All these attacks on Wikileaks remind me of what I saw about eight years ago, after the Bush administration started its "the French won't join us because they're cowards" campaign (apparently relying on its followers' completely forgetting, or never having learned, that without the aid of the French fleet, the colonial American army would almost certainly never have defeated the British forces -- not to mention that little Statue of Liberty centennial gift).

In a local grocery store, the signs for French cheeses in the gourmet section were defaced with derogatory graffiti. That they were allowed to remain indicates that the store management at least agreed with -- or perhaps, committed -- the graffiti.

(But if the store management wanted to discourage purchases of French products, why didn't they just stop importing them to sell? Perhaps store management and their chain's management disagreed.)

I bought a wedge of imported Brie every week for two years in response. (Perhaps the store's reverse psychology worked?)

- - - -

[QUOTE=only_human;239436]Might you actually be thinking about this case?[/QUOTE]Probably either you're right or else I've conflated this with a somewhat-similar local episode.

[QUOTE=cheesehead;240894]Probably either you're right or else I've conflated this with a somewhat-similar local episode.[/QUOTE]

Now you're talking my language Richard.

I do believe this excellent post was missed. Mish says it like it is. I find myself disagreeing very often with his cures for the economy - though not what ails it - but I usually find myself agreeing with his take on politics and civil liberties.

[URL]http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazon-drops-wikileaks-on-request-of.html[/URL]

[QUOTE]The response from the administration is not to crack down on abuses but rather to provide new ways of ignoring abuses.

Just ask yourself, has anyone outside of Bernie Madoff ever been prosecuted, fired, or even reprimanded over fraud, torture, kickbacks, or anything else? Here's the bonus-point followup question: How many times did the SEC fail to act on information that proved Bernie Madoff was a crook?
[/QUOTE][QUOTE] If people have every right to ask questions, how the hell can questions be asked if the US government classifies everything it does not want anyone to know?

The US has no interest in discussing waterboarding, torture, the killing of innocent civilians with our allies or anyone else. The US wants to and is going to do everything it can to suppress that information.

If WikiLeaks has damaging information about Bank of America, we should all want to see it. We should all stand up for the rights to make that data public, not sweep it under the rug.

We do not have a Department of Homeland Security, we have a Department of Homeland Insecurity putting on a pathetic parade of pomp with full body scanners and pat downs that will not do a damn thing.

[B]Why We Have Leaks[/B]

No one has bothered to tackle the question why we have security problems and leaks.

I will tell you why: The US has troops in 140 countries around the world, we arrogantly go where we have no vested interest going, we support corrupt regimes when it suits our purposes, we follow the asinine creed "the enemy of our enemy is our friend", and we believe we - and we alone - act as the moral authority to be the world's policeman.

When you do that you make enemies. When you make enemies you create security problems.

Instead of addressing WHY we make enemies, we setup sham terrorist organizations like the Department of Homeland Security whose efforts make us less secure.

[B]Running List of Needed Criminal Investigations[/B]

Instead of addressing fundamental problems we want to stop leaks.

I will tell you how to stop leaks: Don't do stupid things! Stop trying to be the world's policeman. Prosecute fraud.[/QUOTE]

US Tries to Build Case for Conspiracy by WikiLeaks
 

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/world/16wiki.html?ref=world]U.S. Tries to Build Case for Conspiracy by WikiLeaks[/url]: [i]Federal prosecutors, seeking to build a case against the WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange for his role in a huge dissemination of classified government documents, are looking for evidence of any collusion in his early contacts with an Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information.[/i]
[quote]Justice Department officials are trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped the analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did so, they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.

Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.

Adrian Lamo, an ex-hacker in whom Private Manning confided and who eventually turned him in, said Private Manning detailed those interactions in instant-message conversations with him.

He said the special server’s purpose was to allow Private Manning’s submissions to “be bumped to the top of the queue for review.” By Mr. Lamo’s account, Private Manning bragged about this “as evidence of his status as the high-profile source for WikiLeaks.”

Wired magazine has published excerpts from logs of online chats between Mr. Lamo and Private Manning. But the sections in which Private Manning is said to detail contacts with Mr. Assange are not among them. Mr. Lamo described them from memory in an interview with The Times, but he said he could not provide the full chat transcript because the F.B.I. had taken his hard drive, on which it was saved.
[b]
Since WikiLeaks began making public large caches of classified United States government documents this year, Justice Department officials have been struggling to come up with a way to charge Mr. Assange with a crime. Among other things, they have studied several statutes that criminalize the dissemination of restricted information under certain circumstances, including the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.

But while prosecutors have used such laws to go after leakers and hackers, they have never successfully prosecuted recipients of leaked information for passing it on to others — an activity that can fall under the First Amendment’s strong protections of speech and press freedoms.
[/b]
Last week, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said he had just authorized investigators to take “significant” steps, declining to specify them. This week, one of Mr. Assange’s lawyers in Britain said they had “heard from Swedish authorities there has been a secretly impaneled grand jury” in northern Virginia. [/quote]
[i]My Comment:[/i] Note that this is the same Justice Department which has not seen fit to build a single serious case in the little matter of "the largest financial fraud in human history". These f*ckers on Wall Street, at the ratings agencies and who ran the mortgage-issuance-to-anyone-who-can-fog-a-mirror mills are nothing less than financial terrorists, who have done far more harm to the U.S. than al Qaeda ever did. (And I don`t just mean financial and economic harm - how many lives were shortened among the tens of millions of people who lost their jobs, saw a loved one do so, and/or are beset by absolutely crushing levels of mortgage and other debt.) Not only are those crooks not being prosecuted and jailed, they are enjoying record bonuses at taxpayer expense. The staggering magnitude of the hypocrisy here makes me sick.

111

From the Australian newspaper [i]The Age[/i] we find via leaked cable just how concerned the U.S. is about its various allies around the world when it comes to "doing their share" and continually ramping up their military spending:

[url=http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/THE-DAILY-CHART-Americas-misdirected-missile-pd20101214-C4V7F?OpenDocument]THE DAILY CHART: America's misdirected missile[/url]
[quote]The latest WikiLeaks scoop for [i]The Age[/i] is a cable from the United States embassy in Canberra expressing concern to Washington about Australia's ability to meet its purchases of military equipment. Australia's defence budget currently sits at around $22 billion a year and, apparently, US diplomats were left unimpressed by the efforts of Australia's Defence Materiel Organisation chief Stephen Gumley to explain how Australia would meet its aims to increase military spending, as laid out in the White Paper. While the article didn't reveal whether or not the cable's author appreciated the irony of a US official lecturing anyone about measured military spending, this graph should really be passed on to them – just in case.

While this graph puts the US defence budget at $US711 billion in 2009, that doesn't include a number of "off-budget" items that, on some estimates, push US defence spending above $US1.3 trillion. And yet, America continues to drown in debt with only modest efforts to reign in how much it puts towards guns, tanks and missiles. Now, being the world's superpower invariably comes with a large military budget and sure some cash can go missing. But in 2002, then Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted that on some estimates the Pentagon had lost track of $US2.3 trillion in transactions and there was no way of ascertaining how the money was spent. How long will it be before the US really does something about its own military spending problems?[/quote]

Right now, I'm listening to a radio interview with Jim Puckett, founder and director of the Basel Action Network ([URL]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_Action_Network[/URL]). He's talking about what goes on when e-waste (e.g., computer equipment) goes to Ghana (for instance) to have its components recycled.

He reports that many of the hard drives included are not erased or wiped.

Investigators found data files from dozens of U.S. and other government agencies. (E.g., there was a complete list of clients of Wisconsin Child Protective Services.)

- - -

Relevance to this thread:

Where is the politicians' cry for jailing or assassinating those who allow U.S. government agencies' computer hard drives to leave their jurisdiction without being properly erased, wiped or shredded ... or those who ship them overseas without taking any of those actions either?

(Note that since this data isn't being made public, as with Wikileaks, we really don't know how much winds up in possession of folks who (a) know where to get these intact hard drives from U.S. government agencies, and (b) are not U.S.- friendly.)

NYT: The Abuse of Private Manning
 

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/opinion/15tue3.html?ref=opinion]NYT Editorial: The Abuse of Private Manning[/url]
[quote]Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been imprisoned for nine months on charges of handing government files to WikiLeaks, has not even been tried let alone convicted. Yet the military has been treating him abusively, in a way that conjures creepy memories of how the Bush administration used to treat terror suspects. Inexplicably, it appears to have President Obama’s support to do so.

Private Manning is in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va. For one hour a day, he is allowed to walk around a room in shackles. He is forced to remove all his clothes every night. And every morning he is required to stand outside his cell, naked, until he passes inspection and is given his clothes back.

Military officials say, without explanation, that these precautions are necessary to prevent Private Manning from injuring himself. They have put him on “prevention of injury” watch, yet his lawyers say there is no indication that he is suicidal and the military has not placed him on a suicide watch. (He apparently made a sarcastic comment about suicide.)

Forced nudity is a classic humiliation technique. During the early years of the Bush administration’s war on terror, C.I.A. interrogators regularly stripped prisoners to break down barriers of resistance, increase compliance and extract information. One C.I.A. report from 2004 said that nudity, along with sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation, was used to create a mind-set in which the prisoner “learns to perceive and value his personal welfare, comfort and immediate needs more than the information he is protecting.”

Private Manning is not an enemy combatant, and there is no indication that the military is trying to extract information from him. Many military and government officials remain furious at the huge dump of classified materials to WikiLeaks. But if this treatment is someone’s way of expressing that emotion, it would be useful to revisit the presumption of innocence and the Constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

Philip Crowley, a State Department spokesman, committed the classic mistake of a Washington mouthpiece by telling the truth about Private Manning to a small group (including a blogger): that the military’s treatment of Private Manning was “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.” He resigned on Sunday.

Far more troubling is why President Obama, who has forcefully denounced prisoner abuse, is condoning this treatment. Last week, at a news conference, he said the Pentagon had assured him that the terms of the private’s confinement “are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards.” He said he could not go into details, but details are precisely what is needed to explain and correct an abuse that should never have begun. [/quote]
[i]My Comment:[/i] Someone remind me, because I swear at one point I thought I knew the answer to this one: How is Obama not simply a smoother-talking, ethnic-melting-pottish version of Dubya Bush?

Oh wait: Health care "reform", right? Oh, wait - since that was only passed after cutting backroom deals to preserve Big Pharma`s profits and - after the ditching of the much-ballyhooed-during-the-2008-campaign "public option" - centers around a likely-unconstitutional mandate for every living American to engage in commerce with a private insurance carrier which is accompanied by no special privilege (contrast with the somewhat-less-dubious "car insurance" --> "right to use public roads"), that is actually quite Bushian in 2 senses.

He is the same as Bush. Read my latest posts in the Guantanamo thread. I did not have any high hopes of him when he was elected but he has still managed to disappoint. He is Bush-lite or rather Bush III.

A longer article in the Guardian:[URL]http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/mar/16/hear-bradley-manning-because-chains[/URL]

[QUOTE]Ever since, the harsh conditions of Manning's imprisonment – untried and unconvicted – have been causing growing concern, culminating in Hillary Clinton's spokesman Philip Crowley telling a Boston seminar audience at the weekend: "What is being done to Bradley Manning is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid on the part of the department of defence." He was promptly forced to resign.

House too feels the displeasure of the US military when he pulls up at the Quantico guardhouse: "Recently it's become really hard. The brig seems to have done playing nice. I have to pull over. They ask for ID, and radio ahead. They pop the trunk, these guys with shotguns. Then I have to wait sometimes 20 minutes for an escort. Two black SUVs arrive and they take you into the base, for two or three miles, very slowly with police lights going. It nowadays takes about 30 minutes."

Manning is allowed visits only on Saturday and Sunday. The rest of the week he is kept in his cell 23 hours a day, fed a daily diet of antidepressant pills, forbidden to exercise in his cell, and forcibly woken if he attempts to sleep in the daytime. He is continually subject to what is called "maximum custody", and also to a so-called "prevention of injury" order, which among other things, deprives him of his clothes at night and also of normal sheets and bedding in favour of a blanket he describes as being like the lead apron used when operating x-ray machines. He is allowed no personal possessions.

Problems increased after a small demonstration at the Quantico gates. He was then abruptly placed on a further "suicide watch". He wrote in a letter of protest, submitted by his lawyer, a reserve lieutenant colonel in the military: "I was stripped of all clothing with the exception of my underwear. My prescription eyeglasses were taken away from me and I was forced to sit in essential blindness." He writes: "I became upset. Out of frustration, I clenched my hair with my fingers and yelled: 'Why are you doing this to me? Why am I being punished? I have done nothing wrong.'"

The suicide watch was lifted after protests, but following the refusal of an appeal to downgrade his status to that of a normal prisoner, more indignities appear to have been invented. Manning says he made the mistake of saying sarcastically that he could no doubt harm himself with the elastic of his boxer shorts at night. The shorts were then taken away and he was made to parade naked.
[/QUOTE]I bet it is the Congress that is forcing Obama to torture Manning.</snark>

And I hope the Nobel Peace prize committee is ashamed of themselves now.

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/asia/18india.html?ref=world]In India, Leaked Cable About Bribes Sets off a Furor[/url]
[quote]NEW DELHI — India’s Parliament erupted in outrage on Thursday over a report of an American diplomatic cable that described insiders in the governing Congress Party showing off chests of money and boasting of paying bribes to wavering lawmakers to secure passage of a critical 2008 vote on a landmark civilian nuclear deal between India and the United States.

The revelations, contained in a July 18, 2008, cable obtained by WikiLeaks, portray a large, all-out effort by the Congress Party to win a confidence vote in Parliament that could have toppled the wobbly coalition government and doomed the nuclear deal. According to the cable, written five days before the critical vote, a political assistant to an influential Congress Party lawmaker told a United States Embassy diplomat that one small regional political party had already been paid millions of dollars in bribes for support.

The aide also “showed the Embassy employee two chests containing cash and said that around Rupees 50-60 crore (about $25 million) was lying around the house for use as pay-offs,” according to the cable. Another Congress Party member told an American diplomat that Kamal Nath, a government minister, “is also helping to spread the largesse” and was offering jet airplanes as enticements.

“Formerly, he could only offer small planes as bribes,” the unnamed Congress Party member told the American diplomat, according to the cable, which was reported in Thursday’s edition of The Hindu, an English-language Indian newspaper.

The uproar comes as the Congress Party has been besieged for months over allegations of corruption. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, known for his integrity, has been hammered by opposition leaders for failing to prevent a telecom scandal that may have cost India’s treasury as much as $40 billion. A parliamentary committee is now investigating the telecom scandal, and Mr. Singh has defended himself in remarks made to Parliament.

Now the nuclear vote controversy has again inflamed criticism of the government. “It is clear now that this government survived on the strength of a political sin,” Arun Jaitley, a senior leader of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., said Thursday on the floor of the upper house of Parliament.

The 2008 nuclear deal is regarded as a crowning achievement of Mr. Singh’s tenure and is credited with improving the growing partnership between the United States and India, even as technical hurdles remain. Mr. Singh has described nuclear power as a critical component of expanding India’s power supply, though he has called for safety inspections in the wake of the catastrophe in Japan.

But at the time of confidence vote, the nuclear deal was an angrily contested political issue that almost fractured the government. Both the Congress Party and the rival B.J.P. maneuvered frantically over the vote, wooing tiny political parties, most of them regional organizations with no national agenda.[/quote]
[i]My Comment:[/i] And there is at least one "LOL" moment in the affair:
[quote]According to the leaked American cable, the leader of the small party at the center of the bribery allegations, the Rashtriya Lok Dal, demanded that Congress rename an airport in Lucknow, the capital of India’s most populous state, after his father in exchange for his support. The government apparently agreed, sending a notification that the airport would be renamed. [b]Despite this and the alleged cash payments described in the cable, the party ultimately voted against the Congress Party in the confidence vote.[/b][/quote]