OMNI
WIKILEAKS/ASSANGE NEWSLETTER #10,
January 30, 2012.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace (#9 July 21, 2011).
Here is the link to all OMNI newsletters: http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/ For a knowledge-based peace, justice, and ecology movement and an informed citizenry as the foundation for change. Here is the link to the Index: http://www.omnicenter.org/omni-newsletter-general-index/
See Manning Newsletters and Snowden.
Contents of #9 Wikileaks/Assange
Timothy Vaslett: Defense of WikiLeaks, Assange, Manning
Vaslett, Anonymous: Monkeywrenching to Defend WikiLeaks
Amnesty International Praises WikiLeaks
Assange Wins Gellhorn Prize
WikiLeaks Blog by Greg Mitchell
Contents of #10
Help Wikileaks Expose
Petition for Assange
Rolling Stone Interview of Assange
US Persecution from Manning to Assange
Manning Opponent of War Crimes
Assange and Manning for Nobel Peace Prize
Tens of Thousands More
Justice Foreclosed
Films About Assange
Here is the link to all the newsletters on all subjects archived in the OMNI web site: http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/
Help #WikiLeaks Liberate the Trans-Pacific Partnership Negotiating Text!
Just Foreign Policy info@justforeignpolicy.org via uark.edu
August 17, 2012 to jbennet
Dear Dick,
Help free the TPP! Make a pledge to donate to WikiLeaks should it publish the TPP text--and check out the campaign!
Take ActionOn September 6, negotiators will go to Leesburg , Virginia
Americans - and citizens of the other countries that would be covered by the agreement - have a right to see what our governments are proposing to do. Parts of the draft negotiating text have been leaked. We want to see the whole text!
So we're issuing a reward for the liberation of the TPP negotiating text. But our reward has some special features: we want as many people as possible to contribute what they can to raise the reward. That means you.
Check out the campaign and make a pledge here: http://www.freetpp.org
So why are we trying to raise a reward for WikiLeaks to publish the TPP?
First of all, we want WikiLeaks to publish the text. We want this because it will show that WikiLeaks is still relevant to citizen demands for government transparency, that releasing U.S.
This week, Ecuador granted political asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the threat of political persecution by the United States UK authorities have refused to grant Assange safe passage to Ecuador , and he remains trapped in Ecuador United States
The reward isn't to whoever leaks the document, but to WikiLeaks if it publishes the document. In addition to helping WikiLeaks, this path will shield the leaker against any claim that they leaked the document for personal gain. It will be clear that they leaked the document to promote the public interest.
Second, we're "crowdsourcing" our reward. Instead of asking one rich person to put up the money for a reward, we're asking you to make a pledge to make a financial contribution to WikiLeaks, if WikiLeaks publishes the draft TPP negotiating text. If many people make small pledges, that will add up to a big reward. And the reward will grow over time, dramatizing public concern about the secretive TPP negotiations, about the lack of transparency [1], about the threat to access to essential medicines in developing countries [2], about the threat to environmental regulation [3], and about the threat to internet freedom. [4]
Can you help us launch this campaign by making a pledge to donate to WikiLeaks if it publishes the draft TPP negotiating text? You can make your pledge here:
http://www.freetpp.org
Thank you for all you do to help bring about a more just foreign policy,
Robert Naiman, Chelsea Mozen, Sarah Burns and Megan Iorio
Just Foreign Policy
Please support our work. Donate for a Just Foreign Policy.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/donate
References:
1. "Trans-Pacific Partnership Talks: Senators Demand Access To Controversial Documents After Leak," Zach Carter, Huffington Post, 06/25/2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/25/trans-pacific-partnership-documents-sherrod-brown-jeff-merkley-ron-wyden-robert-menendez_n_1624956.html
2. "Trading Away Health: How the U.S.’s Intellectual Property Demands for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Threaten Access to Medicines," Issue Brief, MSF Access Campaign, August 2012, http://aids2012.msf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/TPP-Issue-Brief-IAC-July2012.pdf
3. " The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (aka NAFTA on Steroids): What it could mean for the Environment ," Sierra Club, http://www.sierraclub.org/trade/downloads/TPP-Factsheet.pdf
4. "Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement," Electronic Frontier Foundaton, https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp
UK : Don't Allow US
Since June 19, Wikileaks' Julian Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London US , UK , and Swedish governments that Assange will not be extradited to the United States if he travels to Sweden
But there is still hope. A senior legal advisor to the Ecuadoreans told the Guardian that the UK must waive what is called “specialty” for Assange to be extradited to the US after proceedings in Sweden UK were to give assurances that they would not waive specialty, Assange would be safe to venture to Sweden
To date, there hasn't been much public pressure on the UK UK
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/uk-dont-allow-us-extradition-assange
Thanks!
US the Real Betrayer
“Michael Hastings Interview With Julian Assange”
Rolling Stone, January 18, 2012, RSN
Excerpt: "'The question is, where has the United States US
READ MOREhttp://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/367-wikileaks/9503-focus-michael-hastings-interview-with-julian-assange
Subject: Manning & Assange: Manning Prosecution Lays Basis for Terror Charge Against Assange By Naomi Spencer The United States government is seeking to use its prosecution of Manning, to lay the basis for extraditing Assange to the US and either prosecuting him as a terrorist or locking him away indefinitely in a military prison without any recourse to the courts or due process. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30075.htm
Bradley Manning: Traitor or Hero? By Marjorie CohnIf
Manning had committed war crimes instead of exposing them, he would be a free man today. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30071.html From Sue S 12-26-11
Bradley Manning, Julian Assange Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
DJ Pangburn, Death And Taxes Magazine, Sept. 29, 2011
Pangburn writes: "And while a Nobel Peace Prize nomination might not help Manning avoid prison time or get Assange released from house arrest and his legal charade, it certainly is a form of vindication for both men; many people across the world admire their principled stand."
READ MORE http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/287-124/7637-bradley-manning-julian-assange-nominated-for-nobel-peace-prize
WikiLeaks Publishes Tens of Thousands More Cables
Mark Hosenball, Reuters, August 26, 2011
WikiLeaks is in the process of releasing tens of thousands of previously unpublished U.S.
READ MORE http://www.readersupportednews.org/news-section2/367-wikileaks/7188-wikileaks-publishes-tens-of-thousands-more-cables
For Julian Assange, Justice Foreclosed
·
Every once in a while, a situation arises that so completely captures the spirit of the time—in this case, the horror moving like an amoeba under the surface of our pleasant days, our absurd distractions, our seemingly serious politics—that ordinary assumptions, ordinary arguments and their limited conclusions serve only to obliterate honesty, and so any hope of grappling with the real. Such is the case of Julian Assange now.
About the Author
JoAnn Wypijewski is a writer in New York
Also by the Author
For what the ancients called avarice and iniquity, Alex’s hate was pure. No writer had a deadlier sting against the corruptions of empire.
When it comes to the distant past, there’s a lot we don’t know about what occurred sexually.
He is the wanted man. Wanted for the purpose of conducting criminal proceedings, ostensibly on sexual misconduct allegations in Sweden , but maybe not; maybe on charges of espionage or conspiracy in the United States
I am not comparing the founder of WikiLeaks, a white man benefiting from not only white-skin privilege and straight-man privilege but also class and celebrity privilege, with black men on the other side of a lynch mob. This is not about the particulars of oppression; it is about the political context of law, the limits of liberal expectations and the monstrosity of the state.
Liberals have no trouble generally acknowledging that in those rape cases against black men, the reasoned application of law was impossible. It was impossible because justice was impossible, foreclosed not by the vagaries of this white jury or that bit of evidence but by the totalizing immorality of white supremacy that placed the Black Man in a separate category of human being, without common rights and expectations. A lawyer might take a case if it hadn’t been settled by the mob, but the warped conscience of white America
With Assange, the political context is the totalizing immorality of the national security state on a global scale. The sex-crime allegations against Assange emerged in Sweden on August 20, 2010, approximately four and a half months after WikiLeaks blazed into the public sphere by releasing a classified video that showed a US Apache helicopter crew slaughtering more than a dozen civilians, including two journalists, in a Baghdad Quantico
For disseminating classified materials that exposed war crimes, Assange has been called a terrorist. A coloring book for children, The True Faces of Evil—Terror, from Big Coloring Books Inc. out of St. Louis London
It has been common for the media to compartmentalize: on the one hand, there are complaints of sexual misconduct against Assange by two women in Sweden, which must be seen as a straightforward matter for law enforcement; on the other hand, there is his political activity, also his “attention-seeking,” “narcissism” and “arrogance,” which, come to think of it, sound a lot like traits in a rapist’s profile. Only rarely has anyone—notably Naomi Wolf and the team from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Four Corners program—begun with the intrinsic political challenge posed by WikiLeaks and proceeded from there to scrutinize the Swedish prosecutorial machinery.
That machinery is tricky. Police were so quick to initiate the arrest process that one of the women who came to them—to see if Assange could be forced to take an STD test after she’d had unprotected sex with him—became distraught and refused to give further testimony. The Swedish prosecutor’s office issued an arrest warrant for rape and molestation on one day and withdrew it the next, saying there was no reason to suspect rape, and that the other claim wasn’t serious enough for a warrant. About a week later, the Swedish director of prosecution reopened the investigation, and a court later approved her request to detain Assange for rape, molestation and unlawful coercion. By then he was in London , having been told he was free to leave Sweden London
If the Swedish claims against Assange had involved anything but sex, it’s unlikely that liberals, and even some self-described radicals, would be tiptoeing around this part of the story, either by asking “So I guess he’s a bad guy?” or by arguing “Of course he needs to answer for his crimes.” If it were anything but sex, we would insist on the presumption of innocence. We have instead gotten comfortable with presuming guilt and trusting in the dignified processes of law to guarantee fairness.
“Believe the victim” entered the lexicon decades ago for historically understandable reasons. Women had been denied their own due process, in a sense—their right to make a complaint and expect justice, not vilification or worse. They are still being denied and derided, as the idiot spewings of Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin illustrate. The mutation of basic rights into an imperative for belief, and of full citizens into victims, has not made women any safer, but its cultural manipulation—particularly in high-profile cases—has struck at the foundations of civil liberty in a way that may not have been anticipated.
So here is the spectacle of Assange, as yet unindicted, bearing the dual brand of Sex Offender and Terrorist, the subhuman beings of the twenty-first century. The fusing of abuse and terror in his case thus implies two victims who must be believed, the women and the state. But the women’s claims are murky, and the state is not credible.
It should be possible to imagine a resolution outside the criminal justice system for problems that arise in the course of consensual sexual coupling: dissatisfaction over the use (or ill use) of condoms, constraints that keep people from expressing their wishes or intuiting those of another, selfishness, insensitivity, confusions as “yes” slides into “no” and back to “yes,” perhaps wordlessly—all issues that seem to apply in the Assange case but exist beyond it. That will require a braver sexual politics (and at least another column), and it does not demean experience to recognize that the language of punishment is a poor substitute for the lost language of love.
About the state, though, there must be no illusions. A nation that goes to war on fraud, that insists “We don’t torture” when evidence to the contrary abounds, that kidnaps foreign nationals and puts them on planes to be delivered to dungeons, that spies on its people, asserts its right to lock them up indefinitely and lets documented CIA torturers off the hook of accountability because they were only following orders: that nation will plot, and it will double-cross, and it will kill. Sweden participated in the US United Kingdom has threatened to storm Ecuador United States Sweden
FILMS ABOUT ASSANGE
On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 5:55 PM, Susan wrote:
http://t.co/Hc6psnUR
thanks for sending this, I will share it
I watched the 19min animation description of the charges being filed against Assange
and will watch the remaining 46min video about the case later
the topic is also a movie entitled "we steal secrets" shown at sundance this yr. interesting prof producer who seems convinced that assange should be extradited to sweden, came across with a lot of double talk in his interview on Democracy Now, I smell a rat
interesting indeed, assange SHOULD not be having unprotected sex with people he hardly knew but there are MANY men who would be behind bars for practising the same stupid behavior if that was going to make them a criminal (from David Druding)
I watched the 19min animation description of the charges being filed against Assange
and will watch the remaining 46min video about the case later
the topic is also a movie entitled "we steal secrets" shown at sundance this yr. interesting prof producer who seems convinced that assange should be extradited to sweden, came across with a lot of double talk in his interview on Democracy Now, I smell a rat
interesting indeed, assange SHOULD not be having unprotected sex with people he hardly knew but there are MANY men who would be behind bars for practising the same stupid behavior if that was going to make them a criminal (from David Druding)