So sorry authoritarian state, America still loves you

What’s a super-power to do when trying to keep good relationships with dictatorships and brutish men? Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the Middle East for meetings with Persian Gulf leaders, acknowledged Sunday that it would take years to undo the damage caused by the WikiLeaks revelations, likening her recent travels to an extended…

Will the brave reporters please stand up?

What a sad state of affairs. The vast bulk of American journalists show themselves to be cowards, simply unwilling to defend the importance of what Wikileaks is doing. Too afraid to seriously challenge the Washington line. Shameful: Not so long ago, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could count on American journalists to support his campaign to…

Assange and Mugabe aren’t sharing drinks at sunset

Oh the irony. A former Bush administration official – didn’t their democracy work bring so much happiness to the world? – slams Wikileaks and Julian Assange for allegedly helping Robert Mugabe cement his dictatorship in Zimbabwe by the release of some sensitive cables. Michael Gerson seems to misunderstand the process here. Wikileaks didn’t recklessly release…

Gaza isolation all about money?

Really: A key Israeli cargo crossing for goods entering the Gaza Strip was rife with corruption, according to a U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks on Thursday The June 14, 2006, cable, published Thursday by Norway’s Aftenposten daily, says companies told U.S. diplomats they were forced to pay hefty bribes to get goods into Gaza.…

Israel told US it would keep Gaza on brink of collapse

The Middle East’s Only Democracy Inc: Israel told U.S. officials in 2008 it would keep Gaza’s economy “on the brink of collapse” while avoiding a humanitarian crisis, according to U.S. diplomatic cables published by a Norwegian daily on Wednesday. Three cables cited by the Aftenposten newspaper, which has said it has all 250,000 U.S. cables…

The philosophy behind Openleaks

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, once of Wikileaks and now working on the OpenLeaks project, spoke last last year about his plans and how to bring truly transparent information: Here’s a rough transcript. Extract: There’s project staff that has to manage all of this, that has to take care of all the servers. There’s the whole public that…

Ahmadinejad as the moderate

Really: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sought some kind of nuclear fuel swap deal more than a year ago, but faced internal pressures from hard-liners who viewed it as a “virtual defeat,” according to US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks. The report, available on the WikiLeaks website Tuesday, also suggested Iran trusted the United States more…

US: $10k for killed Iraqi civilians

Victor’s justice and an insight into the occupier’s attitude towards “inconveniences” (aka murdered Iraqi civilians courtesy of Blackwater): Just how much is an Iraqi life worth? I don’t know but, in the aftermath of the killing of 17 Iraqi civilians by Blackwater employees at Nisoor Square in September 2007, apparently Iraq and the United States,…

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