Julian Assange presents massive Project K leak on Wikileaks

‘Who controls the past controls the future’
  April 08, 2013


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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange formally unveiled on Monday the latest release from the whistleblower site, Project K, calling it “the single most significant geopolitical publication that has ever existed.”

Speaking via Skype from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Assange introduced Project K on Monday morning to a group of journalists at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Nearly three years earlier to the day, Assange spoke at the Press Club in person to debut “Collateral Murder,” a video of US soldiers firing at Iraqi civilians that has since become one of WikiLeaks’ most well-recognized contributions to journalism.

 Since that release, WikiLeaks and the organization’s associates have become the target of a number of government investigations, with Assange himself having been confined to the embassy in London for nearly one year while awaiting safe passage to Ecuador where he was granted political asylum. Ongoing attempts to prosecute the journalists for sharing state secrets aside, however, Assange and company have now unloaded the organization’s biggest leak yet.

Project K, says Assange, contains roughly 1.7 million files composed of US Department of State diplomatic communications. And although the material has been classified, declassified and, in some instances, re-classified, the public’s inability to access and peruse the unredacted copies has made them nearly inaccessible. “One form of secrecy is the complexity and the accessibility of documents,” WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson said during Monday’s event. “You could say that the government cannot be trusted with these documents.” "He who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past,” Assange chimed in using his webcam in London to quote from George Orwell’s novel 1984.

“The US administration cannot be trusted with its control of its past,” he said. “That is the result of this information being hidden by secrecy, but more often being hidden in the borderline between secrecy and complexity.” The 1.7 million cables released on Monday span the period of time between 1973 and 1976 when Henry Kissinger sat at the head the State Department under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.  

WikiLeaks has now combined their latest files with the previously-released State Department diplomatic cables that they published starting in 2010 after US Army Private first class Bradley Manning gained access to military intelligence servers and sent over 250,000 documents to the site, along with “Collateral Murder” and a trove of other documents. By combining the earlier State Dept. memos with the new collection of Kissinger cables, Assange says WikiLeaks has created a database that gives journalists unprecedented access to roughly 2 million documents that paint a unique picture of the United States’ relationships with foreign nations during a number of presidential administrations. That infrastructure, dubbed the WikiLeaks Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), “is what Google should be like,” Assange said. “This is a search system that investigative journalists can use effectively,” he said.

With the publishing of the State Dept. cables credited to Pfc. Manning, WikiLeaks previously brought to the public periphery a tome of material that largely focuses on US foreign policy at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The Kissinger cables though, said Assange, reveals a multitude about the US and other nations during a time when western society as we know it today really began to take form.

“The period of the 1970s in diplomacy is referred to as the ‘Big Bang.’ This is when the modern international order came to be,” Assange said at the press conference. “There is really only two periods: post-World War Two and the 1970s.” During the ‘70s, vast decolonization caused the number of countries on the planet to go from only 104 to roughly 160. “To understand all of that complexity, the US State Dept. put together a system to harvest intelligence from its diplomats across the world,” Assange said of Project K. Today, he added, the White House has “more direct control of the periphery.” During the 70s, however, “the relationship between ambassadors and their host government was more essential.”

Project K helps shine a light on exactly how those interactions played out during a time when the Vietnam conflict, Watergate and the Cold War warranted the US to embark in a number of conversations with persons of all affiliations around the world. “The United States makes a priority gaining influence and contacts and informants within opposition movements. Partly in order to corrupt them, partly in order to have bets on both the lead horse and the second in case there is a transition of power,” he said.

But while American interest in the Soviet Union was largely a focal point of the US during the 1970s as one might expect, Assange said that the “titanic struggle” between the two bodies represents only a small sampling of the State Department’s interests during that time. The Kissinger Cables, at roughly one billion words, show that the US “is essentially checking the activity and inactivity of other empires,” said Assange. France, Spain, the UK, Australia and Sweden are all discussed in length in the cables, and even politicians still relevant today make appearances.

“Margaret Thatcher died last night and of course there is a great many cables about her,” said Assange, who put the figure of memos relating to the recently passed former prime minister at around 400. Kissinger, who is alive and active today, is referenced in over 200,000 individual documents included in the trove. Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt — a critic of the whistleblower site and today the nation’s foreign minister — also makes a number of appearances in Project K as well.
 
Speaking to RT at the conference, Hrafnsson said that neither Kissinger nor the current Department of State has yet to respond to the leak — nor does he expect them to. On his part, however, Assange told RT that any formal federal investigation into this project will likely not dwell on any damages spawned by the leak, but instead will focus on how his organization managed to take 1.7 million documents and reverse engineer them in order to publish them in the public domain.

“Essentially,” said Assange, it’s “what Aaron Swartz was doing.” “If the Department of Justice was to go after us for this release like they are attempting to prosecute us for previous releases involving US embassies documents, the approach would probably be along the lines of the approach that was taken was Swartz,” said Assange, “which is the sort of manner of acquisition as opposed to the classification for the matter.” Hrafnsson said that WikiLeaks has been working on Project K and the PlusD database for roughly one year.

Truth Is Offensive

March 31, 2013 — Paul Craig Roberts

In America truth is offensive. If you tell the truth, you are offensive.

I am offensive. Michael Hudson is offensive. Gerald Celente is offensive. Herman Daly is offensive. Nomi Prins is offensive. Pam Martens is offensive. Chris Hedges is offensive. Chris Floyd is offensive. John Pilger is offensive. Noam Chomsky is offensive. Harvey Silverglate is offensive. Naomi Wolf is offensive. Stephen Lendman is offensive. David Ray Griffin is offensive. Ellen Brown is offensive.

Fortunately, many others are offensive. But how long before being offensive becomes
being “an enemy of the state”?

Throughout history truth tellers have suffered and court historians have prospered. It is
the same today. Gerald Celente illustrates this brilliantly in the next issue of the Trends
Journal.

Over the past 35 years I have learned this lesson as a columnist. If you tell readers
what is really going on, they want to know why you can’t be positive. Why are you telling
us that there are bad happenings that can’t be remedied? Don’t you know that God
gave Americans the power to fix all wrongs? What are you? Some kind of idiot, an anti-American, a pinko-liberal-commie? If you hate America so much, why don’t you move to Cuba, Iran or China (or to wherever the current bogyman is located)?

The ancient Greeks understood this well. In Greek mythology, Cassandra was the prophetess who no one believed despite her 100 percent record of being right. Telling the truth to Americans or to Europeans is just as expensive as telling the truth to the Greeks in ancient mythology.

In America and everywhere in the Western world or the entire world, telling the truth is
unpopular. Indeed, in the USA telling the truth has been criminalized. Look for example at Bradley Manning, held for two years in prison without bail and without a trial in violation of the US Constitution, tortured for one year of his illegal confinement in violation of US and international law, and now put on trial by corrupt prosecutors for aiding “enemies of the US” by revealing the truth, as required of him by the US military code. US soldiers are required to report war crimes. When Bradley Manning’s superiors showed themselves to be indifferent to war crimes, Manning reported the crimes via WikiLeaks. What else does a soldier with a sense of duty and a moral conscience do when the chain of command is corrupt?
Julian Assange is another example. WikiLeaks has taken up the reporting function that the Western media has abandoned. Remember, the New York Times did publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which undermined the lies Washington had told both to the public and to Congress to justify the costly Vietnam War. But today no newspaper or TV channel any longer accepts the responsibility to truthfully inform the public. Julian Assange stepped into the vacuum and was immediately demonized, not merely by Washington but also by left-wing and right-wing media, including Internet. It was a combination of jealousy, ignorance, and doing Washington’s bidding.

Without WikiLeaks and Assange the world would know essentially nothing. Spin from Washington, the presstitute media, and the puppet state medias would prevail. So the word went out to destroy Julian Assange.

It is amazing how many people and Internet sites obeyed Washington’s command. Assange has been so demonized that even though he has been granted political asylum by Ecuador, the British government, obeying its Washington master, refuses to allow him safe passage out of the London Ecuador Embassy. Is Assange destined to live out his life inside the Ecuador Embassy in London?

Will Assange be a replay of Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty who on November 4, 1956, sought asylum in the US embassy in Budapest as Soviet tanks poured into Hungary to put down the anti-communist revolution? Cardinal Mindszenty lived for 15 years in the US embassy. Today it is “freedom and democracy” Amerika that is copying Soviet practices during the cold war.

In contrast with “freedom and democracy” US and UK, the “authoritarian,” “communist,” “oppressive” Chinese government when confronted with Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng’s defection to the US embassy in Beijing, let him go.

It is an upside down world when America and the British refuse to obey international law, but the Chinese communists uphold international law.

Insouciant americans are undisturbed that alleged terrorists are tortured, held indefinitely in prison without due process, and executed on the whim of some executive branch official without due process of law.

Most americans go along with unaccountable murder, torture, and detention without evidence, which proclaims their gullibility to the entire world. There has never in history been a population as unaware as Americans. The world is amazed that an insouciant people became, if only for a short time, a superpower.

The world needs intelligence and leadership in order to avoid catastrophe, but America can provide neither intelligence nor leadership. America is a lost land where nuclear weapons are in the hands of those who are concerned only with their own power. Washington is the enemy of the entire world and encompasses the largest concentration of evil on the planet.
Where is the good to rise up against the evil?

How The Government’s Lies Become Truth

September 29, 2012 |Paul Craig Roberts

 

 

In my last column, “A Culture of Delusion,” I wrote that “Americans live in a matrix of lies. Lies dominate every policy discussion, every political decision.” This column will use two top news stories, Iranian nukes and Julian Assange, to illustrate how lies become “truth.”

The western Presstitute media uses every lie to demonize the Iranian government. On September 28 in a fit of unmitigated ignorance, the UK rag, Mail Online, called the president of Iran a “dictator.” The Iranian presidency is an office filled by popular election, and the authority of the office is subordinate to the ayatollahs. Assange is demonized alternatively as a rapist and a spy.

The western media and the US Congress comprise the two largest whore houses in human history. One of their favorite lies is that the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad, wants to kill all the Jews. Watch this 6 minute, 42 second video of Ahmadinejad’s meeting with Jewish religious leaders. Don’t be put off by the title. Washington Blog is making a joke.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/horrifying-graphic-video-of-iranian-leader-savagely-abusing-jews/
 
Last week the news was dominated by the non-existent but virtually real Iranian nuclear weapons program. The Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu, blatantly intervened in the US presidential election, demanding that Obama specify the “red line” for attacking Iran. 

Netanyahu believes his maximum leverage over Obama, the president of the “world’s only superpower,” just prior to the election. Israel cannot attack Iran on its own without the risk of Israel’s destruction. But Netanyahu reasons that if he attacks Iran the week before the US election, Obama will have to join in or lose the Jewish vote for not supporting Israel in states such as Florida, which has a large Jewish population and many electoral votes. If the election is close, Netanyahu, a person consumed by arrogance and hubris, might exercise his threat and attack Iran, despite the opposition of former chiefs of Israeli intelligence and military, the opposition party, and a majority of the Israeli people.

In other words, the outcome of the “superpower’s” presidential election might depend upon whether the sitting president of the “superpower” is sufficiently obedient to the crazed Israeli prime minister.

That the outcome of the US presidential election could depend upon the agenda of the prime minister of a tiny country that exists only because of US financial, military, and diplomatic support, especially the UN veto, should disturb those Americans who think that they are the “indispensable people.” How indispensable are you when you have to do what the Israeli prime minister wants?

The US media makes certain that this question never enters american minds. Americans have been told that if Iran doesn’t have nukes, it has a nuke weapons program. This is what the politicians of both parties, the media, and the Israel Lobby tell them. Americans are told this despite the facts that the CIA and the National Intelligence Estimate stick to the conclusion that Iran abandoned its flirtation with a nuclear weapon in 2003 and the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors on the ground in Iran report no evidence of a nuclear weapons program and no evidence of any diversion of enriched uranium to a weapons program.

Moreover, what could Iran do with a nuclear weapon, other than use it against an aggressor?

Any offensive use would result in Iran’s destruction.

Why do Americans believe Iran has nukes or is making nukes when the CIA says they are not? The answer is that Netanyahu says so, and the elected members of the US government in the House, Senate, and White House are afraid to contradict the Israeli prime minister, as are the American print and TV media. Some “superpower” we are! The “indispensable people” have to grovel in the dirt before Netanyahu. Americans are not even aware of their shame.

Iran, unlike Israel, signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Signatories to the treaty have the right to nuclear energy. Nuclear energy requires a low level of enrichment, 5% or less. The minute Iran announced a nuclear energy program, the Israeli government and its prostitutes in Washington lied that Iran was building a bomb. For exercising its legal rights under the treaty, Iran has been painted as a rogue criminal state and demonized.

A nuclear weapon requires 95% enrichment. To get to 5% from scratch and then to 95% is a long drawn out process. I think I first started hearing Israeli government claims of an Iranian nuke back in he 1990s of last century.

When Iran announced that, in view of the sanctions imposed by the US, sanctions that affect medical supplies, Iran was going to enrich uranium to 20% in order to supply itself with medical isotopes, the Israeli allegations that this would lead to a bomb resulted in Iran saying that the Iranian government was content for France or some other country to supply their medical isotopes and would not pursue enrichment beyond energy requirements. The US and Russia were also mentioned as suppliers.

According to the NY Times on September 29, 2011, “the Iranian president told the Washington Post and later, in basically the same terms, the New York Times: ‘if you [the United States and Europe] give us uranium grade 20 percent now, we will stop production.’”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/opinion/30iht-edvaez30.html?_r=0

On Israel’s orders Washington vetoed the Iranian concession. Solving the problem is not what the Israeli government wants. The problem has to be kept alive so that it can be used to foment an attack on Iran.

The Iranian nuke is one of those grand hoaxes, a lie designed to hide the real agenda.

What is the real agenda?

The real agenda hiding behind the hysterical concern about an Iranian nuke, is the rightwing Israeli government’s design on the water resources of southern Lebanon.

Twice the Israeli government sent the Israeli army into southern Lebanon to occupy and eventually annex the territory. And twice Hizbollah defeated and drove out the vaunted Israeli army.

The few thousand Hizbollah fighters were able to defeat the Israeli army, which is equipped and supplied by US taxpayers’ dollars while Americans are foreclosed out of their homes and left unemployed as Washington applauds the offshoring of their jobs, because Syria and Iran provide Hizbollah with financial support and weapons that destroy Israeli tanks.

Syria, of course, is currently resisting its destruction by Israel and its american puppet state. The overthrow of Syria hasn’t gone well, because the Russians and Chinese didn’t go along with it, like they stupidly did in Libya. But the far rightwing Israeli government has concluded that with american prestige involved in the overthrow of the Assad government in Syria, the deed will be done.

That leaves Iran. The Israeli government knows that it cannot be forthright and say that it wants Americans to go to war with Iran so that Israel can steal southern Lebanon. But if fear over nonexistent nukes can muster the Western populations to support an attack on Iran, Iran can be eliminated as Hizbollah’s supplier, and Israel can steal the water from Lebanon.

There is no discussion whatsoever of the real agenda anywhere in the US print and TV media. I doubt there is any discussion anywhere in Europe, which is a collection of american puppet states.

Will we get World War III for Christmas? Possibly, if the US election is close as it approaches. If the election is too close to call, Netanyahu might throw the dice and rely on Obama following his lead. Iran will be attacked, and the consequences are unknowable.

Let’s turn to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Like Iran, Assange has been demonized, not on the basis of facts but on the basis of lies.

Washington, which poses as a purveyor of human rights, has been mistreating if not torturing Bradley Manning since May 2010 without bringing him to trial in an effort to make Manning say that he and Assange constitute a spy team working against the US.

Assange is a celebrity, because Wikileaks publishes the news leaked to the organization that the Presstitute media suppresses. While in Sweden, Assange was picked up by two celebrity-hungry women who took him home to their beds. The women later bragged of their conquests on social media, but apparently when they found out that they were rivals, they turned on the “two-timer” Assange and made charges. One claimed that he had not used a condom as per her request, and the other claimed that she had offered one helping but he had taken two.

Whatever the accusations, the Swedish prosecutorial office investigated and dismissed the case.

Despite this known fact, the Western Presstitute media reports that Assange is a fugitive evading rape charges by hiding in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. Even RT, an alternative media voice, has fallen for this disinformation.

After Assange was cleared in Sweden, a female prosecutor has tried to reopen the case. There is no evidence for her to bring charges, so she demanded that England arrest Assange and extradite him to Sweden to be questioned.

Normally, people are not subject to extradition for questioning. Only people who have been formally charged are extradited. But this detail wasn’t of interest to the Presstitute media or to the British courts which ruled as Washington desired.

Opinions vary as to whether the female prosecutor who wants Assange for questioning is an ideological feminist who believes no heterosexual sex is legitimate or whether she is in the pay of Washington. But experts agree that once Assange is in Sweden he is certain to be turned over to Washington, which will demand his extradition on trumped up charges. Extradition on trumped up charges is difficult in England but easy in Sweden.

Assange offered to be questioned in London, but the female prosecutor refused. Now the Ecuadoran Embassy is offering to send Assange to the Ecuadoran Embassy in Sweden to be questioned, but Washington, London, and the Swedish prosecutor have refused. They want Assange without the protection of the asylum that Ecuador has granted him.

Washington has how made this obvious. John Glaser writing in Antiwar.com, September 26, 2012, reports: “Newly declassified documents have revealed that the US military designated WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange an enemy of the state, who can be killed or detained without trial.”

 http://news.antiwar.com/2012/09/26/declassified-documents-reveal-us-military-designated-assange-enemy-of-state/
See also http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/27/wikileaks-investigation-enemy 

Assange is Washington’s enemy, because he let the truth get out. WikiLeaks is a journalistic enterprise, not a spy enterprise. It publishes information, some of which is leaked to it by whistleblowers, just as the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the New York Times. The information leaked to WikiLeaks has embarrassed Washington, because it shows Washington to be two-faced, a manipulator of other countries’ governments and medias, and overflowing with mendacity.

In other words, Washington is not the light upon the hill, but the gates of Hell or Mordor.

Assange had best be careful. If he again speaks to supportive crowds from a balcony of the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, he is likely to be shot down by a CIA sniper.

Approved by Obama, of course. Or his successor.

Swiss Banker Gave WikiLeaks Information Revealing Crimes by World's Most Powerful People, as Attacks on Assange and the Site Continue

The mountain of damning information acquired by WikiLeaks just keeps growing -- as do attacks on Assange.
By Lauren Kelley, AlterNet  on January 17, 2011

The mountain of damning information acquired by WikiLeaks just keeps growing, this time thanks to former Swiss banker Rudolf Elmer, who has reportedly fed the whistle-blower site information that could uncover "massive, unmitigated tax evasion " by powerful individuals and corporations around the globe.

Elmer handed over two optical discs worth of data, said to contain Swiss bank accounts linked to thousands of individuals, including some 40 politicians and "pillars of society" from the U.S., Asia and Europe. Speaking at a press conference outside the Frontline Club, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is under house arrest, Elmer called WikiLeaks "my only hope to get society to know what's going on" and said "it is damaging our society in the way that money is moved."

After leaving a Cayman Islands outpost of the Swiss bank Julius Baer in 2004, Elmer alleged that many of the bank's top clients engaged in tax fraud with the full cooperation of Julius Baer leaders, according to Raw Story. Elmer, who went on to found the Swiss Whistleblower website, has fed significant information to WikiLeaks once before, in 2007. He faced a court hearing over that release just last Tuesday.

Assange said he plans to release the information in "a matter of weeks," as soon as it's been verified.

The news comes as Assange faces allegations of sexual misconduct and attempts to extradite him from the UK to Sweden. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is continuing its efforts to smear Assange and punish everyone involved with his website. Most notably, Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. soldier behind a massive leak of classified government documents, is being tortured by being kept in solitary confinement in a Virginia prison.

Assange himself has received numerous thinly-veiled (and not so thinly-veiled) death threats from people all over the world, including individuals associated with the governments of the U.S. and other countries. A website called "People OK With Murdering Assange" compiles the most egregious statements from individuals -- including politicians and prominent media personalities -- who have called for him to be killed.

The Feds have convinced a number of major companies, including PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Amazon, to stop doing business with Assange's site.

Even the newly crowned Miss America got some jabs in at WikiLeaks' expense, saying during the question portion of Saturday's pageant, "You know when it came to that situation, it was actually based on espionage, and when it comes to the security of our nation, we have to focus on security first and then people's right to know. It's important that everybody who's in our borders is safe and so we can't let things like that happen, and they must be handled properly." That answer may have won Teresa Scanlan the crown, but it is of course inaccurate, since no one has ever been successfully prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

Something's Rotten in the State of a Bank

Julian Assange is Not Hamlet

By SAUL LANDAU

Fish rots. Bacteria work their way down from the head and produce the stench that provoked Marcellus: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” He and Horatio had followed Hamlet, beckoned by the ghost of his father, the former King. The ghost verified what Hamlet calls “things rank and gross in nature” among those who rule Denmark, which he also calls an “unweeded garden.” At the play’s end, invaders advance. Hamlet’s assessment proved correct, but he procrastinated.

The modern ghost(s) delivered similar messages to Julian Assange, who used 21st Century theater -- cyberspace -- to reveal the stench emanating from the head of the large rotting fish, located in Washington, D.C.

Wikileaks a trove of evidence governments and big banks had kept secret. Some documents show dubious activity and plotting. US Embassy cables from Tegucigalpa proved Washington knew the 2009 Honduras coup lacked legitimacy as did its new “democratic” government. Nevertheless, Obama provided regime’s thugs with the thin veneer of respectability because they served US interests. Honduran killer squads who “pacified” the country after the military goons had arrested and deported the elected President (Zelaya) continue to assassinate opponents, including journalists, and union leaders.

Secretary of State Clinton not only supports this façade of democracy, but urges Latin American countries, often unsuccessfully, to recognize America’s bloody bastard child. Should Assange’s baring of diplomatic messages receive the blame for such hypocrisy?

Cables from the US Interests Section in Havana provided Congress with information vital to allocating money to “dissidents,” assuming Members evaluate evidence before affirming support for “money grubbing” and “fractious” Cubans who remain unknown in their own country. The cables acknowledge US torture, illegal detention and criminal activities in several countries – secret because the enemy might learn of such actions? ---concerning dumping toxic waste in Africa, mal-treatment of prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The most recent target of Assange’s ghostly behavior – truth-telling as major media accepts the thin tissue of lies that cover crimes of state – is Bank of America, which last month joined MasterCard and PayPal, and stopped processing payments for WikiLeaks. B of A justified its action by citing Wikileaks’ possible illegal activities. In 2009, Assange told Computer World he had revealing documents from Bank of America. In 2010, these documents might “take the bastards [big banks]down,” he added.

One BofA executive “lost” a hard drive with many gigabytes. The Bank engaged in dubious foreclosure procedures on homes previously financed by Countrywide Financial, bought by B of A in 2008. The Bank’s stock plummeted right after the Wikileaks rumor surfaced. Wall St. “suspected Countrywide, the subprime mortgage King, had engaged in “unscrupulous or fraudulent lending practices.”

If Wikileaks published incriminating documents they “would not only reignite political pressure on Bank of America and other top mortgage servicers, but… also strengthen the case of investors pressuring the big banks to buy back tens of billions in soured mortgages. “ (NYT, Jan 2, 2011)

Mighty bank executives and US government bureaucrats trembled when they thought their deeds and words might become public. Bullies who circumvented law and morality to achieve their ends now righteously demand “legal processes” against Julian Assange. One leaker – Assange has not admitted contact with him --- Private Bradley Manning, is held in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico, Virginia, and faces court-martial in 2011.

Although Assange’s case gets much media attention, few journalists have asked the obvious question: since Sweden wants him for questioning regarding accusations of sexual offenses, why doesn’t Sweden send investigators to question him in England rather than issue an INTERPOL alert to 188 nations – and thus generate maximum publicity around the idea that he’s a dangerous criminal? Swedish officials knew the Assange’s British address where a judge’s order confined him. Assange’s possibly unscrupulous sexual relationships with two women hardly merit full-scale extradition. He rightfully suspects, if England extradites him, the Swedish government would send him to Washington where he might face charges under the 1917 Espionage Act or simply be sent to Guantanamo Prison forever.

Some fellow journalists stand in the front line of his firing squad. Judy (once Judith) Miller called Assange “a bad journalist.” She told her FOX public that “he didn't care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone.” Miller’s unverified New York Times stories about Iraqi accumulation of weapons of mass destruction helped rally support for the invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent deaths of countless Iraqis and 4430 American soldiers.

Without fourth estate protection, the US public has few advocates. Ralph Nader argues for praising Assange and others who leaked information to him. “All over the country people are pissed off. They hate Wall Street. They know they are being gouged. They know they are slipping behind. They know their kids will not be as well off as they were, and they were not that well off. But no one is putting it together.”

Unlike Hamlet, Assange didn’t procrastinate. I also applaud him.

How Propaganda Poisons the Mind - and Our Discourse

by Glenn Greenwald

Wednesday, January 12, 2011 by Salon.com

Last week, on January 3, The Guardian published a scathing Op-Ed by James Richardson blaming WikiLeaks for endangering the life of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the democratic opposition in Zimbabwe.  Richardson -- a GOP operative, contributor to RedState.com, and a for-hire corporate spokesman -- pointed to a cable published by WikiLeaks in which American diplomats revealed that Tsvangirai, while publicly opposing American sanctions on his country, had privately urged their continuation as a means of weakening the Mugabe regime:  an act likely to be deemed to be treasonous in that country, for obvious reasons.  By publishing this cable, "WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder," Richardson wrote.  He added:  "WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it – at least to those who understand the value of a life."

This accusation against WikiLeaks was repeated far and wide.  In The Wall Street Journal, Jamie Kirchick -- the long-time assistant of The New Republic's Marty Peretz -- wrote under this headline:  "Julian Assange's reckless behavior could cost Zimbabwe's leading democrat his life."  Kirchick explained that "the crusading 'anti-secrecy' website released a diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Harare" which exposed Tsvangirai's support for sanctions.  As "a result of the WikiLeaks revelations," Kirchick wrote, the reform leader would likely be charged with treason, and "Mr. Tsvangirai will have someone additional to blame: Julian Assange of WikiLeaks."  The Atlantic's Chris Albon, in his piece entitled "How WikiLeaks Just Set Back Democracy in Zimbabwe," echoed the same accusation, claiming "WikiLeaks released [this cable] to the world" and that Assange has thus "provided a tyrant with the ammunition to wound, and perhaps kill, any chance for multiparty democracy."  Numerous other outlets predictably mimicked these claims.

There was just one small problem with all of this:  it was totally false.  It wasn't WikiLeaks which chose that cable to be placed into the public domain, nor was it WikiLeaks which first published it.  It was The Guardian that did that.  In early December, that newspaper -- not WikiLeaks -- selected and then published the cable in question.  This fact led The Guardian -- more than a full week after they published Richardson's accusatory column -- to sheepishly add this obscured though extremely embarrassing "clarification" at the end of his column:

• This article was amended on 11 January 2011 to clarify the fact that the 2009 cable referred to in this article was placed in the public domain by the Guardian, and not as originally implied by WikiLeaks. The photo caption was also amended to reflect this fact.

The way this "clarification" was done was bizarre.  The misleading headline still remains ("If Morgan Tsvangirai is charged with treason, WikiLeaks will have earned the ignominy of Robert Mugabe's gratitude").  So do numerous sentences attributing publication to WikiLeaks ("WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder . . . . in the wake of  WikiLeaks' release . . . where Mugabe's strong-arming, torture and assassination attempts have failed to eliminate the leading figure of Zimbabwe's democratic opposition, WikiLeaks may yet succeed").  Meanwhile, other sentences originally in the piece were changed without notice:  for instance, the claim that "WikiLeaks released last week a classified US state department cable relating to a 2009 meeting between Tsvangirai and American and European ambassadors" was changed to read:  "The Guardian released . . . ."  And the photo caption was changed from "Zimbabwe's PM Morgan Tsvangirai faces a treason inquiry after WikiLeaks's publication of a US embassy cable" to "after the Guardian's publication."

[There are other strange aspects to The Guardian's behavior here.  If a newspaper publishes an accusation this serious and gets it this wrong, isn't more required than the quiet addition of two short sentences at the end of the column, eight days later without any announcement? Moreover, Guardian's Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger objected last night to my attributing Richardson's piece to "The Guardian," insisting that the section where it appeared was comparable to an open forum such as Salon's Open Salon; but that comparison is quite inaccurate, since columns published in The Guardian's "Comment is Free" section are reserved for pieces solicited or accepted by Guardian Editors and published only with their prior approval, whereas "Open Salon" is open to anyone without editorial approval, i.e., like a blog's comment section.   Beyond that, while The Guardian disclosed that Richardson is a GOP operative and works for "Hynes Communications," it doesn't reveal that this organization is the self-proclaimed "nation’s leading social media public affairs agency" representing the online communications strategies of "leading companies and trade associations in the health care; telecommunications; pharmaceutical; finance; defense; energy; aerospace; manufacturing; travel; and retail industries."  In other words, Richardson, like so many people posing as pundits, is a paid communications hack, not some independent commentator.

But far worse, The Guardian published a news article on December 27 -- headlined:  "Morgan Tsvangirai faces possible Zimbabwe treason charge" -- which also attributed publication of this cable to WikiLeaks, and never once mentioned that it was actually The Guardian which did so.  The article's headline states:  "Lawyers to examine PM's comments on sanctions after WikiLeaks reveals talks with US diplomats," while the body of the article reports:  "Zimbabwe is to investigate bringing treason charges . . . over confidential talks with US diplomats revealed by WikiLeaks."  That news story remains uncorrected by The Guardian.]

But at least The Guardian -- for which I have high journalistic regard -- published some sort of correction, woefully inadequate though it may be.  Why hasn't The Wall Street Journal, or The Atlantic, or Politico?   While The Guardian appended this correction yesterday, WikiLeaks on Twitter -- a full week ago -- made clear the falsehood driving all these stories:  "It is not acceptable [for] the Guardian to blame us for a cable the Guardian selected and published on Dec 8."  WikiLeaks then immediately pointed to this post thoroughly documenting that it was The Guardian that first published this cable as part of a December 8 news article it published regarding revelations about Zimbabwe.  So this glaring, serious error has been publicly known and amplified for a full week (through WikiLeaks' Twitter account, followed by 650,000 people, which presumably is followed by anyone writing about WikiLeaks, at least I'd hope so).  Yet these Beacons of Journalistic Responsibility have still failed to acknowledge that the very serious accusation they published about WikiLeaks was based in a wholesale fabrication.

* * * * *

This is not an isolated instance.  The reason I've been so repetitively vigilant about pointing out the falsehood that WikiLeaks indiscriminately published 250,000 diplomatic cables is because there is a full-scale government/media campaign to demonize the group through outright fiction of the type that sold the nation on Iraq's WMD stockpiles and Al Qaeda alliance.  The undeniable truth from the start is that, with very few exceptions, WikiLeaks has only been publishing those cables which its newspaper partners first publish (and WikiLeaks thereafter publishes the cables with the redactions applied by those papers).  This judicious editorial process -- in which WikiLeaks largely relies on the editorial judgment of these newspapers for what to release -- was detailed more than a month ago by the Associated Press.  That's the process that explains why The Guardian -- not WikiLeaks -- was who first published the Zimbabwe cable.  Yet the false accusations that WikiLeaks indiscriminately dumped 250,000 cables went on for weeks before it finally (mostly) stopped (once it was lodged forever in the minds of most Americans) -- and now we have the false claim that WikiLeaks injected this harmful Zimbabwe cable into the public domain, even though it simply didn't.

This is the propaganda campaign -- created by the U.S. Government and (as always) bolstered by the American media -- which is being used to justify WikiLeaks' destruction (and, with it, the repression of some of the most promising avenues for transparency and investigative journalism we've seen in many years).  Just consider this self-satire of a speech given yesterday by U.S. State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley, in which he sets out to rebut the notion that the U.S. is acting hypocritically by touting Internet freedom for the world while simultaneously attempting to obliterate WikiLeaks.  He says:

A free and vibrant press plays an important role around the world in the development of civil society and accountable governments. As a general rule, the freer the press, the more transparent and more democratic the government is likely to be. . . . No one is a greater advocate for a vibrant independent and responsible press, committed to the promotion of freedom of expression and development of a true global civil society, than the United States. Every day, we express concern about the plight of journalists (or bloggers) around the world who are intimidated, jailed or even killed by governments that are afraid of their people, and afraid of the empowerment that comes with the free flow of information within a civil society. . . .We remain arguably the most transparent society in the world.

Let's leave to the side all the Bush-era assaults on press freedom (including imprisoning numerous foreign journalists for years without charges).  Leave aside that Freedom House ranked the U.S. 24th in the world in press freedoms for 2009 (tied with Lithuania and the Czech Republic) and that Reporters Without Borders ranked it 20th.  Leave to the side that those rankings were issued before the Obama administration -- by all accounts -- became vastly more aggressive about prosecuting whistleblowers than any prior administration (even subpoeaning reporters to do it).

Leave to the side the administration's demand that it have "backdoors" to all Internet encryption and its impeding of the whistleblower protections promised by candidate Obama.  Leave to the side how the Obama administration shields virtually every controversial executive branch action in the national security realm -- including plainly illegal ones -- from judicial review by invoking radically broad versions of secrecy privileges pioneered by the Bush DOJ.  And leave to the side the fact that many of the documents released by WikiLeaks are rather banal and uninformative, yet have been marked "SECRET":  showing how reflexively the U.S. Government hides most of what it does from its citizenry behind a wall of secrecy.

Instead, just look at what the U.S. Government is doing to WikiLeaks.  It just caused an international incident by demanding the Twitter data of numerous individuals including a sitting member of Iceland's Parliament.  American officials bullied private corporations and banks to cut off all ties with WikiLeaks.  And it's openly boasting of its intent to criminally prosecute the group for doing nothing more than what newspapers do all the time.  Crowley justified all that by saying this:

We can debate whether there are too many secrets, but no one should doubt that there has been substantial damage in the unauthorized release of a database containing, among other things, 251,000 State Department cables, many of them classified. . . .We are a nation of laws, and the laws of our country have been violated. Since we function under the rule of law, it is appropriate and necessary that we investigate and prosecute those who have violated U.S law. Some have suggested that the ongoing investigation marks a retreat from our commitment to freedom of expression, freedom of the press and Internet freedom. Nonsense.

Anyone passingly familiar with the Obama administration's justifications for refusing to investigate Bush-era crimes will be sickened by that bolded part, but leave to the side, too.  The key point here is that WikiLeaks didn't steal anything.  They didn't break any laws.  They did what newspapers do every day, what investigative journalism does at its core:  expose secret, corrupt actions of those in power.  And the attempt to criminalize WikiLeaks is thus nothing less than a full frontal assault on press and Internet freedoms.

That's where this propaganda comes in to play.  To justify this assault, the U.S. Government needs to claim that WikiLeaks is somehow distinct from what other press outlets do.  So it invents outright falsehoods to do so:  unlike newspapers, WikiLeaks indiscriminately dumps diplomatic cables without editorial judgment; unlike newspapers, they refuse to be transparent about their methods (nobody is less transparent about what they do than large newspapers); and now, WikiLeaks endangers people's lives by recklessly publishing a cable which leaves democratic leaders in Zimbabwe vulnerable to attack, even though it wasn't published by them at all, but by The Guardian.

People devoted to a corrupt cause necessarily rely on falsehoods to advance it.  And what we're seeing here is not only the government doing that, but The Watchdog Media -- as usual -- serving as its most valuable ally.  At the very least, the outlets that published this serious -- and seriously false -- accusation owe their readers a prominent, clear retraction.