Wikileaks and the Power of Corporatism
As we witness the on-going drama of governments and conservative forces around the world trying to shut down the whistleblower site Wikileaks and imprison and silence its founder, Julian Assange, on very thin grounds of sexual assault (read the British newspaper The Daily Mail’s story on the Swedish police report on the allegations – they are beyond absurd), what we are really seeing is a pure moment of what occurs when the corporate state and corporate sector feel threatened by forces they cannot control.
They are panicking and reacting in a very predictable and draconian and even fascistic (dare I use the word) fashion. They are responding in such a heavy-handed manner even though only a tiny fraction of the 250,000 diplomatic documents in existence have been released so far. And they are more embarrassing to the US and other governments than actually causing much in the way of real damage. And they are probably reacting this way because of fears of what will emerge next, in particular given Assange’s threats to release internal documents from Wall Street, specifically Bank of America.
The retaliation against Wikileaks is stemming from  two sectors. First is the corporate state.  Clearly efforts by  powerful state forces are being levelled against Wikileaks by elements of the US government – probably through the National Security Agency (NSA) and Pentagon – designed to take down the Wikileaks website itself, forcing it to go offline for periods of time. There are also the efforts of the Obama administration and Swedish and British governments to arrest, imprison and eventually try Assange for a bevy of crimes, not just the sexual  assault charges. The US Department of Justice is working overtime scouring the legal statutes to find ways to justify having Assange  extradited to the US and tried and imprisoned for the rest of his life.
Then there  are the actions of the corporate sector to drive Wikileaks offline and deprive it of funding. PayPal and Amazon cut off  their services to WikiLeaks while most of the remaining venues through which it’s funded are also freezing out the organization – MasterCard, Visa, and a Swiss bank that WikiLeaks used to process donations. Expect this sort of indirect corporate censorship to continue.
Finally, there is the mass media. With the exception of the four media outlets the documents were released to – The Guardian in the UK, the New York Times, Le Monde in France and Der Spiegel in Germany – the mass media has either condemned the releases, or ignored their contents. Given the monopolized corporate ownership of the mainstream media, this response should come as no surprise.
What we are witnessing in the case of Wikileaks is the consequences of unchecked global corporatism.
What is positive about what’s happening is it reveals the importance of the Internet as a means to disseminate information and get around state and corporate censorship. And it’s heartening to see how many supporters there are of a free media and democracy given the support of Wikileaks is now garnering as a result of this persecution.
Wikigame is a set up to curtail internet freedom.
One of Wikileaks founder quit over the source of funding (about $5 million!!!) – a nifty number for so called hackers turned dissidents. It has been noted that Soros’ freedom vehicles was raising a similar amount of sum at that time Of course it is just a conjecture. Contrary to your assertions the media has given plenty of coverage to this set up, with the journos from national newspapers commending this guy for forcing their profession to fulfil their honourable duties and serve the public.
Check out Charlie Rose’s guests on or around Nov 30.
This admiration for a bohemian Julian Assange purportedly raised in a traveling circus (Anne hamilton byrne the ‘family’ cult has also been mentioned) is puzzling. Bear in mind he was the only one amongst the Nortel hackers who escaped jail sentence, and then he dropped off the public radar for a long period until resurfacing as the information revealer.
To understand this game, Watch what he does not say and Follow the money. JA is just a digital version of Daniel Ellsberg, who by the way recommends him.
For someone who is fighting for transparency apparently, is evasive and moves from location to location as easily as he shifts personalities.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/keeper-of-secrets-20100521-w230.html
Keeper of secrets
Looks like WikiLeaks supporters are fighting back, having taken down Mastercard’s website over its compliance with non-processing of payments:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/mastercard-anonymous/
“For someone who is fighting for transparency apparently, [he] is evasive”
People have the right to privacy. Democratic government’s don’t.
JA has not exposed anything that was not already known. Neither does he have any right to deceive and mislead already stressed out and weary disenfranchised pushed around public.
When our broadcast media takes pains to sound out the wikigame URL twice to viewers, you know they are not worried. Acutally, it means JA is in bed with them. Besides, considering the type of leaders JA attributes as model of ‘transparency’ , it is blatantly obvious his idealism is dark and twisted. Without a doubt, he is messed up.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2034040-1,00.html
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/12/07/18665978.php
Mr. Kirkland, I read through those links. The second one seems to be unsupported nonsense. For instance, it says “In an interview with the Time magazine around the same time, Assange praised Netanyahu as a hero of transparency and openness!”
This appears to be a reference to the interview in your first link. But Assange says nothing of the sort in that interview.
As to deceive and mislead, it takes an heroic spin effort to manage to claim the mass release of unexpurgated texts as deception. The problem some people have seems to be that US diplomats in Asia didn’t say things quite as convenient as we might like. But Assange has no control over that. He just released the bleedin’ cables. In any case, first of all the cables relating to Iran didn’t say quite what the mainstream media made them out to say, which again was out of Assange’s control:
http://www.counterpunch.org/porter12072010.html
“In fact, the cables show that most Gulf Arab regimes – including Saudi Arabia itself – have been seriously concerned about the consequences of a strike against Iran for their own security, in sharp contrast to Israel’s open advocacy of such a strike. They also show the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait expressing that concern with greater urgency in the past two years than previously.
Those facts were completely ignored, however, in the Times’ account. ”
And secondly I don’t know what anyone expected. Diplomats saying to their bosses, “Our nefarious plan to lie about Iran is showing success, master”? What the diplomatic cables show in general is sucking-up and groupthink. The messages American diplomats send to their bosses contain valuable information, but we can’t expect them to be an accurate, neutral representation of the actual situation wherever they are. Rather, they are going to be typical bureaucratic CYA and party line following, with a bit extra added because after all, we’re talking about diplomats.
I think US policy with respect to Iran is immoral, stupid and dangerous, and that Israel’s foreign and domestic policies in general are usually immoral, stupid and dangerous. But that Wikileaks released, among many others, cables which allowed slanted reporting to spin groupthinking cables about the opinions of the leaders of corrupt regimes as supporting those policies, is hardly a basis to turn on the people giving us the truth.
The bottom line is, Wikileaks was given the information, it is genuine, and they are giving it to us despite massive pressures brought to bear on them. Vilifying them is either an act of breathtaking self-sabotage or astroturf.
Julian Assange is a great man. He ownes a private company, due to property rights, and I being a conservative. This should not be an issue legally, or the perview of the nation at large. He was acting legally, and is a great business man.
In this fasicism, they have considered that private sector in the sphere of their interests, is the most effective, and useful tool, in the interest of the nation.
In this light of the facts, that if a private organisation is a function of national concern, the organiser/entrepanuer of the enterprise is responsible to the State.
Presidents get to say there “not pleased” about how a private company like wikileaks acted like any other media outlet, which get sensitive material, and publishes that material, as most and not out of line with other outlets just in scale.
However this fits with the US officials actions concerning the bailouts, and removal of Wogner at GM as CEO seems eerily famillar, and other areas they want to control or sense dissent in the private sector.
Maybe you will understand now, I a little better,
America today, is fascist, using the power of the big corperations with the rule of law. we have a politicals class and corpritist classes, harmonizing their interests.
Julian as far as I’m concerned was within his rights.
Just because it is not from AP bureau, you have dismissed it as unreported nonsense. I believe then you will be shocked that in contrast to recent STL report on CBC, the Russian magazine Odnako have come out with starkly different conclusion. Here is a report in English:
http://www.voltairenet.org/article167553.html
http://www.voltairenet.org/article167639.html
In the interview it is clear JA looks upon Israeli leader positively concerning transparency, for you to dismiss that is a gross omission. And oh the feelings were mutually reciprocated when Israeli leader announced early on there is nothing negative about Israel in wikileaks. That in itself is astounding. And I repeat there is nothing new about Arabs coercing US to take steps to halt Iran’s right to nuclear energy. I remember reading a open letter from a UAE diplomat in one of the prominent US dailies. So have the journos, politicians of broad spectrum, think tank employees have repeatedly cited concerns of their Arab allies urging US to halt Iran’s nuclear rights on the networks, I fail to see the novelty of cablegate. This is concurred by the mid east media personnel as well
http://www.ramikhouri.com/
The Sad Loss of National Dignity
If wikileaks has awakened many people it should be a turning point. Except that I do not share adulation for him, nor do I believe he is fighting for just society. Definitely for some wikileaks has brought forward information unknown otherwise. At the same time, this is a complicated world, things are not what they appear to be.
Just like Soros was frontman for those who brought down the Bank of England, so is Julian Assange/wikileaks posing for someone behind the NWO curtain, If interested explore reports by Daniel Estulin, Wayne Madsen etc, otherwise I have said enough.
Those links say nothing about Assange. The first two say nothing relating to Wikileaks at all, and while they are of interest they are in fact no surprise to me; I’ve been following the saga of the Hariri assassination and related matters. The third uses information from the cables to draw conclusions about the state of affairs in Arab countries; this shows Wikileaks’ usefulness rather than indicting it. And as to the interview, I’m sorry but you are seriously misusing Assange’s words. He calls Netanyahu “Not a naive man” and “a sophisticated politician”. These are hardly arguable statements. And he makes rhetorical use of the fact that Netanyahu said something that sounds like a description of Assange’s own position, in order to deflect accusations of naivete. Effectively, he’s saying “Look, even this cynical politician acknowledges that my work will have this effect. Therefore accusations that I’m naive in my beliefs are baseless”. This is not an endorsement of Netanyahu or of his politics.
It is true that so far, Israel has gotten off pretty lightly in all this–but so what? Not everything can be about anyone’s favourite subject. And after all, only a few hundred out of 250,000 have yet been released.
But all this quibbling takes us away from the key, core issue. Assange and the Wikileaks people are giving us information. The US government and many very large corporations (Visa, American Express, Swiss banks etc.) are uniting to try to crush them. There are two sides here: The side that is giving us the truth, and Big Brother. There is no room here for the more-sophisticated-than-thou conspiracy routine. This is not the time for spinning elaborate theories about why, although all the most powerful interest groups in the world are clearly harmed by this, it’s somehow still got to be something they’re doing. Fooling around with that stuff in this situation is just helping out the Joe Liebermans of the world.
“An FBI whistleblower has alerted that supporting WikiLeaks founder, Julius Assange and subsequently calling for revolution due to government cover-ups are intended results of a counterintelligence reverse tactic not in best interest of the public.
Bob Levin, FBI targeted whistleblower since 2000, knows sophisticated counterintelligence tactics designed to manipulate the unwitting.
Levin has lectured Special Agents in Training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. He has been requested to brief Counterterrorism Taskforce Agents relating to his skill sets and investigative techniques.
“My background was in codes and local, specialized state and federal law enforcement that ended in the FBI,†Levin wrote to this writer in an email.
Levin is now one of thousands of Targeted Individuals in the United States, battling to survive both a hidden form of CIA torture he knows to be part of the CIA Torture Paradigm inflicting citizens in U.S. neighborhoods plus ongoing Cointelpro tactics used in conjunction with the torure. The combined effect is to ruin lives and even assassinate…..
Levin’s email warned about “FBI, CIA and NSA counterintelligence reverse tactics used to bait passionate persons into an actionable trap.â€
The recent operation on Somali and Nicaraguan youths that psychologically herded them into acts of terrorism need be a warning to Americans about PSYOPS master-minded so that innocent people are roped into actions against their best interest according to Levin.
“I’ve trained agents to do this against criminal targets, but as we know, these agencies have increasingly been politicized like the Gestapo,†he stated.
Legal Restorative Justice Revolution
Answering the call to support WikiLeaks and revolt, Levin advocates a restorative revolution under lawful terms of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
This type of revolution “begins with a series of nation strikes and boycotts, followed by insistence that the USDOJ prosecute culpable congressional actors under FBI investigations as named by whistleblower patriots. .
Levin’s opinions can be viewed online within All Voices and Scribd.
According to Levin, when his Blackfile summary report is published, its pages of truth will dwarf present embarrassment of the government from Julian Assange and WikiLeaks’ released diplomatic communications.
http://www.examiner.com/human-rights-in-national/tortured-fbi-whistleblower-warns-wikileaks-fans
hey Kelsey,
sometimes a rose is a rose is a rose, and not a soros-israel-massmedia-corporate-NWO conspiracy to take over the world or justify changing internet censorship in the US, or whatever it is you’re concluding.
http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_the_pattern_behind_self_deception.html