To: PEACE
Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2010 2:55 PM
Subject: Resource: WikiLeaks Mirror Connectors
These links will redirect you to one of thousands (now) of WikiLeaks mirror
sites:
http://www.wikileaks.antiwar.com
http://www.wikileaks.lewrockwell.com
You may want to remember or save the links. (?)
John
***
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/from_jefferson_to_assange_20101207/
From Jefferson to Assange
Robert Scheer
Truthdig: December 08, 2010
All you need to know about Julian Assange's value as a crusading journalist
is that The New York Times and most of the world's other leading newspapers
have led daily with important news stories based on his WikiLeaks releases.
All you need to know about the collapse of traditional support for the
constitutional protection of a free press is that Dianne Feinstein, the
centrist Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, has called
for Assange "to be vigorously prosecuted for espionage."
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Feinstein, who strongly supported the
invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, has the audacity to call for the
imprisonment of the man who, more than any other individual, has allowed the
public to learn the truth about those disastrous imperial adventures-facts
long known to Feinstein as head of the Intelligence Committee but never
shared with the public she claims to represent.
Feinstein represents precisely the government that Thomas Jefferson had in
mind when he said, in defense of unfettered freedom of the press, "[W]ere it
left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers
or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer
the latter."
In the 1787 letter in which he wrote those words, Jefferson was reflecting
the deep wisdom of a political leader who often had been excoriated by a
vicious press that would make the anarchist-inflected comments of an Assange
seem mild in comparison. More than 35 years later, after having suffered
many more vitriolic press attacks, Jefferson reiterated his belief in a free
press, in all its vagaries, as the foundation of a democracy. In an 1823
letter to Lafayette, Jefferson warned: "The only security of all is in a
free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted to
be freely expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is
necessary, to keep the waters pure."
It is precisely that agitation that so alarms Feinstein, for the
inconvenient truths she has concealed in her Senate role would have indeed
shocked many of those who voted for her. She knew in real time that Iraq had
nothing to do with the 9/11 attack, yet she voted to send young Americans to
kill and be killed based on what she knew to be lies. It is her duplicity,
along with the leaders of both political parties, that now stands exposed by
the WikiLeaks documents.
That is why U.S. governmental leaders will now employ the massive power of
the state to discredit and destroy Assange, who dared let the public in on
the depths of official deceit-a deceit that they hide behind in making their
claims of protecting national security. Claims mocked by released cables
that show that our puppets in Iraq and Afghanistan are deeply corrupt and
anti-democratic, and that al-Qaida continues to find its base of support not
in those countries but rather in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab
Emirates, the very nations we arm and protect. The notion that the official
tissue of lies enhances our security is rejected by the growing strength of
radical Islam in the region, as evidenced by the success of Iran, the main
benefactor of our invasion of Iraq, as the leaked cables make clear.
The pretend patriots who use the national security argument to gut what
remains of our most important security asset-our constitutional guarantees
of a truly free press-are just what President George Washington feared when
in his farewell address he warned "against the mischiefs of foreign
intrigue, to guard against the Impostures of pretended patriotism. ."
The pretended patriotism of Feinstein, the first Democrat to co-sponsor the
bill extending the U.S. Patriot Act, represents the death of the Democratic
Party as a protector of our freedoms. As a California resident, I will not
vote for her again, no matter how dastardly a right-wing Republican opponent
she might face. There is no lesser evil to be found in one who would so
cavalierly imprison practitioners of a free press.
That is the issue here, pure and simple. It is unconscionable to target
Assange for publishing documents on the Internet that mainstream media
outlets have attested had legitimate news value. As in the historic case in
which Daniel Ellsberg gave The New York Times the Pentagon Papers exposé of
the official lies justifying the Vietnam War, Assange is acting as the
reporter here, and thus his activities must be shielded by the First
Amendment's guarantee of journalistic freedom.
Actually Ellsberg's position, as morally strong as it was, was weaker than
that of Assange, in that the former Marine and top Pentagon adviser was
working at the government-funded Rand Corp., where he had agreed to rules
about the handling of classified information, including the Pentagon Papers.
Assange operates under no such restraints and is an even clearer example of
the journalist who ferrets out news and attempts to report it. He had no
special clearance that provided him access, and what he did was no different
from what the editors of The New York Times did in publishing news that was
fit to print.
It is outrageous for any journalist, or respecter of what every American
president has claimed is our inalienable, God-given right to a free press,
not to join in Assange's defense on this issue, as distinct from what
increasingly appear to be trumped-up charges that led to his voluntary
arrest on Tuesday in London in a case involving his personal behavior.
Abandon Assange and you abandon the bedrock of our republic: the public's
right to know.
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