Statement from Edward Snowden in Moscow, July 1, 2013

From Wikileaks (emphasis is mine, but emphasis should actually be on every single sentence):

One week ago I left Hong Kong after it became clear that my freedom and safety were under threat for revealing the truth. My continued liberty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, family, and others who I have never met and probably never will. I trusted them with my life and they returned that trust with a faith in me for which I will always be thankful.

On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic "wheeling and dealing" over my case. Yet now it is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions.

This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.

For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum. Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the U.S. in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country. The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.

In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.

I am unbowed in my convictions and impressed at the efforts taken by so many.

Edward Joseph Snowden

Monday 1st July 2013

Tweet

WikiLeaks: Al-Qaeda Ready To Detonate Nuke

Oh what an excellent timing, Mr. Assange.

(And whatever happened to your promise on Bank of America?)

For some reason unknown to me, the leaks these days go to Telegraph, not Guardian.

Here's from Vancouver Sun, citing Telegraph (I couldn't locate it on Telegraph's site):

Al-Qaida is on the verge of producing radioactive weapons after sourcing nuclear material and recruiting rogue scientists to build "dirty" bombs, according to leaked diplomatic documents.

A leading atomic regulator has privately warned that the world stands on the brink of a "nuclear 9/11".

Security briefings suggest that jihadi groups are also close to producing "workable and efficient" biological and chemical weapons that could kill thousands if unleashed in attacks on the West.

Thousands of classified American cables obtained by the WikiLeaks website and passed to The Daily Telegraph detail the international struggle to stop the spread of weapons-grade nuclear, chemical and biological material around the globe.

Tweet

Hey WikiLeaks, What Happened to Bank of America Leak?

It's February, and there was no leak about Bank of America that you promised in January.

Anyone know?

Maybe that's why the shares of Bank of America jumped today?

Tweet

Assange says It Is Bank of America

AFP reports:

...In an interview with The Times on Tuesday, ...Assange also confirmed that WikiLeaks was holding a vast amount of material about Bank of America which it intends to release early next year.

I was secretly hoping that the "bank" he's been talking about was the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. I'll have to wait for Ron Paul to attack that bank...

Shares of Bank of America (symbol: BAC), which has been under pressure since the rumor spread that it was the next target of WikiLeaks, ended at $13.07 in after-hour trading.

(For traders, it was, I believe, a technical breakout from the double-bottom pattern, with the target price of $14.56. For more, see my TA blog. I'm not recommending anything here, and BAC would be the last thing I want to trade.)

Tweet

Iceland May Ban Mastercard and Visa Over WikiLeaks

Iceland, on the way to economic recovery since it decided to let its troubled lenders fail two years ago, is considering taking away the operating licenses from Mastercard and Visa in the country over their ban on donations to WikiLeaks.

From Raw Story on 12/13/2010:

Credit card companies that prevented card-holders from donating money to the secrets outlet WikiLeaks could have their operating licenses taken away in Iceland, according to members of the Icelandic Parliamentary General Committee.

Representatives from Mastercard and Visa were called before the committee Sunday to discuss their refusal to process donations to the website, reports Reykjavik Grapevine.

"People wanted to know on what legal grounds the ban was taken, but no one could answer it," Robert Marshall, the chairman of the committee, said. "They said this decision was taken by foreign sources."

The committee is seeking additional information from the credit card companies for proof that there was legal grounds for blocking the donations.

Marshall said the committee would seriously review the operating licenses of Visa and Mastercard in Iceland.

(Full article at the link)

Tweet

"Operation Payback" Takes Down Visa and Mastercard Sites

Well, you wanted a cyber war, Mr. Obama. Now you've got it. Good luck to you.

"Operation Payback" took down the website of Mastercard, and then proceeded to do the same at Visa's website. It was successful in less than a minute. The entity behind "Operations Payback" didn't like it when Mastercard and Visa did the bidding of the government and stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks.

Paypal froze the WikiLeaks account under the government pressure, preventing WikiLeaks from receiving donations.

And yet another popular Internet site has caved in to the government's demand and removed the user behind "Operation Payback": Twitter.

Ah, the futility of the action by Twitter, and they should know it. Now you can follow "Operation Payback" again, on Twitter, at these accounts:

@AnonOpsNet
@Anon_Operations
@Op_Payback

Let's see, the next thing that Obama the cyber warrior (with Senator Rockefeller in tow) may do is to demand that Twitter hand over the information of the followers of "Operation Payback" and WikiLeaks, and harass them as "terrorists" and "traitors".

Doesn't seem odd to you that the ruling class and their wannabes are all up in arms against WikiLeaks and its founder over a bunch of diplomatic cables many of which, many say, are no more than petty gossips, childish temper tantrums? Absolutely nothing happened when WikiLeaks leaked the war documents.

Isn't it ironic that the companies who must depend on free flow of information in the cyberspace - Amazon, Twitter, Paypal, Facebook - cave in to the government pressure very easily and curtail that freedom (and the First Amendment, by the way)?

UK's Guardian had a poll on December 5, asking readers "Would you donate to WikiLeaks if you could?" The result?

86.7% YES
13.3% no

Tweet

Julian Assange: Don't Shoot the Messenger

His Op-Ed piece appeared on The Australian, just as he surrendered to the UK police for not wearing a condom in a consensual sex with a radical feminist in Sweden who's been campaigning for making an unprotected consensual sex a "rape" in that PC country.

The governments in the US and Europe are all up in arms over the leaks this time of the US diplomatic cables which make their elites look like bumbling idiots in the eyes of the governed (the rest of us). Australia is closing the entire post office that receives WikiLeaks mails.

Don't shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths
(Julian Assange, 12/08/2010 The Australian)

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.

Julian Assange is the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.

In the meantime, people are calling for the boycott of Amazon.com (here's one from Justin Raymondo), and hackers around the world are rallying behind Assange.

Tweet

Ruling Class (and Wannabes) Calling for Assange's Assassination

What's his "crime", other than making the ruling class look like a bunch of bumbling idiots?

Oh I see, that's really a serious crime, isn't it, to reveal the emperor with no clothes?

But calling for his assassination (and not to mention Huckabee's idiotic idea of "treason" - Assange is not a US citizen) over a bunch of diplomatic cables?

Or is it because of Assange's hint that the next up will be a US bank, which everyone took to mean Bank of America? Did the Fed order UK to arrest Assange to protect one of the largest Fed member banks?

Zero Hedge's Tyler Durden says it all:

Once again, it only goes to show that if you threaten to take down a government nobody cares; do the same with a bank, and one's arrest becomes imminent.

The political left's hypocricy shines through yet again. Just imagine what they would be saying, if the leak was made during the sorry reign of Bush the Lesser.

Except, as usual, Glenn Greenwald, who had this to say in his 12/1/2010 post:

...as soon as Scott Ritter began telling the truth about Iraqi WMDs, he was publicly smeared with allegations of sexual improprieties. As soon as Eliot Spitzer began posing a real threat to Wall Street criminals, a massive and strange federal investigation was launched over nothing more than routine acts of consensual adult prostitution, ending his career (and the threat he posed to oligarchs). And now, the day after Julian Assange is responsible for one of the largest leaks in history, an arrest warrant issues that sharply curtails his movement and makes his detention highly likely.

Tweet

Amazon.com Defers to Senator Lieberman and Stops Hosting WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks 1, Amazon 0.

Amazon.com, capitulating to the pressure from neocon Senator Joe Lieberman, forced WikiLeaks to stop using Amazon's computers to distribute State Department communications and other documents that are "embarrassing" [to who?]. No comment from Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos on complying with Lieberman's request.

Well, I wouldn't feel so bad any more if Congress decides to tax sales of goods and services over the Internet and hit the bottom lines and the top lines of Internet retailers like Amazon. I think I will cancel my subscription at Amazon...

WikiLeaks apparently responded by saying:

"If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books," WikiLeaks said in another tweet.

After a few hours of down-time and after Amazon.com lost my respect, WikiLeaks reopened on servers in Sweden. And WikiLeaks to Amazon:

"WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted. Free speech the land of the free – fine our $ are now spent to employ people in Europe."

Tweet

WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Interview with Forbes

Brilliant.

"[I]n order for there to be a market, there has to be information."

"For a market to be free, people have to know who they're dealing with."

"WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical."


An Interview with Wikileak's Julian Assange (Andy Greenberg, 11/29/2010 Forbes)

Tweet

WikiLeaks Strikes Again, and It's A Quarter-Million Confidential State Department Documents

According to New York Times, which is one of the three papers in the world that have received the WikiLeaks' leaks (the other two being The Guardian of UK and Der Spiegel of Germany),

WASHINGTON — A cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.

Some of the cables, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, were written as recently as late February, revealing the Obama administration’s exchanges over crises and conflicts. The material was originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing secret documents. WikiLeaks posted the first installment of the archive on its Web site on Sunday.

What's amusing to me is the bit of information about how the State Department tried to "make a deal" with foreign countries. The "deal" offered by the US was either bribery using aid money or bribery using Obama as an "incentive":

Bargaining to empty the Guantánamo Bay prison: When American diplomats pressed other countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State Department version of “Let’s Make a Deal.” Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from diplomats recounted. The Americans, meanwhile, suggested that accepting more prisoners would be “a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe.”

Neocon Senators like Claire "I love TSA love pats" McCaskill (D) and Lindsey "Let's attack Iran" Graham (R) are of course squawking again about prosecuting the leakers. I'd say let's arrest all these bungling, clueless US government officials squandering a huge wad of money and goodwill across the globe.

I wonder if Slovenia agreed... (I'm sure these girls want to meet Obama...)

Tweet

Millionaire Whistle-Blower Program in Dodd-Frank Financial "Reform" Bill

Irony and cynicism are not lost, at least not to me.

Another gem has been unearthed from the Dodd-Frank (or Donk) bill of financial "reform", now a law of the land. CNBC reports:

The Hypocrisy of the Millionaire Whistle-Blower Program (7/27/2010 CNBC)

"Under a little noticed provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill, the government will pay bounties that could amount to millions of dollars to whistle-blowers who bring evidence of fraud to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"The odd thing is that just a few years ago, similar payoffs in securities fraud cases were regularly occurring-but they were illegal.

"Four years ago, a grand jury indicted the Milberg Weiss law firm for making illegal payments to lead plaintiffs in numerous securities class action cases from 1981 to 2001. The firm had been paying a portion of its attorney's fees to the lead plaintiffs in the cases.

"The government alleged that this "kickback" created a conflict of interest between the lead plaintiffs and the rest of the class members, ultimately reducing the payout to the victims in the cases.

"The Milberg Weiss partners all pled guilty. Two of the partners went to jail.

"The new Dodd-Frank whistle-blower award will allow people who give information to the government to collect rewards that can amount to up to 30 percent of the recovery from the resulting SEC case. This will reduce the amount of money available for distribution to victims of the securities fraud-just as the Milberg Weiss kickbacks allegedly reduced the payouts to the victims in the class-action suits.

"One of the strongest justifications for outlawing kickbacks to lead plaintiffs in class actions is that the payments seemed to be part of the class-action extortion racket, in which plaintiff's lawyers would file class-action suits any time a company's stock dropped. Having a ready-made set of paid-off lead plaintiffs made this task all too easy." [The article continues.]

But now since the government will be making the kickback, I mean, "incentive" payment, why it will be all dandy. Extortion racket? What are you talking about? The government in the business of extortion racket? (Have you read Smedley Butler yet?)

This "incentive" payment immediately brought up in my mind the "incentive" payment that the US military made to people in Iraq and Afghanistan to supposedly ferret out "terrorists". And we know who those "terrorists" mostly turned out to be, don't we? Instead of "terrorists", we imprisoned farmers, goat herd, anyone, who were turned in by someone who needed money, who held some personal grudge against them.

Another sublime irony is the whistleblowing by Wikileaks. Wikileaks has disclosed what a racket and an uncontrollable mess the whole Afghan war waged by the US and its NATO allies has been. Instead of rewarding the whisleblower, the US government is going after them. Bradley Manning is locked up in Kuwait for his whistleblowing - disclosing the video of the US military in Iraq gleefully shooting the civilians.

This is getting too rich. Rat out a fraudulent bankster and be a millionaire! But don't you dare rat out the government, or you will get 50 years in jail!

Tweet

Wikileaks' Massive Leak on Afghan War

Wikileaks made the secret military documents on War in Afghanistan available on Sunday. They leaked these documents to three major newspapers, who all have the special section titled "The War Logs" on their sites:

New York Times (US)

Der Spiegel (Germany)

Guardian (UK)

Those papers who didn't get the "leak" downplay (e.g. Telegraph UK, Washington Post).

Here's the headlines and snippets from the Washington Post coverage of the leak:

Leak itself gains more attention than contents
Experts say documents shouldn't alter approach
Wikileaks' revelations aren't anything new
This was all secret?

Here's Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo, "Bradley Manning's Gift" (7/26/2010):

"They said the huge cache of classified documents – including 250,000 diplomatic messages passed from US embassies around the world to Washington – was a fantasy, “boasting” by Pfc. Bradley Manning, the intelligence analyst who gave Wikileaks that video of US soldiers laughing and shouting “good shot!” as they mowed down Iraqi civilians. The “hi tech” media, especially Wired magazine, did everything they could do discredit and smear him, including spreading rumors about his alleged sexuality. Now, with the release of over 91,000 internal US government communications, intelligence analyses and incident reports via Wikileaks, the motive behind the determined effort to smear Manning and shut down Wikileaks is all too apparent.

"The Guardian provides a helpful interactive map, in which you click on a location and read the “incident report.” Of course, you’re reading a selection of what the Guardian editors consider important, but it looks to me like their news judgment isn’t bad at all, because the first one I clicked on was an intelligence report detailing meetings of the Taliban with Osama bin Laden in Quetta, Pakistan, and in villages on the border with Afghanistan. So, bin Laden is not only alive, but they know where he is. I guess when Hillary was hectoring the Pakistanis about the whereabouts of bin Laden, the subtext was: “If we know, then you must know, too!”

"A good number of the incident reports are those that detail civilian casualties, which don’t seem to have been reported by our own “embedded journalists”: the title of this one, “Five in car, including toddler, machine-gunned by patrol,” is typical of what the reader has in store. Here’s another: “Special forces wound two, kill six, including young girl, plus donkey and chickens.” There are hundreds of such reports, detailing slaughters both horrifying (“56 civilians killed in NATO bombing”) and pathetic (“Practice shell kills child and 10 sheep, injures shepherd”).

"What’s particularly bad, from the perspective of the Obama administration officials charged with selling this war to the American people, is the dramatic portrayal of the sheer chaos enveloping our military effort, such as this one, entitled “Border police high on opium’ in shoot-out.” Oh, and by the way, the Taliban is apparently armed with portable heat-seeking missiles – a fact the administration has been covering up."

In "Notes in the Margin", Mr. Raimondo says:

"The release of the logs also brings into focus the Manning case, and its importance – really, at this point, its centrality – to all those opposed to our foreign policy of global intervention. Bradley is sitting in a jail in Kuwait, right now, being interrogated and, who knows, perhaps even tortured, within an inch of his life. This is intolerable. He is a hero, not a traitor: he is giving us the truth about what we’re doing in Afghanistan, and around the world. We should thank him for this priceless gift by working tirelessly to free him.

"Enveloped in a cloak of secrecy, our rulers get away with murder – literally – committing their crimes in the dark, until someone like Pfc. Manning shines a light on the truth. Now is the time for the American people to take up that cry, and declare: Not one more dime, not one more life!

"Hands off Wikileaks! Free Bradley Manning!"

Tweet