rigorousintuition.ca

vanlose kid wrote:^ ^

great piece Jack, thanks. also, followed the link back to the source and:

Exclusively in the New Print Issue of CounterPunch

The Sex Smears Against Julian Assange

What did Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen really claim he did? Read Guy Rundle’s dissection of how the Guardian stitched up the man who gave them Wikileaks. PLUS Israel Shamir on Russia’s real political divisions, beyond the Putin/Medvedev burlesque peddled by the western press PLUS Larry Portis on the rise of Marine Le Pen. Is fascism looming in France?

that i'd like to read.

*

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ma ... gile/print

WikiLeaks accused Bradley Manning 'should never have been sent to Iraq'

Guardian exclusive: Soldier held over US intelligence leak was known to be mentally fragile and unsuited to army life

Maggie O'Kane, Chavala Madlena and Guy Grandjean
guardian.co.uk, Friday 27 May 2011 22.25 BST


The American soldier at the centre of the WikiLeaks revelations was so mentally fragile before his deployment to Iraq that he wet himself, threw chairs around, shouted at his commanding officers and was regularly brought in for psychiatric evaluations, according to an investigative film produced by the Guardian.

Bradley Manning, who was detained a year ago on Sunday in connection with the biggest security leak in US military history, was a "mess of a child" who should never have been put through a tour of duty in Iraq, according to an officer from the Fort Leonard Wood military base in Missouri, where Manning trained in 2007.

The officer's words reinforce a leaked confidential military report that reveals that other senior officers thought he was unfit to go to Iraq. "He was harassed so much that he once pissed in his sweatpants," the officer said.

"I escorted Manning a couple of times to his 'psych' evaluations after his outbursts. They never should have trapped him in and recycled him in [to Iraq]. Never. Not that mess of a child I saw with my own two eyes. No one has mentioned the army's failure here – and the discharge unit who agreed to send him out there," said the officer, who asked not to be identified because of the hostility towards Manning in the military.

"I live in an area where I would be persecuted if I said anything against the army or helped Manning," the officer said.

Despite several violent outbursts and a diagnosis of adjustment disorder, a condition that meant he was showing difficulty adjusting to military life, Manning was eventually sent to Iraq, where it is alleged he illegally downloaded thousands of sensitive military and diplomatic documents and passed them on to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

In Iraq, Manning retained his security clearance to work as an intelligence specialist.

Two months after his arrival, the bolt was removed from his rifle because he was thought to be a danger, his lawyer, David Coombs, has confirmed.

A Guardian investigation focusing on soldiers who worked with Manning in Iraq has also discovered there was virtually no computer and intelligence security at Manning's station in Iraq, Forward Operating Base Hammer. According to eyewitnesses, the security was so lax that many of the 300 soldiers on the base had access to the computer room where Manning worked, and passwords to access the intelligence computers were stuck on "sticky notes" on the laptop screens.

Rank and file soldiers would watch grisly "kill mission" footage as a kind of entertainment on computers with access to the sensitive network of US diplomatic and military communications known as SIPRNet.

Jacob Sullivan, 28, of Phoenix, Arizona, a former chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear specialist, was stationed at FOB Hammer in Manning's unit.

"A lot of different people worked from that building and in pretty much every room there was a SIPRNet computer attached to a private soldier or a specialist," Sullivan said

"On the computers that I saw there was a [sticky label] either on the computer or next to the computer with the information to log on. I was never given permission to log on so I never used it but there were a lot of people who did."

He added: "If you saw a laptop with a red wire coming out of it, you knew it was a SIPRNet. I would be there by myself and the laptops [would] be sitting there with passwords. Everyone would write their passwords down on sticky notes and set it by their computer. [There] wasn't a lot of security going on so no wonder something like this transpired."

Manning is facing multiple charges of downloading and passing on sensitive information. No one else at the base has been charged. Manning denies all the charges. If convicted he could face up to 55 years in jail.

The US Defence Security Service is also investigating why Manning, who had been sent for psychiatric counselling before he was deployed to Iraq, was not screened more fully before he was allowed to work in intelligence.

Eyewitness accounts by soldiers who served with him there and friends in the US who spoke to the Guardian paint a picture of an increasingly unstable and at times violent man.

One soldier who served with him describes him "blowing up and punching this chick in the face".

Additional reporting by Daniel Fisher
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

No “Conspiracy Theory”: Wikileaks Cable Confirms North American Union Agenda

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
June 3, 2011

No Conspiracy Theory: Wikileaks Cable Confirms North American Union Agenda 030611top4

A newly leaked U.S. diplomatic cable originally written over six years ago confirms that the agenda to merge the United States, Canada and Mexico into an integrated North American Union has been ongoing for years, debunking claims made consistently by the corporate media and establishment talking heads that the NAU is a baseless “conspiracy theory”.

“The cable, released through the WikiLeaks website and apparently written Jan. 28, 2005, discusses some of the obstacles surrounding the merger of the economies of Canada, the United States and Mexico in a fashion similar to the European Union,” reports the National Post.

“An incremental and pragmatic package of tasks for a new North American Initiative (NAI) will likely gain the most support among Canadian policymakers,” the document said. “The economic payoff of the prospective North American initiative … is available, but its size and timing are unpredictable, so it should not be oversold.”

While serving to confirm the agenda to integrate the United States, Mexico and Canada into an EU-style political and monetary union, the Wikileaks cable will come as no surprise to those who watched Alex Jones’ 2006 documentary Endgame, in which precisely the same information was outlined, with particular focus on the Security and Prosperity Partnership, or SPP meetings.

The mission to create a North American Union was also discussed in September 2006 during a closed-door meeting of high-level government and business leaders in Banff, Canada.

Despite the manifestly provable factual basis of the matter, during the 2008 presidential election the establishment media attempted to smear Ron Paul by attributing the notion of a move towards a North American Union to him and then claiming it was a non-existent “conspiracy theory,” when the veracity of the issue was readily documented from the very start.

A Newsweek hit piece subsequently claimed that Ron Paul’s concerns over a NAFTA superhighway, a North American Union or a regional currency were completely baseless, and yet the newly leaked cable states U.S. diplomats were busy discussing a “move forward with continental integration, including a possible common currency, labour markets, international trade and the borders of the three countries,” as well as “easier access across the U.S. border,” more than six years ago.

Watch a clip from the 2006 documentary Endgame in which the agenda behind the North American Union was exposed, even as the corporate media still claimed it was a mythical conspiracy theory.

http://www.infowars.com/no-conspiracy-t ... on-agenda/

Julian Assange Wins Martha Gellhorn Journalism Prize
By Jason Deans, Guardian UK
06 June 11


WikiLeaks founder praised as 'brave, determined, independent' by judges.

ulian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has won the 2011 Martha Gellhorn prize for journalism.

The annual prize is awarded to a journalist "whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda, or 'official drivel', as Martha Gellhorn called it."

"WikiLeaks has been portrayed as a phenomenon of the hi-tech age, which it is. But it's much more. Its goal of justice through transparency is in the oldest and finest tradition of journalism," Martha Gellhorn prize judges said in their citation.

"WikiLeaks has given the public more scoops than most journalists can imagine: a truth-telling that has empowered people all over the world. As publisher and editor, Julian Assange represents that which journalists once prided themselves in - he's brave, determined, independent: a true agent of people not of power. "

The judges also gave Martha Gellhorn special awards for journalism to Umar Cheema, of the International Times of Pakistan; Charles Clover, the Financial Times's Moscow correspondent; and Jonathan Cook, a freelance journalist based in Nazareth.

Judges for the 2011 awards were Dr Alexander Matthews, John Pilger, James Fox, Shirlee Matthews, Cynthia Kee and Jeremy Harding.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/05-4

Published on Sunday, June 5, 2011 by The Sunday Telegraph (UK)

Julian Assange Claims FBI Tried to Bribe Wikileaks Staff
The Wikileaks founder defended the organization's "enviable record"

by Holly Watt

Julian Assange appeared at The Telegraph Hay Festival to defend Wikileaks' “enviable record” and claimed that the FBI had tried to bribe the organisation’s staff.

The founder of the whistle-blowing website disclosed his group would publish more leaked documents in the future. He also threatened to break controversial super-injunctions if the details were leaked to him.

During an hour-long appearance, Mr Assange insisted that “the internet does not give you free speech”.

He said that those revealing secrets online were “hounded from one end of the earth to the other”. His speech was watched by a series of well-known personalities including Vanessa Redgrave and Ralph Fiennes.

Mr Assange added that his group had faced numerous recent challenges, including attempts by the FBI to try and bribe employees.

Mr Assange pointed out that Wikileaks had published details of “five or six” super-injunctions in the past. However, in a bizarre moment, he admitted that Wikileaks might resort to a super-injunction in order to protect its sources.

“There probably is a circumstance where we would [apply for a super-injunction],” said Mr Assange.

Mr Assange also accused the British public of “a rather annoying middle-class squeamishness” over the publication of secret cables and documents.

“It would rather destroy an entire revolution,” said Mr Assange.

He insisted that he had seen no evidence that anyone had lost their lives as a result of Wikileaks disclosures, despite American Government warnings that this would occur.

“We have a perfect record, and an enviable record that I am proud of,” he said.

But he indicated that opening up societies around the world may mean fatalities are a price worth paying.

Mr Assange was heckled by the Channel 4 presenter Jon Snow as he answered a question about Private Bradley Manning, who has been accused of leaking secret documents to Wikileaks.

Private Manning is currently being held in Fort Leavenworth after being arrested just over a year ago.

“He’s your Bradley Manning,” shouted Mr Snow when Mr Assange raised the issue of political prisoners around the world. The Wikileaks founder expressed support for the plight of Mr Manning and thousands of other “political prisoners” who he said are held without good reason.

Mr Assange also described his time in solitary confinement in prison.

Mr Assange is currently fighting extradition to Sweden, where he has faced allegations of sexual assault.


© 2011 The Sunday Telegraph


Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
Source URL: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/05-4

SNIP

Posted by Nietzsche
Jun 5 2011 - 3:12pm


Right forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne
Yet that scaffold sways the future and behind the dim unknown
Standth God within the shadows keeping watch above his own
-------James Russell Lowell

Let's all hope he is right. We need all the help we can get right now.


Posted by rtdrury
Jun 6 2011 - 6:32am

SNIP

"But he indicated that opening up societies around the world may mean fatalities are a price worth paying."

It's only kapitalist propaganda that a whistleblower or any dissenter should accept blame for injury/death in the people's struggle against elite oppression. It's very simple logic and ethics that indicate elites should bear full responsibility. The elites and their thuggy little pawns. The people's conscience is always clear. Who's trying to confuse us about this?

Frontline Club Exclusive: Julian Assange in conversation with Slavoj Žižek

Last year, whistleblower website WikiLeaks released three of the biggest ever leaks of classified information in history: the Iraq War Logs, the Afghanistan War Logs and Cablegate.

Since then the world has undoubtedly changed. Ambassadors have resigned amid scandals exposed by leaked cables; the UK government has ordered a review of computer security; and, at the same time, a huge wave of protest has swept the Middle East and North Africa – in part fuelled, some believe, by WikiLeaks revelations.

Discussing the impact of WikiLeaks on the world and what it means for the future, for this very special event WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange will be in conversation with renowned Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek.

Focusing on the ethics and philosophy behind WikiLeaks' work, the talk will provide a rare opportunity to hear two of the world’s most prominent thinkers discuss some of the most pressing issues of our time.

It will also mark the publication of the paperback edition of Living in the End Times, in which Žižek argues that new ways of using and sharing information, in particular WikiLeaks, are one of a number of harbingers of the end of global capitalism as we know it.

The event will be chaired by Amy Goodman, the award-winning investigative journalist and host of Democracy Now!, a daily, independent news hour which airs on the internet and more than 900 public television and radio stations worldwide.

Audience members are invited to submit questions to the speakers by emailing events@frontlineclub.com with the subject line "Question 2 July".

http://www.frontlineclub.com/events/201 ... zizek.html

This is the first lecture in a series of five, as part of The Wednesday Lectures – Hosted by Raimond Gaita.

WACA will be posting videos of each of the Wikileaks lectures and would like to thank the Melbourne Law School for granting us permission to film the entire series.

Details of the Wikileaks Series of The Wednesday Lectures :

8 June – Guy Rundle ‘From Cold war to Cyberwar: Power, the State and the Wikileaks Effect’

Two decades after the Berlin Wall came down, and a decade after 9/11 became the pretext for a relentless attack on citizenship and civil liberties, a series of releases by the Wikileaks website threw the operation of secrecy and state control of information into chaos. From the Icelandic rebellion against financial crisis, to the Arab Spring, both the quantity and quality of information released has changed the relationship between state, citizen and information.

These momentous events allow us to rethink the inherited privileges and assumptions of state and corporate power, and to ask if a new relationship can be created between global citizens, states and international organisations - indeed, it causes us to ask how it could not be.
 


Guy Rundle is currently the UK correspondent for Crikey and a regular contributor to The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and many other publications. A former editor of Arena Magazine, and a writer of several stage shows for Max Gillies, his most recent book is The SHellackling, on the rise of the US 'Tea Party'.

15 June - Raimond Gaita ‘ Power and Consent’

This is the second lecture in a series of five, as part of The Wednesday Lectures – Hosted by Raimond Gaita.

At the heart of democratic ideals is the contrast between legitimate and illegitimate persuasion. To a large extent, the difference is marked by the ways that forms of persuasion respect – or fail to respect – what Simone Weil called our “faculty of free consent.” The lecture will explore what we should make of the distinction and what its implications are for political action when democratic governments become more secretive, more authoritarian and more reliant on spin.

Raimond Gaita is Professorial Fellow in the Melbourne Law School and The Faculty of Arts at University of Melbourne and Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at King’s College London. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His books include: Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, Romulus, My Father, A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love & Truth & Justice, Breach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics and, as editor and contributor, Gaza: Morality Law and Politics and Muslims and Multiculturalism.

22 June – Panel Discussion ‘Secrecy, Power and Democracy’

This is the third lecture in a series of five, as part of The Wednesday Lectures – Hosted by Raimond Gaita.

Join this panel of experts as they discuss the overall theme of this lecture series.

Raimond Gaita: Raimond Gaita is Professorial Fellow in the Melbourne Law School and The Faculty of Arts at University of Melbourne and Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at King’s College London. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His books include: Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, Romulus, My Father, A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love & Truth & Justice, Breach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics and, as editor and contributor, Gaza: Morality Law and Politics and Muslims and Multiculturalism.

Guy Rundle: Guy Rundle is currently the UK correspondent for Crikey and a regular contributor the The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and many other publications. A former editor of Arena Magazine, and a writer of several stage shows for Max Gillies, his most recent book is The Shellacking, on the rise of the US ‘Tea Party’.

Gerry Simpson
: Gerry Simpson is the Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law at Melbourne Law School, and is a Professor of Public International Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Great Powers and Outlaw States (Winner of the American Society of International Law’s Certificate of Merit in 2005) and more recently Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law and Outside International Law.

Robert Manne
: Robert Manne is Professor of Politics at La Trobe University and a member of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences. He is one of Australia’s best-known public intellectuals. His publications include The Petrov Affair, The Shadow of 1917, The Culture of Forgetting, In Denial, and The Howard Years. Whitewash: On the Fabrication of Aboriginal History (editor and contributor), Dear Mr Rudd: Ideas for a Better Australia (editor and contributor), Left, Right Left and Making Trouble. He contributes regularly to The Monthly).

29 June – Kevin Heller ‘Can the U.S. Prosecute WikiLeaks for Espionage? Should It?’

This is the fourth lecture in a series of five, as part of The Wednesday Lectures – Hosted by Raimond Gaita.

Kevin Heller is Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School. He is the author of The Nuremberg Military Tribunals, The Origins of International Criminal Law and The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law (with Markus Dubber). He is also a permanent member of the international-law blog Opinio Juris. He has written for numerous journals of international law and been advisor numerous international criminal trials including those of Saddam Hussein and Radovan Karadzic.

6 July – Helen Pringle ‘Gimme Shelter: The Power of Secrecy and Silence in Democracy’

This is the fifth lecture in a series of five, as part of The Wednesday Lectures – Hosted by Raimond Gaita.

This talk offers an appreciation and defence of the power of secrecy and silence in a democracy. It is often assumed that secrecy shelters domination and that silence provides a license for coarse exercises of power by government or business.

Breaking the silence and the triumph of a principle of general transparency are not only the apparent aims of the Wikileaks project, but form a broader injunction to publicise the smallest details of every aspect of our lives. Pringle argues that this is not an emancipatory project: a general breaking of silence shatters the shelter within which our intimate lives are conducted, and in turn guts public life of its standing and dignity.

Helen Pringle is in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales. Her research has been widely recognised by awards from Princeton University, the Fulbright Foundation, the Australian Federation of University Women, and the Universities of Adelaide, Wollongong and NSW. Her main fields of expertise are human rights, ethics in public life, and political theory. Dr Pringle is currently working on a project concerning the place of pornography within considerations of free speech, entitled Practising Pornography. She is also involved in an international research project on ethnography and sexual slavery in early colonial Queensland.

http://wikileaksaustraliancitizensallia ... %E2%80%99/

Julian Assange wrote:
Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial.

Conspiracies are cognitive devices. They are able to outthink the same group of individuals acting alone Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate (the conspiratorial environment), pass through the conspirators and then act on the result. We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment), a computational network (the conspirators and their links to each other) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment).

in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/06/15/w ... amendment/

WikiLeaks grand jury witness David House refuses to testify, invokes Fifth Amendment


By Agence France-Presse
Wednesday, June 15th, 2011 -- 10:19 pm


WASHINGTON — A friend of Bradley Manning, the American soldier accused of leaking classified files to WikiLeaks, said he declined to answer questions at a grand jury hearing.

Prosecutors, who have not given up bringing charges against the whistle-blower website's founder Julian Assange, had subpoenaed David House to testify before the grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia.

But House said that during the closed-door hearing he invoked the constitution's Fifth Amendment, which protects him from self-incrimination, offering only his name and address and refusing to answer the prosecutors other questions.

"The show trial that is now under way in Alexandria, Virginia has the potential to set a dangerous precedent for regulating the media," House said in a statement issued by Manning's support network.

"Using Nixonian fear tactics that were honed during the Pentagon Papers investigation, the DoJ (Department of Justice) is attempting to dismantle a major media organization -- WikiLeaks -- and indict its editor, Julian Assange," he said.

"The DoJ's ever-widening net has now come to encompass academics, students, and journalists in the Cambridge (Boston) area," he said.

President Barack Obama's administration is seeking to force these individuals to testify "against this media organization in an attempt to cast its publications and those of its media partners -- the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El Pais -- as acts of espionage."

Grand juries, which are empanelled to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to bring charges in a case, typically meet in secret unless a witness discloses that he or she has been summoned to testify.

Although the hearing does not mean that charges against Assange are imminent, it is a strong indication that the US administration, as promised, continues to pursue that goal.

It opened a criminal investigation against Assange in July 2010, following a massive document dump by his website that continues to roil US relations with countries around the world.

One possible avenue open to prosecutors is to show that Assange personally asked Manning, a US army private, to obtain confidential documents.

Manning is awaiting a possible court martial on charges that include "aiding the enemy," which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.

Assange, 39, is under house arrest in Britain, awaiting trial on sexual assault and molestation charges in Sweden.

He has denied knowing the source of the leaks, but has defended Manning as a victim of US government mistreatment.

JackRiddler wrote:semper, can you provide context? Years? Relation? Etc.