Tom Hartmann - Wikileaks and democracy : Free Speech Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Dissent
The ruling class speak about these principles and claim to believe in them until someone uncovers and makes public their lies, deceit, corruption or incompetence.
Those opposed to Wikileaks in the U.S.A crosses party lines including both Republicans and Democrats. So we get the spectacle of former members of the criminal and corrupt Bush administration being joined by members of the Obama administration in the Mainstream Media echo chamber condemning Julian Assange .
Obama may bring about some small changes in America's governance but for the most part when it comes down to it he will defend an environment of secrecy, paranoia, propaganda and lies to defend the corrupt and undemocratic foundations of the American government and its ruling elite. Obama is unwilling to challenge the former Bush administration for its corruption and criminal activities including trashing the US constitution and the Bill of Rights. Obama as we have seen fears the CIA and FBI and Homeland Security and so kills any criticisms of these agencies .President Obama like most of the US presidents since WWII has gone out of his way to appease the war-mongering Pentagon and its corporate buddies.
Ah yes there is money to be made producing and selling armaments to the US government and to help fuel conflict around the globe.
Juian Assange and Wikileaks and all those who support them are demonized by the ruling class for uncovering the corruption, lies, propaganda , incompetence of those who rule.
Like To See Hillary Clinton Go After Torturers The Way She's Going After WikiLeaks! Jeremy Scahill
Julian Assange High tech terrorist
Son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: Why We Must Fight to Protect WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. 1
Democrqacy Now Dece. 30, 2010.
Julian Assange: Why WikiLeaks Is Taking on the Pentagon
It is disturbing that Julian Assange is being characterized as the number one enemy of America and of other nations while those who defended the use of torture and trashing the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights and even common decency are treated as honorable men and women. Criminals such as Karl Rove, Condoleeza Rice and merchants of hate such as Glenn beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity are joined by the Obama administration in their demonization of Wikileaks. Of course as we now know Obama has done everything he can to protect from investigation or prosecution the criminals who were part of the infamous, notorious authoritarian Bush/Cheney Regime.
So we can conclude that it is considered a more serious crime to publish supposedly classified government documents than to have launched an unnecessary war ; to kill a few hundred thousand civilians; to reduce a country to rubble ; to illegally imprison tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis and to abuse and torture thousands. The rule of law is a meaningless piece of rhetoric when it comes to those who are in power in the US or its allies.
Julian Assange Worse Than A Pedophile
Dec. 28, 2010.
And why we should support wikileaks and others who provide an outlet for whistleblowers:
Honor the WikiLeakers By Alexander Cockburn "Information Clearing House" jan. 1,2011
-- -- When it comes to journalistic achievements in 2010, the elephant in the room is WikiLeaks. I've seen many put-downs of the materials as containing "no smoking guns", or as being essentially trivial communications to the State Department from U.S. diplomats and kindred government agents around the world.
Now, it's true that the cables were legally available to well over 1.5 million Americans, who had adequate security clearance. But trivial? Don't believe it. The cables show the daily business of a mighty empire acting in manners diametrically opposite to public pretensions. The cables form one of the most extraordinary lessons in the cold realities of international diplomacy ever made public. Normally, scholars have to wait for 10, 20, even 50 years to gain access to such papers.
The WikiLeaks documents show that the picture of the international business of the United States offered by the major U.S. media to the public is an infantile misrepresentation of reality. The efforts being made by Attorney General Eric Holder to bolster secrecy and espionage laws show that the U.S. government, led currently by a man who pledged "transparency," wants the American people to remain in blissful ignorance of what its government is actually doing.
The alleged leaker of the WikiLeaks files, Army Private Bradley Manning, currently being held in solitary confinement in sadistic conditions, should be vigorously applauded and defended for exposing such crimes as the murder of civilians in Baghdad by U.S. Apache helicopters. The WikiLeaks Afghan-related files are a damning, vivid series of snapshots of a disastrous and criminal enterprise.
In these same files, there is a compelling series of secret documents about the death squad operated by the U.S. military known as Task Force 373, an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, which has been hunting down targets for death or detention without trial. From WikiLeaks we learn that more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a "kill or capture" list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritized effects list.
Julian Assange and his colleagues should similarly be honored and defended.
They have acted in the best traditions of the journalistic vocation.
The U.S. began the destruction of Afghanistan in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, started financing the mullahs and warlords in the largest and most expensive operation in the CIA's history until that time. Here we are, more than three decades later, half-buried under a mountain of horrifying news stories about a destroyed land of desolate savagery, and what did one hear on many news commentaries earlier this week? Indignant bleats often by liberals, about WikiLeaks' "irresponsibility" in releasing the documents, twitchy questions such as that asked by The Nation's Chris Hayes on the "Rachel Maddow Show": "I wonder ultimately to whom WikiLeaks ends up being accountable."
The answer to that last question was given definitively in 1851 by Robert Lowe, editorial writer for the London Times. He had been instructed by his editor to refute the claim of a government minister that if the press hoped to share the influence of statesmen, it "must also share in the responsibilities of statesmen."
"The first duty of the press," Lowe wrote, "is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation ... The Press lives by disclosures ... For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences — to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice and oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world."
and so it goes,
GORD.
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