Exclusive rough-cut of first in-depth documentary on WikiLeaks and the people behind it!
From summer 2010 until now, Swedish Television has been following the secretive media network WikiLeaks and its enigmatic Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange.
Reporters Jesper Huor and Bosse Lindquist have traveled to key countries where WikiLeaks operates, interviewing top members, such as Assange, new Spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson, as well as people like Daniel Domscheit.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Once again, I can't rec This video interview from Al Jazeera english enough. 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.
also, thanks to user sullivanst for this comment earlier today :
The original intent of that section (2+ / 0-)
Recommended by:kafkananda, cedar park
is entirely, unambiguously clear: that you cannot make an act that was not a crime at the time it was committed, retroactively a crime. Fortunately, the language itself also is unambiguous. Fortunately as well, although this would be much less comforting if it stood alone against the Roberts court, the Supreme Court has over 200 years of unambiguous precedent about what constitutes an impermissible ex post facto law:
[A] law shall not be passed concerning, and after the fact, or thing done, or action committed. I would ask, what fact; of what nature, or kind; and by whom done? That Charles 1st. king of England, was beheaded; that Oliver Cromwell was Protector of England; that Louis 16th, late King of France, was guillotined; are all facts, that have happened; but it would be nonsense to suppose, that the States were prohibited from making any law after either of these events, and with reference thereto. The prohibition, in the letter, is not to pass any law concerning, and after the fact; but the plain and obvious meaning and intention of the prohibition is this; that the Legislatures of the several states, shall not pass laws, after a fact done by a subject, or citizen, which shall have relation to such fact, and shall punish him for having done it. The prohibition considered in this light, is an additional bulwark in favour of the personal security of the subject, to protect his person from punishment by legislative acts, having a retrospective operation.
Econmic: 6.38, Social: 6.72
by sullivanst on Mon Dec 13, 2010 at 12:34:20 PM PST
[ Parent | Reply to This | RecommendHide ]
Yesterday's livethread is chock-full-a-links and good info as well down in the comments. Please feel free to check all the livethreads for other info that I have not carried over. All have good stuff in there.
Wikileaks cables
Great place to read and see what the NYTimes etc have not posted as of this moment like the Honduran cables and what they show
Here is the Guradian's map of what countries the cables have mentioned(notice no Honduras as of yet): 
Unnoficial Wikileaks information source will give you up-to-date info giving you a few extra hours to do other things with your life...
In a stunning result for McConnell, Holder, Lieberman and a few folks on this site, Time Magazine's reader poll for Person Of The Year went to....wait for it....wait for it.....Julian Assange!!
Readers voted a total of 1,249,425 times, and the favorite was clear. Julian Assange raked in 382,020 votes, giving him an easy first place. He was 148,383 votes over the silver medalist, Recep Tayyip Ergodan, Prime Minister of Turkey.
And boom goes the dynamite! HAHA
PEN International, a global writers' organization with special consultative status at UNESCO and the United Nations, has released an official statment on WikiLeaks. Here is a snippet:
PEN International champions the essential role played by freedom of expression in healthy societies and the rights of citizens to transparency, information and knowledge.
The Wikileaks issue marks a significant turning point in the evolution of the media and the sometimes conflicting principles of freedom of expression and privacy and security concerns. The culture of increasing secrecy in governments and the rise of new technology will inevitably lead to an increasing number of transparency issues of this sort. PEN International believes it is important to acknowledge that while the leaking of government documents is a crime under U.S laws, the publication of documents by Wikileaks is not a crime. Wikileaks is doing what the media has historically done, the only difference being that the documents have not been edited.
The Walkley Foundation has initiated a letter to Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, signed by members of the board, editors of major Australian newspapers and news sites, and news directors of the country's commercial and public broadcasters. Here is a snippet:
The volume of the leaks is unprecedented, yet the leaking and publication of diplomatic correspondence is not new. We, as editors and news directors of major media organisations, believe the reaction of the US and Australian governments to date has been deeply troubling. We will strongly resist any attempts to make the publication of these or similar documents illegal. Any such action would impact not only on WikiLeaks, but every media organisation in the world that aims to inform the public about decisions made on their behalf. WikiLeaks, just four years old, is part of the media and deserves our support.
Already, the chairman of the US Senate homeland security committee, Joe Lieberman, is suggesting The New York Times should face investigation for publishing some of the documents. The newspaper told its readers that it had ‘‘taken care to exclude, in its articles and in supplementary material, in print and online, information that would endanger confidential informants or compromise national security.’’ Such an approach is responsible — we do not support the publication of material that threatens national security or anything which would put individual lives in danger. Those judgements are never easy, but there has been no evidence to date that the WikiLeaks material has done either.
There is no evidence, either, that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have broken any Australian law. The Australian government is investigating whether Mr Assange has committed an offence, and the Prime Minister has condemned WikiLeaks’ actions as ‘‘illegal’’. So far, it has been able to point to no Australian law that has been breached.
A list of some journolists and their quotes defending Wikileaks. Here are some brief examples:
The Washington Post editorial: Don't charge WikiLeaks Snippet:
"Such prosecutions are a bad idea. The government has no business indicting someone who is not a spy and who is not legally bound to keep its secrets. Doing so would criminalize the exchange of information and put at risk responsible media organizations that vet and verify material and take seriously the protection of sources and methods when lives or national security are endangered."
Sydney Morning Herald editorial: Julian Assange and the public's right to know Snippet:
"The Australian government's condemnation of WikiLeaks is also deeply troubling. Attempts to silence Mr Assange and those who work with him threaten the free flow of information that makes democracy possible. Such attempts are dangerous and must be resisted."
The Nation editorial: First, They Came for WikiLeaks. Then... snippet:
"As a magazine that champions free speech, The Nation defends the rights of leakers and media organizations to disclose secrets that advance a public interest without fear of retribution — or murder. If the Justice Department goes after Assange as an enemy of the state, what's next? The arrest of the editors of the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País, the news outlets that collaborated with WikiLeaks?"
Javier Moreno, editor-in-chief, País: WikiLeaks cables had a huge impact in Spain Snippet:
"The impact within Spain and in Latin America has been huge. This has been especially so in Spain, because of our four-part series on the national court, looking at some high-profile cases in which the US embassy in Madrid has tried to influence judges, the government, and prosecutors in cases involving US citizens. One involved a detainee in Guantánamo, another covered secret rendition flights in Spain, and another was about the murder of a Spanish journalist by US fire in Baghdad."
Just go to the link to read them all....
From The Nation's liveblog Greg Mitchell reports:
11:25 Bad news for the WikiLeaks-obsessed (You talkin' to me? You talkin' to ME?): The Guardian's great blog devoted to this apparently cut back to one shift from two a day. NYT's "The Lede" blog now doing nothing.
Hmmmmm
Firedoglake post: U.S. Determination to Indict Assange Meant to Scare Press away from Future Leaks. Disclaimer: this article says a lie about President Obama.
So, why would the Obama Administration be so aggressive against Assange when doing so flies in the face of their written guidelines and standard glib protocol? Is it really all about prosecuting Assange? That would be hard to believe; more likely it is not just to monkeywrench Assange and WikiLeaks, but to send a hard and clear prior restraint message to the American press. This is almost surely confirmed by the rhetoric of Joe Lieberman, who is rarely more than a short ride away from his disciple and friend Barack Obama on such matters, and who is making noises about also prosecuting the New York Times.
Never before has the Espionage Act, nor other provisions of the criminal code, been applied to First Amendment protected American press in the manner being blithely tossed around by US officials in the WikiLeak wake. Avoidance of First Amendment press and publication has been not just the general position of the DOJ historically, it has been borne out by significant caselaw over the years. If you need a primer on the hands off attitude that has been the hallmark of treatment of press entities, you need look no further than New York Times v. United States, aka the "Pentagon Papers Case". In NYT v. US, the government could not even use the Espionage Act in a civil context against the press, much less a criminal one as they propose for Assange, without being forcefully shot down. Daniel Ellsberg is right when he says that "Every attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me".
From Mother Jones: Wikileaks, Rendition and the CIA's Italian Job :
Mon Dec. 13, 2010 3:15 AM PST
Among the hundreds of diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in recent weeks were a number pertaining to extraordinary rendition—the practice of effectively kinapping a suspected terrorist in one country and transporting him to another, usually Arab, nation for interrogation that almost invariably invovles torture. Most of the time, renditions happen quietly; CIA operatives swoop in and out and no one's the wiser. Then came the February 2003 kidnapping of a cleric named Abu Omar in Milan, Italy. The operation was bungled (the American operatives used unencrypted, trackable cell phones, for starters), and, in a major embarassment to the US, the 23 CIA agents involved were eventually tried by an Italian court. In 2009, they were convicted in absentia of violating Italian law. (Peter Bergen wrote about the case, and interviewed Abu Omar himself, for the March/April 2008 issue of Mother Jones.) Recently, I spoke to Steve Hendricks, a freelance journalist and author whose most recent work is the just-released A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial, about Abu Omar, renditions, and the impact of the Wikileaks disclosures. Here's an edited transcript of our conversation. (In some cases, I've expanded my original questions to provide additional context):
Please read the conversation. Amazing.
CNN Rumsfeld: Government documents in new memoir, but not like WikiLeaks
But it's a recent tweet that may be getting the most attention. Using Twitter-friendly abbreviations, Rumsfeld said on his account, "With my book I will release 100s of supporting docs on a website--many previously classified, but unlike #Wikileaks, all cleared by USG."
But for Michael Mukasey, President George W. Bush's last attorney general, the matter is clear cut: The US should prosecute Assange because it's "easier" than prosecuting a major news outlet. Brilliant man this Mukasey
User Robert Naiman, who also writes at Huffingtonpost, gave us this diary earlier today Daniel Ellsberg: I am Wikileaks. and it includes the Colbert interview with Ellsberg.
Swiss bank investigated for freezing Wikileaks funds. You a Nazi? That is A-OK. Fight for truth? Oops. Your funds are frozen. Neat.
Near v. Minnesota
Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931), was a United States Supreme Court decision that recognized the freedom of the press by roundly rejecting prior restraints on publication, a principle that was applied to free speech generally in subsequent jurisprudence. The Court ruled that a Minnesota law that targeted publishers of "malicious" or "scandalous" newspapers violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (as applied through the Fourteenth Amendment). Legal scholar and columnist Anthony Lewis called Near the Court's "first great press case."[1]
It was later a key precedent in New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), in which the Court ruled against the Nixon administration's attempt to enjoin publication of the Pentagon Papers.
New York Times Co. v. United States
New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), was a United States Supreme Court per curiam decision. The ruling made it possible for the New York Times and Washington Post newspapers to publish the then-classified Pentagon Papers without risk of government censure.
President Richard Nixon had claimed executive authority to force the Times to suspend publication of classified information in its possession. The question before the court was whether the constitutional freedom of the press under the First Amendment was subordinate to a claimed Executive need to maintain the secrecy of information. The Supreme Court ruled that First Amendment did protect the New York Times' right to print said materials.
Wikileaks Twitter page
Iceland may ban MC, Visa over Wikileak censorship
"People wanted to know on what legal grounds the ban was taken, but no one could answer it," Robert Marshall, the chairman of the committee, said. "They said this decision was taken by foreign sources."
The committee is seeking additional information from the credit card companies for proof that there was legal grounds for blocking the donations.
Marshall said the committee would seriously review the operating licenses of Visa and Mastercard in Iceland.
The Washington Post reports that WikiLeaks’s Assange gains influential defenders. Here is a snippet:
On Friday Jack L. Goldsmith, "widely considered one of the brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament" when he joined the Bush administration Justice Department in 2003, according to a typical assessment, wrote that he found himself "agreeing with those who think Assange is being unduly vilified."
...
Goldsmith's remarks came only a few days after libertarian standard-bearer Rep. Ron Paul virtually celebrated WikiLeaks for exposing America's "delusional foreign policy."
"When presented with embarrassing disclosures about U.S. spying and meddling, the policy that requires so much spying and meddling is not questioned," said the nominal Texas Republican, denouncing calls for prosecuting Assange. "Instead the media focuses on how authorities might prosecute the publishers of such information."
...
On Monday influential Harvard political scientist Stephen M. Walt endorsed Goldsmith’s views, asking whether The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward shouldn’t be prosecuted for publishing secrets if Assange was.
User ukit has a diary up right now, The State Depts Bizarre Logic Regarding Wikileaks Go check it out.
As always folks, thank you and Give me back my links!!! Oh, sorry. Just had a Mel Gibson moment. Give up the links in the comments!!
Thanks.
I will post again tomorrow(that's tuesday to you and me)another livethread at 8pmest.
