This wikileaks guy should be "taken out" of the picture.

[Nitro Express]

Maybe World War III has already started. The war between the hackers. You can't control the world by controlling the mainstream press anymore.

[Nitro Express]

I had had to hire a lawyer to get $30,000 out of Well Fargo. They wouldn't give me my money and kept hiding behind red tape and excuses. It's a horrible bank. So is Chase. These sharks are now trying to use the Federal Government to run you local regional banks out of business. Then we will have the banking monopoly from hell.

[Nitro Express]

Well. As long as Barrack Obama remains in office, nothing will happen to these banks. He doesn't care what we think of him and he's going to continue the program the banks outlined for him.

[Seshmeister]

If I can just interrupt your off topic ranting, I thought the Economist summed up the argument quite well today.

The basic question is not whether we think Julian Assange is a terrorist or a hero. The basic question certainly is not whether we think exposing the chatter of the diplomatic corps helps or hinders their efforts, and whether this is a good or bad thing.

To continue to focus on these questions is to miss the forest for the texture of the bark on a single elm. If we take the inevitability of future large leaks for granted, then I think the debate must eventually centre on the things that will determine the supply of leakers and leaks. Some of us wish to encourage in individuals the sense of justice which would embolden them to challenge the institutions that control our fate by bringing their secrets to light. Some of us wish to encourage in individuals ever greater fealty and submission to corporations and the state in order to protect the privileges and prerogatives of the powerful, lest their erosion threaten what David Brooks calls "the fragile community"—our current, comfortable dispensation.

[Nitro Express]

The US Federal Government is about as crooked as it's ever been. It's nice to see Hillary Clinton and Joe Libermann squirm. In normal circumstances what Wikileaks did might not be a good thing but when you have thugs and criminals in the government, exposing the rat's nest might be a good thing.

It sure exposes a lot of lies and hidden agendas that start wars and get us into situations we shouldn't be in.

This is much different than sharing info with an enemy that means the nation harm or giving weapons systems secrets away for money. If anything it's bad for the politicians and good for the average person. I don't see anything that puts the general public in danger but plenty to put a political career in danger.

[Seshmeister]

I still can't get away with the stupidity in information management security terms.

My understanding is that after 9-11 they came up with the idea that to prevent something similar happening again all information should be shared amongst all government agencies. This has apparently led to a potential mailing list of 2 million who could access the thoughts of diplomats all over the world.

It's a complete joke that the focus is on Wikileaks who have actually acted quite responsibly so far. It was inevitable that such a system was going to be totally insecure.

[Blaze]

Keir Thomas – Thu Dec 2, 1:31 pm ET



When the Wikileaks "cablegate" scandal broke last week, those behind the whistle-blowing Website found their servers under heavy load. No surprise there, of course, but an additional DDoS hack attack didn't help.

To remedy the situation, Wikileaks did what anybody else would do by renting some elastic space in the cloud to take up the strain. They chose Amazon Web Services, which, although initially unperturbed by the move, yesterday removed Wikileaks' material without an explanation or apology. It appears Amazon came under political pressure to do so.

{...}

It boils down to what cloud providers consider to be objectionable material. Most service agreements are a little vague on this point, perhaps deliberately so. Amazon's Web Services Customer Agreement says the following, which is wildly open to interpretation and could theoretically let them remove just about anything:

11.2. Applications and Content. You represent and warrant: [...] (iii) that Your Content (a) does not violate, misappropriates or infringes any rights of us or any third party, (b) does not constitutes defamation, invasion of privacy or publicity, or otherwise violates any rights of any third party, or (c) is not designed for use in any illegal activity or to promote illegal activities, including, without limitation, use in a manner that might be libelous or defamatory or otherwise malicious, illegal or harmful to any person or entity, or discriminatory based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age;

Even if the service agreements were crystal clear about what is and isn't acceptable content, there will be many borderline cases that could fall either way. Anybody using cloud services could potentially be at the mercy of unaccountable arbiters within the organization.

{...}

Where does their legal liability start and stop? Bearing in mind that cloud computing is a radically different prospect compared to simple Web hosting, will cloud computing need its own set of laws and regulations? Will the wise IT manager wait until various lawsuits have proved what is or isn't acceptable when it comes to the cloud?

The other issue raised is how easily cloud services will hand over material to government agencies when requested. Keeping a server computer within your premises allows property rights that prevent law enforcement getting their hands on it without significant hassle. How much hassle would law enforcement agencies need to go through to get Amazon to roll over?

Could law enforcement agencies deliberately cause disruption for a business by getting the cloud service to deactivate or suspect their account? It isn't hard to imagine, is it?

{...}


There's a risk of navel gazing here, but following all logical and legal paths is something anybody involved in a migration to cloud computing will have to do. If not, they could be left very red-faced.

At the moment, it feels like we're at the beginning of the beginning of understanding the nature of cloud computing. Only the brave would dive in at this point in time.

Keir Thomas has been writing about computing since the last century, and more recently has written several best-selling books. You can learn more about him at http://keirthomas.com and his Twitter feed is @keirthomas.

http://www.pcworld.com/search?qt=Keir+Thomas&s=d

[Diamondjimi]

~Data~

[FORD]

Amazon probably took down the page the minute their CEO Jeff Bozo found out about it. He's a snivelling little Repuke weasel who just spent millions to make sure he'd never have to pay his fair share of taxes up here in Washington state.

[chefcraig]

Amazon probably took down the page the minute their CEO Jeff Bozo found out about it. He's a snivelling little Repuke weasel who just spent millions to make sure he'd never have to pay his fair share of taxes up here in Washington state.

I dunno, FORD. Amazon has proven that they'll take money from just about anybody, until the publicity gets too negative. Remember, this is the same outfit that felt it OK to offer a how-to book for pederasts at it's Kindle store until it was pointed out that this wasn't exactly a great idea. Amazon Removes Pedophilia Book From Store

[Blaze]

Amazon Says Government Pressure Didn't Lead to WikiLeaks Ban

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/2010...wikileaksban_1

Amazon booted WikiLeaks due to copyright ownership violation

http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news...ship-violation

Amazon says WikiLeaks violated its terms of service

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/12/02/wik...ion=cnn_latest

WikiLeaks accuses cowardly Amazon of lying

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101203...internetamazon





In other news

WikiLeaks Rebounds as New Hosting Provider Seeks Protection

http://www.pcworld.com/author/Jeremy%20Kirk

[Oolith]

State Department Warns Students Against Discussing WikiLeaks on Facebook, Twitter

A State Department official warned students at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs this week that discussing WikiLeaks on Facebook or Twitter could endanger their employment prospects.
The official, a former student of the school, called the career services office of his alma mater to advise students not to post links to WikiLeaks documents, nor to make comments on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, as "engaging in these activities would call into question [a student's] ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government," he was quoted as saying in an e-mail sent to students by the career services office on Tuesday.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mashable/201...ebook_twitter;

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/1..._n_792059.html

h


Excuse me? My and that is involved status before the world court is profound compared to the US. As long as the US refuses to be held accountable, they are deviants, as deviant as the mothers that sold children to the Jacksons.

[Hardrock69]

This is a direct link to Wikileaks.org

http://213.251.145.96/


http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010...sh-us-pressure

WikiLeaks: Internet backlash follows US pressure against whistleblowing site

Individuals redirecting parts of their own sites to Swedish internet host amid 'censorship'

American pressure to dissuade companies in the US from supporting the WikiLeaks website has led to an online backlash in which individuals are redirecting parts of their own sites to its Swedish internet host.

Since early on Friday morning, it has been impossible to reach WikiLeaks by typing wikileaks.org into a web browser because everyDNS, which would redirect queries for the string "wikileaks.org" to that machine address, removed its support for Wikileaks, claiming that it had broken its terms of service by being the target of a huge hacker attack. (See What is DNS?)

Without a DNS record, it is only possible to reach WikiLeaks by typing in the string of numbers which, for most web users, is too unmemorable to make it feasible.

That, campaigners say, points to the principal weakness in the internet's pyramidial DNS setup, where a limited number of site registrars can control whether a site is findable by name or not.

Website hosts are being encouraged to add a "/wikileaks" directory into their sites, redirecting to which redirects to http://88.80.13.160/, run by the Swedish hosting company Bahnhof.

At present, that location redirects users to a Wikleaks page at http://213.251.145.96/, which is run by a French company, but if pressure from the French government pushes Wikileaks off that host, it will still have the Swedish location.

At the same time, scores of sites "mirroring" WikiLeaks have sprung up – by lunchtime today, the list was 74-strong and contained sites that have the same content as WikiLeaks and – crucially – link to the downloads of its leaks of 250,000 US diplomatic cables.

The backlash has also gained its own tag on the microblogging service Twitter, where people who have linked to the main site are using the hashtag #imwikileaks.

The technical details of how to make a site's subdirectory point directly to the WikiLeaks site are described by Paul Carvill, a British developer, and Jamie McClelland.

"I've done this as a simple gesture of my support for WikiLeaks and my opposition to arbitrary censorship of the web by governments and corporations," Carvill says on his page, while McLelland says that adding his support "seems like a good way for us all to really pitch in and share the risk that the folks at WikiLeaks are taking all by themselves".

[Nickdfresh]

Arrested WikiLeaks chief denied bail in U.K.
Assange tells court he will challenge bid to send him to Sweden to face sex offense allegations


LONDON — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was refused bail and jailed for a week by a British court Tuesday, pending an extradition hearing over alleged sex offenses in Sweden.

Assange surrendered to U.K. police earlier in the day in the latest blow to his WikiLeaks organization, which faces legal, financial and technological challenges after releasing hundreds of secret U.S. diplomatic cables.

Swedish prosecutors had issued an arrest warrant for the 39-year-old Australian, who is accused of rape and sexual molestation in one case and of sexual molestation and unlawful coercion in another.

Assange surrendered at 9:30 a.m. local time (4:30 a.m. ET) Tuesday. The U.K.'s Guardian newspaper reported that Assange later arrived at a London court accompanied by British lawyers Mark Stephens and Jennifer Robinson.

During his court appearance, Assange said he would fight extradition to Sweden and provided the court with an Australian address. Britain's Sky News reported that Assange was receiving consular assistance from officials at the Australian High Commission.

The next court hearing is scheduled to take place December 14, and Assange will remain in custody until then because he was deemed to be a flight risk.

Judge Howard Riddle told Assange that he had "substantial grounds" to believe he wouldn't turn up for subsequent proceedings.

In response, WikiLeaks tweeted: "Let down by the UK justice system's bizarre decision to refuse bail to Julian Assange. But #cablegatereleases continue as planned."

Several supporters gathered outside the court holding placards reading "Gagging the truth" and "Protect free speech," NBC News said.

Assange had been hiding out at an undisclosed location in Britain since WikiLeaks began publishing hundreds of U.S. diplomatic cables online last month.

The legal troubles for Assange stem from allegations leveled against him by two women he met while in Sweden over the summer. The arrest warrant under which he was detained by British police arrived on Monday this week.

Assange denies the allegations, which his lawyer Stephens says stem from a "dispute over consensual but unprotected sex." Assange and Stephens have suggested that the prosecution is being manipulated for political reasons.

'He is not violent'
One of the women involved in the sexual abuse allegations told the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet that she had had voluntary relations with him and had never wanted him to be charged with rape, the Guardian said.

"He is not violent and I do not feel threatened by him," she said — anonymously — according to the paper.

A spokesman for WikiLeaks called Assange's arrest an attack on media freedom and said it won't prevent the organization from releasing more secret documents.

"This will not change our operation," Kristinn Hrafnsson told The Associated Press.

Also on Tuesday, The Australian newspaper published an op-ed by Assange in which he says WikiLeaks is "fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public."

'Poison pill'
British police have been caught in the middle of the legal dispute over WikiLeaks and Assange's rape accusations, a former assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan Police told msnbc.com Tuesday.

"This is a set of circumstances that the Metropolitan Police will not want to get folded into," Andy Hayman said. "They got drawn into it.Ultimately it's between his lawyers, the Swedish authorities and possibly the Americans."

Hayman added that it was now up to Sweden to prove to the U.K. that there were grounds to extradite Assange.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, visiting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, was pleased by the arrest.

"That sounds like good news to me," he said.

Meanwhile, the Guardian reported that WikiLeaks had no current plans to issue the code for an encrypted version of the rest of its documents — which has been called a "poison pill" — that would enable them to be published instantly, as it had threatened to do if its staff were arrested.

The organization's room to maneuver has been narrowing by the day. It has been battered by Web attacks, cut off by Internet service providers and is the subject of a criminal investigation in the United States, where officials say the release jeopardized national security and diplomatic efforts around the world.

But amid Assange's personal legal troubles, his website continued to reveal state secrets.

According to the latest diplomatic cables — reported by the Guardian — NATO has drawn up secret plans to defend the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and Poland against any Russian threat.

Nine NATO divisions were identified for combat operations in the event of Russian aggression and countries were grouped together in a new regional defense scheme codenamed Eagle Guardian, the cables said.
Video: Stakes raised in WikiLeaks investigation (on this page)

And in one of its most sensitive disclosures yet, WikiLeaks released on Sunday a secret 2009 diplomatic cable listing sites around the world that the U.S. considers critical to its security .

Such revelations have prompted the U.S. to consider prosecuting Assange, but the rape allegation presents a more immediate issue.

'Dangerous'
Pentagon spokesman Col. David Lapan called the WikiLeaks' disclosure "dangerous" and said it gives valuable information to the nation's enemies.

NBC News reported that jihadists with connections to al-Qaida have started communicating online about the release.

"We want to exploit this document," one reportedly wrote.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday the Obama administration was considering using laws in addition to the U.S. Espionage Act to possibly prosecute the release of government information by WikiLeaks.
Video: Defiant Assange fights legal, online attacks

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard told a news conference Tuesday that it is "grossly irresponsible" for WikiLeaks to publish items like critical infrastructure lists.

But she backed away from her comment made last week that posting classified U.S. government documents on the WikiLeaks website was an "illegal" act.

She said police were still investigating whether Assange had broken any Australian laws.
More from breakingnews.com

For days, WikiLeaks has been forced by governments, hackers and companies to move from one website to another. It is now relying on a Swedish host.

But WikiLeaks' Swedish servers were crippled after coming under suspected attack again Monday, the latest in a series of such assaults.

It was not clear who was organizing the attacks. WikiLeaks has blamed previous ones on intelligence forces in the U.S. and elsewhere.

WikiLeaks' huge online following of tech-savvy young people has pitched in, setting up more than 500 mirrors.

Meanwhile, the Swiss postal system's financial arm, Postfinance, shut down a bank account set up by Assange to receive donations after the agency determined that he provided false information regarding his place of residence in opening the account. Assange had listed his lawyer's address in Geneva.

"He will get his money back," Postfinance spokesman Alex Josty said. "We just close the account."

Assange's lawyers said the account contained about $41,000. Over the weekend, the online payment service PayPal cut off WikiLeaks and, according to Assange's lawyers, froze $80,000 of the organization's money.

Visa also said Tuesday that it had suspended all payments to WikiLeaks pending an investigation of the organization's business.

The group is left with only a few options for raising money now — through a Swiss-Icelandic credit card processing center and accounts in Iceland and Germany.

NATO combat plan
According to the latest leaked cables, NATO took a secret decision to draft contingency plans for the former Soviet states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania earlier this year at the urging of the United States and Germany.

The move ended years of division within the alliance over how to view Russia, the Guardian said.

In parallel talks with Warsaw, the newspaper added, Washington offered to beef up Polish security against Russia by deploying special naval forces to the Baltic ports of Gdansk and Gdynia, putting F-16 fighter aircraft in Poland and rotating C-130 Hercules transport planes into Poland from U.S. bases in Germany.

NATO leaders were understood to have quietly endorsed the new strategy to defend vulnerable parts of eastern Europe at a summit in Lisbon last month, the Guardian said.
Slideshow: WikiLeaks in cartoons (on this page)

In Lisbon, NATO and Russia agreed to cooperate on missile defense and other security issues, and hailed a new start in relations strained since Russia's military intervention in Georgia in 2008. U.S. President Barack Obama has a policy of "resetting" relations with Moscow.

But the WikiLeaks cables point to the underlying tension in the relationship between the former Cold War adversaries.

The plan entailed grouping the Baltic states with Poland in a new regional defense scheme, codenamed Eagle Guardian, the paper said.

Poland, the Baltic states and others were rattled by Russia's brief war against Georgia and have been irked by large-scale Russian army exercises in Belarus and by Moscow's new military doctrine that sees NATO expansion as a threat.

The Guardian said nine NATO divisions — U.S., British, German and Polish — had been identified for combat operations in the event of aggression against Poland or the Baltic states.

Earlier this year, the United States started rotating U.S. army Patriot missiles into Poland.

But the secret cables exposed the Patriots' value as purely symbolic. The Patriot battery was for training purposes, and was neither operational nor armed with missiles, said the Guardian.

NBC News, msnbc.com staff, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

[ELVIS]

This guy is being set up...

[Nitro Express]

This guy is being set up...

Assange could be the fall guy in an organization that was actually set up by people interested in destabalizing the world and using it as an excuse to clamp down on free speech in the US. It's all creepy and fishy to me. Even if Wikileaks is dirty we need to stand with Assange and demand his release because if they can do it to him, they can do it to us. Our government is so corrupt exposing the dirt is actually a positive thing. People need to wake up before all this corruption buries us in fascism.

[ashstralia]

because if they can do it to him, they can do it to us.

but you didn't create and maintain a website which openly divulges state secrets. so i think you're safe, mate.

[Jesus Christ]

If an empire wants you dead, you needeth not break any actual laws. Ye can take My word for that one.

Of course in My case, death was only a temporary setback, but that is beside the point.

[ashstralia]

If an empire wants you dead, you needeth not break any actual laws. Ye can take My word for that one.

Of course in My case, death was only a temporary setback, but that is beside the point.

JESUS! MAAAAAATE!
how do you answer the prayers which begin;
my name is mbango. i am a weathy industrialist......

[Seshmeister]

This guy is being set up...

For once I agree that this could be a conspiracy.

[Seshmeister]

but you didn't create and maintain a website which openly divulges state secrets. so i think you're safe, mate.

It's kind of debatable whether once you give 3 million people access to information if it is still a state secret.

[Nickdfresh]

For once I agree that this could be a conspiracy.

Me too. But what are the Swedes getting out of it?

[Nickdfresh]

It's kind of debatable whether once you give 3 million people access to information if it is still a state secret.

It's funny, but I heard journalists on an NPR program saying that they approached the U.S. gov't about not printing details if they threatened anyone's life (sources) and the gov't wanted them not to print stuff that was just embarrassing to diplomats and foreign leaders. But he (I didn't get his name) speculated that there might actually be some positives, even a net overall positive effect as the cables showed diplomats in actions actually trying to do what the gov't claimed publicly, and he cited the fact that the cables revealed that Arab gov'ts are every bit as afraid of Iranian nukes as the Israelis are, and that this might possibly liberating the Middle Eastern Arab press to begin opining openly against the Iranian gov't on this issue and others...

[Jesus Christ]

JESUS! MAAAAAATE!
how do you answer the prayers which begin;
my name is mbango. i am a weathy industrialist......

Oh, that's an easy one....

Sell all thy possessions and give the money to the poor. Then get back to Me

[PETE'S BROTHER]

Maybe World War III has already started. The war between the hackers. You can't control the world by controlling the mainstream press anymore.

LONDON – Hackers rushed to the defense of WikiLeaks on Wednesday, launching attacks on MasterCard, Swedish prosecutors, a Swiss bank and others who have acted against the site and its jailed founder Julian Assange.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101208/...i_te/wikileaks

[ashstralia]

It's kind of debatable whether once you give 3 million people access to information if it is still a state secret.

agree sesh. but you have to admit he's found a great way to make a lot of powerful enemies.

[Blaze]

Interesting hack.

I buzzed a story about
Hackers strike at MasterCard to support WikiLeaks
What got buzzed was
Iraq war leaks: US didn't probe abuse allegations (AP)

[Blaze]

Item 2

[Blaze]

I have yahoo pro, but yahoo has security holes you could drive a mack truck through. Especially their IM client.
Same goes for MSN. Almost any executable IM.

Only small private (less than 20,000) networks can really manage an IM client.


The point is, I am not surprised at all of the hacks to their news site ( it happens regularly.)
I don't even think it raises redflags at yahoo security, it is kinda like throwing a fag butt out the window. Yea, it is littering, but rarely do you get pulled over. But do it at night when being followed by a non-smoking officer, especially after leaving the bar. Oh you get the alphabet test for sure.

[ELVIS]

Don't shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths

WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.

IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win."

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.

These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia, was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.

If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, any of the US embassy cables or any of the stories about the things WikiLeaks has reported, consider how important it is for all media to be able to report these things freely.

WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain's The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.

Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be "taken out" by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be "hunted down like Osama bin Laden", a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a "transnational threat" and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister's office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.

And Australians should observe with no pride the disgraceful pandering to these sentiments by Julia Gillard and her government. The powers of the Australian government appear to be fully at the disposal of the US as to whether to cancel my Australian passport, or to spy on or harass WikiLeaks supporters. The Australian Attorney-General is doing everything he can to help a US investigation clearly directed at framing Australian citizens and shipping them to the US.

Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.

We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn't want the truth revealed, including information about its own diplomatic and political dealings.

Has there been any response from the Australian government to the numerous public threats of violence against me and other WikiLeaks personnel? One might have thought an Australian prime minister would be defending her citizens against such things, but there have only been wholly unsubstantiated claims of illegality. The Prime Minister and especially the Attorney-General are meant to carry out their duties with dignity and above the fray. Rest assured, these two mean to save their own skins. They will not.

Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with the State Department: "You'll risk lives! National security! You'll endanger troops!" Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can't be both. Which is it?

It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US, with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn't find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.

But our publications have been far from unimportant. The US diplomatic cables reveal some startling facts:

► The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.

► King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US to attack Iran.

► Officials in Jordan and Bahrain want Iran's nuclear program stopped by any means available.

► Britain's Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect "US interests".

► Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept from parliament.

► The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay. Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government". The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

[Blaze]

IMO, the US has been being treated like the big dumb stupid (homely) boyfriend to the Middle Eastern States.

Oh, look at Iran, he is getting close to me!!!!

They could give a fuch other than get Iran away.

[PETE'S BROTHER]

;1507310Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.

i'll take three

[Nitro Express]

For once I agree that this could be a conspiracy.

It's strange enough to be one. With the shit going on with TSA and Homeland Security and US Senators talking about shutting down the internet, I wouldn't put it past someone to use WikiLeaks as the excuse to end net neutrality. Sure it's interesting to see behind the curtain and see all the lies but it also gives big brother an excuse to clamp down more. The borders are wide open but they are feeling you up at the airport. They don't give a ratt's ass about real security, it's power and control they are after or it's just bullshit incompetance.

[Seshmeister]

I wouldn't go that far I just mean he could have been set up by the two women he allegedly raped/assaulted.

[BigBadBrian]

The WikiLeaks Vindication of George W. Bush
Larry Elder
LINK

The WikiLeaks de facto declassification of privileged material makes it case closed: Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction -- and intended to restart his program once the heat was off.

President George W. Bush, in the 2003 State of the Union address, uttered the infamous "16 words": "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Former Ambassador Joe Wilson sprang into action and, in an op-ed piece, in effect wrote, "No, the Cheney administration sent me to investigate the allegation -- and I found it without merit."

Put aside that Wilson's CIA-employed wife, not the evil Vice President Dick Cheney -- as Wilson implied -- sent him on the African errand. Put aside that the British still stand by the intelligence on which Bush made the claim. And put aside that the anti-Bush Washington Post, in an editorial, concluded that Wilson had lied about not finding evidence to support the Iraq-in-Africa-for-uranium claim, since he told the CIA the opposite when he reported back from Africa.

Bush claimed that Iraq sought uranium, specifically "yellowcake." What is yellowcake, and why would its presence or attempted acquisition corroborate the nearly unanimous assumption that Saddam possessed WMD?

The Associated Press called yellowcake "the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment" and said that it "also can be enriched for use in reactors and, at higher levels, nuclear weapons using sophisticated equipment."

"Bush and Iraq: Follow the Yellow Cake Road" headlined a euphoric Time magazine July 2003 piece -- written when the Bush administration began backtracking from the Iraq-sought-uranium-from-Africa claim. Time said no yellowcake equals no WMD equals bogus basis for war.

The article led with this ripper: "Is a fib really a fib if the teller is unaware that he is uttering an untruth? That question appears to be the basis of the White House defense, having now admitted a falsehood in President Bush's claim, in his State of the Union address, that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa."

Time hoisted (the now discredited) Joe Wilson on its shoulders as The Man Who Told the Truth to Power: "Just last weekend, the man sent by the CIA to check out the Niger story broke cover and revealed that he had thoroughly debunked the allegation many months before President Bush repeated it." Never mind that the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Wilson's report "lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal" sought by Iraq in Niger.

Let's recap.

Bush, in building the case for war against Iraq, lied to the nation. He falsely claimed that Iraq was attempting to purchase yellowcake from Africa. Time magazine specifically referred to the yellowcake "lie" in accusing Bush of fabricating the case for war. Therefore, were Iraq to have had yellowcake -- an assertion called a "lie" -- it would have confirmed the presence of WMD, giving credence to Bush's declaration of Iraq as a "grave and gathering threat."

But ... there ... was ... yellowcake. This brings us back to WikiLeaks.

Wired magazine's contributing editor Noah Shachtman -- a nonresident fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution -- researched the 400,000 WikiLeaked documents released in October. Here's what he found: "By late 2003, even the Bush White House's staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But WikiLeaks' newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction (emphasis added). ... Chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam's toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict -- and may have brewed up their own deadly agents."

In 2008, our military shipped out of Iraq -- on 37 flights in 3,500 barrels -- what even The Associated Press called "the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program": 550 metric tons of the supposedly nonexistent yellowcake. The New York Sun editorialized: "The uranium issue is not a trivial one, because Iraq, sitting on vast oil reserves, has no peaceful need for nuclear power. ... To leave this nuclear material sitting around the Middle East in the hands of Saddam ... would have been too big a risk."

Now the mainscream media no longer deem yellowcake -- the WMD Bush supposedly lied about -- a WMD. It was, well, old. It was degraded. It was not what we think of when we think of WMD. Really? Square that with what former Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean said in April 2004: "There were no weapons of mass destruction." MSNBC's Rachel Maddow goes even further, insisting, against the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that "Saddam Hussein was not pursuing weapons of mass destruction"!

Bush, hammered by the insidious "Bush Lied, People Died" mantra, endured one of the most vicious smears against any president in history. He is owed an apology.

When Hollywood makes "The Vindication of George W. Bush," maybe Sean Penn can play the lead.

[Seshmeister]

Ludicrous article which debunks itself.

[BigBadBrian]

Ludicrous article which debunks itself.

How? YOU debunk it! Come on, post some of your liberal British sources (does the UK even have a conservative voice? I think not). Post facts, not opinion please.

[Seshmeister]

Even if it is all completely correct, degraded yellow cake is not a weapon of mass destruction, it's not even a weapon at all.

The ludicrous bit is that Bush and Blair should be apologised to.

Actually ludicrous maybe isn't the correct word, it's offensive. Offensive to the families of the hundreds of thousands of dead.

[BigBadBrian]

Even if it is all completely correct, degraded yellow cake is not a weapon of mass destruction, it's not even a weapon at all.

Backpeddling, are you?

[ELVIS]

Fruit cake is a WMD