Will WikiLeaks unravel the American 'secret government'?

[Albert Doyle]

More CIA dirty tricks. What America really hates is people who practice true democracy - not the phony controlled poodle media type we have here. America is a false democracy run by CIA and military right-wing fascists. Julian Assange is a Constitutional hero - which is why our Orwell government is attacking him.


We need to set-up a special UN court to evaluate any international charges that benefit the American government. America is a rogue fascist/military state and its legal charges cannot be trusted. International Constitutional democracy based on the type America has betrayed.

[Peter Lemkin]

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) today condemned the political backlash being mounted against the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, and accused the United States of attacking free speech after it put pressure on the website’s host server to shut down the site yesterday.

The website’s host Amazon.com blocked access to WikiLeaks after United States officials condemned the torrent of revelations about political, business and diplomatic affairs that has given people around the world unprecedented access to detailed information from United States sources, much of it embarrassing to leading public figures.

“It is unacceptable to try to deny people the right to know,” said Aidan White, IFJ General Secretary, “these revelations may be embarrassing in their detail, but they also expose corruption and double-dealing in public life that is worthy of public scrutiny. The response of the United States is desperate and dangerous because it goes against fundamental principles of free speech and democracy.”

The IFJ has taken no position on the justification for the release of hundreds of thousands of internal documents which have made headlines around the world in the last few days, but it has welcomed the decision of WikiLeaks to use respected channels of journalism including Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde and El Pais to filter the information.

“This information is being processed by serious, professional journalists who are well aware of their responsibilities both to the public and to people implicated in these revelations,” said Whit, “it is simply untenable to allege, as some people have, that lives are being put at risk here. The only casualty here is the culture of secrecy that has for too long drawn a curtain around the unsavory side of public life.”

The IFJ is also concerned about the welfare and well-being of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and Bradley Manning, the United States soldier in Iraq who is under arrest and suspected of leaking the information. Both men are the target of a growing political campaign mounted by government officials and right-wing politicians.

Assange has been forced into hiding and is the subject of an international police investigation over allegations concerning sexual offences in Sweden.

The IFJ says that calls by right wing commentators for Manning to be executed and that Assange be hunted down as a spy, as demanded by former Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, show a mood of intolerance and persecution that is dangerous not just for the two men but for all journalists engaged in investigating public affairs.

“The IFJ and its members support the rights of whistleblowers and the responsible reporting of information in the public interest,” said White, “this over-reaction by politicians and their allies illustrates that they have not understood the historical significance of these events. The people’s right to know is not something that can any longer be willfully ignored. They have to adjust to the fact journalists have a duty to report, fairly and accurately and with due respect for the rights of all parties in the public interest.”

[Peter Lemkin]

LONDON [NYT] — Julian Assange, the founder of the beleaguered WikiLeaks anti-secrecy group, was denied bail by a London court on Tuesday after he was arrested on a Swedish extradition warrant for questioning in connection with alleged sex offenses.

Members of the news media waited outside the rear entrance of Westminster Magistrates Court for the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in London on Tuesday.

In a hearing that lasted just under an hour, Mr. Assange said he would fight extradition. But despite the presence in court of several prominent people ready to vouch for him, he was called a flight risk and ordered to remain in custody until a further court session on Dec. 14. His British lawyer, Mark Stephens, told reporters Mr. Assange would appeal the denial of bail.

Reporters and television crews from around the world watched as an armored wagon holding Mr. Assange pulled away from the court, and photographers rushed at its rear windows, cameras flashing. Dozens of WikiLeaks supporters who had gathered outside the courthouse converged on vehicle, banging on its side panels and yelling "We love you!"

The developments offered the latest twist in the drama swirling around WikiLeaks following its publication of vast troves of leaked United States government documents.

Mr. Assange’s associates said his detention would not alter plans for further disclosures like the wealth of field reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that it released over the summer and fall, and, over the past nine days, confidential diplomatic messages between the State Department and American representatives abroad.

“Today’s actions against our editor-in-chief Julian Assange won’t affect our operations: we will release more cables tonight as normal,” a posting on the WikiLeaks Twitter account said.

That left unclear whether a more serious threat would be carried out. In recent days, Mr. Assange has asserted that “over 100,000 people” had been given the entire archive of 251,287 cables “in encrypted form.” Only around 1,000 of them have so far been released; in many, names of sources who might be compromised or endangered were redacted.

“If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically,” Mr. Assange wrote in a question-and-answer session on the Web site of the British newspaper The Guardian. Mr. Stephens, the lawyer, reiterated that warning on Tuesday saying a “a virtual network” of “thousands of journalists” around the world would ensure that the rest of the documents would be published.

The arrest seemed to draw ever sharper battle-lines over Mr. Assange. His supporters cast him as a crusader; his foes, including the Obama administration, have been infuriated by revelations of sensitive material whose publication, his critics say, could threaten American security interests, alliances and lives.

That contest was evident in the courtroom where the film director Ken Loach, campaigning journalist John Pilger, and Jemima Khan, a socialite and activist, were among a group of supporters that offered to stand surety for Mr. Assange, only for bail to be refused because of what police said was a risk that he would go underground or flee.

Mr. Assange entered the court wearing a dark blue suit and tie and flanked by two court officers. Over the last few months he has frequently seemed to change his appearance, dying his hair a darker color. But on Tuesday, strands of silver and gray showed through. Prosecutors said he had refused to be finger-printed or give a DNA sample, and, when asked for his address offered a post office box in Australia.

The Swedish warrant covers accusations lodged months ago by two Swedish women who said separate consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange became nonconsensual after he was no longer using a condom. Mr. Assange has denied any wrongdoing and suggested that the charges were trumped up in retaliation for his WikiLeaks work.

Tuesday’s day’s rapid-fire events began when Mr. Assange was arrested by officers from Scotland Yard’s extradition unit after he went to a central London police station by prior agreement with the authorities.

He arrived by car for a subsequent court hearing near the Houses of Parliament on the banks of the Thames, using a rear entrance to skirt a scrum of television cameras, satellite vans and reporters from Britain, the United States, China, Russia, Japan and many European countries, including Albania. He left in an armored police truck.
Speaking a crowded courtroom whose poor acoustics muffled his words, Mr. Assange said he did not consent when asked whether he understood that he could agree to be extradited to Sweden. That set the stage for what could be protracted legal wrangling over his fate. He was not asked to plead guilt or not guilty.

Police and members of the news media outside Magistrates Court, where the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was expected to arrive, in London on Tuesday.

Previously, Mr. Stephens, his lawyer, had suggested that Mr. Assange might resist extradition on the grounds that Swedish authorities could interview him by video-link from Stockholm or at their embassy in London and that the extradition request itself is politically motivated.

“It’s about time we got to the end of the day and we got some truth, justice and rule of law,” Mr. Stephens told reporters on Tuesday. “Julian Assange has been the one in hot pursuit to vindicate himself to clear his good name.”

In a statement earlier on Tuesday, the police said: “Officers from the Metropolitan Police extradition unit have this morning arrested Julian Assange on behalf of the Swedish authorities on suspicion of rape.”

The British police statement said that Mr. Assange was “accused by the Swedish authorities of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape, all alleged to have been committed in August 2010.”

The arrest was made under a European arrest warrant “by appointment at a London police station at 09:30 today,” the statement said.

While widely anticipated, the arrest opened an array of new questions about Mr. Assange’s future, even as the Justice Department in Washington said it was conducting what Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. called “a very serious, active, ongoing investigation that is criminal in nature” into the WikiLeaks matter.

In an article in The Australian newspaper on Tuesday, by contrast, Mr. Assange depicted WikiLeaks as a proponent of what he termed scientific journalism, which “allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on.”

“That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?” he wrote. “Democratic societies need a strong media, and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest.”

His arrest came amid mounting challenges to the operation of WikiLeaks, as computer server companies, Amazon.com and PayPal.com, have cut off commercial cooperation with the organization.

Visa said on Tuesday that it had suspended all payments to WikiLeaks pending an investigation of the organization’s business, Reuters reported. The decision appeared to strike a further blow against the organization, which relies on donations made online, and came a day after a Swiss bank froze an account held by Mr. Assange that had been used to collect donations.

As of Monday night, the group had released fewer than 1,000 of the quarter-million State Department cables it had obtained, reportedly from a low-ranking Army intelligence analyst.

So far, the group has moved cautiously. The whole archive was made available to five news organizations, including The New York Times. But WikiLeaks has posted only a few dozen cables on its own in addition to matching those made public by the news publications. According to the State Department’s count, 1,325 cables, or fewer than 1 percent of the total, have been made public by all parties to date.

Justice Department prosecutors have been struggling to find a way to indict Mr. Assange since July, when WikiLeaks made public documents on the war in Afghanistan. But while it is clearly illegal for a government official with a security clearance to give a classified document to WikiLeaks, it is far from clear that it is illegal for the organization to make it public.

Perhaps in a warning shot of sorts, WikiLeaks on Monday released a cable from early last year listing sites around the world — from hydroelectric dams in Canada to vaccine factories in Denmark — that are considered crucial to American national security.

Nearly all the facilities listed in the document, including undersea cables, oil pipelines and power plants, could be identified by Internet searches. But the disclosure prompted headlines in Europe and a new denunciation from the State Department, which said in a statement that “releasing such information amounts to giving a targeting list to groups like Al Qaeda.”

Asked later about the cable, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the continuing disclosures posed “real concerns, and even potential damage to our friends and partners around the world.”

In recent months, WikiLeaks gave the entire collection of cables to four European publications — Der Spiegel in Germany, El País in Spain, Le Monde in France and The Guardian. The Guardian shared the cable collection with The New York Times.

Since Nov. 28, each publication has been publishing a series of articles about revelations in the cables, accompanied online by the texts of some of the documents. The publications have removed the names of some confidential sources of American diplomats, and WikiLeaks has generally posted the cables with the same redactions.

The five publications have announced no plans to make public all the documents. WikiLeaks’ intentions remain unclear.

[Peter Lemkin]

Julian Assange wrote this Op-Ed for The Australian today:


IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s The News, wrote: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.”

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch’s expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.

These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia , was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.

If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, any of the US embassy cables or any of the stories about the things WikiLeaks has reported, consider how important it is for all media to be able to report these things freely.

WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain ‘s The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.

Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be “taken out” by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be “hunted down like Osama bin Laden”, a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a “transnational threat” and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister’s office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.

And Australians should observe with no pride the disgraceful pandering to these sentiments by Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.

We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn’t want the truth revealed, including information about its own diplomatic and political dealings.

Has there been any response from the Australian government to the numerous public threats of violence against me and other WikiLeaks personnel? One might have thought an Australian prime minister would be defending her citizens against such things, but there have only been wholly unsubstantiated claims of illegality. The Prime Minister and especially the Attorney-General are meant to carry out their duties with dignity and above the fray. Rest assured, these two mean to save their own skins. They will not.

Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with the State Department: “You’ll risk lives! National security! You’ll endanger troops!” Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can’t be both. Which is it?

It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US , with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan . NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn’t find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.

But our publications have been far from unimportant. The US diplomatic cables reveal some startling facts:

The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US Officials in Jordan and Bahrain want Iran ‘s nuclear program stopped by any means available.

Britain’s Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect “US interests”.

Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept from parliament.

The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay . Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government”. The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

[Peter Lemkin]

Senator Joe Lieberman, the head of the Senate's homeland security committee, suggests that the New York Times and other news organisations using the WikiLeaks cables may also be investigated for breaking the US's espionage laws. :vollkommenauf:

[Albert Doyle]

Calling Lieberman an "Independent" is an oxymoron.


He is doing his job right on time for a certain lobbied cause. And in light of this Lieberman is probably the one who qualifies under the Espionage Act.

[Ed Jewett]

Indecent Exposure: WikiLeaks Hounded for Showing Power Its True Face [URL="http://chris-floyd.com/index.php?view=article&catid=1:latest-news&id=2059:indecent-exposure-wikileaks-hounded-for-showing-power-its-true-face&format=pdf"]
[/URL] [URL="http://chris-floyd.com/index.php?view=article&catid=1:latest-news&id=2059:indecent-exposure-wikileaks-hounded-for-showing-power-its-true-face&tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page="]
[/URL] [URL="http://chris-floyd.com/component/mailto/?tmpl=component&link=aHR0cDovL2NocmlzLWZsb3lkLmNvbS9hcnRpY2xlcy8xLWxhdGVzdC1uZXdzLzIwNTktaW5WNlbnQtZXhwb3N1cmUtd2lraWxlYWtzLWhvdW5kZWQtZm9yLXNob3dpbmctcG93ZXItaXRzLXRydWUtmjZS5odG1s"]
[/URL] Written by Chris Floyd Monday, 06 December 2010 23:30

Even as WikiLeaks fights for its life -- a phrase that becomes less metaphorical by the day, especially for Julian Assange, hounded and hunted by several governments -- its revelations continue to shake the world's power structures. Every day we are treated to the edifying spectacle of the most powerful and privileged people on earth scurrying around like panicked rats, trying to escape the streams of light pouring into their filthy backrooms, exposing their ruthless machtpolitik -- and their monumental incompetence at every level.

The trove of leaked diplomatic cables is too rich to encompass or fully process right away. Dip your hand into one batch and you come out with a whole handful of jewels, each one worthy of careful, in-depth analysis, buttressed with innumerable links to current events and detailed historical context. This is the work of months, even years. For now, we can only survey the highlights as they are released and draw some initial impressions.

Two things stand out immediately. First, the leaked cables reveal -- or rather, confirm -- that American "intelligence" on the activities of foreign nations is based almost totally on hearsay, rumor, gossip and fantasies brewed from a deadly mix of arrogance and ignorance. Second, they show that the overwhelming majority of the public statements made by top American officials about the nation's foreign policy are deliberate, knowing lies: the cheapest, most threadbare bromides about America's noble intentions coupled with cynical fear-mongering, which knowingly fans low-grade -- or non-existent -- threats into dire "emergencies" that somehow, always, fill the coffers of war-profiteers (and that new breed of gluttonous predator, the security-profiteers) and require ever-greater expansions of authoritarian power.

Or as Arthur Silber, who has explored these themes in depth for years, puts it: "They'll lie about everything."

Take for example a couple of the latest Guardian stories from the WikiLeaks trove: "Cables portray Saudi Arabia as cash machine for terrorists" and "Saudi Arabia rated a bigger threat to Iraqi stability than Iran." These are not particularly major revelations, but they are highly illustrative for our purposes. In them, we find American diplomats flinging accusations of extensive terrorist funding by powerful Saudis and, in particular, by Saudi-based charities which work around the world. Even as they report their assertions back to Washington, however, the diplomats admit that the "intelligence" they are relying upon is merely "suggestive," that it is based on "limited information," that confirmation of the charges and rumors is "hard to come by."

This is not to say that powerful Saudi interests -- that is, staunch political allies and business partners of the American elite -- are not helping finance extremist organisations around the world. This is hardly a secret: the Saudi Arabian monarchy itself is one of the most extremist organizations in the world, openly propagating a retrograde and repressive brand of Islam, even as its bloated ranks of royalty enjoy every possible secular indulgence in their Western pleasure palaces.

And the American government has often used the Saudis' extremist networks to advance its own agenda -- usually the undermining of any government or movement (secular or religious) that might offer a genuine alternative to thuggish American clients (such as the brutal dictatorship in Egypt) or simply to the general principle of rule by corrupt, rapacious elites (such as our own dear great and good in God's shining city on the hill). Must we bring up yet again the great US-Saudi alliance in building a worldwide network of armed Islamic extremists to fight the great Jesus-Mohammed-Allah-Jehovah crusade against the Commies in Afghanistan? (Well yes, we must, given the total amnesia that afflicts the American memory, where every new day is a fresh clean slate of goodness and righteousness.) And that, of course, just scratches the surface in the US-Saudi use of Sunni extremists over the years, in such places as Bosnia and more recently in Lebanon and Palestine, where, as Seymour Hersh reported, the Americans and Saudis were backing al Qaeda allies -- yes, yes, years after 9/11 -- to try to counteract Hizbollah and Hamas.

But are Saudi tycoons and Saudi charities specifically funding any extremist organizations that might not be serving American interests at this particular moment? No one knows -- certainly not American "intelligence," with its "limited information" and its boldly asserted unsupported suppositions. But what is interesting and revealing in this instance is that, in private, Washington evidently believes that powerful Saudis, with the knowledge if not the outright connivance of Saudi leaders, are financing America's enemies in the "War on Terror" -- but in public we hear nothing but high praise for our stalwart Saudi allies and their anti-terrorism efforts. Again, the Wikileaks revelations lay bare the ruthless power politics that actually govern world affairs, where murder, corruption, terror and war are simply the tools of the trade in a vicious, murky racket of ever-shifting alliances that have no rhyme or reason beyond a bestial urge for dominance.

The other story, about the jackal-fight over the carcass of Iraq after its American ravaging, is perhaps even more revealing -- and more sinister. Here we find American officials reporting back to the Potomac court that the imperial satraps in Baghdad are far more worried about meddling from the Saudis than from the Great Satanic Googily-Moogily of Iran. According to the dispatches, the Iraqi leaders are keen to assure their American patrons that they can easily "manage" the Iranians, who want stability; but the Saudis wanted a "weak and fractured" Iraq, and were even "fomenting terrorism that would destabilize the government."

Naturally, the 2009 report of the then US ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, is riddled with arrogant dismissal of the Iraqis' own assessment of their situation, and parrots back to Team Obama some of the usual evidence-free mind-reading of what the Great Googily-Moogily is really up to in Iraq -- which, even in Hill's most malign construction, is a level of "interference" several orders of magnitude less than, oh, say, invading the country, killing a million of its people, driving four million more from their homes and unleashing endless sectarian war.

But after tossing his bosses the ritual red meat, Hill gets down to the reality which, as our better know full well, lies behind their never-ending warmongering against Iran. He writes that the relation between Iran and Iraq is based on natural, "longstanding historical realities" that "should not lead to alarmist tendencies or reactions on our part." Iran's influence, he says, "should not be overestimated," and that the two countries will find many "points of divergence" on various issues, such as borders, water rights and ordinary political jockeying.

Again, the bipartisan American power structure knows very well that there is no great existential threat -- or even a minor military threat -- emanating from Iran. Yes, the Iranian government is a nasty, corrupt, amoral enterprise, blatantly violating its professed ideals and generally stinking up the joint. (Why, do you know they even execute women, and that their president believes that some kind of long-dead religious figure is going to come again at the end of time and take over the universe? What primitive barbarians, eh?) But so what? As the WikiLeaks cables have confirmed once again, all governments fall somewhere along this same inhumane spectrum. Readers can perhaps decide for themselves just where on that spectrum a nation that has engaged in the above-noted act of mass-murdering aggressive war in Iraq might fall.

But whatever they say amongst themselves, in public our bipartisan elites are eager to stoke fear and hatred of Iran among the populace, with the ever-present threat of war against the Persian demons held out continuously as an imminent, desirable prospect -- yea, verily, a moral good, done in the service of all humankind. Just as they knew all along that Iraq posed no threat yet spent years -- years -- wearing away all resistance to the act of aggression they craved, so too with Iran. It may appear at times that these homicidal cravings for violent domination have been put on the back burner, as we sometimes saw with Iraq; but rest assured -- that back burner is itself kept on high heat, and the stew of war is always boiling.

One final observation: it is remarkable that the WikiLeaks release of diplomatic cables has provoked a far more virulent and draconian reaction from government officials -- and from their craven sycophants in the mainstream media -- than we ever saw after the earlier releases about Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet many of those Terror War releases provided detailed, eyewitness accounts of horrific acts of murder, brutality, and depraved indifference toward the slaughter of innocent people. It seems the American elite are more outraged at being caught in various diplomatic faux pas than being shown to be perpetrators and facilitators of murder, repression and state terror. That's because they know that their cowed and passive subjects -- continually stoked with the hatred and fear of foreign demons -- don't care how many darkies get killed on the other side of the world. And so the Terror War leaks occasioned no more than a few days of Beltway bluster.

But the new releases put a bit of a crimp in business as usual for our backroom operators, exposing some of the rank hypocrisy and all-pervasive corruption of our great and good -- and of their clients and partners around the world. All this might -- just might -- give the rabble unseemly notions ... such as the idea that their interests are perhaps not being served all that well by a system run by and for a handful of liars, tyrants, killers and thieves. We can't have that.

And so Julian Assange is now being hounded -- perhaps to his eventual death -- not for revealing war crimes and atrocities, but for showing us a glimpse of our leaders as they really are: stupid, vain, petty and savage.

[Myra Bronstein]

3 offenses by the same women over three days (it looks like)...

Mmmm. She must've really been outraged.

Simply outraged.

Outraged, I say.

Hilarious.

[Magda Hassan]

3 offenses by the same women over three days (it looks like)...

Mmmm. She must've really been outraged.

Simply outraged.

Outraged, I say.

Hilarious.

:date:

[Magda Hassan]

I'd love to know how long this particular law has been on the books in Sweden and who else has ever been charged and how their trials went. It could be that it was set up recently as a honeypot trap for Julian.