Julian Assange On ‘Crushing Bastards’, David Gower And Manning’s Death Sentence
JULIAN Assange, the Australian founder of Wikileaks with the looks of a combed David Gower, says “inside sources in the White House” warn him not to visit the US. He needs inside sources to tell him that? Doesn’t Assange read the media or follow that journalisic mainstay – the hunch?
If one thing has emerged from the Wikileaks story it is that Wikileaks likes being the story. Why mention your sources inside the White House if you want to protect them? You mention them to give yourself credibilty.
If Wikileaks is to be undone, it will be undone by vanity. But how important is it and those leaked documents on the Afghan war? A news round-up on how the media became the news:
READ: Wikileaks Gives Lazy Journalists Biased History Of War In Afghanistan: Pictures
Assange was talking to the Frontline Club:
“Today the White House put out a private briefing to reporters about Wikileaks and me and it quoted a section from an interview with me in Der Spiegel saying that I enjoy crushing bastards.
“Somehow the White House finds that offensive. In terms of returning to the United States I don’t know. Our sources advise from inside the US government that there were thoughts of whether I could be charged as a co-conspirator to espionage, which is serious.
“That doesn’t seem to be the thinking within the United States any more however there is the other possibility of being detained as a material witness and being kept either in confinement or not being allowed to leave the country until the Manning case is concluded.”
Already helping the CIA with their enquiries, did he leak the files?
Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in a radio interview yesterday called for the execution of Army analyst Bradley Manning if investigators conclude that Manning leaked classified information to WikiLeaks, NPR reports.
“If they won’t charge him with treason, they ought to charge him with murder,” the Michigan congressman, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, saidduring an interview with WHMI. The host asked Rogers whether treason during wartime qualifies as a capital offense. “Yes,” Rogers responded. “And I would support it 100 percent.”
READ: Why The Pentagon Is Hunting Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Over Bradley Manning
“I would really like to see President Obama move to ask the government of Iceland to shut that Web site down,” said Liz Cheney. “I’d like to see him move to shut it down ourselves if Iceland won’t do it.” The Wikileaks server is located in Sweden, which makes this comment a little baffling.
Or not: Iceland And Wikileaks Create The Icelandic Freedom of Expression Award To Abolish Libel Laws
Bias: Wikileaks And Julian Assange Caught In Bias Storm Over Reuter’s Iraqi Journalists ‘Slaughter’
The Taliban, a radical Islamic militia in Afghanistan, announced its gratitude toWikileaks for the release and vowed to hunt down those revealed in the documents to be collaborating with the U.S. It appears that they have now made good on that threat.
Khalifa Abdullah, a tribal elder, was removed from his home in Monar village, in Kandahar province’s embattled Arghandab district, by gunmen. He was then executed.
At the same time, 70 other tribal elders received death threats warning them that the Taliban had obtained reason to believe they were collaborating with the U.S.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates Of Hell
Like journalists, the U.S. government says it tries to protect its sources and supporters. Defense Secretary Gates commented, “I spent most of my life in the intelligence business, where the sacrosanct principle is protecting your sources. It seems to me that, as a result of this massive breach of security, we have considerable repair work to do in terms of reassuring people and rebuilding trust, because they clearly—people are going to feel at risk.”
It does seem a little precious to accept comfortably that in a war you’re going to have a certain amount of so-called “collateral damage” and even so, if someone exposes some truths about the way that war is being prosecuted and that exposure adds some additional death and suffering to the total, then it’s the EXPOSURE of the facts, and not the war itself that is somehow evil.
What Says Ronald Reagan’s Son, Michael?
Jullian Assange, alleged anti-war crusader, has revealed himself for what he is – a subversive who has no qualms about the damage he does to the United States and to the members of our armed forces.
Blame The Messenger – Sunny Hundal Has Some Weird Logic
But the case against WikiLeaks doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Has it endangered the lives of Afghanis? That’s only plausible if you believe the Taliban are short of targets and without their own informants. The documents were already available to every soldier and contractor there.
The Wikileaks secrets were known by pretty much everyone out there.
The stuff that recent Russian spies managed to filch won’t have been 1,000th as damaging to security as the Wikileaks material. Big moment.
Fox’s Wayne Simmons calls Wikileaks “a terrorist organization”.
Let’s be clear: WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise. Its reason for existence is to obtain classified national security information and disseminate it as widely as possible — including to the United States’ enemies. These actions are likely a violation of the Espionage Act, and they arguably constitute material support for terrorism.
The furor surrounding Wikileaks, the website which last week released a mass of classified US Military documents about the war in Afghanistan, has taken an interesting twist. A mysterious 1.4GB ‘insurance’ file has been published on the site…
One theory regarding the contents of the file is that it could contain approximately 15,000 documents that Assange stated were held back from the cache of leaked Afghanistan documents when around 77,000 were released last week. However, the file is considerably greater in size than the original cache of documents, so this seems unlikely.
The War:
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British Prime Minister Tony Blair addresses the troops at Al Sha'afa camp in north Oman as part of a two day diplomatic visit to the area. Al Sha'afa base is the centre of Operation Swift Sword II, involving more than 20,000 British servicemen and women. * ... in the biggest deployment since the Gulf War, although the forces are not involved in the current attacks on Afghanistan.
Posted: 3rd, August 2010 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
