Wikileaks and Cablegate

Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, because it has little indeed to contribute to that change of the world and of circumstances which is among the most legitimate political activities. Only when a community has embarked upon organized lying on principle, and not only with respect to particulars, can truthfulness as such, unsupported by the distorting forces of power and interest, become a political factor of the first order. Where everybody lies abut everything of importance, the truthteller, whether he knows it or not, has begun to act; he, too, has engaged in political business, for, in the unlikely event that he survives, he has made a start toward changing the world. — Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics", in Between Past and Future

Britain threatens to storm the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to arrest Julian Assange

Wikileaks

A radical new development in the fight against censorship emerged in 2006. Wikileaks allows whistleblowers to upload documents which may prove embarrassing to governments and corporations without risk of harrassment.

Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations.

Cablegate

On November 28, 2010, Wikileaks began releasing the first of 250,000 secret, confidential and NOFORN ('not to be shown to foreigners') cables sent between the U.S. State Department and numerous U.S. embassies around the world, cables which, in the words of Israel Shamir, "throw a bright light upon the murky policies of the American Imperium, on their methods of collecting information, of delivering orders, of subverting politicians and robbing nations."

Predictably, the U.S. State Department condemned the release, and there have been attempts to block the Wikileaks Cablegate website. An advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has even called openly in a TV interview for Assange's assassination. Acting in her role as U.S. puppet the Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has declared WikiLeaks to be "acting illegally" — without, however, saying which law in which country has been broken (and Julian Assange is rightly considering suing her for slander).

It was the Zionist Senator Joe Lieberman who leaned on Amazon to ban Wikileaks from its servers. And he also leaned on Tableau Software to prevent Wikileaks using its visualization software to display some things graphically. It's so amusing to see people like Lieberman and Hillary Clinton (who "waxed lyrical in a speech in January about an Internet free of government interference") squirming in the light of the Wikileaks revelations. They show no reluctance to invade the privacy of ordinary people but these hypocrites complain loudly when the tables are turned. And note that people such as Lieberman and Clinton have a right to privacy only as ordinary people, not when they are acting as the official (elected or appointed) representatives of the citizens who elected the government of which they are part.

BBC, 2010-12-03: Domain name provider forces Wikileaks offline
"The website of whistle-blowing organisation Wikileaks has been shut down
by the company [EveryDNS.net] providing it with domain name services."

The Wikileaks and Cablegate websites can still be accessed via several IP addresses, as given at Wikileaks Mirrors (the IP addresses for Cablegate are: 91.194.60.90, 91.194.60.112 and 204.236.131.131). If that URL goes down also then that page can be accessed via: http://87.102.255.157 For a complete list of mirrors see Cryptome's page.

Support for Assange

We protest at the attacks on WikiLeaks and, in particular, on Julian Assange. The leaks have assisted democracy in revealing the real views of our governments over a range of issues which have been kept secret and are now irreversibly in the public domain. All we knew about the mass killing, torture and corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan has been confirmed. The world's leaders can no longer hide the truth by simply lying to the public. The lies have been exposed. The actions of major corporations such as Amazon, the Swiss banks and the credit card companies in hindering WikiLeaks are shameful, bowing to US government pressure. The US government and its allies, and their friends in the media, have built up a campaign against Assange which now sees him in prison facing extradition on dubious charges, with the presumed eventual aim of ensuring his extradition to the US. We demand his immediate release, the dropping of all charges, and an end to the censorship of WikiLeaks.  —  Letter to The Guardian (UK), 2010-12-10, from John Pilger and 17 others

Clearly, the world will never be the same. Now's the time for all ordinary people to say "Fuck you!" to the American Imperium and to the corporate capitalist global elite (with the U.S. government as its compliant tool) — and none too soon. And also to all the puppet governments (Sweden, Australia, Canada and others) upon which the American Imperium depends; without their active support it cannot last long.

Further reading:

Added from June 2011 onward:

Britain threatens to storm the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to arrest Julian Assange

There are reports that "Mr Assange was offered [Australian] consular assistance, but he thanked them and declined the offer." Consular assistance normally means renewal of a passport and (if an Australian is arrested overseas) recommendation of a lawyer. But Australian passports are valid for ten years, so it is unlikely that Julian Assange's Australian passport will expire anytime soon. And Assange has no need of a recommendation of a lawyer since the Wikileaks legal team is already being headed by the renowned Spanish human rights investigator Baltasar Garzon (who indicted the Argentinian torturer Augusto Pinochet). So what exactly does 'consular assistance' mean in this case? It certainly does not mean support from Assange's home government in the form of a denunciation of threats by prominent U.S. citizens for his assassination, and it does not mean the Australian government's requesting the Swedish government to provide assurance that Assange will not be handed over to the U.S. if he sets foot in Sweden. It's very likely that that is exactly what would happen, exposing Assange to the likelihood of torture and the possibility of execution. Shame on the Australian government!

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