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The Truth Will Always Win
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.
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266 Comments so far
Show Allbrezinski is telling you that wikileaks was probably manipulated by israelis to embarrass obama?
now that is one fancy spin with multiple twists, even from Brezinski. he must be so proud that he came up with that pretzel and some are actually lapping that shit up.
Cracks in the wilderness of mirrors
By Pepe Escobar
The temptation to see WikiLeaks as a neo-Baudelairean artificial paradise - the marriage of libertarian anarchism and cyber-knowledge - could not be more seductive. Now no more than 40 people are helping founder Julian Assange, plus 800 from the outside.
All this with a 200,000 euro (US$264,000) annual budget - and a nomad home base. WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson maintains that this is still a "gateway for whistleblowers", where sources are unidentified and even unknown. You can get a whistleblower to show the emperor has no clothes with just 200,000 euros - just as someone, be him Osama bin Laden or not, could usher the real "new world order" in on 9/11 with $500,000.
{The book of sand}
Let's examine Assange's crime. Here he is, in his own words, in "State and Terrorist Conspiracies": "To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neo-corporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough to carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally we must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action."
So Assange understands WikiLeaks as an anti-virus that should guide our navigation across the distortion of political language. If language is a virus from outer space, as William Naked Lunch Burroughs put it, WikiLeaks should be the antidote. Assange basically believes that the (cumulative) revelation of secrets will lead to the production of no future secrets. It's an anarchic/romantic/utopian vision.
It's vital to remember that Assange configures the US essentially as a huge authoritarian conspiracy. American political activist Noam Chomsky would say the same thing (and they wouldn't want to arrest him for it). The difference is that Assange deploys a combat strategy: he aims to corrode the ability of the system to conspire. That's where the metaphor of the computer network fits in. Assange wants to fight the power of the system, treating it as a computer choking in the desert sands. Were he alive, it would be smashing to see the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges penning a short story about this.
On top of writing his own "Book of Sand", Assange is also counter-attacking the Pentagon's counter-insurgency doctrine. He's not in "tracking-the-Taliban-and taking-them-out" mode. This is just a detail. If the conspiracy is an electronic network - let's say, the (foreign policy) Matrix - what he wants is to strike at its cognitive ability by debasing the quality of the information.
Here intervenes another crucial element. The ability of the conspiracy to deceive everyone through massive propaganda is equivalent to the conspiracy's penchant for deceiving itself through its own propaganda.
That's how we get to the Assange strategy of deploying a tsunami of leaks as a key actor/vector in the informational landscape. And that takes us to another crucial point: it doesn't matter whether these leaks are new, gossip or wishful thinking (as long as they are authentic). The - very ambitious - mother idea is to undermine the system of information and thus "force the computer to crash", making the conspiracy turn against itself in self-defense. WikiLeaks believes we can only destroy a conspiracy by rendering it hallucinatory and paranoid in relation to itself.
All this also takes us farther into crucial territory. The bulk of the cablegate-inspired global-talk-show tsunami has totally missed the point. Once again, it doesn't matter that most cables are gossip - trashy tabloid stuff. See it as Assange's way of illustrating how the conspiracy works. He is not interested in journalistic scoops (as much as his media partners, from the Guardian to Der Spiegel may be); what he wants is to strangle the nodes that make the conspiracy possible - to render the system "dumb and dumber".
No doubt cablegate shows how the US State Department seems to be in dumb-and-dumber territory - not even creative enough to do their own versions of "pimp my cable". This is already an extraordinary victory for an organization different from anything we have seen so far, which is doing things that journalists do or should be doing, and then some. And there will be more, on a major bank's secrets (probably Bank of America), on China's secrets, on Russia's secrets.
(To be continued in the next post just below this one)
Thanks for sharing. Intelligent, informative info.
Wikileaks and other groups that report the truth give me hope that humanity has not been completely blinded. 10 yrs of my life looking in at war, 10 yrs of propaganda, but I still saw the truth. Many people of my generation do not care why they are joining or what they are fighting for or who exactly. The last 5 years I have seen several of my friends go and come back not the same as when they left. I still know people leaving one is in Afghanistan right now, I may not be close to them but I cringe at the thought of what could happen to them for a LIE. Modern colonialism to exploit two countries for their natural resources. But hey I don't blame them for choosing to go because hey war is on tv 24/7. The only history is war history and at schools there were more military recruiters than college ones, preying on minorities and low income kids filling them with half truths and promises they know wont happen. The military is good in that it can teach people skills they would of never received on their own but their skills should not be wasted... I do not want to see my generation destroyed by the military industry, the constant propaganda of the army with videogames, and I hope my generation will wake up as a whole as we now face greater threats to the world then ever before as the human race faces climate change and plutocracy control of the world. I will fight for what is true so that others may understand that the fight for the world has just begun.
The Australian government seems bent on co-operating with the US to persecute Assange.
Is there a realistic option of a campaign to boycott Australian goods and products till the economic squeeze removes the present PM????
A few moments ago Kevin Rudd spoke to the issue and asserted that the US government is responsible for the leaks as they did not provide adequate security for their cables. As former Labor Prime Minister and currently Foreign Minister in the governmnet headed by Julia Gillard, Mr. Rudd stated that as an Australian citizen Mr. Assange is entitled to the protections and assistance of the Australian government. Mr. Rudd, unlike his boss the Prime Minister, seems to remember what a labor party is all about and who and what are the historic rivals to progress and freedom. Mr. Rudd stands alone among world leaders as a defender of free speech. We should support his efforts and his and Julian's courage. There are many office holders in the supposed 'free world' that ought to be ashamed of themselves if only they weren't so damned shameless and spineless.
WHAT A SHILL ! You are a phony assange ! And the moron`s who buy this jerk`s B.S are...well, let`s say naive. Ask him where he get`s his financial backing. I`ll give you a hint...it`s a mythical (illegal)country in the mid-east. enough said. Go back to your butt kissing sheeple !
Pretty lonely out there, ay?
How many Nazi disino agents does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
10, one to screw in the light bulb and 9 to denounce THE GLOBAL JEWISH CONSPIRACY for for using their MOSSAD orbital mind control rays for burning out the light bulb in the first place. Thanks JohnDixon for bringing some humor to my day.
Now I dislike Zionist crimes in Palestine by the *state* of Israel as much as the next lefty, but tired Nazi blame the Jews for everything rhetoric is just that tired.
All our protests against the Iraq invasion, before and after it started, were ignored by the U.S. press. The Grandma in her 90's who walked to Maine to protest was ignored. Letters and social justice lobbies were ignored. Even our election of Barach Obama has been largely in vain.
So thank you Julian for finally finding a way!
From all this data did you find even one thing in it that will make anyone do anything about even one issue?
Everything I have seen is just typical diplomatic BS that goes on daily in every country and has for 2000 years. You can get the same embarrassing notes from England's ambassador to France in 1300. I just don't see the reason for outrage in the data you have released.
Was it worth it? Good luck of course though. The "rape" charges are just crap. You'll beat them no doubt.
As of this morning there were NO legal Charges against Assange...just accusations. Anyone can be accused of anything. How many cases of smears and false accusations have been made by the USA government.
Police arrest and incarcerate people daily then lie about it.
That is what Governments and Police do best. Filling quotas is more important. Protecting the people is secondary:
The fact that the Main Stream Media is running this story worries me the most.
Is it just a prelude to Internet Censors? I to fear that it is. But the quality of the online Video games will just get better. Wham pau boom slice.
Makes you a good Warrior and a liar to. Virtual dee, virtual dumb!
Dear Mr Assange
Firstly - congratulations! You are creating change, and let's hope it goes in the right direction.
Just a few comments though - firstly, there is no such thing as just wars, saying so puts you in the same light as those who you currently profess to want to expose - the USA would say Iraq was a just cause, using the war word is just not politically correct.
Would you say Hiroshima or Nagsaki were just wars? There are no winners in wars, only losers, (normally the innoncent civillian bystander), which you have seen for yourself. I feel qualified to say this as I am a survivor of war myself.
Also - The media helps keep governments honest? Really? Doesn't the media work for governments? Look at how much news is censored - even as I write this....
War has always had hard truths - all you need to do is read Roman history - so exposing the barbaric behaviour of the US Empire is nothing new really....
Regarding Sarah Palin - is she really a threat? This woman does not even know which Korean ally is working with her own country - in a TV interview recently, she claimed that the US must protect its Northern Korean Ally.....mmmmm....
Are you really naive enough to think the Australian government gives a toss about you? You have committed felons on your own patch after all....
"We are the underdogs" = a good old Australian saying....
Perhaps defending yourself in Sweden against the trupped up charges against you might give you a higher level of respect as well - if you have nothing to hide, then you will be able to stand your ground....
I think your actions are admirable Mr Assange, but clever revolutionaries use, and choose their words carefully.....
All the best to you.