Punishing the WikiLeaker Misses the Point. George Orwell wrote: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
" A true journalist's job is to expose government wrongdoing and propaganda, skewer hypocrites, and speak for those with no voice. Wikileaks Chief to Write Monthly Column in Top Swedish Online Tabloid. Wikileaks' chief Julian Assange will write a monthly column for Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet as part of his bid for Swedish legal protections.
Assange met with Aftonbladet's Chief Director, Jan Helin, to discuss the upcoming role. (Source: Aftonbladet) One of the oldest tabloids, Aftonbladet was also among the first to jump online and remains one of the largest internet sites in Europe. (Source: Wikimedia Commons) Tabloid has been running strong since 1830 -- was among first worldwide to adopt internet publishing Embroiled in an international politics controversy and owner of one the internet's most divisive properties, what's a man to do? Bloody WikiLeaks. The Pentagon warns that WikiLeaks' vow to publish more stolen U.S. documents may be worse than the first leaks.
Even the anti-war left opposes the theft. When will WikiLeaks be treated as an enemy? WikiLeaks, which puts stolen, mostly classified U.S. documents on the Internet, justifies its publishing of secrets as throwing sunlight on the devious doings of governments. In reality, its founder, Julian Assange, is an anti-American agitator whose main aim is to end the U.S. war in Afghanistan by any means necessary. Wikileaks for re-election - On Line Opinion - 16/8/2010.
The "leak" of 91,000 US/NATO and Australian intelligence documents on July 25, 2010 appears to have been a passively authorised leak by the Obama Administration (if my theory is correct).
While Obama professes outrage at the "leak" and demands an international legal response this is but a political facade of a newby signifying nothing. US IT security passively and intentionally watched as the documents cache was downloaded by the main suspect, Bradley Manning in one of the US Department of Defence (DoDs) highly protected and monitored data security establishments. I'm not saying Manning is bad - just helpful to Obama. Hopefully Manning is not nailed by the system. First some political motivations - on Obama's part. Obama has calculated that great political danger lies in being seen to “decide” to withdraw from Afghanistan.
Advertisement. Afghanistan is an unwinnable war, and our leaders know it. The End of Military History. Washington has failed to learn from Israel’s mistakes that the Western way of war finished, argues American Conservative contributing editor Andrew Bacevich in this essay courtesy of TomDispatch.com.
By Andrew J. Bacevich. WikiLeaks and the war in Afghanistan. Last September, an assessment of the war in Afghanistan, by the American commander General Stanley McChrystal, was leaked to the press.
The timing was not incidental. President Obama was trying to make up his mind about what kind of war he wanted to wage, for how long, and with how many soldiers. Iranian Influence in Afghanistan. Click here to view this Outlook as an Adobe Acrobat PDF. No. 4, July 2010 This is the first in a series of Middle Eastern Outlooks documenting Iran's growing influence in Afghanistan. As the United States targets the Taliban in Afghanistan, Iran is using soft-power tactics to combat U.S. influence and win over the minds of the people. The Dutch Pull Out of Afghanistan. Link by Link - WikiLeaks Turns to the News Media to Package the Information. Wikileaks And Julian Assange Caught In Bias Storm Over Reuter’s Iraqi Journalists ‘Slaughter’ The Pioneer > Online Edition : >> The enemy among us. WikiLeaks – shooting the messenger. Consortiumnews.com. If independent-minded Web sites, like WikiLeaks or, say, Consortiumnews.com, existed 43 years ago, I might have risen to the occasion and helped save the lives of some 25,000 U.S. soldiers, and a million Vietnamese, by exposing the lies contained in just one SECRET/EYES ONLY cable from Saigon.
I need to speak out now because I have been sickened watching the herculean effort by Official Washington and our Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) to divert attention from the violence and deceit in Afghanistan, reflected in thousands of U.S. Petraeus hedges on US exit date from Afghanistan. 15 August 2010Last updated at 16:26 Gen David Petraeus: "As conditions permit, we transition tasks" - Video courtesy NBC/Meet the Press The new commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan, Gen David Petraeus, says he will not be bound by a 2011 target date to start withdrawing US troops. Speaking on NBC television, Gen Petraeus said he reserved the right to tell President Obama whether the pull-out date was too early.
WikiLeaks' Collateral Murder: U.S. Soldier Ethan McCord's Eyewitness Story. Harvard National Security Journal. WikiLeaks: Rest of war documents to be released in a few weeks. A spokesman for the WikiLeaks document-revealing website said Saturday that the 15,000 remaining documents on the Afghanistan war will be published within "two weeks to a month.
" Last week, the Pentagon called on WikiLeaks to turn over the last of the documents, which the website said it was reviewing to redact information that would harm "innocent parties who are under reasonable threat. " WikiLeaks fired back at the Pentagon's request that the website "do the right thing" with a series of tweets responding to "obnoxious" Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell.
On Saturday, Australian Julian Assange, who describes himself as a board member of the website and a spokesman, told reporters in Stockholm, "This organization will not be threatened by the Pentagon or any other group. We proceed cautiously and safely with this material. " Op-Ed Columnist - Kiss This War Goodbye. But if we were titillated that Sunday, it wasn’t immediately clear that this internal government history of the war had mass appeal. Tricia Nixon’s wedding in the White House Rose Garden on Saturday received equal play with the Pentagon Papers on The Times’s front page.
On “Face the Nation” the guest was the secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, yet the subject of the papers didn’t even come up. That false calm vanished overnight once Richard Nixon, erupting in characteristic rage and paranoia, directed his attorney general, John Mitchell, to enjoin The Times from publishing any sequels. WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Could Face Criminal Charges from U.S. Allies. For five long and very strange years, death haunted tiny Dryden, NY, a town near the Finger Lakes where a plague of car accidents, suicides, and even grisly murders involving two popular cheerleaders just kept mounting up.
A suit over the reported U.S. targeting of Anwar Awlaki would open a useful debate - latimes.com. May the U.S. government kill one of its own citizens without first convicting him of a crime?
A court may have the opportunity to answer that important question. After being sued by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Treasury Department has issued a license allowing the civil liberties groups to provide legal services to the father of Anwar Awlaki, an American-born Muslim cleric who is reportedly on a list of individuals targeted for assassination by the military or the CIA. Awlaki's father insists that his son is not a terrorist.
WikiLeaks seeks protection in Sweden. Publishers are a new sort of refugees, WikiLeaks founder said in Stockholm as he plans to publish more secret Afghan documents. • WikiLeaks to publish more secret Afghan files• The US puts pressure on Sweden over WikiLeaks• Swedish IT firm helps WikiLeaks publish papers Julian Assange, founder of whistleblower website WikiLeaks, will apply for Swedish publishing licence. That would give the website protection under the Scandinavian country's whistleblower protection laws.
"We're dealing with organizations that don't obey the law. We're dealing with intelligence agencies," Julian Assange told news agency TT. Checkpoint Washington - Julian Assange defends Wikileaks. WikiLeaks.org founder Julian Assange made a rare public appearance at the TED Global conference in Oxford, England, where he defended his group and explained how it posts documents in an interview with Chris Anderson, the curator of the Technology, Entertainment, Design conferences. American Friends Service Committee: Email - General Petraeus waging war in the media. View this message as a web page. Dear Friend, Iraq Veterans Against the War Calls for Prosecution of Bush Administration Officials for War Crimes.
NEW YORK - August 10 - At its seventh annual national convention in Austin, Texas, IVAW called for the prosecution of senior Bush administration officials for allegedly conspiring to manipulate intelligence in order to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq. IVAW alleges that Bush administration officials conspired to create the perception that Saddam Hussein presented an imminent threat to the United States in order to bypass an uncooperative U.N. Files Appeal of Warrantless Wiretapping Case Jewel v. NSA.