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Worth remembering: Mastercard and PayPal refused to process donations to Wikileaks – because, I assume, the US government asked them to. It was blatantly anti-democratic and it was barely examined by the media, who have mostly abandoned the role envisioned for them when the First Amendment was written.

Speak Truth to Power

h/t Don in Mass

Happy Fourth bobbleheads.

Weiner’s a fool but there’s more here than meets the eye

The bigotbasher at The Conservative Lie had a good post this week on the scandal-de-jour as it relates to other interesting events in our national life – he speculates about why Weiner’s predilection for adolescent sexual behavior came out at this time and what that might have to do with Justice Thomas and Obamacare and Citizens’ United and a recent letter Weiner wrote Thomas saying he should recuse himself on the Obamacare and charging him with a financial conflict of interest on Citizens’ United.

Speaking truth to power can have terrible consequences (power of course means the monied interests). For instance, I’ve always believed:

• Elliot Spitzer’s fascination with prostitutes was known in political and financial circles, but it wasn’t till the old  Sheriff of Wall Street gained some regulatory power as Governor that it all hit the front pages.
• Julian Assange’s transformation from internet bad boy to international criminal happened after he announced the pending release of damning documents relating to the practices of Bank of America.

Also, while looking for an image  to use here, I came across this story at NEWS ONE: For Black America.

For months, Rep. Weiner has prompted Thomas to disclose the money his wife, Virginia Thomas made working for Liberty Central, a political organization that has openly opposed President Obama’s health care reform agenda. According to Weiner, Mrs. Thomas’ political affiliations put the justice’s impartiality on the bench in question.

Details of Virginia Thomas’ salary and other payments were disclosed Friday night as the press and most Americans prepared for the Memorial Day weekend.

But guess what happened the next day and dominated the news cycle for the next week? Yup. Never really saw that Ginny Thomas story anywhere.

Here’s the letter Weiner wrote Thomas that precipitated the document release by Ginny Thomas.

The Honorable Justice Clarence Thomas
United States Supreme Court Building
1 First Street Northeast
Washington D.C., DC 20543
Dear Justice Thomas:

As an Associate Justice, you are entrusted with the responsibility to exercise the highest degree of discretion and impartiality when deciding a case. As Members

Bank of America – who’s your Daddy?

I wonder what happened to the Wikileaks expose of Bank of America.

You may recall that shortly after the Wikileaks’ dump of US Military files (Bradley Manning),  Julian Assange promised that documents were coming showing illegal practices at Bank of America. One day later it was breathlessly reported that Assange is a pervert and rapist. Now those documents are yesterday’s news. Nothing’s been released.

You may also remember what  happened to Elliot Spitzer after he became governor? As Attorney General, he was known as The Sheriff of Wall Street where he was feared and loathed. As Governor he had power to hurt them with exposure and regulation. Voila! Another sexual perversion surfaces.

In February, after Assange’s announcement of Wikileak’s planned release – and the subsequent personal smears – this story appeared at their site:

Bank of America using Private Intel Firms to Attack Wikileaks
2011-02-09

In a document titled “The WikiLeaks Threat” three data intelligence companies, Plantir Technologies, HBGary Federal and Berico Technologies, outline a plan to attack Wikileaks. They are acting upon request from Hunton and Williams, a law firm working for Bank of America. The Department of Justice recommended the law firm to Bank of America according to an article in The Tech Herald. The prosed attacks on WikiLeaks according to the slides include these actions:

• Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions of sabotage or discredit the opposing organizations. Submit fake documents and then call out the error.
• Create concern over the security of the infrastructure. Create exposure stories. If the process is believed not to be secure they are done.
• Cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters. This would kill the project. Since the servers are now in Sweden and France putting a team together to get access is more straightforward.
• Media campaign to push the radial and reckless nature of WikiLeaks activities. Sustain pressure. Does nothing for the fanatics, but creates concern and doubt among moderates.
• Search for leaks. Use social media to profile and identify risky behavior of employees.

And TPM has observed that:

. . . the Gitmo files could be Assange’s last hurrah. Wikileaks’ encrypted submission has been broken for more than a year now, which means no new juicy tidbits have been coming in.

It’s too easy.

I can’t leave this alone

And the reason I can’t leave it alone is because it’s important. We should all be disturbed by the unprecedented attack on wikileak’s founder/editor Julian Assange.

I have said before – I am agnostic about him, his actions and his organization. I am, however, not agnostic about the attacks on wikileaks web site and the attempts to silence an inconvenient muckraker, whistleblower – call him what you will, the man is not a criminal.

Glenn Greenwald today:

WikiLeaks has posted to its website only 960 of the 251,297 diplomatic cables it has.  Almost every one of these cables was first published by one of its newspaper partners which are disclosing them (The Guardian, the NYT, El Pais, Le Monde, Der Speigel, etc.).  Moreover, the cables posted by WikiLeaks were not only first published by these newspapers, but contain the redactions applied by those papers to protect innocent people and otherwise minimize harm. 

So when is Joe Lieberman going after those papers?

Image from here, where you’ll also find an ironic statement from Hillary Clinton which includes this:

Courageous journalists across the globe risk their freedom and their lives to provide independent information on government actions and their consequences; report the news from conflict zones; expose crime, corruption and wrongdoing; and reveal human rights violations – all despite efforts, in some cases, by governments and others, to control what people read, hear and think.

And, again:

(It’s still about the banks guys. Wonder when that promised document dump from inside a ‘major US bank’ is coming?)

More about missing the point

Glenn Greenwald at Salon has a series of terrific posts about government and corporate overreaction re wikileaks and especially about Julian Assange. And about the dangers inherent in what constitutes an attack on free speech.

Greenwald is a constitutional lawyer, a long time blogger before his Salon gig, a tad verbose (but he does have a lot of good stuff to say!) and prolific. He’s always worth checking in with.

He’s here.

The realm of the ridiculous

Image via Wikipedia

I guess this is like arresting Al Capone on tax evasion. Julian Assange of wikileaks is now in custody in London and has been denied bail.

Naomi Wolf writes an open letter to Interpol today with one of the all-time great headlines:

Julian Assange Captured by World’s Dating Police

She notes:

I see that Julian Assange is accused of having consensual sex with two women, in one case using a condom that broke. I understand, from the alleged victims’ complaints to the media, that Assange is also accused of texting and tweeting in the taxi on the way to one of the women’s apartments while on a date, and, disgustingly enough, ‘reading stories about himself online’ in the cab.

Both alleged victims are also upset that he began dating a second woman while still being in a relationship with the first.

Of course, the ever alert Chris Matthews, upon hearing of htis for the friggin’ first time last week, sputtered “but this guy’s a rapist! A rapist!” Matthews is great on politics, not so good on anything else.

(It’s still about the banks guys. Wonder when that promised document dump from inside a ‘major US bank’ is coming?)

Are the banks the real reason?

Two facts. Wikileaks is down – no server at present since Amazon axed them (although they’ll likely find another). And Julian Assange is a sexual pervert* being chased by Interpol (are sexual crimes their beat?)

Scott Ritter

(And by the way, does anyone remember Scott Ritter being branded a pedophile after he spoke out about no WMD in Iraq?)

It’s curious to me that all this happened not when he dumped the war documents or when he got the diplomatic documents out into the public – this is all happening in advance of the leak about a ‘major US bank’.

* The of sexual assault charge isn’t new and I honestly don’t know what the charge is or how solid it is. What IS new is Interpol jumping in.

Oh fer elvis’ sake!

Normally I would refrain from mocking  Palin (unless provoked), but this is just Palin in a nutshell. She Tweeted about the Wikileaks matter:

Inexplicable: I recently won in court to stop my book “America by Heart” from being leaked,but US Govt can’t stop Wikileaks’ treasonous act?

Does she know Wikileaks doesn’t originate in this country and that Assange is not an American?