Friday 29th of March 2024

a message for amerika .....

a message to amerika .....

Here's the AAP story on today's Wikileaks rally in Sydney:

More than a thousand advocates of free speech have taken to the streets of Sydney in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Australian-born Mr Assange has enraged the United States by leaking American diplomatic cables that embarrassed world leaders.

He is currently on bail in England as he fights attempts to extradite him to Sweden for questioning on allegations of sexual assault.

NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge told the crowd of more than 1000 people in central Sydney on Saturday that the Australian government should support Mr Assange after Prime Minister Julia Gillard dubbed the website "unlawful".

"The actions of WikiLeaks are not only lawful, they're essential for fostering free speech in the 21st century. That's why we're here to support those actions."

Mr Shoebridge said that from a Greens' perspective, the whaling leaks were the most significant.

US diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks show that as late as February 2010, Australia was willing to compromise with Japan if the deal resulted in a reduced level of whaling.

"Here they are in the major Australian newspapers, they're speaking in support of an absolute ban on whaling," he said.

"Yet we now know that in the dark corridors they're shuffling along trying to cut a deal with the Japanese government which would continue to see the slaughter of whales."

Protesters collected money for Queensland's flood victims as they marched down Sydney's George Street.

duplicity .....

When WikiLeaks in mid-2010 published documents detailing the brutality and corruption at the heart of the war in Afghanistan, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, held a Press Conference and said of WikiLeaks (and then re-affirmed it on his Twitter account) that they "might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family."  

This denunciation predictably caused the phrase "blood on their hands" to be attached to WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, in thousands of media accounts around the world.  But two weeks later, the Pentagon's spokesman, when pressed, was forced to admit that there was no evidence whatsoever for that accusation:  "we have yet to see any harm come to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the WikiLeaks documents," he admitted. 

Several months later, after more flamboyant government condemnations of WikiLeaks' release of thousands of Iraq War documents, McClatchy's Nancy Youssef - in an article headlined:  "Officials may be overstating the danger from WikiLeaks" - reported that "U.S. officials concede that they have no evidence to date" that the disclosures resulted in the deaths of anyone, and she detailed the great care WikiLeaks took in that Iraq War release to protect innocent people.

The disclosure of American diplomatic cables triggered still more melodramatic claims from government officials (ones faithfully recited by its servants and followers across the spectrum in Washington), accusing WikiLeaks of everything from "attacking" the U.S. (Hillary Clinton) and "placing at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals" and "ongoing military operations" (Harold Koh) to being comparable to Terrorists (Joe Biden). 

But even Robert Gates was unwilling to lend his name to such absurdities, and when asked, mocked these accusations as "significantly overwrought" and said the WikiLeaks disclosures would be "embarrassing" and "awkward" but would have only "modest consequences."  

Since then, it has become clear how scrupulously careful WikiLeaks has been in releasing these cables in order to avoid unnecessary harm to innocent people, as the Associated Press reported how closely WikiLeaks was collaborating with its newspaper partners in deciding which cables to release and what redactions were necessary.  Indeed, one of the very few documents which anyone has been able to claim has produced any harm - one revealing that the leader of Zimbabwe's opposition privately urged U.S. officials to continue imposing sanctions on his country - was actually released by The Guardian, not by WikiLeaks.

To say that the Obama administration's campaign against WikiLeaks has been based on wildly exaggerated and even false claims is to understate the case.  But now, there is evidence that Obama officials have been knowingly lying in public about these matters.  The long-time Newsweek reporter Mark Hosenball - now at Reuters - reports that what Obama officials are saying in private about WikiLeaks directly contradicts their public claims:

Obama Officials Caught Deceiving About Wikileaks

very much a threat .....