Julian Assange In Conversation With John Pilger
An extended interview with Julian Assange recorded during filming of John Pilger’s latest film The War You Don’t See.
The attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are a response to an information revolution that threatens old power orders, in politics and journalism.
The incitement to murder trumpeted by public figures in the United States, together with attempts by the Obama administration to corrupt the law and send Assange to a hell hole prison for the rest of his life, are the reactions of a rapacious system exposed as never before.
The US Justice Department has established a secret grand jury just across the river from Washington in the eastern district of the state of Virginia. The object is to indict Julian Assange under a discredited espionage act used to arrest peace activists during the first world war, or one of the war on terror conspiracy statutes that have degraded American justice.
Judicial experts describe the jury as a deliberate set up, pointing out that this corner of Virginia is home to the employees and families of the Pentagon, CIA, Department of Homeland Security and other pillars of American power.
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Wouldn't it be a good idea to qualify that endorsement a little? Assange has aided terrorists, gone beyond transparency and tried to hurt American business. I think the ideal whistleblower would behave quite differently. I don't think Assange's behavior has been consistently worldcentric itself.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that there needs to be a separation between government and corporations, William, but there is more evidence of less-than-worldcentric behavior on the part of Wikileaks in today's New York Times. I don't see any justification or benefit to this:
ReplyDeleteWASHINGTON — In a shift of tactics that has alarmed American officials, the antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks has published on the Web nearly 134,000 leaked diplomatic cables in recent days, more than six times the total disclosed publicly since the posting of the leaked State Department documents began last November.
A sampling of the documents showed that the newly published cables included the names of some people who had spoken confidentially to American diplomats and whose identities were marked in the cables with the warning “strictly protect.”
State Department officials and human rights activists have been concerned that such diplomatic sources, including activists, journalists and academics in authoritarian countries, could face reprisals, including dismissal from their jobs, prosecution or violence. . . .
Among those named, despite diplomats’ warnings, were a United Nations official in West Africa and a foreign human rights activist working in Cambodia. They had spoken candidly to American Embassy officials on the understanding that they would not be publicly identified.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/us/30wikileaks.html