Sorry, Edward Snowden is not leaking “allegations” open to USG refutation

Corporate media doesn’t want to do its job investigating or reporting on security state mechanisms and excesses, and it’s not going to let Edward Snowden do it either. Isn’t it curious that they’re able to allege Snowden’s leaks are “allegations” instead of …LEAKS? Of course they’ve only got their corrupt selves for peer review. The US press leaves the foreign papers to break Snowden’s documents after which it can accurately say the conclusions are “reported”, giving US officials a premise to dismiss the “accusations”. Except they’re not accusations, or allegations or conclusions, they’re unveiled fact. The US security agencies aren’t reportedly violating the privacy of citizens, they ARE! And no, “everyone is[n’t] spying on everyone” the security states are spying on their peoples. Neither you, nor I are spying on anyone, except maybe via Facebook. Our oligarchs and their world security apparatus are keeping close tabs on us via wildly illegal surveillance, to the bemusement of media talking heads.
 
NMT has for some time been writing about how the NSA is recording all phone calls and internet transmissions, not merely “meta” data. Of course our reports were suppositions, so THANK YOU EDWARD SNOWDEN for the confirmation. Any credible response to Snowden’s revelations, whether from the White House or Angela Merkel, must begin with expressing gratitude for the moral superiority of a brave whisteblower.

Let’s not forget Wikileaks snitch Adrian Lamo, saboteur Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Swedish Woman in Red Anna Ardin

While we’re praising Wikileaks and its impact on our revolutionary times, let’s call out those who betrayed the cause, they’re already erasing their tracks on Wikipedia. First there’s hackster-confidant Adrian Lamo who turned in Bradley Manning; there’s fired Wikileaks volunteer Daniel Domscheit-Berg who permanently dismantled the anonymous leak submission mechanism; there’s jilted neoliberal faketivist Anna Ardin who schemed to bring Julian Assange to an ultra-right prosecutor’s attention in Sweden; there’s de facto honeypot Sofia Wilen whose complicity is still a mystery; and there’s President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder who persist in persecuting whistleblowers, who’ve empaneled a grand jury against Assange and who consider Wikileaks a terrorist enterprise.

Julian Assange and Bradley Manning put lie to Western pretense of freedom and rule of law


The UK wouldn’t extradite Pinochet, but they’re threatening to storm the Ecuadorian embassy in London to see that Wikileaks impresario Julian Assange is extradited to Sweden where a prosecutor wants to decide whether to charge him for sexual violations, more likely so that the Australian can then be rendered to the US to be imprisoned like Bradley Manning and face the death penalty for espionage. The US denies this intention, though it voted against Ecuador’s allies to hold a meeting about the continuing US-UK assault on journalism and whistleblowers. Can the Western empire let Assange and Manning escape severe reprimand? The two are only the mastermind and the alleged-source who’ve ignited the global uprising behind the anti- austerity movements, Arab Spring, and Occupy. President Obama cannot leave either off the hook without encouraging a deluge of more insider defections. Bradley Manning is already under torture in military custody, but Assange continues to evade US clutches. Should he escape to asylum in Ecuador where Obama’s exterminator drones can deal “American Justice”? The US has yet to condemn a white man to targeted assassination, but in the Global South, in darker-skinned populations, who will know? I favor Ecuador expanding its embassy to more than the first floor office, to offer Wikileaks an entire center of operations for as long as Julian Assange is confined under virtual house arrest. In Assange’s speech from the embassy balcony he repeated three times: “Bradley Manning must be released.” Journalists must be free to expose the crimes of the rich. Citing prison sentences for a Bahrain dissident and Russia’s Pussy Riot, Assange concluded: “There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.”

Here’s the full text of Assange’s statement:

“I am here today because I cannot be there with you today. But thank you for coming. Thank you for your resolve and your generosity of spirit.

“On Wednesday night, after a threat was sent to this embassy and the police descended on this building, you came out in the middle of the night to watch over it and you brought the world’s eyes with you.

“Inside this embassy, after dark, I could hear teams of police swarming up into the building through its internal fire escape. But I knew there would be witnesses. And that is because of you.

“If the UK did not throw away the Vienna conventions the other night, it is because the world was watching. And the world was watching because you were watching.

“So, the next time somebody tells you that it is pointless to defend those rights that we hold dear, remind them of your vigil in the dark before the Embassy of Ecuador.

“Remind them how, in the morning, the sun came up on a different world and a courageous Latin America nation took a stand for justice.

And so, to those brave people. I thank President Correa for the courage he has shown in considering and in granting me political asylum.

“And I also thank the government, and in particular Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino, who upheld the Ecuadorian constitution and its notion of universal rights in their consideration of my asylum. And to the Ecuadorian people for supporting and defending this constitution.

“And I also have a debt of gratitude to the staff of this embassy, whose families live in London and who have shown me the hospitality and kindness despite the threats we all received.

“This Friday, there will be an emergency meeting of the foreign ministers of Latin America in Washington DC to address this very situation.

“And so, I am grateful to those people and governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, and to all other Latin American countries who have come out to defend the right to asylum.

“And to the people of the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden and Australia who have supported me in strength, even when their governments have not. And to those wiser heads in government who are still fighting for justice. Your day will come.

“To the staff, supporters and sources of Wikileaks, whose courage and commitment and loyalty has seen no equal.

“To my family and to my children who have been denied their father. Forgive me, we will be reunited soon.

“As Wikileaks stands under threat, so does the freedom of expression and the health of all our societies. We must use this moment to articulate the choice that is before the government of the United States of America.

“Will it return to and reaffirm the values, the revolutionary values it was founded on, or will it lurch off the precipice dragging us all into a dangerous and oppressive world, in which journalists fall silent under the fear of prosecution and citizens must whisper in the dark?

“I say it must turn back. I ask President Obama to do the right thing. The United States must renounce its witch-hunts against Wikileaks. The United States must dissolve its FBI investigation.

“The United States must vow that it will not seek to prosecute our staff or our supporters. The United States must pledge before the world that it will not pursue journalists for shining a light on the secret crimes of the powerful.

“There must be no more foolish talk about prosecuting any media organisation; be it Wikileaks, or be it the New York Times.

“The US administration’s war on whistleblowers must end.

“Thomas Drake, William Binney and John Kirakou and the other heroic whistleblowers must – they must – be pardoned or compensated for the hardships they have endured as servants of the public record.

“And to the Army Private who remains in a military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, who was found by the United Nations to have endured months of torturous detention in Quantico, Virginia and who has yet – after two years in prison – to see a trial: he must be released.

“Bradley Manning must be released.

“And if Bradley Manning did as he is accused, he is a hero and an example to us all and one of the world’s foremost political prisoners.

“Bradley Manning must be released.

“On Wednesday, Bradley Manning spent his 815th day of detention without trial. The legal maximum is 120 days.

“On Thursday, my friend Nabeel Rajab, President of the Bahrain Human Rights Centre, was sentenced to three years in prison for a tweet. On Friday, a Russian band were sentenced to two years in jail for a political performance.

“There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.

“Thank you.”

A face to launch a thousand protests. Leak your trophy footage you cowards

Young Iraqi watching as US soldiers raid her home
This is a still from John Pilger’s THE WAR YOU DON’T SEE, recently blocked from its US debut in Santa Fe. Why? Because such images will stop war. In particular this shows a terrified Iraqi girl held at gunpoint as her home is searched. I wonder how many such scenes have been captured by embed cameras or GI cellphones. Western eyes are being inoculated to violence and gore, our victims dehumanized, foreign civilians reduced to collateral, but it appears our media managers worry Americans cannot yet resist the ordinary tears of children. Imagine such scenes of heartbreak gone viral across the web. Never mind atrocity or war crime, show us emotional responses with which we can identify. The mass of digital records could doubtless overwhelm Wikileaks. These are not top secret, yet nearly any have been leaked. My appeal to the cowardly US soldier, or the damnable media embed, leak the footage which haunts you already, your PTSD may be the contagion to end public support for our state sponsored terrorism.

Need another reason to boycott 900 lb bully Amazon? Censoring Wikileaks

Amazon booted Wikileaks from its cloud server service, at the behest of Zionist warmonger Joe Lieberman. Twittered Wikileaks in response:
“If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.” The corporate media is already censoring “Cablegate” with misdirection, describing the leaked diplomatic cables as indelicate embarrassments, as opposed to incriminating revelations of America’s imperialist anti-democratic outrages. The Interpol has declared an international manhunt of the Wikileaks founder based on scurrilous accusations of sexual misconduct, Canada is calling for Julian Assange’s execution via US drone, our politicians want to prosecute the Australian Assange under the draconian 1917 US Espionage Act. Amazon’s cowardly deed today is a reminder of the private sector’s omniscient control over everyone’s access to information. Imagine a world where whistleblowers are denied whistles. Shopping bags only please. On Amazon’s internet no one can hear you scream.

While the US media is scolding Wikileaks spokespeople for shaming US diplomacy, the free presses are reporting about the cables which detail the US abuse of diplomatic cover to supply intelligence data, some of it intended to direct US/Israeli drone strikes. The collusion of foreign governments to help the US circumvent international law, US complicity in the Honduran coup, among many other crimes.

Bradley Manning allegedly confessed leaking Cablegate to FBI informer Adrian Lamo, describing the trove of damning revelations thus:

“Hilary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available in a searchable format to the public. Everywhere there is a U.S. post there is a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. It is open diplomacy, worldwide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope and breathtaking depth. It is beautiful and horrifying.”

Although an estimated half million US government operatives had access to these cables, only 20-year-old intelligence analyst Manning had the conscience to recognize the immorality being kept from public view. That’s a military culture of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, of which discrimination against sexual preference is the smallest consequence.

Have you read any of the objective coverage of the damning cables? What’s been released is only a fraction, so as not to overwhelm a media which can only focus on a single soundbite at a time. Is the absence of cables critical of Israel evidence that Julian Assange is actually MOSSAD? Rather, and I’m not alone in pointing this out, the dearth of diplomatic cables to and from Israel indicates the streamlined collusion with the US. Only in Tarantino movies do hired killers have dialog. Old comrades don’t regale each other with revelations about Quarter Pounder versus Le Royale. Israeli and US diplomats have nothing to have to keep abreast about.

Is Assange really CIA/MOSSAD/AIPAC? I’d say the smears against him more likely are. When the same voices disparaging Assange ALSO find themselves horrified by the revelations of the US diplomatic cables, is when I’ll start giving them some credibility. Nobody’s so cynical that they cannot be shocked about US indifference to its inhumanty. Noam Chomsky calls it the US’ hate of Democracy.

Surprise! In anticipation of further incriminating Afghan leaks, Wikileaks Julian Assange charged with rape

Where the CIA cannot yet use predator drones, it retains character assassins. Sweden’s authorities confirm that accusations of rape and molestation (!) made against Julian Assange in the Swedish tabloid Expressen will require the Wikileaks founder to report to police.
UPDATE: Prosecutors now say suspicions were unfounded.

Much to the consternation of its citizens, Swedish police have collaborated with CIA renditions, and the Swedish press is not outside of the reach of the Zionist media.

US inhumanity maxed at Azimuth Limit

WikiLeaks video combat footage of 2007 collateral murder in Iraq“Light ’em all up. Come on, fire!” Watching the leaked combat footage of the helicopter gunships killing unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007, I’m troubled by my own desensitized response. When I saw earlier leaked videos of an AH-64 vaporizing Iraqi farmers and a C-130 wreaking mayhem in Afghanistan, I remember my real shock at seeing a human life extinguished. This time not even flinch. “Just fuckin’, once you get on ’em just open ’em up.” Not at the brutality, nor the callousness of the play by play –even as the pilots targeted rescuers trying to help the wounded. I fault the Rules of Engagement that allowed the massacre, not the soldiers’ laughing swagger –as I hope they will not begrudge my unguarded satisfaction when eventually spectators will be treated to leaked footage of American soldiers taking some fire.

If you watched the video, perhaps you too were wishing that July 12, 2007 had recorded a massive setback for US troops in Iraq, at the height of the “surge” where a whole shitload of “dismounts” had been ambushed by IED explosions in a Baghdad square in the aftermath of a civilian massacre. Those who watched the 39-minute extended version I know were hoping to see a resolution like that, instead of an additional war crime of disproportional force and the targeting of civilians, a Hellfire missile attack on a building into which armed and unarmed men had entered, surrounded by passing innocents and rescuers scrambling to help.

There it goes! Look at that bitch go!
Patoosh!
Ah, sweet!
Need a little more room.
Nice missile.
Does it look good?
Sweet!

The Army has declared that no further inquiry will be made into the 2007 killing of the two Reuters journalists. Its FOIA requests long thwarted, even Reuters is not expressing outrage at this footage. Civilians and journalists about to be lit up The corporate media is hoping to let this story fade on the fringe. Does this mean that more pilots and gunners might become emboldened to leak other trophy reels? It doesn’t take Nelson Ratings for news outlets to see that viewers are already clamoring for more combat snuff films.

We could grant amnesty in exchange for those who turn in the most degenerate sequences.

And pretend they’ll remain anonymous. Ultimately friends and relatives will be able to place identities with the radio voices. Speaking on one of the clearest channels is the young voiced HOTEL-26, who reported taking fire from the photographers and ID’d the “RPG” with started the whole engagement. Likewise the gunner on CRAZY HORSE-18 who responded “Alright, hahaha, I hit ’em….” is addressed “God damn it, Kyle.”

And then there’s the poor 30mm gunner in CRAZY HORSE-19 who assessed his work thus:

Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield! Ha ha!

While chomping at the bit to fire upon the improvised ambulance, he was momentarily thwarted by a puzzling “Azimuth Limit” which prevented his shooting.

Bloggers are now abuzz to decode the Azimuth Limit which slowed the turkey shoot when none of the gunners were showing restraint. Azimuth is the angular measurement of an object’s distance clockwise from True North. On rifles it expresses the adjustment of a gunsight to its boresight. On aircraft it apparently has something to do with the angle of relation to the axis of the fuselage. Whatever it is, maybe we can ratchet military Azimuth Limits down flat, if that’s what it will take to stop our soldiers from blowing away civilians, journalists, children and their rescuers alike. The shooters can cuss and salivate all they want so long as their trigger mechanisms respect human life or at least balk at excessive carnage.

What doesn’t come across the audio is what the US soldiers on the ground are saying to themselves as they survey “that big pile of [unarmed] bodies,” in their palaver, the “dead bastards.”

UPDATE — the testimonials begin:

From Iraq war veteran Michael Prysner, co-founder of March Forward!

The harrowing Apache footage released by WikiLeaks gives us a stomach-turning glimpse of war. Seventeen minutes of cold-blooded massacre in a war of more than seven years. A brief clip of one Apache video; a quick look at one part of one mission. Hundreds of those missions take place every day.

The video came to light thanks to military whistleblowers who provided it to WikiLeaks together with supporting documents.  Imagine if we had access to all such videos, the things we would see. Imagine all the Iraqis killed who have no one to uncover the truth about their deaths. Had the death of two Reuters news staffers not generated interest in this video, then the destruction of three families by hellfire missiles fired into an apartment building with no provocation, in a separate engagement also featured in the video, would have never been made public.

This massacre is a drop in a sea of blood. Many other such “incidents” will never be known.

Officers claimed there was “no question” that the pilots were responding to enemy fire; the video shows there is no question that they were not responding to enemy fire. They said that they had “no idea” how the journalists were killed; the video shows that they know very well how those journalists were killed. They were gunned down standing in a crowd of unarmed people.
After the slaughter of that group, the pilots beg for permission to kill the innocent passers-by who had come to the aid of one of the wounded, like any of us would have done if we saw our neighbor dying on the ground as we drove down the street. They kill everyone trying to help the dying journalist, and critically wound two children seen sitting in the front seat.

We see a group of unarmed men mowed down by a machine gun designed to destroy armored vehicles. We see a vanload of good Samaritans obliterated for trying to help a dying victim. We see all this with the soundtrack of the pilots mocking the dead, congratulating each other and laughing about the massacre.

No wonder the U.S. military goes to such great lengths to keep such videos from us. They want us to see Iraq and Afghanistan through their lens, through their embedded reporters, filtered by censorship and restrictions. They know that, once the people of this country see the extreme racism and brutality behind these occupations, they will be repulsed by what their tax dollars are paying for.

The military brass and the White House politicians have tried to justify this senseless atrocity. “Cut the pilots some slack. This was in Baghdad. This was a battle zone”—that’s been their line. The pilots had been indoctrinated with the same colonial mentality. “That’s what they get for bringing their kids into battle,” one pilot says.

The father driving that van was not “bringing his kids into battle.” He was bringing them to school, driving down the street where they live. But the U.S. occupation has made all of Iraq a battle zone. To those pilots, to their commanders over the radio and to the generals in the Pentagon, every single person in Baghdad and in Iraq is “fair game.”

The pilots joked about the people they killed, laughed about U.S. military vehicles running over dead bodies, knowing that their commanders were listening and that they were being recorded. They were not acting out of character. This is the culture of the occupation. This is how these wars are being conducted.

Having seen this, one cannot honestly believe that these atrocities are committed day in and day out for the liberation of the Iraqi people.

The Pentagon’s talking heads and media lackeys are hard at work putting their spin on this story. It’s time to tell the truth. For more than seven years, the U.S. has unleashed criminal, unprovoked aggression against the people of Iraq, and they have been doing the same thing in Afghanistan for more than eight years.

The U.S. military presence in Iraq is a colonial occupation force. The only way forward is a complete, immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. This government will not do that unless all of us who are outraged by these criminal acts stand up and demand it.

Iraq war veteran Josh Stieber, US Army Specialist, 1st ID, Bravo Company 2-16 in Baghdad (Rustamiyah) 2007-2008. Although he was not present at the scene of the video, he knows those who were involved and is familiar with the environment.

A lot of my friends are in that video. After watching the video, I would definitely say that that is, nine times out of ten, the way things ended up. Killing was following military protocol. It was going along with the rules as they are.

If these videos shock and revolt you, they show the reality of what war is like. If you don’t like what you see in them, it means we should be working harder towards alternatives to war.

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Federal investigations, American innocence

U.S. Attorney General Albert Gonzales has just called for another Justice Department investigation. This time they want to know what government official leaked the story that President Bush has been conducting illegal surveillance upon U.S. citizens without the proper warrants.
 
Does this recall the investigation prompted by the revelation that our CIA has been using secret prisons in Europe to detain people illegally? They’re against European law and against American law. But Gonzales wanted to know the same thing: who told.
 
Soviet era prisonKiejkuty- a Soviet era prison in Poland, revealed to be one of the “black sites,” the secret network of CIA prisons for keeping ghost detainees from domestic scrutiny.

Remember the indignant reaction in 2004 to the suggestion that America was operating “gulags?”

Illegal activity on the part of the president. Illegal activity on the part of the CIA. Where is the investigation into the members of this government who failed to leak these stories?

Not only are there laws which protect whistleblowers, there are laws which punish people who keep mum about wrong-doings which they’ve witnessed. Is Alberto Gonzales interested in any of those laws?

Perhaps Gonzales authored another position paper advising Bush administration officials that they needn’t worry themselves with notions of personal responsibility in this the shiny age of Neocon omnipotence.

Need for warrants
President Bush claims that he ordered this domestic spying to protect our nation against terrorists. Since the warrants he would have needed are practically rubber stamped anyway, why would he need to act without having obtained them, in accordance to the law?

A leader elected in a democracy is not supposed to be able to declare all by himself who is an enemy of the state, just as a police commissioner is not supposed to be able to pick on whatever neighboor’s household he wishes. That’s what judicial review is for. “Got a warrant?” We all know our right. It’s in the Constitution. We put it there.

Freedom of Information Act requests have shown that Bush’s surveillance extends beyond looking for Taliban suicidal hijacker suspects. Perhaps Bush feared that the judicial oversight which comes with having to apply for a warrant might preclude those other categories. That’s what the oversight is for, to prevent a dictator from usurping a democracy.

Because someone is a particular religion is not a probable cause which would justify spying on them. No, George, because someone is protesting for peace, this is not a cause to spy on them.

A judicial review board trying to uphold the constitution will not issue a warrant because someone is blowing the whistle on a major energy company, or because they are making a competitive bid against Halliburton, or trying to organize a union against Wal-mart, or trying to expose the Bush family financial ties, or challenging Tom Delay’s redistricting. Those are not illegal activities and thus do not justify law-enforcement attention.

And what are you trying to learn from eavesdropping? What they are up to? What they are up to is generally known, that’s how you became worried about them in the first place.

Instead, are you looking for a vice, or a family secret, or some vulnerability which you can exploit, either through blackmail, coercion, brute force, or by sudden secret unconstitutional detention, to stop their activities which you say are a threat to your America?