Around 8pmest every night
Using my old iBook G4 that I bought used two years ago and it is better than the crappy Netbook was when it was new before it was attacked. Another Dell thrown in the trash. I guess all those free BILLIONS W.Bush gave to the right-wing freak that owns Dell to make sure they could try to corner the market was all spent on ads. Sad.
Greg Mitchell audio interview. You need to listen if for no other reason than that Mitchell is the Wikileaks coverage MAN!!
Palin better not go "down under"
Sarah Palin better watch out.
Under Australian law, inciting violence is a serious crime: an offense which could even trigger the prosecution of members of the US political class and mainstream media who called for the assassination of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to his attorney.
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Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who's long professed to be Christian, claimed during a Nov. book signing that he wanted to see Assange and the leaker "executed" for their actions. Huckabee did not issue similar calls for employees of publications like The New York Times or The Guardian, which at the time had published more US diplomatic cables than WikiLeaks.
Palin, similarly, wrote on her Facebook page that Assange should be pursued "with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders" -- the implication being that the US military should assassinate him in person or by remote.
Conservative talk show host Bill O'Reilly has also called for the leaker to be executed, but stopped short of calling for violence against Assange.
Likewise, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) suggested that WikiLeaks should be designated a "foreign terrorist organization" by the Secretary of State. His call was echoed by the Senate's top Republican, Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who called Assange a "terrorist" and said the US should "change the law" in order to pursue him if current statutes did not permit it.
WikiLeaks' Assange Finds Support In Native Australia: AUDIO click link to listen.
Local media have editorialized that Prime Minister Julia Gillard misjudged the degree of public support for Assange last month when she accused him of breaking U.S. and possibly Australian laws.
"Let's not put any glosses on this," Gillard said. "It would not happen, information would not be on WikiLeaks, if there had not been an illegal act undertaken."
Gillard backed down a bit when an Australian Federal Police investigation concluded that no Australian law had been broken.
But she insisted that Assange was in the wrong. "The release of all of this documentation has been grossly irresponsible, and I stand by the remarks I've made about this previously," Gillard said.
Gillard's words cost her some support among members of her ruling Labor Party. Some members felt that Gillard had unfairly prejudged Assange, and that whatever Assange had done, his legal rights as an Australian citizen should be upheld.
Lawmaker Sharon Grierson, who sits on the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement, sees the Assange case as a litmus test for freedom of speech and information.
"We're a government that's improved freedom of information, so it seems to me slightly hypocritical that we would make that judgment very quickly about information being released," Grierson said.
Robert Stary, Assange's Melbourne-based lawyer, thinks his client's defense should be pretty straightforward, because he considers Assange to be a journalist, protected by U.S. First Amendment guarantees of free speech.
But Stary is worried about some possibilities: "Our main concern is really the possible extradition to the U.S. We've been troubled by the sort of rhetoric that has come out of various commentators and principally Republican politicians — Sarah Palin and the like — saying Mr. Assange should be executed, assassinated."
Gwynne Dyer: The Haitian follies
A confidential 2006 cable from the U.S. embassy in Haiti, subsequently made public by Wikileaks, said that the United States viewed the possible return of either of the two exiled Haitian ex-presidents, Jean-Bertrand Aristide or Jean-Claude Duvalier, as "unhelpful". But one of them, former president-for-life Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, is already back in Haiti, probably with Washington’s approval.
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irst, there is the fact that both the United States and France, where Duvalier was living in exile, would have been keeping track of him, and must have known of his intention to return. Indeed, they probably put him up to it: he was travelling on a long-expired diplomatic passport, and would never have been allowed to board the plane to Haiti if Washington and Paris had not quietly blessed his trip.
Secondly, he may never see the inside of a jail. He was set free after the court hearing without even having to post bail, and the chief magistrate has 90 days to decide whether there is enough evidence to bring him to trial. A lot can happen in 90 days.
Thirdly, "Baby Doc" has some support in Haiti, as witness the crowds chanting support for him outside the court. It has been 25 years since he left power, and most of the 10 million Haitians are under 25. They don’t remember the kidnappings, torture, and murder of opponents of the Duvaliers, father and son, by the regime’s militia, the Tonton Macoute.
WikiLeaks And The Double Edge Of "Internet Freedom" Andy Greenberg of Forbes interviews Evgeny Morozov about his new book and Wiki stuff.
Forbes: How do you interpret the State Department’s simultaneous push for "Internet Freedom" and its anger towards and embarrassment at the hands of WikiLeaks?
Evgeny Morozov: There are two ways to read it. One is that the State Department is very naïve. They thought the Internet would never ultimately be used against them. But there’s also more sinister way to read it, one that will probably be seen in Russia, Iran, and China. And that’s that the State Department was very hypocricial and duplicitous in its view of the Internet, that they want to promote internet freedom abroad and limit it at home.
If you actually look closely at the domesetic debate about the internet, on cybercrime or cyberwar, restriction on Internet piracy, there are all sorts of developments domestically in the U.S. that show the U.S. wants regulation.
What the U.S. government wants is that the Chinese or Iranian government can’t censor the web, but they themselves want to preserve that privilege. If you listen to Joe Lieberman, even before WikiLeaks, he’s the one who wants the kill switch for the Internet, a similar attitude to the Chinese. That kind of rhetoric really scares foreign governments.
The WikiLeaks saga just highlights that duplicitous nature. The U.S. government isn’t ready to walk its talk domestically, and I think that just got revealed.
But if Cablegate hadn’t targeted the U.S. documents but rather those of Russia or China, Hillary Clinton would have been proven right in her emphasis on the Internet’s ability to undermine authoritarians, no?
You think so? I don’t. It’s important to unpack the WikiLeaks story. I don’t think Julian Assange has a very clearly sophisticated theory of promoting democracy in the world. I appreciate his views on transparency and secrecy, but there’s a real problem in universalizing his strategy. It can work in certain conditions and countries and circumstances, but it fails the universalization test. You can’t apply it to everyone and make the world a better place.
If WikiLeaks had a trove of documents from China or Russia, we wouldn’t have seen anywhere near the explosion of media coverage that we’ve seen in the last few weeks. You have to remember that we don’t have a shortage of evidence of corruption in Russia or China. In Russia, you dion’t need access to secret cables to show that bureaucrats are corrupt. Just go and take photos of their villas and the summer houses they buy with their state salaries. It’s already in the open, but exposure by itself in these countries doesn’t lead to democratic change.
There are all sorts of reasons why people don’t organize riots and overthrow their governments. Part of this is the element of uncertainty. You don’t know what would happen in Russia if the government fell or what would replace it. Better to stay with your modest economic growth and marginal improvemtns in lifestyle than risk a civil war that would follow a revolution. Looking at the Russian experience of the last 100 years, it’s not an outlandish theory.
Information can embarrass governments, but you have to look at the nature of governments as well as the nature of information to measure this embarrassment factor.
Basic Links
Wikileaks cable page
Unofficial Wikileaks information site
Greg Mitchell's amazing Wikileaks blog at The Nation
Aftenposten english Wikileaks torrent - I can't seem to find an updated page for this. Please let me know if you can.
Glenn Greenwald
Wikirebels
@Youtube
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
@Swedish TV
In full
Al Jazeera English discussion
It's about 22mins long and well worth it. Again, here is the exchange that I think is VERY important at about the 10min mark:
When the host asks Baruch Weiss, a former U.S. Government lawyer,
if leaking classified information is a crime in the United States, he says:
"I'm going to say it twice because noone will believe me the first time, but the answer is usually no. No.
There is no statute on the books in the United States that says 'Thou shalt not leak classified information.' There is no statute of that sort. Congress tried to pass one during the Clinton administration and Clinton Vetoed it and for a very good reason. And the good reason is, that in the United States there is a huge over-classification problem. There is a huge amount of material that should not be classified that is."
Julian Assange: A Wanted Man
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Audio of Greenwald interviewing Lamo - Transcript also at Informationthread 20
Robert Meeropol, the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—the only U.S. citizens to be executed under the Espionage Act, in what’s been described as the most controversial death sentence in U.S. history. This week, Meeropol released a widely read statement in support of WikiLeaks called, "My Parents Were Executed Under the Unconstitutional Espionage Act-Here's Why We Must Fight to Protect Julian Assange."
Part 1
Transcript and Part 2 at Informationthread 22
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On Dec 31, Democracy Now! dedicated the full hour today to Wikileaks and Julian Assange. You can find the full transcript at the Democracy Now! link and the Daniel Ellsberg transcript at Informationthread 23
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For more on Bradley Manning
Informationthread 11
Informationthread 13
Informationthread 15
Informationthread 28
For more info on DOJ/Twittergate :
Informationthread 37
Informationthread 36
Informationthread 35
Informationthread 34
Informationthread 33
Informationthread 32
Informationthread 31
Democracy Now! Interviews Birgitta Jónsdóttir
Part 1
Part 2
Transcript at Informationthread 36
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The Agenda tv show interviews Birgitta Jonsdottir
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Democracy Now! Dr. Atul Gawande: Solitary Confinement is Torture Transcript at Informationthread 28
UPDATE my 2nd diary at Kos saying that Olbermann was gone. What a sad and predictable day.