Deep Politics Forum

Huckabee: Execute whoever leaked WikiLeaks cables :thefinger:
By JPOST.COM STAFF
12/02/2010 10:33

2012 Republican presidential hopeful says US gov't employee responsible for leak is guilty of treason, has blood on hands.


Former Arkansas governor and 2012 Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee called for the execution of whoever is responsible for the leaking of 250,000 US diplomatic cables on the WikiLeaks website this week, according to a Wednesday report on the Guardian's website.

"Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason, and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty," Huckabee stated.

RELATED:
WikiLeaks founder 'wanted' by Interpol over rape claims
Wikileaks founder: 'Obama stifles freedom of the press'

"They've put American lives at risk. They put relationships that will take decades to rebuild at risk. They knew full well that they were handling sensitive documents they were entrusted...and anyone who had access to that level of information was not only a person who understood what their rules were, but they also signed, under oath, a commitment that they would not violate. They did … Any lives they endangered, they're personally responsible for and the blood is on their hands," he added.


US army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning is suspected of leaking the cables. He has been charged with transferring classified data and delivering national defense information to an unauthorized source. He faces up to 52 years in prison. Manning is currently being held at a military base.

Huckabee joined another potential Republican candidate Sarah Palin in calling for harsh punishments for those involved in the WikiLeaks affair. Palin said that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be "hunted down."

University of Calgary Professor Tim Flanagan on Wednesday called for the assassination of Assange in a television interview with Candadian state broadcaster CBC.

Flanagan helped organize the campaign of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2003. He also served as the Conservative Party's campaign manager in Canada's general elections in 2004 and 2006. He retired in 2006 and became a full-time teacher.

"Well I think Assange should be assassinated actually," Flanagan said about Assange. "I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something," he suggested.

Peter Lemkin Wrote:JAVIER COUSO: [translated] We were surprised to find that for the first time in the existence of Interpol, which was created at the beginning of the 20th century, this agency, Interpol, has refused a direct arrest order issued by the judge in this case. It is only valid within the eurozone.

Quite damning.

Assange's UK solicitor is Mark Stephens of Finer Stephens Innocent. He is a trusteee of 'Index on Censorship'. He has recently threatened Derek Summerfield, a doctor who campaigns against the complicity of the Israeli Medical Association and its President, Yoram Blachar, in the torture of Palestinians, with a libel suit if he doesn’t shut up. Hmmm

Tony Greenstein's blog: Not so Innocent – Index on Censorship Trustee Seeks to Silence Campaigner Against Torture

Quote:But the actions of Mark Stephens are entirely different. It is to defend a powerful man, head of both the World and Israeli Medical Associations, in his determination to provide a cover for the use of torture. Of course none of this is new in the halls of infamy but what marks out Mark’s actions are that he is also a trustee of Index on Censorship!! Presumably Mark Stephens is opposed to censorship except when it comes to torturers, Zionists or Zionist torturers. Or maybe his commitment to fighting censorship stops when it threatens his pocket.

controlled by the Rothschild banking family


Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has won an award from the “Economist” magazine, a financial publication controlled by the Rothschild banking family, and he has also featured on an “Economist” video clip, raising questions about conflicts of interest. Assange predicted a bank run could be triggered by bank data leaks but he does not mention that this would result in the robbery of millions of people because of the way the fractional reserve banking system works, and profit the banks. Is a false flag bank run hyped by the banker’s media and carried out by a Rothschild operative being planned to rob millions and to implement emergency laws?
Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who plans to leak bank documents that will take down „one or two“ major banks according to Forbes, has won an award from the Economist, a magazine belonging to the Economist group, half of which is owned by the Financial times, a subsidiary of Pearson PLC. A group of independent shareholders, including many members of the staff and the Rothschild banking family of England.

Kurt Nimmo writes that the Economist is owned by members of the Rothschild banking family of England. It is run by the Economist Group, a known CIA front
http://www.infowars.com/rothschild-and-c...orshipers/

Greek blogger Vicky Chrysou found that Assange won an Economist Censorship Index Award in 2008.
http://vickytoxotis.blogspot.com/2010/11...leaks.html

Assange’s close links to perhaps the world’s leading financial publication, which has consistently given misinformation about the eurozone and bank bailout, are underlined by a recent video interview he held with the Economist magazine.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_HPLHIBT...r_embedded

Assange has not only won awards from the Rothschild banking family’s financial publications; he also won an award from Amnesty International, which works closely with the UN, itself associated with the IMF, the World Bank profitting politically and financially from the gigantic national debts saddled on country’s by banks with the help of compliant politicians.

Assange’s latest Wikileaks have been hyped by the mainstream media around the world as a major diplomatc row and destablising factor in spite of the fact that they are largely trivial gossip and news items that are in alignment with the Globalist’s goals.

If Assange were a real activist, he would not be getting any coverage from the mainstream media, let alone so headlines every day in every well known corporate media outlet. The alleged hide and seek between Assange and the US government as well as Interpol is played out on the theatrical stage of the world’s media when it is well known the US government and Interpol can arrest anyone they want virtually any time they want given their immense resources.

The Economist and FT were also among the corporate media that consistently hyped the swine flu pandemic and the need for vaccines last April while blocking information about the incident where Baxter contaminated 72 kilos of seasonal flu vaccine with the bird flu virus in ist biosecurity level 3 labs — virtually ruling out an accident — and so nearly triggered a global bird flu pandemic.

This media group has also consistently given misinformation about the current financial crisis and how it is being engineered by the banks to rob people, using the fractional reserve banking system.

Vienna Economics University Professor Franz Hormann explained how „banks create money out of air“ in a model for fraud in an interview with Der Standard recently. Hormann has also said that current economic theory is „political propaganda.“ But the Economist Group and IMF spout this propaganda all the time for the profit of the banks.

A bank run would result in the loss of people’s money, savings, pay checks and so bring ruin to millions of people – but this is what Assange wants because that is what will happen as anyone with a basic knowledge of economics now. The fractional reserve banking system means that the money or capital people put in the bank does not need to be on their account: capital can be spread all over the banks activities, locked in bonds and shares. Governments have very limited guarentees for deposits.

So if there the bankers can engineer a bank run, it will be the ordinary people who are robbed once more. Assange goes along with the propaganda that banks have capital in the banks not fractional reserve digits.

Expect the corporate media to hype Assange’s bank data leaks and hype the disaster and so help the banks justify bringing down the shutters and ruining millions if not billions of people in the process in a crash as devastating as 1931.

The media hyped the mild swine flu into a pandemic and they can hype a few extra withdrawls into a bank stampede as well unless we take action and demand that financial services scrutinse all withdrawals.
Because the euro is crumbling faster than expected, the bankers are desperate to institute some form of emergency law or martial law and a false flag bank run initiated by their operative Assange and hyped by their media would suit their plans perfectly.

His irresponsible actions that could destroy the world’s economy in a financial Pearl Harbour — also on December 7th, the date set for another irresponsible bank run — certainly are those of an operative working for the banks and may even be on the orders of the Rothschilds directly given his close links to the Economist. His task is to destroy the financial system before the eurozone fragments, allowing country’s potentially to restore their own currencies and regain their souvereignty.

His gigantic financial crime is also designed to discredit the alternative media and investigative journalists and so give the a chance to close websites and steer people back into the mainstream media.
Accusations of a sordid rape are also desgned to discredit investigative journalists in the eyes of the public.

Help spread this news: a false flag bank run hyped by the media is being planned by a Rothschild operative and it will result in the robbery of millions of people. Get financial regulators and the police to scrutinize all financial transactions and stop banks declaring themselves broke artificially, thereby robbing customers.

It is weird that he gave an interview recently to Time magazine and Forbes - these are HARDLY alternative media...something very strange is going on...but I sense it is not without great complication and wheels within wheels within wheels...... It is too early to tell what the original purpose of Wikileaks was, is now and if it is running its own show or being controlled - perhaps by several different entities, at this point. Time will tell.
Meanwhile, it certainly has 'stirred things up a bit'.:aetsch:

Brown's poodles snap and growl, but then grovel at the master's voice:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec...on-torture

Quote:UK overruled on Lebanon spy flights from Cyprus, WikiLeaks cables reveal
Americans dismissed 'bureaucratic' Foreign Office concern that Lebanese Hezbollah suspects might be tortured

David Leigh
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 1 December 2010 23.00 GMT


RAF Akrotiri at Limassol, Cyprus. WikiLeaks cables claim the US brushed aside British objections about secret spy flights from the base Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

American officials swept aside objections that secret US spy flights from Britain's Cyprus airbase risked making the UK an unwitting accomplice to torture, the leaked diplomatic cables reveal.

The use of RAF Akrotiri for U2 spy plane missions over Lebanon – missions that have never been disclosed until now – prompted an increasingly acrimonious series of exchanges between British officials and the US embassy in London, according to the cables.

Labour ministers demanded a full "audit trail" of the covert operation, codenamed Cedar Sweep, in 1998 amid growing public concern in the UK about CIA rendition flights and complicity in torture. The planes gathered intelligence that was then passed to the Lebanese authorities to help them track down Hezbollah militants.

As the row escalated, the US rejected the British concerns over torture in unequivocal terms, with one senior official at the embassy in London baldly stating in one cable: "We cannot take a risk-avoidance approach to CT [counter terrorism] in which the fear of potentially violating human rights allows terrorism to proliferate in Lebanon."

The cables disclose that as well as the Lebanon missions, U2s from Akrotiri were gathering intelligence over Turkey and northern Iraq. The information was secretly supplied to the Turkish authorities in an operation codenamed Highland Warrior. The British protested that "in both cases, intelligence product is intended to be passed to third-party governments".

On 18 April 2008, Britain demanded the US embassy provide full details of all flights so ministers could tell whether they "put the UK at risk of being complicit in unlawful acts … This is a very important point for ministers".

A US diplomat, Maura Connelly, cabled: "We understand that these additional precautionary measures stem from the February revelation that the US government transited renditioned persons through Diego Garcia without UK permission and HMG's resultant need to ensure it is not similarly blindsided in the future."

She complained the demands were "burdensome" and "an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy".

A letter from Will Jessett, then director of counter-terrorism at the Ministry of Defence, said "the use of UK bases for covert or potentially controversial missions" on behalf of Lebanon or Turkey meant it was "important for us to be satisfied that HMG is not indirectly aiding the commission of unlawful acts by those governments".

The letter said other states, particularly Cyprus, might well object should they find out. Ministers therefore wanted the US to submit each time "an assessment of any legal or human rights implications".

On 24 April, the embassy sent a cable back to Washington entitled: "Houston, we have a problem." It stated: "HMG ministers are adamant."

The embassy "pushed back hard" on demands for a full "audit trail" of spy flights. But in what appears to have been a heated dispute, the British detailed other US "oversights".

"Contacts cited instances in which operations Highland Warrior and Cedar Sweep had been conducted from the UK sovereign base areas of Akrotiri without the proper ministerial approvals … In addition, Highland Warrior had raised tensions with the Cypriots, jeopardising the UK's hold on Akrotiri."

There were "other lapses that proved embarrassing to HMG (ie renditions through Diego Garcia and improperly documented shipments of weaponry through Prestwick airport".

The US used Prestwick in 2006 as a staging post to ship laser-guided bombs to Israel, causing British protests. The Israelis wanted the munitions to attack Hezbollah bunkers in Lebanon.

The US embassy concluded: "A new element of distrust has crept into the US-UK mil-mil relationship.

"The renditions revelation proved highly embarrassing for the Brown government. The British proposal … may be disproportionate but is almost certainly an indication of the Brown government's sensitivity … at a time Brown is facing increasing domestic political woes."

A month later Britain was still "piling on concerns and conditions" about human rights, saying that although junior minister Kim Howells was making the decisions, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, was being kept informed.

British officials warned that ministerial concerns "could jeopardise future use of British territory".

US patience snapped when a Foreign Office official, John Hillman, passed on the message that "even the [US] state department's own human rights report had documented cases of torture and arbitrary arrest by the Lebanese armed forces".

Hillman urged the US to ensure the welfare of prisoners in Lebanon "if there were any risk that detainees captured with the help of Cedar Sweep intel could be tortured".

It was at this point that Richard LeBaron, charges d'affaires at the London embassy, cabled Washington that human rights concerns could not be allowed to get in the way of counter-terrorism operations. Britain's demands were "not only burdensome but unrealistic", he said, proposing "high-level approaches" to call the British to heel.

"Excessive conditions such as described above will hinder, if not obstruct, our co-operative counter-terrorism efforts," he said.

Senior Bush administration official John Rood stepped in and the foreign office's director general for defence and intelligence, Mariot Leslie, hastened to placate him.

The clash had been "unnecessarily confrontational", she told him. "Leslie expressed annoyance at the additional conditions conveyed by the FCO working level," the cable states. "She had not been aware beforehand that such a message would be conveyed. In fact she regretted the tenor of the discussions had turned prickly, and underscored HMG appreciation for US-UK military and intelligence co-operation."

The US was not actually expected to check on detained terrorists, she reassured him. "Ministers had merely wanted to impress upon the US government that they take the human rights considerations seriously.

"She noted that HMG 'desperately needs' [Cyprus] for its own intelligence gathering and operations and was committed to keeping them available to the US (and France).

"However, the Cypriots are hypersensitive about the British presence there and, she said, could 'turn off the utilities at any time'. That, combined with the 'toxic mix' of the rendition flights through Diego Garcia, has resulted in tremendous parliamentary, public and media pressure on HMG."

Leslie stuck to her guns on one point, saying the US embassy would still have to put in full written applications for future spy missions because "Miliband believed that 'policymakers needed to get control of the military'." The cable stated: "Leslie … was very frank that HMG did object to some of what the US government does (eg renditions)."

JUAN GONZALEZ: As the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks continues to publish secret U.S. diplomatic cables, its founder Julian Assange has gone into hiding in order to avoid arrest. Earlier today, Sweden’s highest court refused permission for Assange to appeal the arrest order issued over charges of alleged rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion. Assange has denied the allegations and said he is the target of a smear campaign. Earlier this week, Interpol, the international law enforcement organization, issued a red notice alert for Assange’s arrest. He could now be detained on the sex charges in any of the 188 countries that are part of Interpol. Meanwhile, here in the United States, Attorney General Eric Holder has announced WikiLeaks is the target of a criminal probe, and some politicians have accused Assange of breaking the Espionage Act.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the legal problems facing Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, we’re going to London. We’re joined by his lawyer Jennifer Robinson. She is one of the few people who have been in contact with Julian this week.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Jennifer Robinson, where is Julian Assange right now?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: He is here in the U.K. I can confirm that much. But as to his exact whereabouts, I cannot confirm.

AMY GOODMAN: Do the authorities know where he is?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: The authorities certainly know how to contact him via his lawyers. And I must, I’m sorry, correct you, that he is not in hiding, evading any Interpol arrest warrant. He has genuine concerns for his personal safety as a result of numerous very public calls for his assassination. And he’s obviously incredibly busy with the WikiLeaks current works and the attacks on their systems. So, any suggestion that he is evading Interpol arrest warrants is incorrect.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, in terms of this Interpol warrant, what does it mean in terms of what would be the procedure if, let’s say, British authorities decided to—if they could find where he is and decided they wanted to execute this warrant?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: Well, I think the first thing that we have to remember is that an Interpol red notice is not actually an arrest warrant. It is considered by states who are member states of Interpol as a valid provisional arrest notice, so the authorities can take action. Though what we do know, and has been reported today, is that if a European arrest warrant was issued, the authorities would be obliged to arrest my client. Reports today have suggested that a European arrest warrant was communicated to SOCA, the authorities here in the U.K., but that was returned on the grounds of an administrative error, and we’re seeking confirmation at the moment of what that problem was. In our view, the Interpol arrest warrant, there are serious issues with it, on the grounds of due process concerns arising in the Swedish proceedings, and also, indeed, for the need for it, given our client’s voluntary offers of cooperation that were rejected by the Swedish prosecuting authorities.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain, Jennifer Robinson, what that was? What were Julian Assange’s efforts to deal with the Swedish authorities?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: Well, first, it’s important to note that Mr. Assange remained in Sweden for almost a month in order to clear his name. While he was in Sweden after the allegations came out, he was in touch with the prosecuting authorities and offered on numerous occasions to provide interview in order to clear his name. Those offers were not taken up by the police. Now, he obviously has had to travel for work and had meetings to attend. And in order to leave Sweden, he sought the specific permission of the prosecutor to leave, on the grounds that there was an outstanding investigation, and she gave that permission. So he left Sweden lawfully and without objection by the prosecuting authorities. Since that time, we have communicated through his Swedish counsel on numerous occasions offers to provide the answers to the questions that she may have through other means, through teleconference, through video link, by attending an embassy here in the U.K. to provide that information. And all of those offers were rejected. It’s also important to remember that the prosecutor has not once issued a formal summons for his interrogation. So, all of these communications have been informally. And in our view, it’s disproportionate to seek an arrest warrant when voluntary cooperation has been offered.

JUAN GONZALEZ: How unusual is this for an Interpol red alert notice to go out over what is essentially a local—not, I wouldn’t say a minor allegation, but certainly not something that would warrant an international manhunt of this kind?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: Absolutely, I agree with you entirely. My instructions from Swedish counsel is that it’s highly irregular for allegations of this kind to give rise to a red notice. On the basis of our appeal to one of the lower courts, the rape charge was in fact struck out. And as we have always maintained, the facts certainly do not meet that charge. So, there are real questions about the proportionality of seeking an arrest warrant on the basis of the allegations that are made. And of course we have to remember that no formal charges have been issued.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about the growing number of threats against Julian Assange. The former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has said Assange should be, quote, "hunted down," and a former campaign aide of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper went a step further in a recent interview on the Canadian Broadcasting, CBC.

TIM FLANAGAN: Well, I think Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something. You know, there’s no good coming of this.

AMY GOODMAN: That was University of Calgary professor Tim Flanagan, who served as the Conservative Party’s campaign manager in Canada’s general election in 2004 and 2006. Jennifer Robinson, as Julian Assange’s attorney, your response?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: These calls for his assassination are absolutely outrageous and, indeed, illegal. I think that the prosecuting authorities ought to consider prosecuting these individuals for incitement to violence. Obviously assassination is illegal, and we take these concerns very seriously. Now, the press around the fact that my client is in hiding to evade arrest is absolutely incorrect. And one can imagine that when you have very public officials making these sorts of serious calls for assassination, that one would be concerned for their personal safety. I also think that it raises genuine concerns when you have Sarah Palin making such allegations for the prospect of my client receiving any sort of due process in the U.S.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I wanted to ask you about the—potentially, obviously, a much more difficult situation is the criminal investigation that Attorney General Holder and U.S. officials say they are now looking into about the possibility of charging your client with violations of the U.S. Espionage Act. Your response to that?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: Obviously, we will be taking advice from U.S. lawyers on the Espionage Act. I’m not a practicing U.S. lawyer. Though it is of grave concern and a matter that we are following closely. In our view, WikiLeaks ought to be entitled to the First Amendment protections for free speech. And any prosecution under the Espionage Act would call into question those protections.

AMY GOODMAN: Will Julian Assange be making any public statements anytime soon?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: I’m not sure that he will be making any public statements anytime soon. At present, he is busy on other matters.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting. He put out the Iraq war logs, the Afghanistan war logs, as well, if you will. Then you have the cable—these diplomatic cables. All of that he was—continued—able to travel freely. Now, even after the cables, it’s when he said, you know, "I’ll be now releasing the documents of one of the largest banks in America"—many are suspecting it’s Bank of America—does the full arrest warrant go out for him, or as you said, the red flag. Jennifer Robinson?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: Well, I think that certainly it’s very interesting timing that the arrest warrant has come about. But there’s—in terms of the document release, I think it’s just very interesting timing that the arrest warrant has come at the time that it has, two days after the leak of the—the release of all these documents.

AMY GOODMAN: You talked about he is now busily at work on other matters. Are you talking about the continued release of documents? And how exactly is he doing it? And, oh, how many people is he working with?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: As his lawyer, I’m not privy to the internal operations of WikiLeaks, and we only provide advice on his—the external legal matters. As I understand it, the documents will continue to be released. And as has been reported in the press in the past few days, WikiLeaks is dealing with a number of attacks on its systems from a technical point of view, which are of great concern and put at threat the operations of WikiLeaks.

JUAN GONZALEZ: One other question. You’ve confirmed that he is in the U.K. Have you been contacted at all by British authorities about having contact with your client?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: We have not been—we have not been contacted by the police, though we have made clear that we are acting for Mr. Assange and that he can be contacted via us. But no contact has been made with us thus far.

AMY GOODMAN: And what does Julian Assange say, Jennifer Robinson, about these charges of rape and sexual molestation?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: Obviously, he vehemently denies the allegations and is incredibly keen to clear his name, hence the reason for our voluntary offers of cooperation to the prosecutor over the past several weeks.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, on the issue of being called a terrorist, you have national politicians like New York’s Congress member Peter King saying that WikiLeaks should be declared a terrorist organization. At the same time, federally in this country, if a person is declared a terrorist, an executive order—or if that’s not exactly the technical name—can be issued, for example, for Awlaki, where he can be assassinated. Are you concerned about this?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: Absolutely, and I think the suggestion that WikiLeaks is a terrorist organization is absolutely outrageous.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Jennifer Robinson. Can you say how Julian Assange is protecting himself right now?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: He is obviously concerned about personal safety and is maintaining a low profile in order to protect himself from those threats.

AMY GOODMAN: And you’re saying he’s not in hiding from authorities but from possible personal harm?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: He is absolutely not evading arrest. He is in—he’s not in hiding. His location is not disclosed out of concern for general personal safety issues. And the prosecuting authorities are able to contact him via his lawyers. There is no suggestion that he is evading arrest.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, the legality of the U.S. going after the WikiLeaks website, the pressure on Amazon to drop WikiLeaks?

JENNIFER ROBINSON: I think that’s more a matter of politics than the law.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you, Jennifer Robinson, for being with us, speaking to us from London. She is one of the attorneys for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.

Is Wikileaks a Front for the CIA or Mossad?

A Journalist Asks and Immediately Dismisses a Fair Question with No Good Reason
by John Chuckman / December 2nd, 2010
It is not at all clear why you should say that. The “of course” only emphasizes the lack of analytical basis for your total dismissal.
Especially when one considers that in the end you, yourself, suggest a theme to the material.
In our own lifetimes, we have learned of many dark operations more impressive than the selected release of some not-all-that-secret documents, many of them having release dates of not too many years in the future. The term “conspiracy theory” is now consistently used to disparage those who are genuinely puzzled about the official explanations of certain big events.
Yes, we have the paranoid extreme, but that extends into the mainstream too, even into politics.
In the end you must judge major news events by the standards of the late I.F. Stone. You must read different versions and explanations and make comparisons and weightings. You must judge the purport of the material itself, what it is intended to say or not say.
We live in a shadow world as never before in human history with vast intelligence establishments working day and night and a press now reduced to a small number of owners who have their own reasons for giving slants to affairs or even completely misrepresenting them.
Truth is perceived infrequently, but there are immensely well-financed establishments busy “getting out the story” and even creating it in some cases. To say otherwise is to admit to extreme naiveté or perhaps dishonesty.
When was the last time a paper like your Telegraph or even the New York Times did some serious investigative journalism for readers? Especially where the earth-shaking matters are concerned, rather than mother’s milk stuff like the abuse of parliamentary expenses. Almost never.
Where were you with Blair’s countless lies? Bush’s lies and absurdities? We lived through a set of events in which, after the greatest peace march in history, Blair managed to twist the truth and lie his way into doing something against the overwhelming sense of the British people. And the press pretty well let it happen.
We only have a few genuine investigative journalists in the world, and they include notably Seymour Hersh and Robert Fisk. But even their work must be subject to evaluation. They can have things planted on them, and they make mistakes.
The WikiLeaks material is undoubtedly authentic, but that does not at all exclude an underlying purpose in its release.
It is a well-known practice of intelligence agencies to give large bits of genuine material, none of it too compromising, in order to get either an important piece of intelligence in return or to “bury” some damaging deception like a fish hook planted in a minnow.
The CIA used to brag of having a huge house organ whose keys could be played to create the sense of a Bach fugue of seeming news. It was talking about all the publications, both compliant and duped, in which it could plant a story and have it reverberate ultimately as a convincing event.
I’m not sure whether WikiLeaks, itself, falls into the compliant or duped category, but the nature of the material, the main themes plus the many important things undoubtedly missing, say something important to those listening carefully.
I am completely underwhelmed by the content of the military WikiLeaks, both this time and previously.
Very little there that well-informed people did not already know. Yes, of course, the juicy tidbits about so-and-so said are fun, and so they are meant to be, but they are not all that informative.
I am sure there are countless lies and atrocities contained in the universe covered so far by WikiLeaks, but they are not in the material released.
The idea that no one knows where Assange is also strikes me as slightly ridiculous in this age of massive intelligence operations and the trampling of individual rights in the name of fighting terror.
If you think otherwise because of Osama bin Laden, you are rather late in learning he has been dead since the bombing of Tora Bora. The United States has kept him alive, as it were, for a focus in its insane War on Terror.
Cui bono?
The US looks like an innocent victim, just guilty of some unpleasant gossip here and there. Who wouldn’t know that? Israel gains support for an attack on Iran.
The leaks serve Israeli-Pentagon interests.
And do so in a convincing, seemingly disinterested way.
These leaks also serve America’s now cancerously-swollen intelligence apparatus in seeking more repression and secrecy within American society.
Your off-hand dismissal is unfair and unwarranted.
John Chuckman lives in Canada and is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. Copyright © 2007 by John Chuckman. Read other articles by John, or visit John's website.
This article was posted on Thursday, December 2nd, 2010 at 7:00am and is filed under Disinformation, Espionage/"Intelligence", Iran, Israel/Palestine, Media, Osama Bin Laden, Whistleblowing.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/12/is-wik...more-25853

Amnesia as a Way of Life: WikiLeaks amid the “Careless People”

by Phil Rockstroh / December 2nd, 2010
As many wags have noted, the disclosures of Wikileaks have subjected the US Empire and its operatives to a full-body scan. Turnaround is fair play, because, until now, in the US, the powerless masses are subject to arbitrary pat downs and body scans, while the powerful and connected are massaged by privilege and ensconced in immunity.
In hindsight, one realizes, when the Obama administration promised transparency and accountability in government, National Security State enabler that Barack Obama has proven himself to be, that his administration’s definition of transparency would entail the countenancing of said body scans at the nation’s airports, revealing the private bits of the hoi polloi, as, all the while, his administration was engaged in stonewalling the hidden agendas and felonies of the corporate and governing elite. Recent events should remove any doubt regarding who stands exposed and who will remain cloaked by official aegis.
Unlike Julian Assange at Wikileaks, when the Democratic Congress had the opportunity to create an atmosphere of openness and transparency, they demurred. Once granted positions of authority, the Democrats didn’t exercise their constitutionally granted powers to initiate investigations, hold hearings, nor issue subpoenas. This failure of will and integrity amounts to complicity by omission. Withal, Democrats gave their tacit support and approval to the last administration’s (as well as to the present one’s continuation of more of the same) constitution-shredding, morally repugnant policies.
On most occasions, existing within the tacit repression and the benumbing, virtual reality carnival of the corporate/National Security State leaves an individual with a sense of being stranded in anonymity … cast into circumstances wherein one feels the necessity to follow the unspoken dictates of a nebulous form of authority that remains hidden, both by physical distance and organizational insularity. In contrast, when one is introduced to the apparatus of the National Security State, by means of a full body search, this unnerving intrusion upon the body can bring clarity to the mind as to how the elite and apparatchik of the US government regard that mass annoyance known as its citizenry and any quaint notions those wretches clutch pertaining to their constitutional granted rights and liberties.
These present outrages will flair up and spiral through the news cycle. Yet, the practices will remain in place, and, after a time, become normalized. This has proven to be the case with other previously revealed excesses of the so-call War on Terror and the attendant assaults against civil liberties and breaches of international law incurred in the name of this ongoing, seemingly endless, national psychotic episode e.g., the existence of the “detention camp” at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the illegal invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and those operations concomitant litany of war crimes and affronts to human dignity, such as the acts of torture committed at Abu Ghraib prison — as well as — the whole blood-sodden laundry list of outrages and excesses of present day US imperium.
If there is any hope for the US to ever function as a democratic republic, the revelations, unearthed by Wikileaks, should constitute the beginning of a long, painful process of grim discovery.
First, one must ask: Why is it the corporate media is so deeply invested in promulgating distracting and miss-the-point narratives, hyper-adrenaline arguments of narrowed context and little consequence — and, in general, trafficking in piffle packaged as news and public debate — rather than showing even a passing interest, much less an avidity, for the pursuit of stories that confront power and might present a challenge to the present order?
As with any criminal enterprise, the essential question to ask is: who benefits from the crime (and the subsequent coverup) and who gets the payoff? Although most of human existence is constituted by ambiguity, this situation is not. The evidence of war crimes and fiscal malfeasance committed by the nation’s political and financial elite are so pervasive that it cannot be missed, and that is precisely the reason the corporate media, as well as a large percentage of the general public, works so hard to ignore the situation.
Lord Northcliffe’s aphorism provides a clue:
“News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.” — Lord Northcliffe, British publisher 1865-1922
Accordingly, at present, there arrives a paucity of news, but, hour after hour, comes a drowning deluge of advertising. Enveloped in this commercially dominated hologram, on a cultural basis, it has proven difficult to arrive at a common lexicon to tell the tale of truths buried and freedoms imperiled.
The weightless, insubstantial quality of the consumer age engenders a state of mind wherein consequences cannot be grasped then processed. As a result, a sense of drift prevails. Yet below the surface churns a nebulous dread — a feeling of being propelled towards a time of unbearable reckoning.
But such enervating thoughts must be banished from the mind; hence, amnesia, as a way of life, becomes the prevailing mindset of psyches minted in the media age hologram i.e., a manner of perceiving the world in which official accountability becomes as evanescent as last season’s advertising campaign roll-out.
Voting for “change” becomes as meaningless and inconsequential as the introduction of Coke “Classic” and “Be all you can be.” The US might as well have election campaigns in which the Michelin Man runs against the Energizer Bunny.
By means of its inherently self-narrowing context, the lingua franca of the media hologram reduces complex and conflicted human aspirations into consumer choices — and the vastness of life to retail experience, as, simultaneously, its proliferate narratives envelop, saturate and bind to the architecture of our psyches becoming the quanta of our thoughts and the shared lexicon of our utterances.
Living in this milieu, that is as manic as it is mind-grinding, decisions must be made rapidly, with little time allowed for reflection (decision-making carrying no more depth and lasting meaning than a text message vote by cell phone involving some contrived Reality TV competition) because the proliferation of empty, non-choices just keeps being proffered and the rate of arrival keeps accelerating.
Tragically, in this environment, the recent Wikileaks revelations will be marginalized in the electronic image-crowded air and quickly dissipate like any other media age phantom.
Yet the US consumer state’s infantilized inhabitants will never transfigure the raging Furies of truth-deferred into cooing Teletubbies of endless, imagined innocence (albeit, as terrifying as those homunculi of hell-bound cuteness are). The childishness of US uberculture seems the voice of Newspeak as it might have been composed by Dr. Seuss, in a fever delirium, dreaming he is Glen Beck.
Often, it is not the content of what a cartoonish demagogue, such as Beck, is saying; rather, it is the way they say it — the emotional tonality of the line reading that resonates with their audience. Apropos, the US is a depressing place nowadays. Viewed in the context of emotional catharsis, Glen Beck’s crying jags and feigned emotional disclosures resonate with his audience because there is much reason to weep regarding the degraded state of their lives.
In an era where policies of official secrecy and corporatist predation meet little resistance, dread and feelings of dislocation will be present just below the surface. If one listens to the subliminal criteria playing out beneath Beck’s bathos, one can hear inadvertent arias intimating the end of empire — a cheese-bag death-swoon — operatic in scale.
What is lamentable is — the emotional and intellectually dishonest, demagogic displacements he attributes to the cause of his audience’s discontent and the sleight of hand employed to create the illusion of truths revealed.
“Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.” — Eric Hoffer
This is the price paid when one affords scant deference to self-awareness, but, in contrast, possesses an unflagging fealty to the pursuit of shallow diversions and self-limiting delusion … All maintained by the crackpot casuistry, elevated to an art form, if not holy writ, in the US, that willful ignorance is a form of freedom of choice, that normalcy is maintained by official cover-ups and personal denial.
The system is rigged, from top to bottom; it is only through an astonishing (almost credulity-defying) degree of self-deception on the part of the general public of the US, in collaboration with the mendacity of its political and economic elite, this dim, brutal, unwieldy and wounded system continues to stagger onward.
Lamentably, the US Empire, as was the case with any imperium throughout history, has grown into a bloated abomination kept provisionally alive by self-deluded apparatchik and ignorant killers. What can one do about the situation, other than try to get out of the way of this wounded giant and stand clear upon its inevitable collapse? Unfortunately, damn little.
The structure of the revolving door dynamic of the governmental/corporate exploiter class has allowed the elite therein to escape any sense of accountability. In addition, their vastly inflated salaries, with attendant perks and privileges, have separated them even further from the general population; hence, providing them with immunity from consequences, as well as, insularity from commonplace experience; thus, allowing them to embrace the most airless of aspirations — that greed, grotesquely out of proportion privilege, and unchecked power run riot constitutes a viable means to move in the world and establish a social order.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made […]” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Pg. 180-181)
Among the political elite of both major parties come few calls for the kind of disclosure and official accountability that could stem the decline of the nation. Facing the fact that, in the US, there is not a true opposition party causes many people in the general population to become understandably angry, anxious, and depressed, thereby primed for pronouncements of demagogues and the diversions of commercial media palliatives.
“What WikiLeaks is doing is to short-circuit this entire democratic process — claiming for itself the exclusive, unilateral, and unchecked power to decide what should and shouldn’t be made public. This is therefore not only an attack on our national security, but an offense against our democracy and the principle of transparency.”
–Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee
If one could cut through the thicket of false premises, logical fallacies, false dichotomies, arrays of strawmen, general flutter-headed palaver, and out and out paranoid fantasy marshaled by the caretakers and apologists of the present system, I would ask this question — why is it you are driven with such vehemence to defend and attempt to preserve the current order? As it is, it seems the nation is being held together with hydrogenated fat, wheat gluten, payday loans, Tyvek®, particleboard, and the provisional binding of homespun bigotry and official duplicity.
And what remains? How does one rise to meet the day confronted by such diminished prospects and prevailing degradations? Is there solace to be found in the following?
“It does not take a majority to prevail … but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” — Samuel Adams
Sadly, in the provinces beyond the Washington/New York government/corporate state nexus, it may well be impossible to start an authentic populist brushfire when the political landscape is covered in flame-retardant, corporate-laid Astroturf.
Still: It would be entertaining, in the very least, to rock the foundation of the US House of Empire with the repeated force of numerous Wikileaks type revelations, until its closet doors are flung open wide, causing the skeletons within to dance.
Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com Read other articles by Phil, or visit Phil's website.
This article was posted on Thursday, December 2nd, 2010 at 7:00am and is filed under Democrats, Imperialism, Media, Obama, Whistleblowing.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/12/amnesi...ss-people/

Wikileaks: A Government Caught Up in Mendacity and Lies

by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts


Global Research, December 2, 2010


The reaction to WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange tells us all we need to know about the total corruption of our “modern” world, which in fact is a throwback to the Dark Ages.


Some member of the United States government released to WikiLeaks the documents that are now controversial. The documents are controversial, because they are official US documents and show all too clearly that the US government is a duplicitous entity whose raison d’etre is to control every other government.


The media, not merely in the US but also throughout the English speaking world and Europe, has shown its hostility to WikiLeaks. The reason is obvious. WikiLeaks reveals truth, while the media covers up for the US government and its puppet states.


Why would anyone with a lick of sense read the media when they can read original material from WikiLeaks? The average American reporter and editor must be very angry that his/her own cowardice is so clearly exposed by Julian Assange. The American media is a whore, whereas the courageous blood of warriors runs through WikiLeaks’ veins.


Just as American politicians want Bradley Manning executed because he revealed crimes of the US government, they want Julian Assange executed. In the past few days the more notorious of the zombies that sit in the US Congress have denounced Assange as a “traitor to America.” What total ignorance. Assange is an Australian, not an American citizen. To be a traitor to America, one has to be of US nationality. An Australian cannot be a traitor to America any more than an American can be a traitor to Australia. But don’t expect the morons who represent the lobbyists to know this much.


Mike Huckabee, the redneck baptist preacher who was governor of Arkansas and, to America’s already overwhelming shame, was third runner up to the Republican presidential nomination, has called for Assange’s execution. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/01/us-embassy-cables-executed-mike-huckabee So here we have a “man of God” calling for the US government to murder an Australian citizen. And Americans wonder why the rest of the world hates their guts.


The material leaked from the US government to WikiLeaks shows that the US government is an extremely disreputable gang of gangsters. The US government was able to get British prime minister Brown to “fix” the official Chilcot Investigation into how former prime minister Tony Blair manipulated and lied the British government into being mercenaries for the US invasion of Iraq. One of the “diplomatic” cables released has UK Defense Ministry official Jon Day promising the United States government that prime minister Brown’s government has “put measures in place to protect your interests.”


Other cables show the US government threatening Spanish prime minister Zapatero, ordering him to stop his criticisms of the Iraq war or else. I mean, really, how dare these foreign governments to think that they are sovereign.


Not only foreign governments are under the US thumb. So is Amazon.com. Joe Lieberman from Connecticut, who is Israel’s most influential senator in the US Senate, delivered sufficiently credible threats to Amazon to cause the company to oust WikiLeaks content from their hosting service. http://news.antiwar.com/2010/12/01/facing-lieberman-boycott-amazon-ousts-wikileaks/


So there you have it. On the one hand the US government and the prostitute American media declare that there is nothing new in the hundreds of thousands of documents, yet on the other hand both pull out all stops to shut down WikiLeaks and its founder. Obviously, despite the US government’s denials, the documents are extremely damaging. The documents show that the US government is not what it pretends to be.


Assange is in hiding. He fears CIA and Mossad assassination, and to add to his troubles the government of Sweden has changed its mind, perhaps as a result of American persuasion and money, about sex charges that the Swedish government had previously dismissed for lack of credibility. If reports are correct, two women, who possibly could be CIA or Mossad assets, have brought sex charges against Assange. One claims that she was having consensual sexual intercourse with him, but that he didn’t stop when she asked him to when the condom broke.


Think about this for a minute. Other than male porn stars who are bored with it all, how many men can stop at the point of orgasm or when approaching orgasm? How does anyone know where Assange was in the process of the sex act?


Would a real government that had any integrity and commitment to truth try to blacken the name of the prime truth teller of our time on the basis of such flimsy charges? Obviously, Sweden has become another two-bit punk puppet government of the US.


The US government has got away with telling lies for so long that it no longer hesitates to lie in the most blatant way. WikiLeaks released a US classified document signed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that explicitly orders US diplomats to spy on UN Security council officials and on the Secretary General of the United Nations. The cable is now in the public record. No one challenges its authenticity. Yet, today the Obama regime, precisely White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, declared that Hillary had never ordered or even asked US officials to spy on UN officials.


As Antiwar.com asked: Who do you believe, the printed word with Hillary’s signature or the White House?


Anyone who believes the US government about anything is the epitome of gullibility.