Who's a threat again?

I happened to be doing a Google search on a British singer and somehow found myself looking at a forum of one of the most infamous white supremacist sites on the net, who were in a flap about the ancestry of said singer, and other well known performers.

One commenter was describing his "heartbreak" that Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page is 1/8th Chinese...

Among the vile comments that flowed from this:

"Its disgusting to see a White Male with an Asian Female and the monstrosities they create"

...Lots of bizarre remarks about Jews of course. Endless pseudo-scientific dribble. Frothing rubbish about the white people being at threat...

Now here's an observation:

If these people were embarrassing diplomats with the facts of what they actually said - instead of stirring up genocidal rants - the authorities would have launched cyber attacks on their site, leaned on every associated commercial institution to dump them, Fox News would be calling for their assassination, and various appendages of the US government would be looking for some law somewhere to say the First Amendment doesn't apply.

But they're 'just' Nazis, so why bother huh?

Excellent comment re WikiLeaks

By John Birmingham in the Brisbane Times December 7th:

I had dinner once with Salman Rushdie. Meh. Big deal. Everyone in publishing's had dinner at least once with The Rush. Which means that we all had the interesting experience of dining under armed guard because of the fatwa hanging over him.

It's Allah knows how long since that vicious, sex- and death-obsessed old scrote Khomeini dropped a death sentence on Rushdie for having the temerity to commit a thoughtcrime against his barbarous form of religious derangement. And in that time, despite the damnable inconvenience of it all, and a significant lobby both inside and outside government in favor of letting the mad mullah's hitmen have their way, the West as a whole has mobilised the resources of the various states through which Rushdie has passed to safeguard him from mullah-sanctioned murder.

What a long way we've fallen then, to a position where various spokeswhores of the American Right - some of them occupying positions of state power - can call for the assassination or extrajudicial kidnapping of an Australian citizen with nary a word of protest from our own government or dissenting opinion from the opposition.

I speak of Julian Assange, of course. The weirdest Bond villain ever, putative head of the WikiLeaks collective, and possibly the only celebrity Australian not to have an invite from Oprah.

Sure, I have issues with WikiLeaks. I don't buy into the leftist groupthink that Assange's creation is an untrammelled good. The most recent release, the US diplomatic cables, is more embarrassing than threatening to US interests, although even this tranche of documents raises the prospects of unintended consequences. For instance I wouldn't want to be that Aussie businessman the Chinese grabbed up the other day given that Beijing will now be looking for a way to humiliate Kevin Rudd and the Australian government for his advice to Hillary Clinton on handling the rising Chinese superpower. Nor would I want to be one of the military or political actors in the hot seat on the Korean peninsula trying to decide how North Korea will react over the medium- or even short-term to the revelation that China is willing to see the Kim regime collapse.

But in the end Assange remains an Australian citizen and he is due the protection we offer to all our citizens when they are threatened by rogue actors, even states, because their actions have upset somebody in power somewhere. It doesn't mean he gets a free pass on the allegations against him in Sweden, but it should mean that at the very least those moronic politicians and media celebretards in the US who've been calling for his murder should be getting a visit from one of our consular officials, preferably an ex-SAS or Commando Regiment old boy, to have a quiet word in their shell - like about how seriously we take incitement to murder our fellow little Vegemiters (Australians).

After all, as Salman Rushdie knows, anybody anywhere can pull a trigger.

By the way, today the Australian Federal Police have announced their conclusion that neither WikiLeaks nor Julian Assange has committed any crime under Australian law, in spite of our prime minister pronouncing the release of secret cables as "illegal".

You stuffed up there, Julia.

Remember he's an Australian citizen, innocent till proven guilty of a crime under some law that actually makes sense.

An Australian citizen.
That's meant to mean something.
At least to our own government.

Stunning Contradiction

Eventually I'll get to my view of all this as an Australian citizen and what I consider to be some craven behaviour on the part of the Australian government, however right now I think you NEED to read about this:

On the very day WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange was arrested, the U.S. Department of State -- which is waging all-out legal, PR and cyberwar against WikiLeaks for releasing its private cables -- announced it is pleased to host UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day in 2011.

The three-day celebration in may will pay tribute to new media that have made it possible for repressed people around the world to express their opinions and make public information their oppressive governments tried to keep secret.

"We are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age"

- Kevin Fogarty writing for ITworld

The press release for World Press Freedom Day also states:

"Expanding access to the internet and mobile technologies has opened new routes for gathering and sharing news and information. Those same technologies also have provided new tools to regimes that seek to filter and censor information or to silence those who want to express themselves. World Press Freedom Day 2011 will offer a forum for media freedom advocates, journalists, and policymakers to tackle these challenges and keep them on the global agenda. Freedom of the media is a fundamental human right that requires strong support and constant vigilance."

Joseph Lieberman, on the hand, said on Fox News (....) that he believed a newspaper should be investigated alongside WikiLeaks:
"To me, The New York Times has committed at least an act of bad citizenship, and whether they have committed a crime, I think that bears a very intensive inquiry by the Justice Department.”

The Guardian covers World Press Freedom Day with a very lyrically titled article:
"World Press Freedom Day reminds us that information is democracy's oxygen"

Right-wing bullshit re WikiLeaks.

Cenk Uygur on the utter hypocrisy of Republicans and their voicebox Fox News regarding WikiLeaks - reminding us also of who REALLY DID endanger the life of an intelligence operative, and what justice was served.



My friends, this is a pivotal event. We are witnessing one of the terrible collisions of our times between our right to know the truth, and the people who - for their own base political purposes - would destroy those who seek to give the truth to us.

Between those who deal in facts, and those who feed us lies.

By the way... Note this post from 6 months ago.

Some other little sound bites:

One indication of the indiscriminate forces being whipped up by the affair surfaced on a website called TOPIX which this week ran the question: Should the Yanks kill Julian Assange? Mr Humbert, from Irvine in California, wrote, ''The US should say to Australia, either you hand this treasonous scum's head on a stick with his ball stuffed in his mouth or we break diplomatic relations.''
Yank Oliver, from Sudbury in Canada, went further: ''That would stand as a good warning for other Aussies not to betray their allies.'' But neither went as far as Dr Zauius from Sudbury in Canada: ''Strike team needs to be dispatched to Sweden. I am wondering why they have not handed him over. Perhaps it is time to examine the Swiss (Right-wing political geography at its best...) in serious detail.''

- Martin Flanagan, journalist (you know... people who tell us stuff) for The Age newspaper

WikiLeaks

"Shares in Bank of America, the largest US bank, tumbled more than 3 per cent on Tuesday amid speculation it would be the next target of leaked documents from WikiLeaks."

Interesting... what have they been up to...?

Sarah Palin: "Assange is not a 'journalist', any more than the 'editor' of al-Qaeda's new English-language magazine Inspire is a 'journalist'."

False equivalence. Palin, dumb bitch, also calls his actions treasonous, so presumably she didn't even know he was Australian.

Meghan McCain: "creepy rogue Swedish guy"

Oh the boys in Sweden will just love you for that, Meghan.

Now consider:

"In April the website (WikiLeaks) released graphic, classified video footage of an American helicopter gunship firing on and killing Iraqis in a Baghdad street in 2007, apparently in cold blood. The de-encrypted video, which WikiLeaks released on its own sites as well as on YouTube, caused an international uproar.
The Baghdad video has been WikiLeaks' biggest coup to date, although an extraordinary number of unauthorised documents - more than a million - have found their way to the website. These include a previously secret, 110-page draft report by the international investigators Kroll, revealing allegations of huge corruption in Kenya involving the family of the former president Daniel arap Moi; the US government's classified manual of standard operating procedures for Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, which revealed that it was policy to hide some prisoners from the International Committee of the Red Cross; a classified US intelligence report on how to marginalise WikiLeaks; secret Church of Scientology manuals; an internal report by the global oil trader, Trafigura, about dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast; a classified US profile of the former Icelandic ambassador to the US in which the ambassador is praised for helping quell publicity about the CIA's activities involving rendition flights; and the emails leaked from the embattled Climate Research Unit at East Anglia in Britain, last November, which triggered the so-called ''climategate'' scandal."

Note the frothing "hunt him down and clip him" cowboys were not so passionately and murderously critical of WikiLeaks when the latter gave them Climategate... hmm?

What we weren't being told

A sequel of sorts to this post.

Wikileaks has done it again. This time, though.... they've REALLY done it:

"The US has emphatically restated its mission in Afghanistan while condemning the leaking of a trove of secret military field reports that lay bare the grim reality of the nine-year conflict, including the apparent duplicity of ally Pakistan. A statement by National Security Adviser General James Jones implied that the leaked material was out of date and had been overtaken by President Barack Obama's ''surge'' strategy, now under way. But the statement did not deny key judgments drawn from the 92,000 documents released by whistleblower website WikiLeaks: that the Pakistan military had been aiding insurgent groups and that coalition forces were struggling alongside an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence."

You'll have heard or read all about it by now...

...how the Taliban are using heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, how the Pakistani intelligence service is playing both sides against the middle, how civilians have been killed in numbers far beyond those reported... how utterly screwed we are in the war in Afghanistan...

I want to believe there's a point to all this, but are our people (Australia is the biggest contributor of military to the effort outside of NATO) being killed over there just to save face with a protracted pullout and handover?

The truth sets you free...

That is... unless you say it about someone powerful...

"Julian Assange, the Australian-born face of the web iconoclast WikiLeaks, is in hiding overseas after the US military arrested one of its own soldiers, Bradley Manning, and accused him of leaking a a secret video of a US Army helicopter gunning down civilians in Iraq in 2007.

The video was released on Wikileaks this year, and the US is now desperate to find Mr Assange before he leaks thousands of hugely embarrassing state diplomatic cables, which are believed to discuss the Middle East, its governments and leaders.

Mr Assange, 38, is an enigmatic figure who moves frequently between countries and has bases in Iceland, Kenya, Australia and elsewhere.

He was due to speak at a conference in Las Vegas on Friday but cancelled shortly before he was due to appear."