My following article appears on ABC Unleashed today: The rolling revelations of the WikiLeaks US embassy cables will continue for months but equally interesting is the reaction of the global media. Many in the British media establishment, not given advance look at the documents, fumed against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and repeated government spin that…
Wikileaks
Wikileaks is one of the biggest and most important stories in the world, challenging governments and journalists alike. I’ve been writing extensively about the group since 2006, featured an exclusive interview in 2008 with founder Julian Assange and examined the myriad of issues around the website. Assange himself asked me in the early days whether I wanted to be on the group’s board to vet incoming leaks and determine their veracity before publishing. I agreed but unfortunately this never eventuated.
Wikileaks unloads on the vestiges of our faux democracy
The UK Guardian is doing wonderful work this week, publishing a litany of information over the Wikileaks dump. Every day brings huge new revelations, leaving so many in the mainstream media simply ignoring the best bits (hello ABC Radio’s AM today, utterly shunning anything about the issues). One: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wanted to expose…
Amazon crushes free speech and we’re watching
This is a disgrace and shows the utterly spinelessness of some in corporate America. We will not forget: The United States struck its first blow against WikiLeaks after Amazon.com pulled the plug on hosting the whistleblowing website in an apparent reaction to heavy political pressure. The main website and a sub-site devoted to the diplomatic…
Colombo starts to feel heat over killings of Tamils
Wow. What a Guardian headline: “WikiLeaks cables: ‘Sri Lankan president responsible for massacre of Tamils’”: American diplomats believed that the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, bore responsibility for a massacre last year that is the subject of a UN war crimes inquiry, according to a leaked US cable. Lawyers for Tamil activists in Britain are…
All those private lobbyists in DC wondering if their money will come this month
Feel the fear as the political elites scramble for cover. The poor dears, having to find ways to defend behaviour by their well-paying clients: Much has been written about the State Department’s intensive effort to deal with the release of secret diplomatic cables by the website WikiLeaks, but there is also a separate, massive effort…
Sarkozy, like Gillard, Cameron et al, long to look into the eyes of US President
Just what the world needs; another Western leader desperate to be loved by America: President Nicolas Sarkozy is an unusually solid French friend of America. He is also a “mercurial” man operating in “a zone of monarch-like impunity” surrounded by advisers often too fearful to give honest counsel, according to leaked cables from the United…
How dare you look into our boys doing bad things, says US
Here are just two examples of Washington pressuring nations not to pursue investigations into alleged human rights abuses committed by the US post 9/11. Real democracy in action. One: US officials tried to influence Spanish prosecutors and government officials to head off court investigations into Guantánamo Bay torture allegations, secret CIA “extraordinary rendition” flights and…
Chomsky: Wikileaks cable show US contempt for world
Noam Chomsky on the Wikileaks cables: One of the major reasons for government secrecy is to protect the government from its own population. … So Hillary Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu surely know of the careful polls of Arab public opinion. The Brookings Institute just a few months ago released extensive polls of what Arabs think…
US visiting refugee camps to further its oh so noble goals
The fusing of aid and military actions is a worrying development that threatens the independence of truly independent NGOs (and the US military isn’t part of this, sorry Barack): A US military plan to survey refugee camps and aid agencies on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, possibly to obtain targeting information for air strikes, sparked alarm among…