The Wikileaks Question

[JackRiddler]

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It's a busy thread, whipstitch. That's well worth throwing in. I'll note Gawker is just the right pub to cover the Ardin angle. (And just the wrong one to pretend they assessed the war logs and repeat talking points about how they're harmless. But of course you're not the one who quoted them on that.)

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[anothershamus]

Booze and hookers! The best way to discredit people in our backward media. It doesn't matter what they do, attack their character, and all the wikileaky goodness goes away and only the stench of assault remains. It's a really old CIA standard. The Swiss are coerced into to getting him out in the open and then he gets thrown in a black helicopter, renditioned and voila! He returns several weeks later slobbering, with a lobotomy, as a spokesman for Fox News.

[JackRiddler]

thanks to seemslikeadream

Indecent Exposure: WikiLeaks Hounded for Showing Power Its True Face

WRITTEN BY CHRIS FLOYD
MONDAY, 06 DECEMBER 2010 23:30

Even as WikiLeaks fights for its life -- a phrase that becomes less metaphorical by the day, especially for Julian Assange, hounded and hunted by several governments -- its revelations continue to shake the world's power structures. Every day we are treated to the edifying spectacle of the most powerful and privileged people on earth scurrying around like panicked rats, trying to escape the streams of light pouring into their filthy backrooms, exposing their ruthless machtpolitik -- and their monumental incompetence at every level.

The trove of leaked diplomatic cables is too rich to encompass or fully process right away. Dip your hand into one batch and you come out with a whole handful of jewels, each one worthy of careful, in-depth analysis, buttressed with innumerable links to current events and detailed historical context. This is the work of months, even years. For now, we can only survey the highlights as they are released and draw some initial impressions.

Two things stand out immediately. First, the leaked cables reveal -- or rather, confirm -- that American "intelligence" on the activities of foreign nations is based almost totally on hearsay, rumor, gossip and fantasies brewed from a deadly mix of arrogance and ignorance. Second, they show that the overwhelming majority of the public statements made by top American officials about the nation's foreign policy are deliberate, knowing lies: the cheapest, most threadbare bromides about America's noble intentions coupled with cynical fear-mongering, which knowingly fans low-grade -- or non-existent -- threats into dire "emergencies" that somehow, always, fill the coffers of war-profiteers (and that new breed of gluttonous predator, the security-profiteers) and require ever-greater expansions of authoritarian power.

Or as Arthur Silber, who has explored these themes in depth for years, puts it: "They'll lie about everything."

Take for example a couple of the latest Guardian stories from the WikiLeaks trove: "Cables portray Saudi Arabia as cash machine for terrorists" and "Saudi Arabia rated a bigger threat to Iraqi stability than Iran." These are not particularly major revelations, but they are highly illustrative for our purposes. In them, we find American diplomats flinging accusations of extensive terrorist funding by powerful Saudis and, in particular, by Saudi-based charities which work around the world. Even as they report their assertions back to Washington, however, the diplomats admit that the "intelligence" they are relying upon is merely "suggestive," that it is based on "limited information," that confirmation of the charges and rumors is "hard to come by."

This is not to say that powerful Saudi interests -- that is, staunch political allies and business partners of the American elite -- are not helping finance extremist organisations around the world. This is hardly a secret: the Saudi Arabian monarchy itself is one of the most extremist organizations in the world, openly propagating a retrograde and repressive brand of Islam, even as its bloated ranks of royalty enjoy every possible secular indulgence in their Western pleasure palaces.

And the American government has often used the Saudis' extremist networks to advance its own agenda -- usually the undermining of any government or movement (secular or religious) that might offer a genuine alternative to thuggish American clients (such as the brutal dictatorship in Egypt) or simply to the general principle of rule by corrupt, rapacious elites (such as our own dear great and good in God's shining city on the hill). Must we bring up yet again the great US-Saudi alliance in building a worldwide network of armed Islamic extremists to fight the great Jesus-Mohammed-Allah-Jehovah crusade against the Commies in Afghanistan? (Well yes, we must, given the total amnesia that afflicts the American memory, where every new day is a fresh clean slate of goodness and righteousness.) And that, of course, just scratches the surface in the US-Saudi use of Sunni extremists over the years, in such places as Bosnia and more recently in Lebanon and Palestine, where, as Seymour Hersh reported, the Americans and Saudis were backing al Qaeda allies -- yes, yes, years after 9/11 -- to try to counteract Hizbollah and Hamas.

Now Floyd could add how the Saudi US-client state support in the Iraqi theater of Sunni anti-Shia attacks with foreign fighters and money -- even as the US outfitted the Shia death squads out of the Interior Ministry, thus helping to turn an anti-US insurgency into a Shia-Sunni civil war -- fits the same historic pattern of convergent interests! But he misses that, as the next question shows.

But are Saudi tycoons and Saudi charities specifically funding any extremist organizations that might not be serving American interests at this particular moment? No one knows -- certainly not American "intelligence," with its "limited information" and its boldly asserted unsupported suppositions. But what is interesting and revealing in this instance is that, in private, Washington evidently believes that powerful Saudis, with the knowledge if not the outright connivance of Saudi leaders, are financing America's enemies in the "War on Terror" -- but in public we hear nothing but high praise for our stalwart Saudi allies and their anti-terrorism efforts. Again, the Wikileaks revelations lay bare the ruthless power politics that actually govern world affairs, where murder, corruption, terror and war are simply the tools of the trade in a vicious, murky racket of ever-shifting alliances that have no rhyme or reason beyond a bestial urge for dominance.

The other story, about the jackal-fight over the carcass of Iraq after its American ravaging, is perhaps even more revealing -- and more sinister. Here we find American officials reporting back to the Potomac court that the imperial satraps in Baghdad are far more worried about meddling from the Saudis than from the Great Satanic Googily-Moogily of Iran. According to the dispatches, the Iraqi leaders are keen to assure their American patrons that they can easily "manage" the Iranians, who want stability; but the Saudis wanted a "weak and fractured" Iraq, and were even "fomenting terrorism that would destabilize the government."

Naturally, the 2009 report of the then US ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, is riddled with arrogant dismissal of the Iraqis' own assessment of their situation, and parrots back to Team Obama some of the usual evidence-free mind-reading of what the Great Googily-Moogily is really up to in Iraq -- which, even in Hill's most malign construction, is a level of "interference" several orders of magnitude less than, oh, say, invading the country, killing a million of its people, driving four million more from their homes and unleashing endless sectarian war.

But after tossing his bosses the ritual red meat, Hill gets down to the reality which, as our better know full well, lies behind their never-ending warmongering against Iran. He writes that the relation between Iran and Iraq is based on natural, "longstanding historical realities" that "should not lead to alarmist tendencies or reactions on our part." Iran's influence, he says, "should not be overestimated," and that the two countries will find many "points of divergence" on various issues, such as borders, water rights and ordinary political jockeying.

Again, the bipartisan American power structure knows very well that there is no great existential threat -- or even a minor military threat -- emanating from Iran. Yes, the Iranian government is a nasty, corrupt, amoral enterprise, blatantly violating its professed ideals and generally stinking up the joint. (Why, do you know they even execute women, and that their president believes that some kind of long-dead religious figure is going to come again at the end of time and take over the universe? What primitive barbarians, eh?) But so what? As the WikiLeaks cables have confirmed once again, all governments fall somewhere along this same inhumane spectrum. Readers can perhaps decide for themselves just where on that spectrum a nation that has engaged in the above-noted act of mass-murdering aggressive war in Iraq might fall.

But whatever they say amongst themselves, in public our bipartisan elites are eager to stoke fear and hatred of Iran among the populace, with the ever-present threat of war against the Persian demons held out continuously as an imminent, desirable prospect -- yea, verily, a moral good, done in the service of all humankind. Just as they knew all along that Iraq posed no threat yet spent years -- years -- wearing away all resistance to the act of aggression they craved, so too with Iran. It may appear at times that these homicidal cravings for violent domination have been put on the back burner, as we sometimes saw with Iraq; but rest assured -- that back burner is itself kept on high heat, and the stew of war is always boiling.

One final observation: it is remarkable that the WikiLeaks release of diplomatic cables has provoked a far more virulent and draconian reaction from government officials -- and from their craven sycophants in the mainstream media -- than we ever saw after the earlier releases about Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet many of those Terror War releases provided detailed, eyewitness accounts of horrific acts of murder, brutality, and depraved indifference toward the slaughter of innocent people. It seems the American elite are more outraged at being caught in various diplomatic faux pas than being shown to be perpetrators and facilitators of murder, repression and state terror. That's because they know that their cowed and passive subjects -- continually stoked with the hatred and fear of foreign demons -- don't care how many darkies get killed on the other side of the world. And so the Terror War leaks occasioned no more than a few days of Beltway bluster.

But the new releases put a bit of a crimp in business as usual for our backroom operators, exposing some of the rank hypocrisy and all-pervasive corruption of our great and good -- and of their clients and partners around the world. All this might -- just might -- give the rabble unseemly notions ... such as the idea that their interests are perhaps not being served all that well by a system run by and for a handful of liars, tyrants, killers and thieves. We can't have that.

And so Julian Assange is now being hounded -- perhaps to his eventual death -- not for revealing war crimes and atrocities, but for showing us a glimpse of our leaders as they really are: stupid, vain, petty and savage.

[82_28]

.. The entirety of the Internet and the freedoms of information and communication it affords simply CANNOT HINGE UPON ONE LONE MAN.

Of course it doesn't, maybe theres a lil' problem with your ridiculous simplification, hmm?

.. It's just conversation!

You should listen to yourself sometime.

Here. Let me simplify it even more for you. NBC Nightly News last week. Simple enough now for you? Did you watch it? Probably not. And that's A-OK, I can't blame you. It's still a motherfucking conversation whether it is more fruitful for you to belittle me or not. Jesus H Christ. I'm throwing shit out there as is my duty in this motherfucking dump. Hmmm? Jesus. Look at it as a motherfucking sci-fi novel instead of a fucking business as usual circa 1985 (another number just thrown out there). Use your imagination. Run with it. I sure am.

Do you see the fucking arguments ensuing between fellow minds? This is a "tell", bro. This is a tell. I am neither wrong nor am I right. But the fact that we must argue about the potentialities of this ground breaking "ability" to all of a sudden, wow, gee, we're finally getting the truth is bunk. Why? Because the motherfucking populace doesn't give fuck one about the truth as it is anyhow. If they had, none of this would be happening in the first place.

As I have maintained, this seems to me to be an assault on the open-source flow of information -- eventually. This eventuality shall happen soon.

[82_28]

And sure, I fully agree in principle with what Floyd is saying now. However, this is the "ace in the hole" or "ace up the sleeve" or however the saying goes. There is simply too much potential for all of this to be fucked with. I don't give a fuck about who's doing it, but that it is happening and possibly, for instance, how can one help neutralize something that may or may not be happening.

Umberto Eco's essay was spot on. Thanks for that, wombat.

[JackRiddler]

As I have maintained, this seems to me to be an assault on the open-source flow of information -- eventually. This eventuality shall happen soon.

A major state/corporate assault on the free Internet and free press has been inevitable since Internet got big. I don't welcome it and am not optimistic about the outcome, but that is very far from an argument that Wikileaks or Manning's releases were set up intentionally by USG elements to provide the enabling event. (By degrading their ability to conduct the empire? That is the opposite of what 9/11 did.) After 9/11 the US was forthright in its assault on even the appearance of international law and launched bloody wars of aggression. This has people everywhere (some of them in high places, no doubt) angry and looking for payback, and cheering on Wikileaks. If there are elite factions orchestrating the Wikileaks releases I'd expect them in Europe, where tellingly Assange has received relative protection as well as abuse, and where most of the Wikileaks mirror action is coming from.

.

[JackRiddler]

.

My resistance to firm conclusions about any aspect of the ongoing events doesn't apply to Glenn Greenwald. He's some kind of gold standard for reason. Go to http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn ... index.html for all of his columns, always full of links I can't reproduce here. One of his latest makes the "debate" we're having on RI look like it's on some other planet:

Wednesday, Dec 1, 2010 06:02 ET
The moral standards of WikiLeaks critics

By Glenn Greenwald

Time's Joe Klein writes this about the WikiLeaks disclosures:

I am tremendously concernced [sic] about the puerile eruptions of Julian Assange. . . . If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in "freedom" stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He's the one who should be in jail.

Do you have that principle down? If "a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail" because of the WikiLeaks disclosure -- even a "single one" -- then the entire WikiLeaks enterprise is proven to be a "disaster" and "Assange is a criminal" who "should be in jail." That's quite a rigorous moral standard. So let's apply it elsewhere:

What about the most destructive "anarchic exercise in 'freedom'" the planet has known for at least a generation: the "human disaster" known as the attack on Iraq, which Klein supported? That didn't result in the imprisonment of "a single foreign national," but rather the deaths of more than 100,000 innocent human beings, the displacement of millions more, and the destruction of a country of 26 million people. Are those who supported that "anarchic exercise in 'freedom'" -- or at least those responsible for its execution -- also "criminals who should be in jail"?

How about the multiple journalists and other human beings whom the U.S. Government imprisoned (and continues to imprison) for years without charges -- and tortured -- including many whom the Government knew were completely innocent, while Klein assured the world that wasn't happening? How about those responsible for the war in Afghanistan (which Klein supports) with its checkpoint shootings of an "amazing number" of innocent Afghans and civilian slaughtering air strikes, or the use of cluster bombs in Yemen, or the civilian killing drones in Pakistan? Are those responsible for the sky-high corpses of innocent people from these actions also "criminals who should be in jail"?

I'm not singling out Klein here; his commentary is merely illustrative of what I'm finding truly stunning about the increasingly bloodthirsty two-minute hate session aimed at Julian Assange, also known as the new Osama bin Laden. The ringleaders of this hate ritual are advocates of -- and in some cases directly responsible for -- the world's deadliest and most lawless actions of the last decade. And they're demanding Assange's imprisonment, or his blood, in service of a Government that has perpetrated all of these abuses and, more so, to preserve a Wall of Secrecy which has enabled them. To accomplish that, they're actually advocating -- somehow with a straight face -- the theory that if a single innocent person is harmed by these disclosures, then it proves that Assange and WikiLeaks are evil monsters who deserve the worst fates one can conjure, all while they devote themselves to protecting and defending a secrecy regime that spawns at least as much human suffering and disaster as any single other force in the world. That is what the secrecy regime of the permanent National Security State has spawned.

Meanwhile, in the real world (as opposed to the world of speculation, fantasy, and fear-mongering) there is no evidence -- zero -- that the WikiLeaks disclosures have harmed a single person. As McClatchy reported, they have exercised increasing levels of caution to protect innocent people. Even Robert Gates disdained hysterical warnings about the damage caused as "significantly overwrought." But look at what WikiLeaks has revealed to the world:

We viscerally saw the grotesque realities of our war in Iraq with the Apache attack video on innocent civilians and journalists in Baghdad -- and their small children -- as they desperately scurried for cover. We recently learned that the U.S. government adopted a formal policy of refusing to investigate the systematic human rights abuses of our new Iraqi client state, all of which took place under our deliberately blind eye. We learned of 15,000 additional civilian deaths caused by the war in Iraq that we didn't know of before. We learned -- as documented by The Washington Post's former Baghdad Bureau Chief -- how clear, deliberate and extensive were the lies of top Bush officials about that war as it was unfolding: "Thanks to WikiLeaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public," she wrote.

In this latest WikiLeaks release -- probably the least informative of them all, at least so far -- we learned a great deal as well. Juan Cole today details the 10 most important revelations about the Middle East.

(all these links at original, http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn ... index.html)

Scott Horton examines the revelation that the State Department pressured and bullied Germany out of criminally investigating the CIA's kidnapping of one of their citizens who turned out to be completely innocent. The head of the Bank of England got caught interfering in British politics to induce harsher austerity measures in violation of his duty to remain apolitical and removed from the political process, a scandal resulting in calls for his resignation. British officials, while pretending to conduct a sweeping investigation into the Iraq War, were privately pledging to protect Bush officials from embarrassing disclosures. Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered U.N. diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data in order to spy on top U.N. officials and others, likely in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961 (see Articles 27 and 30; and, believe me, I know: it's just "law," nothing any Serious person believes should constrain our great leaders).

Do WikiLeaks critics believe it'd be best if all that were kept secret, if we remained ignorant of it, if the world's most powerful factions could continue to hide things like that? Apparently. When Joe Klein and his media comrades calling for Assange's head start uncovering even a fraction of secret government conduct this important, then they'll have credibility to complain about WikiLeaks' "excessive commitment to disclosure." But that will never happen.

One could respond that it's good that we know these specific things, but not other things WikiLeaks has released. That's all well and good; as I've said several times, there are reasonable concerns about some specific disclosures here. But in the real world, this ideal, perfectly calibrated subversion of the secrecy regime doesn't exist. WikiLeaks is it. We have occasional investigative probes of isolated government secrets coming from establishment media outlets (the illegal NSA program, the CIA black sites, the Pentagon propaganda program), along with transparency groups such as the ACLU, CCR, EPIC and EFF valiantly battling through protracted litigation to uncover secrets. But nothing comes close to the blows WikiLeaks has struck in undermining that regime.

The real-world alternative to the current iteration of WikiLeaks is not The Perfect Wikileaks that makes perfect judgments about what should and should not be disclosed, but rather, the ongoing, essentially unchallenged hegemony of the permanent National Security State, for which secrecy is the first article of faith and prime weapon. I want again to really encourage everyone to read this great analysis by The Economist's Democracy in America, which includes this:

I suspect that there is no scheme of government oversight that will not eventually come under the indirect control of the generals, spies, and foreign-service officers it is meant to oversee. Organisations such as WikiLeaks, which are philosophically opposed to state secrecy and which operate as much as is possible outside the global nation-state system, may be the best we can hope for in the way of promoting the climate of transparency and accountability necessary for authentically liberal democracy. Some folks ask, "Who elected Julian Assange?" The answer is nobody did, which is, ironically, why WikiLeaks is able to improve the quality of our democracy. Of course, those jealously protective of the privileges of unaccountable state power will tell us that people will die if we can read their email, but so what? Different people, maybe more people, will die if we can't.

The last decade, by itself, leaves no doubt about the truth of that last sentence. And Matt Yglesias is right that while diplomacy can be hindered without secrecy, one must also consider "how the ability to keep secrets can hinder diplomacy" (incidentally: one of the more Orwellian aspects of this week's discussion has been the constant use of the word "diplomacy" to impugn what WikiLeaks did, creating some Wizard of Oz fantasy whereby the Pentagon is the Bad Witch of the U.S. Government [thus justifying leaks about war] while the State Department is the Good Witch [thus rendering these leaks awful]: that's absurd, as they are merely arms of the same entity, both devoted to the same ends, ones which are often nefarious, and State Department officials are just as susceptible as Pentagon officials to abusive conduct when operating in the dark).

But Matt's other point merits even more attention. He's certainly right when he says that "for a third time in a row, a WikiLeaks document dump has conclusively demonstrated that an awful lot of US government confidentiality is basically about nothing," but I'd quibble with his next observation:

There’s no scandal here and there’s no legitimate state secret. It’s just routine for the work done by public servants and public expense in the name of the public to be kept semi-hidden from the public for decades.

It is a "scandal" when the Government conceals things it is doing without any legitimate basis for that secrecy. Each and every document that is revealed by WikiLeaks which has been improperly classified -- whether because it's innocuous or because it is designed to hide wrongdoing -- is itself an improper act, a serious abuse of government secrecy powers. Because we're supposed to have an open government -- a democracy -- everything the Government does is presumptively public, and can be legitimately concealed only with compelling justifications. That's not just some lofty, abstract theory; it's central to having anything resembling "consent of the governed."

But we have completely abandoned that principle; we've reversed it. Now, everything the Government does is presumptively secret; only the most ceremonial and empty gestures are made public. That abuse of secrecy powers is vast, deliberate, pervasive, dangerous and destructive. That's the abuse that WikiLeaks is devoted to destroying, and which its harshest critics -- whether intended or not -- are helping to preserve. There are people who eagerly want that secrecy regime to continue: namely, (a) Washington politicians, Permanent State functionaries, and media figures whose status, power and sense of self-importance are established by their access and devotion to that world of secrecy, and (b) those who actually believe that -- despite (or because of) all the above acts -- the U.S. Government somehow uses this extreme secrecy for the Good. Having surveyed the vast suffering and violence they have wreaked behind that wall, those are exactly the people whom WikiLeaks is devoted to undermining.

* * * * *

On the issue of the Interpol arrest warrant issued yesterday for Assange's arrest: I think it's deeply irresponsible either to assume his guilt or to assume his innocence until the case plays out. I genuinely have no opinion of the validity of those allegations, but what I do know -- as John Cole notes -- is this: as soon as Scott Ritter began telling the truth about Iraqi WMDs, he was publicly smeared with allegations of sexual improprieties. As soon as Eliot Spitzer began posing a real threat to Wall Street criminals, a massive and strange federal investigation was launched over nothing more than routine acts of consensual adult prostitution, ending his career (and the threat he posed to oligarchs). And now, the day after Julian Assange is responsible for one of the largest leaks in history, an arrest warrant issues that sharply curtails his movement and makes his detention highly likely. It's unreasonable to view that pattern as evidence that the allegations are part of some conspiracy -- I genuinely do not believe or disbelieve that -- but, particularly in light of that pattern, it's most definitely unreasonable to assume that he's guilty of anything without having those allegations tested and then proven in court.

Finally, as I noted last night: I was on Canada's CBC last tonight talking about these issues; it can be seen here. I'll also be on MSNBC this morning, at roughly 10:00 a.m., on the same topic.


UPDATE: The notion that one crime doesn't excuse another has absolutely nothing to do with anything I wrote; it's a complete nonsequitur, merely the standard claim of those who want to propound moral standards for others that they not only refuse to apply to themselves, but violate with far greater frequency and severity than those they're condemning.



UPDATE II: This cartoonist (and Professor of History) summarized several of the key points perfectly:

[lupercal]

He's some kind of gold standard for reason.

Glenn "I work for the CATO Institute" Greenwald, yeah he's some kind of gold standard alright, the gold standard of spooky shillsters:

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10080

[JackRiddler]

.

Brief detour to detail lupercal's evidence that Greenwald is one of THEM, an article he wrote for the Cato Institute:

White Paper

April 2, 2009
Drug Decriminalization in Portugal:
Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies

by Glenn Greenwald

On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were "decriminalized," not "legalized." Thus, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm. Drug trafficking continues to be prosecuted as a criminal offense.

While other states in the European Union have developed various forms of de facto decriminalization — whereby substances perceived to be less serious (such as cannabis) rarely lead to criminal prosecution — Portugal remains the only EU member state with a law explicitly declaring drugs to be "decriminalized." Because more than seven years have now elapsed since enactment of Portugal's decriminalization system, there are ample data enabling its effects to be assessed.

Notably, decriminalization has become increasingly popular in Portugal since 2001...

I don't know if or what Greenwald was paid for that, but if the CATO Institute wanted to pay me to publish whatever article I wanted to write advocating drug decriminalization, I'd be very happy to take money well spent.



PS:

Thank you wombaticus for the Umberto Eco piece!

[Belligerent Savant]

.

If we are to accept that major media is essentially managed/controlled by the very few [not only in the US, but globally], and we acknowledge that those very few have been managing/manipulating news 'stories' [and through other channels, events themselves], then how can anyone with such assumptions believe this Wikileaks/Assange onslaught is NOT ultimately just another aspect of such controls, with an eventual benefit to the few?

How can something have SO MUCH EXPOSURE in the worldwide press, have SO MUCH SATURATION -- even in this f'ing forum -- and NOT be controlled/managed, at least partially if not wholly, by the very same forces many on this board seem to rail against?

Of course, those that do NOT accept the above notions of media control need not apply.

This Assange character has his face in all the papers, his name everywhere, yet he continues to roam the earth with seemingly minimal fear while "smear" campaigns are being leveled against him so that some may think "THE MAN" is trying to take him down...

Such theatrics.

And yet, some have subscribed to it. And why not? I mean, have you watched what passes for TV programming lately?

THIS is the new REALITY TV. Drink it up.

Consume.

[nathan28]

This Assange character has his face in all the papers, his name everywhere, yet he continues to roam the earth with seemingly minimal fear while "smear" campaigns are being leveled against him so that some may think "THE MAN" is trying to take him down.

Man, it's a good thing that not everyone is falling for the stories we're working all this OT on here at ZioDisney to restore Assange's credibility. I mean, take a look at this, what a joke, how can anyone believe that you'd get drunk and wind up at her place? What a joke, I can't believe all the sheeple fall for this nonsense.

Hunt for WikiLeaks' Julian Assange may end with surrender

THE hunt may soon be over for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as the fugitive Australian plans to surrender to British police overnight.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/hunt-for-wikileaks-julian-assange-may-end-with-surrender/story-e6frf7lf-1225967095676

Julian Assange Expected To Appear In U.K. Court As U.S. Also Tightens Screws

WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange is widely expected to appear in a British court room Tuesday as he threatens to release a massive new batch of secret diplomatic cables.

http://www.neontommy.com/news/2010/12/julian-assange-expected-appear-uk-court-us-also-tightens-screws

Assange in talks to come out of hiding

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
LONDON - Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks Web site, was in negotiations with British authorities late Monday to come out of hiding for what is set to be a high-profile extradition hearing to face criminal allegations in Sweden.

Assange - whose Web site's release of thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables is generating outrage and embarrassment in official circles - was reportedly close to agreeing to appear in a British courtroom as early as Tuesday. Scotland Yard declined to comment on the negotiations.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 07295.html

[smiths]

if the case against Assange rests on some of the material put forward in the last few pages, then i reckon he's laughing,

i for one am increasingly convinced of the genuine nature of wikileaks and Assange

to the people who view it as a psyops i have one question,
do you think it impossible that an individual or group with the right skills could set about this task?

[AhabsOtherLeg]

.
Time's Joe Klein writes this about the WikiLeaks disclosures:

If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in "freedom" stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He's the one who should be in jail.

A single foreign national being rounded up and put in jail would be a human disaster - so we must immediately round up a foreign national (Julian Assange) and put him in jail!

Joe Klein's not too bright, is he? Why didn't Greenwald use that immediate, laughable self-defeat against him? It fairly leaps off the page.

As for the Cato institute, it is a pretty terrible organisation in itself, but they have put out some genuinely useful stuff over the years, particularly about the militarisation of the police, and the scourge of botched and brutal no-knock and warrantless SWAT raids.
They even made a handy interactive map to show how bad the problem is. It is bad: http://www.cato.org/raidmap/

Sometimes they seem to be on the right side in the War On Drugs (or the winning side, at any rate). But that's off-topic.

...Going back in the thread a bit, I'm finding it hard to see how Wikileaks could be part of a game to rein in the freedom of the Internet. They were the ones who leaked the info about content filtering by the governments of Australia and Thailand, and showed how Finland, Denmark and Australia use the spectre of child pornography to push through the censorship of legitimate sites. They could be part of a double game, I suppose, but it'd have to be a very long-term one.

And why do folk seem surprised to see the attitudes and viewpoints of American officialdom (Iran bad, Israel good, America double-plus-good) in a bunch of documents written by American officials, for the viewing of other American officials?

A lot of the time (like with the "Godfather" character analysis doc about the rulers of Azerbaijan) they just seem to be trying to keep each other vaguely entertained at their desks. The job must be dull most of the time. Reading stuff, writing stuff, sending emails.

It's interesting - we've all seen the secret memoirs and table-talk of emperors and dictators and statesmen before, and we've had the various people's histories from the various people's own mouths - but this might be the first time we've seen the unvarnished viewpoints of all the flunkies, functionaries, seatwarmers and vacuous, do-nothing placemen that an empire (however evil) needs in order to exist. The less interesting it is, the more interesting it is.

[vanlose kid]

Hackers take down website of bank that froze WikiLeaks funds


By Daniel Tencer
Monday, December 6th, 2010 -- 8:32 pm

A group of Internet activists calling themselves Operation Payback have taken credit for shutting down the website of a bank that earlier Monday froze funds belonging to WikiLeaks.

Announcing its successful hack on a Twitter account, the group declared, "We will fire at anyone that tries to censor WikiLeaks."

Earlier in the day, Swiss bank PostFinance issued a statement announcing that it had frozen 31,000 euro ($41,000 US) in an account set up as a legal defense fund for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The bank said it had frozen the account because, in opening it, Assange had claimed residency in Geneva.

"Assange cannot provide proof of residence in Switzerland and thus does not meet the criteria for a customer relationship with PostFinance," the bank said.

As of Monday evening, the PostFinance website was unavailable.

Operation Payback also promised a hack attack on PayPal, the online payment service that last week cut off WikiLeaks, denying the group a major tool for collecting donations from supporters.

With the financial noose tightening around WikiLeaks even as a legal one tightens around its founder's neck, Operation Payback has effectively declared war on the organizations working to hobble WikiLeaks.

"In these modern times, Internet access is fast becoming a basic human right," the group says in a video posted to YouTube. "Just like any other basic human right, we believe it is wrong to infringe upon it."

The video continues: "To move to censor content on the Internet based on your own prejudice is, at best, laughably impossible. The unjust restrictions you impose on us will meet with disaster, and only strengthen our resolve to disobey and rebel against your tyranny."

WikiLeaks has in recent days been under a deluge of cyber-attacks that led to its DNS registration for its .org URL being taken down, but by mid-Monday the site had reappeared on more than 500 different domains.

News sources in Britain reported late Monday that Assange has arranged to meet with British police on Tuesday, and will likely face a court hearing over an international warrant issued by Sweden in connection with accusations of sexual assault. The criminal probe does not allege non-consensual sex, only that Assange had sex with two women without a condom.

Supporters of the secret-spilling organization argue that the controversies surrounding WikiLeaks -- from the unusual criminal probe against Assange, to banks freezing their funds -- are part of a global campaign to shut down a website that has embarrassed world leaders on numerous occasions.

-- With earlier reporting by Stephen C. Webster

The following video was posted to YouTube by Operation Payback.



http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/hack ... aks-funds/

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10.18am: Sky News is reporting that Assange was arrested at 9.30 this morning. It says he is expected to appear before City of Westminster magistrates court later today.

9.55am: The cyber war over WikiLeaks appears to be escalating, with supporters of the site reportedly taking revenge against the Swiss bank that froze Assange's assets.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/201 ... ve-updates

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[vanlose kid]

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Time's Joe Klein writes this about the WikiLeaks disclosures:

If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in "freedom" stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He's the one who should be in jail.

A single foreign national being rounded up and put in jail would be a human disaster - so we must immediately round up a foreign national (Julian Assange) and put him in jail!

Joe Klein's not too bright, is he? Why didn't Greenwald use that immediate, laughable self-defeat against him? It fairly leaps off the page.

As for the Cato institute, it is a pretty terrible organisation in itself, but they have put out some genuinely useful stuff over the years, particularly about the militarisation of the police, and the scourge of botched and brutal no-knock and warrantless SWAT raids.
They even made a handy interactive map to show how bad the problem is. It is bad: http://www.cato.org/raidmap/

Sometimes they seem to be on the right side in the War On Drugs (or the winning side, at any rate). But that's off-topic.

...Going back in the thread a bit, I'm finding it hard to see how Wikileaks could be part of a game to rein in the freedom of the Internet. They were the ones who leaked the info about content filtering by the governments of Australia and Thailand, and showed how Finland, Denmark and Australia use the spectre of child pornography to push through the censorship of legitimate sites. They could be part of a double game, I suppose, but it'd have to be a very long-term one.

And why do folk seem surprised to see the attitudes and viewpoints of American officialdom (Iran bad, Israel good, America double-plus-good) in a bunch of documents written by American officials, for the viewing of other American officials?

A lot of the time (like with the "Godfather" character analysis doc about the rulers of Azerbaijan) they just seem to be trying to keep each other vaguely entertained at their desks. The job must be dull most of the time. Reading stuff, writing stuff, sending emails.

It's interesting - we've all seen the secret memoirs and table-talk of emperors and dictators and statesmen before, and we've had the various people's histories from the various people's own mouths - but this might be the first time we've seen the unvarnished viewpoints of all the flunkies, functionaries, seatwarmers and vacuous, do-nothing placemen that an empire (however evil) needs in order to exist. The less interesting it is, the more interesting it is.

hey, stop making sense, ahab. you're spoiling the "narrative flow", dontcha know? leave the white whale alone.

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