#FREEBRAD - #FreeAnons - We Are All Bradley Manning: New Video Explains Why June 7, 2013  |   Private First Class Bradley Manning is on trial now after releasing information to the public. He has already spent 1,108 days in confinement awaiting trial. The information he shared exposed the unjust detainment of innocent people in Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and served as a catalyst for pro-democracy movements in the Arab world. Instead of the cold, clean images of drone planes soaring and American flags waving that mainstream news outlets project, the information Manning helped release displayed the disturbing, human truth about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among other crimes, the whistleblower is accused of “aiding the enemy”—a capital offense and his most serious charge. A conviction on this charge would mean life in prison, and a possible death sentence. Since it’s the public who benefited from this information, does that make us the enemy? What price will future whistleblowers pay? These are the questions posed on the Manning support network website, I Am Bradley Manning [3]. The site is set up in part to promote a new PSA film created by the eponymous group. The site’s tagline reads, “I am Bradley Manning because I believe the public deserves the truth and whistleblowers deserve a fair trial.” The video I Am Bradley Manning features big-names including actors Maggie Gyllenhaal, Russell Brand and Peter Sarsgaard; filmmaker Oliver Stone; musicians Tom Morello and Moby; journalists Chris Hedges, Phil Donahue and Matt Taibbi; and author Alice Walker among others, carrying signs to declare they, too, are Bradley Manning. Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg tells the camera, “I was Bradley Manning.” The video’s participants call the “aiding the enemy” charge absurd. The dialogue opens with the question, “When you join the military are you asked to keep any war crimes you might see secret?” The video proceeds to pose important points that pertain to Manning’s case, including facts like: The cables Manning released were not “top secret” [4] documents. The whole concept of the whistleblower protection laws [5] in place is that you cannot get in trouble for reporting illegal or improper activity. Manning exposed real war crimes. The most stark example of war crimes Manning exposed is the video from Iraq titled Collateral Murder. [6]  (None of the people associated with the murder of unarmed civilians and journalists, as shown in Collateral Murder, have been arrested or tried for their crimes.

) Shortly after passing the military information to WikiLeaks, Manning asked former hacker Adrian Lamo this question: “If you saw incredible things, awful things…things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington D.C….what would you do?” The video echoes this question in a call-to-action statement at its close. Thousands of people in solidarity have posted photos of themselves holding “I am Bradley Manning” signs to iam.bradleymanning.org. Manning has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and almost 65,000 people have already signed a Roots Action petition [7] asking that he receive the prize. “I want people to see the truth, because without it you cannot make informed decisions as a public,” Manning says in a chat [8] logs with journalist Adrian Lamo prior to his arrest. He also said he hoped the publication of the diplomatic cables would ignite “worldwide discussion, debates, and reform.” Now it is for the public to influence the future of one whistleblower, and whistleblowers at large.  See more stories tagged with: bradley manning [9], video [10], i am bradley manning [11], trial [12], whistleblower [13] Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/we-are-bradley-manning Links:[1] http://www.alternet.org[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/april-m-short[3] http://iam.bradleymanning.org/[4] http://www.thenation.com/blog/174622/seven-myths-about-bradley-manning[5] http://www.dni.gov/index.php/about-this-site/no-fear-act/whistleblower-protection-laws[6] http://collateralmurder.com/[7] http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=7612[8] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/wikileaks-chat/[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/bradley-manning-0[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/video[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/i-am-bradley-manning[12] http://www.alternet.org/tags/trial-0[13] http://www.alternet.org/tags/whistleblower[14] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
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#FREEBRAD - #FreeAnons -

We Are All Bradley Manning: New Video Explains Why

June 7, 2013  |  

Private First Class Bradley Manning is on trial now after releasing information to the public. He has already spent 1,108 days in confinement awaiting trial. The information he shared exposed the unjust detainment of innocent people in Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and served as a catalyst for pro-democracy movements in the Arab world. Instead of the cold, clean images of drone planes soaring and American flags waving that mainstream news outlets project, the information Manning helped release displayed the disturbing, human truth about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Among other crimes, the whistleblower is accused of “aiding the enemy”—a capital offense and his most serious charge. A conviction on this charge would mean life in prison, and a possible death sentence.

Since it’s the public who benefited from this information, does that make us the enemy? What price will future whistleblowers pay? These are the questions posed on the Manning support network website, I Am Bradley Manning [3]. The site is set up in part to promote a new PSA film created by the eponymous group.

The site’s tagline reads, “I am Bradley Manning because I believe the public deserves the truth and whistleblowers deserve a fair trial.”

The video I Am Bradley Manning features big-names including actors Maggie Gyllenhaal, Russell Brand and Peter Sarsgaard; filmmaker Oliver Stone; musicians Tom Morello and Moby; journalists Chris Hedges, Phil Donahue and Matt Taibbi; and author Alice Walker among others, carrying signs to declare they, too, are Bradley Manning. Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg tells the camera, “I was Bradley Manning.” The video’s participants call the “aiding the enemy” charge absurd.

The dialogue opens with the question, “When you join the military are you asked to keep any war crimes you might see secret?”

The video proceeds to pose important points that pertain to Manning’s case, including facts like:

  • The cables Manning released were not “top secret” [4] documents.

  • The whole concept of the whistleblower protection laws [5] in place is that you cannot get in trouble for reporting illegal or improper activity.

  • Manning exposed real war crimes.

The most stark example of war crimes Manning exposed is the video from Iraq titled Collateral Murder. [6]  (None of the people associated with the murder of unarmed civilians and journalists, as shown in Collateral Murder, have been arrested or tried for their crimes.

)

Shortly after passing the military information to WikiLeaks, Manning asked former hacker Adrian Lamo this question: “If you saw incredible things, awful things…things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington D.C….what would you do?”

The video echoes this question in a call-to-action statement at its close. Thousands of people in solidarity have posted photos of themselves holding “I am Bradley Manning” signs to iam.bradleymanning.org.

Manning has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and almost 65,000 people have already signed a Roots Action petition [7] asking that he receive the prize.

“I want people to see the truth, because without it you cannot make informed decisions as a public,” Manning says in a chat [8] logs with journalist Adrian Lamo prior to his arrest. He also said he hoped the publication of the diplomatic cables would ignite “worldwide discussion, debates, and reform.”

Now it is for the public to influence the future of one whistleblower, and whistleblowers at large. 

See more stories tagged with:
bradley manning [9],
video [10],
i am bradley manning [11],
trial [12],
whistleblower [13]
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/we-are-bradley-manning

Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/april-m-short
[3] http://iam.bradleymanning.org/
[4] http://www.thenation.com/blog/174622/seven-myths-about-bradley-manning
[5] http://www.dni.gov/index.php/about-this-site/no-fear-act/whistleblower-protection-laws
[6] http://collateralmurder.com/
[7] http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=7612
[8] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/wikileaks-chat/
[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/bradley-manning-0
[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/video
[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/i-am-bradley-manning
[12] http://www.alternet.org/tags/trial-0
[13] http://www.alternet.org/tags/whistleblower
[14] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

(via cultureofresistance)

Source: alternet.org

#FREEBRAD OP-ED: BRADLEY MANNING AND QUEER COLLABORATION Rescinding Bradley Manning’s invitation to be the grand marshal of San Francisco’s big gay celebration is not what pride is all about, says Victoria Brownworth. Ask anyone, queer or straight, what they think the queerest city in America is and most will say San Francisco. The City by the Bay has been the locus of all things queer since before Stonewall. It made perfect sense, then, that San Francisco Pride would choose as its 2013 grand marshal Bradley Manning, the former Army intelligence specialist who is currently being prosecuted by the Obama administration and the Army for leaking thousands of classified documents via WikiLeaks. Many of those documents have been published and discussed extensively by top-level newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Manning has been deemed a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International and other human rights groups. In March, Manning was short-listed for the Nobel Peace Prize with support from people as diverse as Republican congressman Ron Paul of Texas and Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. The Guardian, a U.K. newspaper, chose Manning as its Person of the Year 2012. His case has been a cause célèbre throughout Europe. But within hours of the announcement Friday that Manning would be the grand marshal, and subsequent notification of Manning himself through Courage to Resist, which raises money to support his defense, Lisa L. Williams, San Francisco Pride board president, issued a disturbing press release. Williams stated emphatically that Manning’s nomination was “a mistake and never should have been allowed to happen.” Williams also blamed a rogue member of the committee that chooses the marshals and said he “had been disciplined.” Disciplined — perhaps like Manning himself has been by the Obama administration, which has invoked the nearly century-old Espionage Act to prosecute Manning (but not any of the news outlets that have repeatedly published the documents he released) and other whistle-blowers. The S.F. Pride board allegedly received numerous complaints from gay and lesbian service members about the choice of Manning and so withdrew it, blaming an unnamed board member. Craven. The text of Williams’s press release reads like an indictment of Manning and his supporters rather than a simple “oops — we got our signals crossed.” The use of the term “disciplined” seems decidedly nonconsensual and very Bush-era. On Monday longtime San Francisco activists Tommi Avicolli Mecca, Michael Petrelis and Lisa Gedulgig held what they termed a social justice protest outside the San Francisco Pride office. Protesters wore Bradley Manning masks and carried signs saying “I Am Bradley Manning.” Daniel Ellsberg attended the protest. The Pride committee’s decision to dishonor Manning wasn’t just craven, it was — and is —reprehensible. It is absolutely anathema to what any Pride event is supposed be about, which is support for the diversity among and courage of LGBT people. The ease with which the committee backed off the choice of Manning should unnerve every single queer in America. This is what collaboration looks like. When I first read Williams’s press release, I was dumbfounded. I have been writing about Manning’s case since his arrest in May 2010. I detailed his torture at the hands of the Obama administration. I tweeted regularly how long he’d been held without charge as weeks turned to months. I elucidated the reasons why he should be given a presidential pardon and the precedent for it. But Williams, even as she allows that Manning will get his day in court, cites as fact that Manning’s actions were dangerous and asserts, “Even the hint of support for actions which placed in harms [sic] way the lives of our men and women in uniform, and countless others, military and civilian alike, will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride.” As Williams, speaking for the S.F. Pride committee in toto, presents it, Manning is tantamount to a terrorist, equivalent to the Tsarnaev brothers, putting the lives of countless people, military and civilian alike, at risk … Continued at http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2013/05/01/op-ed-bradley-manning-and-queer-collaboration
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#FREEBRAD

OP-ED: BRADLEY MANNING AND QUEER COLLABORATION

Rescinding Bradley Manning’s invitation to be the grand marshal of San Francisco’s big gay celebration is not what pride is all about, says Victoria Brownworth.

Ask anyone, queer or straight, what they think the queerest city in America is and most will say San Francisco. The City by the Bay has been the locus of all things queer since before Stonewall.
It made perfect sense, then, that San Francisco Pride would choose as its 2013 grand marshal Bradley Manning, the former Army intelligence specialist who is currently being prosecuted by the Obama administration and the Army for leaking thousands of classified documents via WikiLeaks. Many of those documents have been published and discussed extensively by top-level newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.
Manning has been deemed a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International and other human rights groups. In March, Manning was short-listed for the Nobel Peace Prize with support from people as diverse as Republican congressman Ron Paul of Texas and Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. The Guardian, a U.K. newspaper, chose Manning as its Person of the Year 2012. His case has been a cause célèbre throughout Europe.
But within hours of the announcement Friday that Manning would be the grand marshal, and subsequent notification of Manning himself through Courage to Resist, which raises money to support his defense, Lisa L. Williams, San Francisco Pride board president, issued a disturbing press release. Williams stated emphatically that Manning’s nomination was “a mistake and never should have been allowed to happen.” Williams also blamed a rogue member of the committee that chooses the marshals and said he “had been disciplined.”
Disciplined — perhaps like Manning himself has been by the Obama administration, which has invoked the nearly century-old Espionage Act to prosecute Manning (but not any of the news outlets that have repeatedly published the documents he released) and other whistle-blowers.
The S.F. Pride board allegedly received numerous complaints from gay and lesbian service members about the choice of Manning and so withdrew it, blaming an unnamed board member.
Craven.
The text of Williams’s press release reads like an indictment of Manning and his supporters rather than a simple “oops — we got our signals crossed.” The use of the term “disciplined” seems decidedly nonconsensual and very Bush-era.
On Monday longtime San Francisco activists Tommi Avicolli Mecca, Michael Petrelis and Lisa Gedulgig held what they termed a social justice protest outside the San Francisco Pride office. Protesters wore Bradley Manning masks and carried signs saying “I Am Bradley Manning.” Daniel Ellsberg attended the protest.
The Pride committee’s decision to dishonor Manning wasn’t just craven, it was — and is —reprehensible. It is absolutely anathema to what any Pride event is supposed be about, which is support for the diversity among and courage of LGBT people.
The ease with which the committee backed off the choice of Manning should unnerve every single queer in America. This is what collaboration looks like.
When I first read Williams’s press release, I was dumbfounded. I have been writing about Manning’s case since his arrest in May 2010. I detailed his torture at the hands of the Obama administration. I tweeted regularly how long he’d been held without charge as weeks turned to months. I elucidated the reasons why he should be given a presidential pardon and the precedent for it.
But Williams, even as she allows that Manning will get his day in court, cites as fact that Manning’s actions were dangerous and asserts, “Even the hint of support for actions which placed in harms [sic] way the lives of our men and women in uniform, and countless others, military and civilian alike, will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride.”
As Williams, speaking for the S.F. Pride committee in toto, presents it, Manning is tantamount to a terrorist, equivalent to the Tsarnaev brothers, putting the lives of countless people, military and civilian alike, at risk …

Continued at http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2013/05/01/op-ed-bradley-manning-and-queer-collaboration

#Thank Manning (HD) - #FreeBrad #FreeManning

~

Flood the Mail Rooms #ThankManning

PFC Manning 239 Sheridan Ave, Bldg 417 JBM-HH, VA 22211

Source: youtube.com

2011-08-24 #Wikileaks releases 55 thousand cables and asks citizens to analyze them in #wlfind hashtag

Wikileaks releases 55 thousand cables from the U.S. embassies in Iran, Afghanistan, Israel, Russia, and Venezuela, among others. Through their official channels they asked for citizen participation in analyzing them. They also asked that they post their finds by sending them to @wikileaks on Twitter under the hashtag #wlfind. You can take a look at the cables yourself by visiting this link: http://wikileaks.org/tag/TU_0.html or http://www.cablegatesearch.net/search.php.

As a consequence of this release, Wikileak’s Californian DNS hoster, Dynadot, “has received a PATRIOT act production order for information on Julian Assange”, according to their website. It also mentioned that it had been complied and that “the production order seeks all available information on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, for the US grand jury in Alexandria, Washington.”

State Dept. Cables? #WikiLeaks Documents? What? Where? - #CoverUp #BlackMail #Coercion #Lies

Last month, the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the State Department’s failure to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking the declassification of 23 leaked State Department cables. These cables have already been fully disclosed online by WikiLeaks and distributed by major national and international newspapers. The U.S. government has maintained that the cables are secret. As we’ve said before, the government’s struggle to ignore WikiLeaks has reached the point of absurdity.

Last week, we received the government’s initial response to our lawsuit; it demonstrates just how far they are willing to go to evade responsibility.

First, the government denies that we even asked for State Department cables in our FOIA request. Instead, they argue that we only requested what we claim are State Department cables. Of course, while insisting that the American people are not entitled to know whether the leaked cables are authentic, the government has simultaneously aggressively pursued the alleged source of the cables. As the ACLU’s complaint states:

To which the government responded:

The government also assured us that even if we had requested what are in fact State Department cables, those cables do not “describe federal government activity.” Even actual State Department cables “are often preliminary and incomplete expressions of foreign policy, and … they do not necessarily represent U.S. views or policy.” Some of these incomplete “expressions” of foreign policy that don’tnecessarily reflect U.S. views or policy include:

  • descriptions of interference with the Spanish investigation of CIA rendition flights and prosecution of Bush administration officials for torture of detainees;
  • urging Germany to drop arrest warrants for the rendition and torture of Khaled El-Masri, an innocent German citizen;
  • attempts to pressure the Italian judiciary to drop international arrest warrants for the CIA’s kidnapping and rendition of Egyptian citizen Abu Omar in Milan;

diplomatic meddling in response to investigations of CIA rendition programs throughout Ireland, Portugal, Switzerland, and the Netherlands;

  • international admissions and negotiations regarding the use of drones throughout Pakistan and Yemen.

The message to the American public is: you don’t need to know if the leaked cables that the world has read are real. But even if they are real, the government won’t take responsibility for their contents. Americans don’t need to know if the State Department is spending our diplomatic capital in attempts to cover up and evade accountability for torture and rendition.

The government concludes with the following:

What the government calls “unusual circumstances” should not allow for further delay. Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act to make the government accountable to the American people. Eventually, the State Department will have to stop ignoring reality and begin to take responsibility for the embarrassments that WikiLeaks has brought to light.

WikiLeaks Plans to Take Legal Action Against Visa, Mastercard

Whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks lost many of the sources of its funding more than six months ago when Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal stopped processing payments to the controversial non-profit. But if those financial blockades continue for five days longer, WikiLeaks will take legal action, according to Forbes.

Unless Visa Europe and Mastercard Europe restore payments to WikiLeaks by Thursday, WikiLeaks and DataCell, its payment provider, will log a formal complaint with the E.U. Commission, the organization’s Icelandic lawyer Sveinn Andri Sveinsson told Forbes.

“They’re boycotting Datacell and WikiLeaks without any objective justification,” Sveinsson said. “This is clearly an abuse of their market dominance.”

Forbes explains that the complaint alleges that Visa and Mastercard are in violation of Articles 101 and 102 of the E.U. treaty, “which deal with competition among businesses and forbid the creation of anti-competitive cartels. Article 101 prevents firms from creating partnerships for the purposes of price fixing, and Article 102 forbids firms in a ‘dominant position’ from abusing that position.”

WikiLeaks recently released a video that claims that losing its financial support has cost the organization around $15 million. Mastercard and Visa have maintained that WikiLeaks is in violation of their terms of service. Visa told Forbes that it will “respond in due course” if WikiLeaks opts to take action, but neither company has commented further.

WikiLeaks caused an international diplomatic debacle when it began the release of more than 250,000 confidential U.S. embassy cables last fall. The organization’s chief, Julian Assange is also fighting a legal battle of his own, currently under house arrest near London, awaiting extradition to Sweden where he faces accusations of sexual assault.


What Does it Cost to Change the World? from WikiLeaks on Vimeo.

#Obama echoes Richard Nixon on #WikiLeaks prisoner - #FreeBradley #FreeManning

The first time President Obama was publicly asked about Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of disclosing government secrets to WikiLeaks, his answer was reminiscent of George W. Bush.

The second time - when he declared Manning guilty without a trial - it was more like Richard Nixon.

Manning, a 23-year-old Army private, is charged with divulging hundreds of thousands of classified documents, including war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq and State Department diplomatic cables.

Until his transfer in late April to a military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., Manning had been held for nine months at the Marine brig in Quantico, Va. Here is how attorney David Coombs, the only person allowed unmonitored visits, described his confinement there:

Held in an isolation cell for 23 hours a day; stripped of his clothing every night, purportedly for his own protection, and given a coarse smock to wear; required to stand naked at some roll calls; prohibited from sleeping between 5 a.m. and 8 p.m. and required to respond to guards’ queries every five minutes; also awakened and required to respond at night whenever guards couldn’t see his face.

The issue landed in Obama’s lap via P.J. Crowley, the State Department’s chief media spokesman and the only member of the administration known to have protested Manning’s treatment.

Answering a question at an MIT student seminar in March, Crowley called the conditions of Manning’s confinement “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.”

Asked about Crowley’s comments at a news conference the next day, Obama said the Pentagon had assured him that its procedures for Manning “are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards,” and that “some of this has to do with Pfc. Manning’s safety.”

Two days later, the State Department announced Crowley’s “resignation,” government-speak for signing a farewell note while being pushed out the window.

What was especially noteworthy about Obama’s comments was his reliance on the Pentagon’s assessment of its own conduct.

It called to mind Bush’s assertions that waterboarding suspected terrorists was legal because his handpicked lawyers had told him so. Or his acceptance of promises from countries like Morocco and Egypt that suspects delivered to them for interrogation after overseas abductions - the practice known as “extraordinary rendition” - would be treated humanely.

Obama’s assurances, at any rate, didn’t satisfy a group of Manning’s supporters, who burst into a protest song April 21 during the president’s $35,800-a-head fundraiser in San Francisco.

Later, one of the protesters asked Obama about Manning. According to a transcript of a cell phone recording, the president first replied that military secrecy laws apply to everyone.

“If I was to release stuff, information that I’m not authorized to release, I’m breaking the law,” Obama said. “We don’t individually make our own decisions about how the laws operate. …

“He (Manning) broke the law.”

The questioner then brought up Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers study of the Vietnam War. That was different, Obama replied, because “what Ellsberg released wasn’t classified in the same way.”

There were at least three things wrong with Obama’s statements, in ascending order of importance:

— The president has the power to declassify any document and wouldn’t be “breaking the law” by releasing it.

— The Pentagon Papers were classified top secret, a more restrictive level than any of the material Manning is accused of leaking.

— Manning is still awaiting trial and is legally presumed innocent.

It’s the first time a U.S. president has made such a public comment since 1971, when Nixon declared that cult leader Charles Manson, then on trial, “was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders.”

Manson was tried and convicted by a civilian jury. Manning will go before a panel of military officers ultimately responsible to the president.

Obama’s comments also raise the question of whether he looks at all criminal cases through the same lens or uses different standards depending on whether the government is alleged to be the victim or the victimizer.

This is, after all, the president who has declared that America needs to look forward, not backward, when asked about investigating former Bush administration officials for allegedly approving torture.

Obama, to be sure, has forbidden waterboarding and renounced torture. His administration also has prosecuted soldiers for killing civilians.

But while promising never to hide government wrongdoing with claims of secrecy, Obama has invoked the state-secrets defense in seeking dismissal of lawsuits challenging the Bush administration’s clandestine wiretapping and rendition programs - suits that alleged crimes by government officials.

His administration is prosecuting another media leak case, against former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake - whose supporters, like Manning’s, describe him as a courageous whistle-blower - with Espionage Act charges that carry up to 35 years in prison. One charge against Manning, aiding the enemy, is punishable by death, although prosecutors say they will not seek the death penalty.

It might be time to add Obama to the long line of presidents who considered crimes against “Them” - suspected lawbreakers, both foreign and domestic - less serious than crimes against “Us.”

Bob Egelko covers the courts for The Chronicle. E-mail him at begelko@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page F - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

#WikiLeaks Founder Accepts Australian Peace Award in London (by NTDTV)

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The founder of the controversial website, WikiLeaks, is being recognized by an Australian human rights group. Julian Assange’s site is known for publishing secret government documents and communications between officials of different nations from around the world.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange accepted an award at the Frontline Club in London on Tuesday. It was presented by the Sydney Peace Foundation.

It awarded him the gold medal of honor for what it calls his “exceptional courage in pursuit of human rights.”

Assange’s Web site, WikiLeaks, has made headlines for posting confidential diplomatic communications between countries… and exposes secret, and often controversial, communications between governments.

[Mary Kostakidis, Chair, Sydney Peace Foundation]:
“It is my great, great pleasure to present you with the Sydney peace medal, for your conviction that truth matters and that justice depends on it. And for your courage, leadership and tenacity in journalism and publishing.”

The organization says the award was made in recognition for the need for greater transparency and accountability of governments.

Assange, who is currently fighting extradition to Sweden on sex allegations, was not able to travel to Sydney to accept his honor due to his strict bail conditions.

[Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Founder]:
“The real value of this award from the Sydney Peace Foundation is that it makes implicit the link between peace and justice. It does not take the safe, feel good option of shunning controversy by uttering platitudes. Instead it goes into difficult terrain by identifying organizations or individuals who are directly engaged in struggles of one kind or another.”

He used the occasion to issue his trademark swipe at the mainstream media.

This time highlighting his anger at the American government’s efforts to charge WikiLeaks with espionage and the setting up of various task forces to monitor the organization’s work.

[Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Founder]:
“No. It is not funny that there is a dedicated CIA task force into our organization.”

Sydney Peace Foundation director Stuart Rees says Assange is paving the way for a more transparent world.

[Stuart Rees, Director, Sydney Peace Foundation]:
“We think that the struggle for peace and justice inevitably involves conflict, inevitably involves controversy. If it was a sort of stumbling towards some kind of consensus nothing would ever happen. Now, in that respect, we think that you and WikiLeaks have bought about what we think is a watershed in journalism and in freedom of information and potentially in politics.”

Assange says WikiLeaks is currently struggling against unprecedented waves of attacks on its sites.

Source: youtube.com

Wikileaks: A Big Dangerous US Government Con Job #wikileaks #cablegate #nwo #cyberwarfare

The story on the surface makes for a script for a new Oliver Stone Hollywood thriller. A 39-year old Australian hacker holds the President of the United States and his State Department hostage to a gigantic cyber “leak,” unless the President leaves Julian Assange and his Wikileaks free to release hundreds of thousands of pages of sensitive US Government memos. A closer look at the details, so far carefully leaked by the most ultra-establishment of international media such as the New York Times, reveals a clear agenda. That agenda coincidentally serves to buttress the agenda of US geopolitics around the world from Iran to Russia to North Korea. The Wikileaks is a big and dangerous US intelligence Con Job which will likely be used to police the Internet.

It is almost too perfectly-scripted to be true. A discontented 22-year old US Army soldier on duty in Baghdad, Bradley Manning, a low-grade US Army intelligence analyst, described as a loner, a gay in the military, a disgruntled “computer geek,” sifts through classified information at Forward Operating Base Hammer. He decides to secretly download US State Department email communications from the entire world over a period of eight months for hours a day, onto his blank CDs while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga. In addition to diplomatic cables, Manning is believed to have provided WikiLeaks with helicopter gun camera video of an errant US attack in Baghdad on unarmed journalists, and with war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Manning then is supposed to have tracked down a notorious former US computer hacker to get his 250,000 pages of classified US State Department cables out in the Internet for the whole world to see. He allegedly told the US hacker that the documents he had contained “incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC.” The hacker turned him in to US authorities so the story goes. Manning is now incommunicado since months in US military confinement so we cannot ask him, conveniently. The Pentagon routinely hires the best hackers to design their security systems.

Then the plot thickens. The 250,000 pages end up at the desk of Julian Assange, the 39-year-old Australian founder of a supposedly anti-establishment website with the cute name Wikileaks. Assange decides to selectively choose several of the world’s most ultra-establishment news media to exclusively handle the leaking job for him as he seems to be on the run from Interpol, not for leaking classified information, but for allegedly having consensual sex with two Swedish women who later decided it was rape.  

He selects as exclusive newspapers to decide what is to be leaked the New York Times which did such service in promoting faked propaganda against Saddam that led to the Iraqi war, the London Guardian and Der Spiegel. Assange claims he had no time to sift through so many pages so handed them to the trusted editors of the establishment media for them to decide what should be released. Very “anti-establishment” that. The New York Times even assigned one of its top people, David E. Sanger, to control the release of the Wikileaks material. Sanger is no establishment outsider. He sits as a member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Aspen Institute Strategy Group together with the likes of Condi Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA head John Deutch, former State Department Deputy Secretary and now World Bank head Robert Zoellick among others.

Indeed a strange choice of media for a person who claims to be anti-establishment. But then Assange also says he believes the US Government version of 9/11 and calls the Bilderberg Group a normal meeting of people, a very establishment view.

Not so secret cables… 

The latest sensational Wikileaks documents allegedly from the US State Department embassies around the world to Washington are definitely not as Hillary Clinton claimed “an attack on America’s foreign policy interests that have endangered innocent people.” And they do not amount to what the Italian foreign minister, called the “September 11 of world diplomacy.” The British government calls them a threat to national security and an aide to Canada’s Prime Minister calls on the CIA to assassinate Assange, as does kooky would-be US Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.

Most important, the 250,000 cables are not “top secret” as we might have thought. Between two and three million US Government employees are cleared to see this level of “secret” document,[1] and some 500,000 people around the world have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRnet) where the cables were stored. Siprnet is not recommended for distribution of top-secret information. Only 6% or 15,000 pages of the documents have been classified as even secret, a level below top-secret. Another 40% were the lowest level, “confidential”, while the rest were unclassified. In brief, it was not all that secret.[2]

Most of the revelations so far have been unspectacular. In Germany the revelations led to the removal of a prominent young FDP politician close to Guido Westerwelle who apparently liked to talk too much to his counterpart at the US Embassy. The revelations about Russian politics, that a US Embassy official refers to Putin and Medvedev as “Batman and Robin,” tells more about the cultural level of current US State Department personnel than it does about internal Russian politics.

But for anyone who has studied the craft of intelligence and of disinformation, a clear pattern emerges in the Wikileaks drama. The focus is put on select US geopolitical targets, appearing as Hillary Clinton put it “to justify US sanctions against Iran.” They claim North Korea with China’s granting of free passage to Korean ships despite US State Department pleas, send dangerous missiles to Iran. Saudi Arabia’s ailing King Abdullah reportedly called Iran’s President a Hitler.

Excuse to police the Internet?

What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaks server in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken.

The process of policing the Web was well underway before the current leaks scandal. In 2009 Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and Republican Olympia Snowe introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.773). It would give the President unlimited power to disconnect private-sector computers from the internet. The bill “would allow the president to ‘declare a cyber-security emergency’ relating to ‘non-governmental’ computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat.” We can expect that now this controversial piece of legislation will get top priority when a new Republican House and the Senate convene in January.

The US Department of Homeland Security, an agency created in the political hysteria following 9/11 2001 that has been compared to the Gestapo, has already begun policing the Internet. They are quietly seizing and shutting down internet websites (web domains) without due process or a proper trial. DHS simply seizes web domains that it wants to and posts an ominous “Department of Justice” logo on the web site. See an example at http://torrent-finder.com. Over 75 websites were seized and shut in a recent week. Right now, their focus is websites that they claim “violate copyrights,” yet the torrent-finder.com website that was seized by DHS contained no copyrighted content whatsoever. It was merely a search engine website that linked to destinations where people could access copyrighted content. Step by careful step freedom of speech can be taken away. Then what?


Notes


1. BBCNews, Siprnet: Where the leaked cables came from, 29 November, 2010, accessed in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11863618

 

2.  Ken Dilanian, Inside job: Stolen diplomatic cables show U.S. challenge of stopping authorized users, Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2010, accessed in http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sc-dc-1130-hackers-20101129,0,6716809.story

 


F. William Engdahl is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by F. William Engdahl

Ron Paul stands up for Julian Assange #ronpaulrevolution #nwo #wikileaks #cablegate #imwikileaks

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) is taking a stand as one of Julian Assange’s few defenders in Washington, arguing that the WikiLeaks founder should get the same protections as the media.

Attorney General Eric Holder said this week that the Justice Department is examining whether Assange can be charged with a crime for posting hundreds of thousands of leaked government intelligence documents and diplomatic cables.

Many Republicans have gone even further in their attacks on Assange, especially former Arkansas GOP Gov. Mike Huckabee, who said this week that the source who leaked to the WikiLeaks founder should be tried for treason and executed if found guilty.

But in a Thursday interview with Fox Business, Paul said the idea of prosecuting Assange crosses the line.

“In a free society we’re supposed to know the truth,” Paul said. “In a society where truth becomes treason, then we’re in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it.”

“This whole notion that Assange, who’s an Australian, that we want to prosecute him for treason. I mean, aren’t they jumping to a wild conclusion?” he added. “This is media, isn’t it? I mean, why don’t we prosecute The New York Times or anybody that releases this?”

Paul followed up with a post to his Twitter account Friday morning: “Re: WikiLeaks — In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.”

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