But maybe, just maybe, the new Wikileaks will have some juicy quotes from high ranking U.S. military and political leaders. Maybe they think Harper is a twitt. Or an asshole. Maybe they say mean things about Harper behind his back. Maybe they don't respect Canada's contribution. Heck if Harper's feelings get hurt it might change his whole mindset. Too bad Canada has to hang it hopes for withdrawal on such a slender thread. They already probably call him an asshole to his face. Peacenik says bring the troops home now.
OTTAWA— The Canadian Press
The U.S. government has notified Ottawa that the WikiLeaks website is preparing to release sensitive U.S. diplomatic files that could damage American relations with allies around the world.
U.S. officials say the documents may contain accounts of compromising conversations with political dissidents and friendly politicians as well as activities that could result in the expulsion of U.S. diplomats from foreign postings.
U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Jacobson phoned Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon to inform him of the matter, a foreign affairs spokeswoman said Wednesday.
Melissa Lantsman said the Canadian embassy in Washington is “currently engaging” with the U.S. State Department on this matter.
Well the Wikileaks files on Iraq are getting some media attention. But between NFL football, MLB playoffs and the start of the NHL season Peacenik hasn't noticed much coverage on the television. And of course the corrupt CNN would rather talk about false charges against Julian Assange than actually discuss the files. Move along, nothing to see here. Just a few thousand war crimes. And a bunch of propaganda.>
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange speaks during a news conference about the internet release of secret documents about the Iraq War, in London October 23, 2010. Wikileaks released nearly 400,000 classified U.S. files on the Iraq war on Friday, some detailing gruesome cases of prisoner abuse by Iraqi forces that the U.S. military knew about but did not seem to investigate.
LONDON -- WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange said Saturday that hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents leaked by the website showed the 'truth' on the Iraq war.
"This disclosure is about the truth," Assange told a news conference in London after WikiLeaks released 400,000 documents which give a grim snapshot of the Iraq war, including showing the abuse of Iraqi civilians by Iraqi security forces.
"The attack on the truth by war begins long before war starts and continues long after a war ends," Assange added. Profile of the WikiLeaks founder
"We hope to correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war and which has continued on since the war officially concluded." Read on....
Peacenik seems to recall that the Pentagon Papers were credited with changing the public's perception of the Vietnam War. The New York Times published them. Major news. Peacenik thinks the mainstream media's coverage of new WikiLeaks will be minimal. The media has been totally neutered and co-opted. Western mainstream media has become Pravda. And the media doesn't care. And the public doesn't care. Peacenik wonders if anything can light a fire under the anti-war movement. At least the French haven't lost their ability to protest. Of course those protests don't warrant much coverage by the mainstream media either. The U.S. population must watch news reports of French riots uncomprehendingly. Just as they watch news reports of Wall Street corruption, war crimes, unemployment, fraud and violence in the U.S. Uncomprehendingly.
File - The Pentagon is seen in this aerial view in Washington, in this March 27, 2008 file photo. The WikiLeaks website appears close to releasing what the Pentagon fears is the largest cache of secret U.S. documents in history _ hundreds of thousands of intelligence reports compiled after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In a message posted to its Twitter page on Thursday Oct. 21, 2010, the organization said there was a "major WikiLeaks press conference in Europe coming up." (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File) (Charles Dharapak - AP)
LONDON -- The WikiLeaks website is poised to release what the Pentagon fears is the largest cache of secret U.S. documents in history - hundreds of thousands of classified intelligence reports since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
U.S. officials said Friday they were racing to contain the damage from the imminent release, while NATO's top official told reporters he feared that lives could be put at risk by the mammoth disclosure.
NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said any release would create "a very unfortunate situation."
"I can't comment on the details of the exact impact on security, but in general I can tell you that such leaks ... may have a very negative security impact for people involved," he told reporters Friday in Berlin following a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Too lazy to comb through the thousands of disclosures in the Wikileaks data? Shannon Larratt has created the following youtube video of monthly IED events in Afghanistan, in which a monthly tally of injuries and casualties is kept, both "friendly" and "enemy." The results are dramatic, and reminiscent of the clip showing how the US and Russia nuked their own territory several thousand times in the past 60 years. They are also reminiscent of various admonitions (unheeded) from The Prince Bride.
For those who have followed the Afghan conflict with an honest eye, there is not a lot that is surprising in the WikiLeaks documents. The war is going badly. We knew that. Elements of Pakistan's intelligence service support the Taliban. We knew that. NATO routinely kills civilians. Ditto. However, to quote Noam Chomsky, "details happen to be important." In this case, journalist Thomas Walkom demonstrates just how important they are when it comes to Canada's role. In particular, the relationship between the American CIA and the Afghan National Directorate of Security is crucial and it explains why Harper's government wants to keep its files on the detainee issue away from public scrutinty. In flaunting both Canadian and international law, will they ever be held to account?
Thomas Walkom
For Canadians trying to puzzle out the so-called Afghan detainees scandal, one item stands out from the mass of raw intelligence leaked this week.
It’s the second-last line in a report of a March 8, 2008, meeting with Amrullah Saleh, at the time head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security. And it casually notes that until 2009, the entire budget of this secret police force was provided by America’s Central Intelligence Agency.
As the New York Times, one of the handful of newspapers first given the documents by the non-profit group WikiLeaks put it: “For years, the CIA had essentially run the NDS as a subsidiary.”
Why this matters in the Canadian context is that it destroys the rationale for the elaborate Afghan prisoner transfer system, first established in late 2005 during the dying days of the then Liberal government and now fiercely defended by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.
![[WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange surrendered to British authorities last week. He is set to appear in court Tuesday.]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sMsKMXbYAzQ-HFvUCrXBJ38aY003tErGjYg4lXK894gHDGNNLS84EQcZLRRkNJTRfzodPVh1y78KwBdgs2-Fb97qV-x_WdgL2wZXYOQX9I2AGFHg8BLszyUXQCZ3kMVd60ayrxl4lseA=s0-d "jury_wikileaks.jpg")
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange surrendered to British authorities last week. He is set to appear in court Tuesday.![[]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_t6cUG9phhww3nls3W1W3kgvqIsV0mVdr3lFQ6QJz8HTTTeZN7rSDdhivhr2jfmdp2faW1rJiJYuXCOlflCpKmTsRP217ISnI_-GYz8YEjIsw4casa9s27ly2qjpg8H6xWYI6eN=s0-d "iamwikileaks.jpg")
