Why.....speaking of Greenwald...he has information on Manning that is disturbing at best and inhumane at 2nd best. He says that Manning:
"has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months -- and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait -- under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning's detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries."
...
"This is why the conditions under which Manning is being detained were once recognized in the U.S. -- and are still recognized in many Western nations -- as not only cruel and inhumane, but torture."
...Assange has this to say about Manning and Assange....
"And so, what it comes down, to me, is -- and I say throwing caution to the winds here -- is that what I've heard so far of Assange and Manning -- and I haven't met either of them -- is that they are two new heroes of mine."
...
Greenwald quotes Manning talking with Lamo and proves what that conversation shows:
"That's a whistleblower in the purest and most noble form: discovering government secrets of criminal and corrupt acts and then publicizing them to the world not for profit, not to give other nations an edge, but to trigger "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms." Given how much Manning has been demonized -- at the same time that he's been rendered silent by the ban on his communication with any media -- it's worthwhile to keep all of that in mind."
Donate to Manning's defense fund here
Naomi Wolf once again weighs in on Assange:
"The fantasy is that somehow this treatment -- a global manhunt, solitary confinement in the Victorian cell that drove Oscar Wilde to suicidal despair within a matter of days, and now a bracelet tracking his movements -- is not atypical, because somehow Sweden must be a progressively hot-blooded but still progressively post-feminist paradise for sexual norms in which any woman in any context can bring the full force of the law against any man who oversteps any sexual boundary.
Well, I was in Norway in March of this year at a global gathering for women leaders on International Women's Day, and heard extensively from specialists in sex crime and victims' rights in Sweden. So I knew this position taken by the male-dominated US, British and Swedish media was, basically, horsesh-t. But none of the media outlets hyperventilating now about how this global-manhunt/Bourne-identity-chase-scene-level treatment of a sex crime allegation originating in Sweden must be 'normative' has bothered to do any actual reporting of how rape -- let alone the far more ambiguous charges of Assange's accusers, which are not charges of rape but of a category called 'sex by surprise,' which has no analog elsewhere -- is actually prosecuted in Sweden.
Guess what: Sweden has HIGHER rates of rape than other comparable countries -- including higher than the US and Britain, higher than Denmark and Finland -- and the same Swedish authorities going after Assange do a worse job prosecuting reported rapes than do police and the judiciary in any comparable country. And these are flat-out, unambiguous reported rape cases, not the 'sex by surprise' Assange charges involving situations that began consensually.
This laughable moment on CNN! This not only made me laugh, it pissed me off. I watch this stupid talking head on CNN all the time and he is a READER, not a JOURNALIST!!!!!
Amazingly stupid CNN idiot tries to kill your brain
Everything in this video is such a bad piece of propaganda except for McGovern. Wow. It's like they did not even try. That's how much respect they have for their viewers.
Wikirebels documentary
@Youtube:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
@Swedish TV:
Doc in full
Al Jazeera English interview
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."
Sam Seder interviews Glenn Greenwald in this Youtube clip. At the start, they discuss this:
US Constitution Article 1, Section 9, Clause 3 No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
"Or, the second thing that could happen is that Mr. Assange arrives in Sweden from the U.K. and learns that pursuant to article 6 of the suppliment to the extradition treaty that's between the U.S. and Sweden, that Sweden has decided on it's own with no imput from Mr. Assange, that Sweden is transferring Mr. Assange to the U.S. to stand trial on the federal criminal charges. Mr. Assange is then wisked away by the U.S. Marshal Service and the FBI. He lands in the U.S. and is put to trial on the U.S. charges. If he loses his U.S. federal criminal case, he is looking at very significant U.S. jail time without the possibility of parole or early release."
Brad Friedman on the David Pakman Show
Amy Goodman interviews Assange Lawyer Mark Stephens Here is part of the interview:
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Stephens, maybe for people around the world who are watching and listening to this right now, you can explain what exactly happened in the courtroom, the fact that Julian Assange has been held for more than a week in prison and has not been charged with a crime. Explain how we have come to this point.
MARK STEPHENS: Well, it’s a slightly bizarre situation. He’s wanted for questioning in Sweden. He’s already had one interview with the Swedish prosecutor. He’s wanted for another interview. The Swedish prosecutor has refused to tell him what she wants to interview him about or to give him the nature of the allegations. So, really, what we’re talking about now is an extradition warrant, which they’ve now issued. And so, the question on the extradition warrant is, should he serve his time in prison while the decision about extradition is being made, or should—as the Swedes would have it, should he be sitting in jail, Scrooge-like, over Christmas? Now, the problem we’ve got is that the Swedes seem dead set to try and keep him in jail.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what the Interpol red—what red flag is, what exactly the Swedes are saying he has done and they want him for, and what it means for him to be extradited to Sweden, if that’s what’s going to happen.
MARK STEPHENS: OK. An Interpol red notice is a notice sent out, usually secretly, but very bizarrely in this case it’s been made public, which allows the authorities of each state to notify Sweden every time he crosses a port or enters or leaves a country. The matter that he’s wanted for is a sexual misdemeanor, a series of offenses in Sweden. He isn’t charged with that. And the Swedish lawyers tell me that even if he were convicted, he wouldn’t go to jail. So we’re in this rather bonkers position where the Swedish lawyers tell us he wouldn’t go to jail, yet on an extradition warrant, he’s being held in custody. And as you said at the top, Amy, they are some onerous conditions. He’s effectively under house arrest—or, as we said in court yesterday, mansion arrest—because he will be put up in a 600-acre estate, a 10-bedroom mansion near London.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what is happening, that you understand is happening, here in the United States in Virginia? So he is being wanted for questioning about sex crimes in Sweden, but then the United States, the Attorney General Eric Holder, has said something else.
MARK STEPHENS: Excuse me, yes. A bit of a cough.
The position is that—the word swirling around the elites in Stockholm is that the Americans are effectively using this as a holding charge. A holding charge, as you’ll know, is a charge that people have no intention of prosecuting, because it’s meritless, or that it’s such a minor offense that actually the big sucker punch is coming, and we haven’t yet seen that. And the word in Stockholm is that there is a secret grand jury empaneled in Alexandria just near the Pentagon and that they are considering how they might get Julian Assange on criminal charges in the United States. Now, the United States authorities have flatly denied that. Now, if that’s true, then it would be difficult to see how he could be extradited. And, of course, as a lawyer, I can’t see that he’s committed any offense. And indeed a congressional report that came out on the 6th of December said very much the same thing. But I’m sure you’ll appreciate, as will viewers, that he has made some big and powerful enemies.
AMY GOODMAN: A friend of Julian Assange has told Sky News he believes that if he is extradited to Sweden, that he could be sent to the United States. Why would it be easier for him to be sent to the United States from Sweden than from Britain, Mark Stephens?
MARK STEPHENS: That’s a very good question, Amy. And the answer really is that we do have extradition arrangements between the U.K. and the U.S., but the British judges have a long history of looking at them pretty carefully. You’ll be familiar with the case of Gary McKinnon, the young child that hacked into the Pentagon computers, comprehensively embarrassed them, and he’s wanted on an extradition warrant to the United States. That’s been being fought for about three or four years now. And so, the possibility is that the British courts would look at this and scrutinize it in a thorough and independent way. That’s what British judges are; they’re not politically influenced. Whereas I think that it’s felt that the Swedes have perhaps a little more of a soft touch and perhaps, more fairly, are less experienced, the judiciary in Sweden, in dealing with these extradition warrants, and perhaps would—it would go more on the nod from Sweden.
AMY GOODMAN: How much money exactly does Julian Assange have to raise for bail?
MARK STEPHENS: He’s got to raise 200,000 pounds in cash. That’s about $300,000. And, of course, the problem with that is that we finished court after banking hours closed yesterday, so—and getting that kind of money out of a bank, you’ll realize that most banks don’t carry that kind of money. It’s very modest amounts that they carry these days, because we spend most of our money electronically. And, of course, he’s being electronically hobbled by Visa and MasterCard, who have stopped the accounts being—paying money to WikiLeaks. And so, actually gathering that money has meant that he’s had to call on—and we’ve had, on his behalf—to call upon the very generous friends that he has, very high-profile individuals. But even they can’t make money move after banking hours. And, of course, that’s why he was sent back to Wandsworth Prison, the very prison that indeed Oscar Wilde, the Anglo-Irish writer, was held in when he was up for crimes of a very different nature.
AMY GOODMAN: He’s been held in solitary in prison, Mark Stephens?
MARK STEPHENS: Yes, very unusually. Men who are accused of rape are usually released on bail, and they are given bail on condition they don’t contact the alleged victim. So, to find someone in prison is unusual enough. To find conditions as sort of onerous as these put on your bail is incredibly unusual. And to then find that you’re put in prison is even more unusual still. Yet further in the unusual stakes is the fact the he’s on a 23-and-a-half-hour lockdown, although he’s a model prisoner, deprived of access to television, to current affairs information, news, newspapers, magazines and such like. So, he really is on almost a punishment regime.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s very interesting. There’s a letter from Women Against Rape, a British organization, in The Guardian newspaper in London. It’s written by Katrin Axelsson in support of Julian Assange. And it says, "Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at the unusual zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued for rape allegations. [...] Women don’t take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst." This is a feminist organization in London. Mark Stephens?
MARK STEPHENS: I think that most of us are extremely troubled about this. And I think the reason that we’re troubled is that false allegations of sex crimes are incredibly rare. When they come along, they stink. This one utterly reeks. And, of course, the problem for that, more widely, is that it discourages genuine complaints about rape and sexual misbehaviors. And, of course, it demeans the complaints that are made by women who have genuinely been abused. And so, any of those kind of false allegations really do devalue this. And I’m not surprised that people like Naomi Wolf and—in the Huffington Post and also that letter in The Guardian are really concerned about this, because it is an unusual zeal, as she says. I would say it’s a vindictive campaign, and one has to understand why that vindictive campaign is going on.
Amy Goodman interviews journalist and film maker John Pilger
AMY GOODMAN: The nationwide warning that has gone out has been remarkable, John. Democracy Now! obtained the text of a memo that was sent to employees at USAID, thousands of employees, about reading the recently leaked WikiLeaks documents. The memo reads in part, quote, "Any classified information that may have been unlawfully disclosed and released on the Wikileaks web site was not 'declassified' by an appropriate authority and therefore requires continued classification and protection as such from government personnel... Accessing the Wikileaks web site from any computer may be viewed as a violation of the SF-312 agreement... Any discussions concerning the legitimacy of any documents or whether or not they are classified must be conducted within controlled access areas (overseas) or within restricted areas (USAID/Washington)... The documents should not be viewed, downloaded, or stored on your USAID unclassified network computer or home computer; they should not be printed or retransmitted in any fashion."
It’s gone out to agencies all over the government. State Department employees have been warned, again, not only on their computers where they’re blocked at work, but at home. People who have written cables are not allowed to put in their names to see if those cables come up. Graduate schools, like SIPA at Columbia University, an email was sent out from the administration saying the State Department had contacted them and that if they care about their futures in government, they should not post anything to Facebook or talk about these documents.
And then you have Allen West, one of the new Republican Congress members-elect, who called for targeted news outlets that publish the cables. In a radio interview, Congressmember West—well, Congressmember-elect West, called for censoring any news outlets that run stories based on the cables’ release. This is what he said.
ALLEN WEST: Here is an individual that is not an American citizen, first and foremost, for whatever reason, you know, gotten his hands on classified American material and has put it out there in the public domain. And I think that we also should be censoring the American news agencies which enabled him to be able to do this and then also supported him and applauded him for the efforts. So, that’s kind of aiding and abetting of a serious crime.
AMY GOODMAN: And speaking of crimes, another Congress member, longtime Congressmember Peter King from here in New York, has called for the classifying of WikiLeaks as a foreign terrorist organization. I did my column this week talking about "'Assangination': From Character Assassination to the Real Thing" and the calls of Democratic consultants like Bob Beckel on Fox Business News for Julian Assange to be killed. He said he doesn’t agree with the death penalty, so he should be "illegally" killed, maybe taken out by U.S. special forces. John Pilger?
JOHN PILGER: Look, Amy, I thought you were reading out there several passages from 1984. I don’t think Orwell could have put it even better than that. Surely, we mustn’t think these things. I’m thinking it at the moment. So if I was over there, I must be guilty of something, and therefore I should be illegally taken out.
Look, there’s always been—as you know better than I, there’s always been a tension among the elites in the United States between those who pay some sort of homage, lip service, to all those Georgian gentleman who passed down those tablets of good intentions all that long time ago and a bunch of lunatics. But they’re powerful lunatics. They’re—perhaps "lunatics" is not quite right. They’re simply totalitarian people. And up they come in anything like this. I see—I read this morning that the U.S. Air Force has banned anybody connecting with it from reading The Guardian. So, everyone is banned from doing things and banned from thinking and so on.
They won’t get away with it. That’s the good news. They are hyperventilating, and they’re hysterical, and so be it, but they won’t get away with it. There are now two genuine powers in the world. We know about U.S. power. But that great sleeper, world public opinion, world decency, if you like, if I’m not being too romantic about it, is waking up. And the scenes outside the court yesterday went well beyond, I think, just the WikiLeaks issue. It is something else. WikiLeaks has triggered something. And I don’t think it will be the proverbial genie being stuffed back in the bottle, either. So, you know, world opinion is—when it stirs, when it moves, when it starts to come together collectively to do things that are important to us all, it’s a very formidable opponent to those totalitarian people who you’ve just quoted. So I’m rather more optimistic.
The immediate thing is to free Julian Assange. And I’m hoping that will happen tomorrow at the High Court. I should just add, you know, Mark Stephens was very eloquently describing the case. But, you know, the absurdity of this case is that a senior prosecutor in Sweden threw this thing out. And I’ve seen her papers. And she was left—she leaves us in no doubt there was absolutely no evidence to support any of these misdemeanors or crimes, or whatever they’re meant to be, at all. It was only the intervention of this right-wing politician in Sweden that reactivated this whole charade. So, in a way, it is perhaps symbolic of the kind of charades, rather lethal charades, that we’ve seen on a much wider scale in relation to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and other issues that have involved the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world. So, what we’re seeing is a rebellion. Where it will go, I’m not quite sure. But it’s certainly started, I can tell you.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. Well, first of all, I mean, Richard Holbrooke, probably more than any U.S. diplomat since Henry Kissinger—and he cut his teeth, of course, during the Vietnam War working under Henry Kissinger—Richard Holbrooke has represented the utter militarization of what is called U.S. diplomacy. He was also at the center of the nexus of U.S. militarists, of aggressive, hawkish, quote-unquote, "diplomats," and the elite, white-shoe media culture. And that’s why you see people like Joe Klein and others falling over themselves to engage in revisionist history about Richard Holbrooke. They only tell one part of the story. And often, in the case of Iraq or Yugoslavia, they’re telling a very one-sided version of history that makes Richard Holbrooke look like something that he wasn’t, and that was a peacemaker. He was a war maker and was someone who extended the tentacles of U.S. foreign policy.
Under the Clinton administration, Holbrooke was sort of the hammer when it came to diplomacy, as he’s been, in a way, under President Obama, though we’ll get to that later with Afghanistan and Pakistan. Let’s remember, when we’re talking about Iraq, Richard Holbrooke wasn’t just speaking as some pundit when he was supporting the Bush administration’s lie-laden case for war in Iraq. He also promoted the idea that Saddam posed a threat with weapons of mass destruction, Richard Holbrooke. But during the Clinton administration, there were the most ruthless economic sanctions in history imposed by the Democrats on the government—or rather, the people—of Iraq, that just targeted the civilian population, denied food and medicine, turned the hospitals of Iraq—and John Pilger knows about this better than anyone, because he did the definitive film on it—turned the hospitals of Iraq into death rows for infants. So, you know, Richard Holbrooke was part of an administration that also bombed Baghdad on multiple occasions in the north and the south of the country, as well, under the guise of the no-fly zones.
Think about this interview everytime you remember or hear new asslicking by the media over Holbrooke
