Holder Needs A Democracy Lesson

The most famous of the "secrets" leaked by Bradley Manning, now Chelsea, was the helicopter gunship attack on a group of men including a Reuters camera crew.

Bradley Manning, with medals

Al Jazeera offices in Baghdad were attacked by American forces on more than one occasion, despite the organization (contrasted favorably as a news source by Hillary Clinton with the Mainstream Channels) having provided the US Military with the exact location of their offices.

Now the attacks on 1st Amendment rights of journalists are coming home to US soil, with the US Borders being used as the means interfering with Press freedom.  Full details here from FreePress.net, including a Petition to Attorney General Eric Holder, an official with a decidedly spotty record on civil liberties - 

"For the second week running, WNYC's On the Media has tried to find out why the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol detained one of its journalists for six hours. But so far, authorities have ignored their call for answers.

We can’t stand by while the government abuses journalists in this way. "Pressure, that's what you have to do,” former Rep. Lee Hamilton told On the Media. “You have to create pressure."

Tens of thousands have already joined our call to action. But we need you to raise the heat.

Push Attorney General Eric Holder to stop the harassment of journalists.

Thanks,

Josh

Journalists should be able to work without fear of detention or intimidation. But reporters can no longer take these rights for granted. Last month, we told you about government authorities harassing journalists in the U.K. We’ve since learned that the same kind of thing is happening right here in the U.S. Demand That Attorney General Eric Holder Stop the Harassment of Journalists. WNYC's On the Media just reported that one of its journalists, Sarah Abdurrahman, was detained with her family at the U.S. border in Niagara Falls for six hours without explanation.1 Government officials have detained journalist and filmmaker Laura Poitras more than 40 times at U.S. borders. They’ve interrogated her, seized her laptops and cameras for weeks at a time and denied her access to a lawyer.2 Photojournalist Duane Kerzic has been detained and had his laptop searched too, and now he’s part of a lawsuit filed by the National Press Photographers Association.4 It’s gotten so bad that last week actor and press freedom advocate John Cusack called on Holder to “guarantee the ... safe passage of journalists who have exercised their rights under the First Amendment.”3 We're working with Cusack to put pressure on Holder but we need you to help us deliver a message the attorney general won’t be able to ignore. This government intimidation has got to stop. And as the nation’s top law enforcement official, Holder needs to stop it. Tell Attorney General Holder to Ensure Safe Passage to Journalists. These scare tactics don’t just hurt journalists. Newly released documents reveal that the government has used border crossings to stop a whistleblower and thousands of other travelers, and has seized and examined these individuals' electronic devices without obtaining search warrants.5 Journalists can’t work under these kinds of conditions. We need to speak up and stop the intimidation now. Sign our letter and we’ll make sure Holder hears our message. Thanks for all that you do, Josh Stearns 1. Sarah Abdurrahman, "My Detainment Story or: How I learned to Stop Feeling Safe in My Own Country and Hate the Border Patrol," On the Media, Sept. 20, 2013: http://act.freepress.net/go/15196?t=8&akid=4456.9504174.P3r8GX 2. Peter Maass, "How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets," New York Times, Aug. 13, 2013: http://act.freepress.net/go/15194?t=10&akid=4456.9504174.P3r8GX 3. John Cusack, "Will Eric Holder Guarantee NSA Reporters’ First Amendment Rights?" Guardian, Sept. 18, 2013: http://act.freepress.net/go/15193?t=12&akid=4456.9504174.P3r8GX 4. Donald R. Winslow, "NPPA Joins Lawsuit Challenging Constitutionality of DHS Laptop Searches," National Press Photographers Association, Sept. 7, 2010: http://act.freepress.net/go/15197?t=14&akid=4456.9504174.P3r8GX 5. Susan Stellin, "The Border Is a Back Door for U.S. Device Searches," New York Times, Sept. 9, 2013: http://act.freepress.net/go/15195?t=16&akid=4456.9504174.P3r8GX

Free Press is a nonpartisan organization building a nationwide movement for media that serve the public interest. Learn more at www.freepress.net."

"Bradley Manning Has Done More for U.S. Security than SEAL Team 6"

Tom Dispatch.com proudly announces that it has won an award for “best political coverage” of the year.

And they celebrate with a righteously angry tirade against the fascists who run our foreign policy:

"Okay, give them this much: their bloodlust stops just short of the execution chamber door. The military prosecutors of the case against Bradley Manning, assumedly with the support of the Obama administration, have brought the virulent charge of “aiding the enemy” against the Army private who leaked state secrets. Yet they claim to have magnanimously taken the death penalty off the table. All they want to do is lock Manning up and throw away the key because, so they claim, he did nothing short of personally lend a hand to archfiend Osama bin Laden. This echoes the charge repeatedly made by top U.S. officials that he and WikiLeaks have “blood on their hands” for releasing a trove of military and State Department documents.

We’re talking about the very officials who planned and oversaw Washington’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the backlands of the planet and who have searched their own hands in vain for any signs of blood.  (None at all, they don’t hesitate to assure us.)  Among them are those, military and civilian, who set up our torture prisons at Guantanamo and in Afghanistan, are ultimately responsible for the perversions of Abu Ghraib, and oversaw kidnappings off the streets of global cities."

"... Given what we now know about the U.S. military’s unwillingness to pursue prosecutions of rape in its own ranks, its eagerness to pursue Manning to the edge of the grave should be considered striking."

This by way of an introduction to an exxccellent, highly persuasive essay by Chase Madar, entitled "How Dystopian Secrecy Contributes to Clueless Wars: Bradley Manning Has Done More for U.S. Security than SEAL Team 6"

Read it here: 

Video: Government "Secrets"

Bradley Manning is facing a military tribunal, a joke court which has already been seen to be interfered with by mysterious persons unknown, presumably from the "Intelligence Community".  His case has been publicly pre-judged months ago, by the alleged Constitutional Scholar and joke Socialist, President Obama.  He may face the death penalty, although the signs are that he will plead guilty to a lesser charge.

The crime he's alleged to have committed, is passing information from an Army computer to WikiLeaks.

(Many people believe that the reason Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is sequestered in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, resisting extradition to Sweden, is that the Obama administration is furious with the leaks he has made to the world's Press, of true information about how the Western powers behave in the Middle East.

The US Government have alleged that WikiLeaks' actions endangered their agents abroad, although WikiLeaks and the Newspapers they passed their information to, spent weeks vetting the material to ensure that no sensitive names were revealed.)

This Video shows the kind of information Bradley Manning revealed, and which the Government does not want our people to know:

Happy Memorial Day!

Alex Gibney's Film on Bradley

Jon Wiener's Preview of his radio show today announced: 

"Wed 4-5pm on KPFK 90.7FM (& streaming live at www.kpfk.org):
On June 4 Bradley Manning goes on trial, charged with espionage and “aiding the enemy,” for releasing to Wikileaks, and the New York Times and The Guardian, hundreds of thousands of classified files documenting widespread civilian casualties, torture, and corruption in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. 

Now an amazing new film explores the David and Goliath story of one man with a computer against the world’s most powerful nation: “We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks.”
We’ll speak with filmmaker ALEX GIBNEY—his other films include “Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room,” and  “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which won the Oscar for best feature documentary.
“We Steal Secrets” opens in LA (and New York) Friday May 24.  WATCH the trailer HERE.

The KPFK fund drive continues -- please call and pledge during the show, 818-985-5735 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 818-985-5735 FREE  end_of_the_skype_highlighting.

podcast info, audio archives & more at www.JonWiener.com."

Occupy, and The Democracy Project

There are sooooo many things to post about this week.  Apple ripping off the IRS, and therefore all of us, to the tune of billions of dollars....

Sen. Bernie Sanders actually doing something about it -

"Apple Inc. avoided paying billions of dollars in U.S. income taxes. A Senate investigation found the tech giant parked overseas about $102 billion of its $145 billion in cash. A subsidiary in Ireland that earned $22 billion in 2011 paid just $10 million in taxes, according to the report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

“It is a total scam,” Sen. Bernie Sanders told Ed Schultz on Tuesday. “It’s not just Apple. Virtually every major multi-national corporation has used these offshore tax havens.” Bernie has introduced legislation that would eliminate the tax breaks and generate $600 billion in revenue over a decade.Listen to Bernie talk about Apple on The Ed Show »
Read more about Bernie's legislation »"

Bradley Manning's "trial" at the hands of the very military whose crimes he's accused of exposing....

A Quote from a famous Israeli: 

“The test of democracy is freedom of criticism.”~ David Ben-Gurion

........ but for now I'll settle for a taste of this Review in the LA Times of Sunday, April 21st, in which "David Graeber looks at the Occupy movement, from the inside"

The reviewer, Ben Ehrenreich, isn't entirely satisfied with the book, by a well-known Anarchist theorist.   The Democracy Project, he says, "provides a rather hurried insider's view of the Occupy movement's beginnings and a far-too-cursory account of its collapse."

But he does give some memorable selections from what David Graeber has to say.

(Sadly, I guess it's necessary here to explain that "Anarchist" and "Anarchism" do not mean Chaos and Violence, as the establishment have told us ad pukeum.  Monarchy means "rule by one person", Oligarchy means "rule by a small group" - which is what many of us feel we live under at present - and An-Archy means no government, the idea that free people are quite responsible enough to run their own affairs, without being ordered around by an elite whom they cannot influence or control.)

"Just open a window or turn on the TV — the same old civilization is rotting all around us. Budget cuts, police shootings, endless and ever-broadening wars, the climate in full-scale, almost-end-times spasm, a Congress of hand puppets yelping on about the manufactured crisis of the moment, a president whose answer to every crisis is More of the Same. Analogous situations have, over the last four years, lighted the streets on fire in Britain, France, Spain, Ireland, Latvia, Italy, Greece, Chile, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Syria, to name a few."

"At the center of Graeber's project is an attempt to rescue the Occupy movement from the irrelevance to which most pundits assigned it. Graeber deftly diagnoses the corporate media-imposed "straitjacket on acceptable political discourse" that guarantees that raising certain questions — about, for instance, the plutocratic and frankly kleptocratic nature of a system in which government bows before a financial services industry whose main "service," he points out, is the creation of bottomless consumer debt — marks you as an extremist lunatic unfit to be heard on the air. `The result,' he writes, `is a mainstream ideology … which almost no one actually holds.'"

You can read the whole review here.

Ehrenreich also credits anthropologist David Graeber: "whose anarchist politics, scholarly virtuosity and long history of activism had already earned him a measure of stardom among left intellectuals, a celebrity that would grow exponentially with the publication of his monumental and often brilliant book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" in July 2011."