I’ve written regularly about the mainstream media’s love of being close to power. Ooh, look over there, Hillary in a red pantsuit! How charming. Sorry,… distracted by a very important news story. Deakin University’s Scott Burchill tackles the same issue, challenging corporate reporter’s desire to be players: To say that the WikiLeaks imbroglio has not…
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Mastercard, Visa and PayPal rather like illegal Zionist colonies
The huffing and puffing over alleged illegality by Wikileaks (nothing proven by a mile) compares badly to actual behaviour by many corporates in the Middle East. An important Crikey investigation: Visa, Mastercard and PayPal all enable donations to be made to US-registered groups funding illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank in defiance of international…
Don’t tell us that Australia is an honest broker in the Middle East
This is the not the behaviour of an ally; it’s the actions of a country utterly incapable of viewing the human rights of Arabs as equal to Israelis: The Israeli ambassador to Australia found Kevin Rudd to be “very pro-Israel” and senior Australian diplomats warned the former prime minister that his condemnation of Iran risked…
Telling Fox News that Assange’s Australian rights must be protected
Fox News broadcasts yet another person who says Julian Assange should be murdered. Nice work, Murdoch. Get Up!’s Brett Solomon injects some sanity:
What makes Assange tick from somebody who should know
Suelette Dreyfus collaborated with Julian Assange to write Underground, a 1997 book about hackers in Australia and across the world. She writes today in the Australian media about the motivations behind Wikileaks and gets inside the mind of Assange himself: If you want to improve the lot of the poorest, most oppressed people in the…
Clapton in Pyongyang?
Because music appreciation is the biggest issue facing North Korea: North Korea asked America to arrange an Eric Clapton concert in Pyongyang, saying that it could help to persuade Kim Jong-il to allow humanitarian aid into the country. A confidential cable dated 22 May 2007 from the US ambassador in Seoul to Washington reveals North…
This is what online civil disobedience looks like
Yesterday’s Guardian editorial tackles the first round of the new info war: In a cyber attack known as Operation Payback, a group of online activists called Anonymous targeted the websites of companies that had treated WikiLeaks like a bad smell. Visa, MasterCard, Paypal and Amazon have all had their websites, and in some cases their…
Scahill on why Washington and Obama are earning hatred around Islamic world
Leading US reporter Jeremy Scahill, testifying before the US House Judiciary Committee, discusses America’s secret wars in the Muslim world (something highlighted by recent Wikileaks revelations): My name is Jeremy Scahill. I am the National Security correspondent for The Nation magazine. I recently returned from a two-week unembedded reporting trip to Afghanistan. I would like…
US government doesn’t quite get the internet part 8622
The CIA, keeping the US safe: Looks like the CIA created a “honeypot” wikileaks mirror at wikileaks.psytek.net, presumably to see who is downloading the leaks—but they screwed up the anonymization. A quick Google reveals who’s behind psytek.net. Wonder what other mirrors they set up, but with better cloaking?
Ellsberg talks about a country that wants to kill truth-tellers
Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg on America’s toxic political culture: Well, as I listened to Attorney General Holder on your program just now, I realize that he’s in the same position of that Attorney General Mitchell was in 40 years ago with the Pentagon Papers when they came out. We have an act of free…