When I get December 3rd, I'll seed that too.
Why?
Today's useful quote, from Glenn Greenwald at Salon (links in that article) :
If there's Nothing New in these documents, can Jonathan Capehart (or any other "journalist" claiming this) please point to where The Washington Post previously reported on these facts, all revealed by the WikiLeaks disclosures:
(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;
(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;
(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch today about this: "The day Barack Obama Lied to me");
(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";
(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;
(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;
(7) the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;
(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,
(9) Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.
That's just a sampling.
This is what Joe Lieberman and his comrades are desperately trying to suppress -- literally prevent it from being accessible on the Internet. And "journalists" like Capehart play along by continuing to insist there's "nothing new" being revealed by WikiLeaks despite their never having reported any of this.
Wikileaks has been kicked off Amazon (hence, I've cleared out my Amazon basket and am boycotting it.) It's lost its domain name. US politicians are calling for Assange to be assassinated and for wikileaks to be branded a terrorist organization; while the US military has openly stated its intention to discredit and destroy wikileaks.
In other words, governments are scared.. And, as John Perry Barlow tweets it :
The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops. #WikiLeaks
1 comment:
I listened to Zizek videos of a recent talk at the Lacan blog last night. He made a point about understanding public and private. He noted that government speech was private in a Kantian formation. Private speech is constrained in ways that two friends talking on the street is not. The latter being public speech.
The way we talk about speech is often just the other way around. So for example we consider it unfortunate that our telephone calls are monitored by the government saying "That's private."
The Columbia Journalism Review interviews Ethan Zuckerman and from that this Kantian way of thinking about public and private makes a lot of sense.
The issue issue is the reduction of public space by private entities like corporation and governments.
At stake is the commons.
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