Time Magazine has put Julian Assange on the cover of their Dec 13 issue, with a headline that says WikiLeaks has not hurt America. It also seems likely that they will make Assange their Man of the Year.
Photo: Time Magazine

      After making news around the world over the past week, the Wikileakssite is struggling to stay onlinein what appears to be a full-court press by the American government to squelch the site and squash its founder, Julian Assange.

      Last week, Amazon booted the whistleblowing site off its servers just 24 hours after being contacted by the staff of Sen Joe Lieberman (who chairs the Senate's committee on homeland security). The London Guardian wonders "whether he was acting on his own or pressed to do so by the Obama administration, and how much pressure was applied to Amazon."

      At the same time, PayPal froze the account of a German foundation that funneled donations to WikiLeaks claiming it was in violation of the company's terms of service. So you can’t donate to support WikiLeaks with PayPal anymore.

      The German site, EveryDNS.net, said it was forced to make the move after a number of coordinated attacks against the site threatened "the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other Web sites," according to the company.

      Meanwhile, the White House sent out an e-mail to federal agencies instructing them to warn employees against accessing WikiLeaks over the internet. The e-mail reads, in part:

      The recent disclosure of U-S Government documents by WikiLeaks has resulted in damage to our national security. Federal agencies collectively, and each federal employee and contractor individually, are obligated to protect classified information pursuant to all applicable laws, as well as to protect the integrity of government information technology systems.

      The Library of Congress has blocked WikiLeaks from its computers as well as its wireless network.

      One unnamed defense contractor has reportedly gone a step further and blocked "employees from accessing any website, including news stories, with 'wikileaks' in the URL."

      "The first serious infowar is now engaged," reads a tweet by a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The field of battle is WikiLeaks."

      WikiLeaks is now relying on several European servers to stay live. Yet, Europe isn't universally friendly to the controversial site. In fact, the French government is looking for ways to prevent servers in its country from hosting WikiLeaks.

      What's being said about WikiLeaks and what's being done to WikiLeaks seems far more troubling than anything WikiLeaks has leaked.
      The United State is now practicing a form of censorship that we in this country chastise when it's practiced in places like China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, the old Soviet Union, or any other "state-run" media.
      Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame writes that he is "disgusted by Amazon's cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating its hosting of the Wikileaks.
      David Samuels of The Atlantic deplores the attacks on Julian Assange: "It is dispiriting and upsetting for anyone who cares about the American tradition of a free press to see Eric Holder, Hillary Clintonand Robert Gibbs turn into H-R Haldeman, John Erlichmanand John Dean… And American reporters, Pulitzer Prizes and all, should be ashamed for joining in the outraged chorus that defends a burgeoning secret world whose existence is a threat to democracy."
      At Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald says Joe Lieberman applying pressure to Amazon is nothing more than a page straight out of Beijing's playbook.
      Lieberman's spokeswoman said: "Sen. Lieberman hopes that the Amazon case will send the message to other companies that might host Wikileaks that it would be irresponsible to host the site." Greenwald writes:

      If the Tea Party movement and the Right generally were even minimally genuine in their ostensible beliefs, few things would trigger more intense objections than a political official trying to dictate to private actors which political content they should allow on the Internet (instead, you have Newt Gingrich demanding that Assange be declared an "enemy combatant" and Sarah Palin calling for his murder).

      Meanwhile, scorn from lawmakers and establishment media alike make their rounds, as in this MSNBC roundtable featuring Congresswoman Susan Molinari and Washington Post editor Jonathan Capehart.

      But NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen argues that the reason valuable sources seek out WikiLeaks as a conduit is because traditional media outlets have lost currency as a government watchdog:

      In the American case, one of the reasons is that the legitimacy of the press itself is in doubt in the minds of the leakers.  And there's good reason for that.  Because while we have what purports to be a "watchdog press," we also have -- laid out in front of us -- the clear record of the watchdog press'  failure to do what it says it can do, which is provide a check on power when it tries to conceal its deeds and its purpose. 

      Ironically, the Washington Post also reported that in those "parts of the world where the leaks have some of the greatest potential to sow controversy, they have barely caused a ripple. Authoritarian governments and tightly controlled media in China and across the Arab Middle East have suppressed virtually all mention of the documents, avoiding the public backlash that could result from such candid portrayals of their leaders' views."
      Isn't the United States government trying to employ the same kind of suppression?
     

      And why? Because diplomats from Hillary Clinton on down were embarrassed because they were caught engaging in high-school gossip, or passing along things any widely-read person would know, such as:

   1. The U-S military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;
   2. The State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;
   3. The State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch today about this: "The day Barack Obama Lied to me");
   4. The British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";
   5. There were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;
   6. "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;
   7. The U-S's own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;
   8. U-S and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and;
   9. Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U-N and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.

      And as Greenwald, notes, none of these stories were reported by the Washington Post, yet today, one of its editor's is practically calling Assange a traitor.
      Is the same Washington Post that broke the Watergate story? If the press is not going defend freedom of the press who will? And if the press is gone, who protects us from the evil empire. It appears today's mainstream journalists have sold their souls to the corporation.
      The U-S government is deflecting attention away from itself by proclaiming that Assange is "evil" and dangerous and that Americans are dumb enough to fall for this line. Sadly, they just might be right.
      We are allegedly an open society, and therefore should know what our diplomats and government are up to in our name, except for those few cases where National Security is really at stake (Calling Angela Merkel dull or Muammar Gaddafi a hound dog is hardly a matter of national security).,  It's both interesting and sad that the media, which long ago and far away was supposed to report on government to the governed, is leading the charge to silence the group that is doing its long-abandoned job... WikiLeaks.
      What's really interesting and ironic about all the demands to execute Assange for espionage and even (lol!) treason is that the same people making such calls were a few years ago waving the banner of "freedom of speech" at Muslims in defense of the cartoon perps who slandered Muhammad. The cartoon representations were both false and malicious.
      Now these same whackos are demanding to prosecute Assange because he has published information that is true and correct and whose greatest crime is that it has offended and embarrassed members of our government.
      Even more disturbing is the nagging notion singled out by Thomas Friedman in his NY Times column: The United States simply isn't the world power it once was " because of our twin addictions to Middle East oil and Chinese credit --and the WikiLeaks show just what crow we have to eat because of that."

      Think how different our conversations with Saudi Arabia would be if we were in the process of converting to electric cars powered by nuclear, wind, domestic natural gas and solar power? [We import $28 billion a month in Saudi oil]. We could tell them that if we detect one more dollar of Saudi money going to the Taliban then they can protect themselves from Iran.
      Think how different our conversations with China would be if we had had a different savings rate the past 30 years and China was not holding $900 billion in U.S.  Treasury securities — but was still dependent on the U.S. economy and technology. We would not be begging them to revalue their currency, and maybe our request that China prevent North Korea from shipping ballistic missile parts to Iran via Beijing airport (also in the cables) wouldn’t be rebuffed so brusquely.

      Instead, we're stuck because we have no leverage, no power. If you think our lawmakers have a difficult time admitting they've been caught engaging in trifles and gossip, imagine them having to face the real music that due to our own policies, we're not the country we once were, or could have been.
      No wonder out government is trying to crush WikiLeaks. God forbid we admit the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

Source from Examiner

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