[PAA-Discuss] FW: Wikileaks - Julian Assange - "The Truth Will Always Win" and War.Wikileaks.Protest: Why New Evidence Demands End to Wars

[Lee Loe]

 2 excellent articles. Lee/Mom/Grandma Lee/Cuz

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From: Portside Moderator [mailto:moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG] 
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Subject: Wikileaks - Julian Assange - "The Truth Will Always Win" and
War.Wikileaks.Protest: Why New Evidence Demands End to Wars

Wikileaks - Julian Assange - "The Truth Will Always Win" and
War.Wikileaks.Protest: Why New Evidence Demands End to Wars

1. The Truth Will Always Win by Julian Assange
   (The Australian)
2. War.Wikileaks.Protest: Why New Evidence Demands End to 
   Wars by Medea Benjamin, Leslie Cagan, Tim Carpenter, Gael
   Murphy, Cindy Sheehan, David Swanson, Debra Sweet
   (Progressive Democrats of America)

==========

The Truth Will Always Win

by Julian Assange

The Australian
December 7, 2010

http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/mediadiary/index.php/australianmedia/
comments/julian1/

In 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The
News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable
that truth will always win."

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's expose that
Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British
commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but
Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination
of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that
need to be made public.

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds
bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted
if not watched carefully.
The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the
Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag
the media from reporting the truth.

These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core
values. The idea, conceived in Australia , was to use internet technologies
in new ways to report the truth.

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work
with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is
true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click
online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge
for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that
media. The media helps keep government honest.
WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and
broken stories about corporate corruption.

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not.
Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is
nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars,
then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the
line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the
people will decide whether to support it.

If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, any of the US embassy
cables or any of the stories about the things WikiLeaks has reported,
consider how important it is for all media to be able to report these things
freely.

WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media
outlets, including Britain `s The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in
Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.

Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has
copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and
its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an
Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in
the US for me to be "taken out" by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I
should be "hunted down like Osama bin Laden", a Republican bill sits before
the US Senate seeking to have me declared a "transnational threat" and
disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister's office
has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American
blogger has called for my 20-year- old son, here in Australia, to be
kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.

And Australians should observe with no pride the disgraceful pandering to
these sentiments by Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations.
That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and
large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.

We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the
messenger because it doesn't want the truth revealed, including information
about its own diplomatic and political dealings.

Has there been any response from the Australian government to the numerous
public threats of violence against me and other WikiLeaks personnel? One
might have thought an Australian prime minister would be defending her
citizens against such things, but there have only been wholly
unsubstantiated claims of illegality. The Prime Minister and especially the
Attorney-General are meant to carry out their duties with dignity and above
the fray. Rest assured, these two mean to save their own skins. They will
not.

Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US
agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with the
State Department: "You'll risk lives! National security! You'll endanger
troops!" Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks
publishes. It can't be both. Which is it?

It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history.
During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person,
as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed.
But the US , with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in
the past few months alone.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress
that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by
the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence
the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan . NATO
in Kabul told CNN it couldn't find a single person who needed protecting.
The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or
sources have been hurt by anything we have published.

But our publications have been far from unimportant. The US diplomatic
cables reveal some startling facts:

The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information
from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris
scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation
of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be
targeted, too.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US Officials in Jordan and Bahrain
want Iran `s nuclear program stopped by any means available.

Britain's Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect "US interests".

Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept from
parliament.

The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees
from Guantanamo Bay . Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President
only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered
millions of dollars to accept detainees.

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court
said "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in
government". The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need
to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

[Julian Assange is the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.]

==========

War.Wikileaks.Protest: Why New Evidence Demands End to Wars

by Medea Benjamin, Leslie Cagan, Tim Carpenter, Gael Murphy, Cindy Sheehan,
David Swanson, Debra Sweet Progressive Democrats of America 

December 2, 2010

http://www.pdamerica.org/articles/alliances/2010-12-02-02-54-52-alliances.ph
p

With Wikileaks Revelations, Peace Community Redoubles Demand for End to Wars
and Voices Support for Whistleblowers

While only a tiny fraction of the U.S. diplomatic cables scheduled for
publication by Wikileaks have thus far been made available, some conclusions
can already be drawn. These cables and the Iraq and Afghan War Diaries
provide an opportunity for Americans to see our government for what it is.

Our government is seen here as controlling a global military and espionage
empire that impacts every region of the globe and deceives its own
population. Secrecy, spying, and hostility have infected our entire
government, turning the diplomatic corps into an arm of the CIA and the
military, just as the civilian efforts in Afghanistan are described by
Richard Holbrooke, who heads them up, as "support for the military." Secret
war planning, secret wars, and lies about wars have become routine. The
United States is secretly and illegally engaged in a war in Yemen and has
persuaded that nation's government to lie about it. The United States has
supported a coup in Honduras and lied about it.

We have long known that the war on terrorism was increasing, rather than
diminishing, terrorism. These leaks show Saudi Arabia to be the greatest
sponsor of terrorism, and show that nation's dictator, King Abdullah, to be
very close to our own government in its treatment of prisoners. He has urged
the United States to implant microchips in prisoners released from
Guantanamo. And he has urged the United States to illegally and aggressively
attack Iran. Congress should immediately block what would be the largest
weapons sale in U.S. history, selling this country $60 billion in weapons.
And Congress should drop any idea of "updating" the 2001 Authorization to
Use Military Force to permit presidents to unconstitutionally launch more
wars. We see what sort of wars our allies urge on our presidents.

We learn that while dictators urge war, other branches of the same
governments, the people, and the evidence weigh against it. We learn from a
cable from last February that Russia has refuted U.S. claims that Iran has
missiles that could target Europe. We learn from September 2009 that the
United States and Britain planned to pressure Yukiya Amano, the then
incoming head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to produce reports
suggesting Iranian nuclear developments, whether or not merited by the
facts, and that National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Jones proposed the
propaganda strategy of baselessly tying Iran's nuclear program to North
Korea's.

Much of the pressure for war appears to come from within the United States,
whose representatives treat the entire world as a hostile enemy to be spied
on, lied to, and exploited. The secrecy that permits this behavior must be
broken if the United States' approach to the world is to change. Those who
have helped to fulfill President Obama's campaign promise of transparency
must be protected from his vengeance, while those who have abused positions
of diplomatic trust to advance agendas of espionage and war planning must be
held accountable.

While other countries may offer residency and protection to Wikileaks'
Julian Assange, it is the United States that has most benefitted from his
work.
We encourage U.S. cities to offer him sanctuary.

Our Department of Justice has granted immunity for aggressive war,
kidnapping, torture, assassination, and warrantless spying, while pursuing
the criminal prosecution of Bradley Manning for allegedly leaking materials
to Wikileaks. Were our government to indict Assange or support the
extradition or rendition of Assange from anywhere in the world to Sweden,
while maintaining that his work and not the Pentagon's has endangered us,
our nation's moral standing would reach a new low.

Our government should cease any actions it is taking to prosecute Julian
Assange for absurd criminal charges, to pressure Sweden to do so, or to
sabotage Wikileaks'
servers. Coverups of leaks have a history in Washington of backfiring in the
form of larger leaks and scandals.
Our State Department should focus on diplomacy and mutually beneficial
partnerships with the world community.

The undersigned express our gratitude to those doing the job a
representative government and an independent media are each supposed to do.
We demand an end to all overt and covert wars, a ban on the use of State
Department employees and contractors in spying or warfare, and a full
investigation of the facts revealed in the Wikileaks cables.

We support the protest of our current wars planned for December 16th, 10
a.m., at the White House.

Signed,

Medea Benjamin, Leslie Cagan, Tim Carpenter, Gael Murphy, Cindy Sheehan,
David Swanson, Debra Sweet, Ann Wright, Kevin Zeese

==========

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