US
war criminals (i.e. the GOV) threaten WikiLeaks
WHISTLEBLOWER,
Private Manning FOR PUTTING CARNAGE ON WIKILEAKS!
5 August 2010 HIROSHIMA 75th
ANNIVERSARY tomorrow, Aug 6th
The drumbeat of calls for repression and violence against WikiLeaks
and Private Bradley Manning is a major threat to democratic
rights. (DECENCY, MORALITY and HUMAN LIFE. Think for a second, remember
the millions of civilians affected horribly by US
dropping two ATOM BOMBS on 2 Japanese cities full of civilians and think
back to USA's Covert PHOENIX PROGRAM which murdered 20,000 civilians in
vietnam, teachers, educators all,-- let's reconsider who's the guilty
party! WIKI LEAKS who just reported the actions or CIA/USA which COMMITTED
THEM!) All sections of the US political establishment, Democratic and Republican,
liberal and conservative, are seeking to retaliate against
those who are exposing atrocities by the US military in Afghanistan and
Iraq, and intimidate all critics of these wars of aggression by American
imperialism. (especially where genocide
of ethnics is concerned. USA would never do this to Swedes, Germans,
Irish or English.)
The most strident rhetoric has come from the ultra-right. Republican Congressman Mike Rogers of Michigan, a former FBI agent who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, told a local radio station Monday that he thought the death penalty would be appropriate punishment for Manning if he is convicted on charges of leaking classified military documents to WikiLeaks.
Pfc. Manning, who worked at an Army intelligence facility in Iraq, is
now imprisoned at the Quantico, Virginia Marine Corps base, awaiting trial
on charges that he supplied WikiLeaks with classified video of a US helicopter
gunship mowing down Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad neighborhood in 2007.
Pentagon officials have also named Manning a “person of interest” in the
leak of 92,000 classified after-action reports dating from 2004 to 2010
on
operations in Afghanistan, which document the killing of hundreds of
Afghan civilians.
Speaking to radio station WHMI August 2, Rogers declared, “I argue the
death penalty clearly should be considered here. He
clearly aided the enemy to what may result in the death of US soldiers
or those cooperating. If that is not a capital offense, I
don’t know what is.”
Rogers was referring to media claims, echoing Pentagon propaganda, that
Afghan informants and spies who are aiding the US
military could be targeted by the Taliban for retaliation if their
names
are uncovered in the files made public by WikiLeaks. “We
know for a fact that people will likely be killed because of this
information being disclosed,” he continued. “That’s pretty
serious. If they don't charge him with treason, they ought to charge
him
with murder.”
Right-wing media pundits have called for a direct assault by the US
government on WikiLeaks. On Fox News Sunday,
commentator Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice-president, called
on
the Obama administration to shut down the
Internet-based organization, presumably through the use of the
Pentagon’s cyber warfare capability.
On Tuesday, in a column in the Washington Post, former Bush White House
aide Marc A. Thiessen, now a weekly
contributor to the newspaper, said the government should kidnap and
imprison Julian Assange, co-founder of WikiLeaks.
("Hey, This is turning
into a litmus test for white-wing cwazies!")
Elmer Fudd
“WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise,”
Thiessen declared. “Its reason for existence is to obtain
classified national security information and disseminate it as widely
as
possible—including to the United States’ enemies.” He
argued that there is ample precedent for using the powers of “rendition”
exercised by the CIA against those engaged in
“material support for terrorism”
“Assange is a non-US citizen operating outside the territory of the
United States,” he wrote. “This means the government has a
wide range of options for dealing with him. It can employ not only
law
enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to
bring Assange to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of
business.”
Thiessen contended that if Iceland or Belgium refused to extradite him,
“the United States can arrest Assange on their territory
without their knowledge or approval.” Under existing US law, he claimed,
“we do not need permission to apprehend Assange
or his co-conspirators anywhere in the world.”
Liberal Democrats have chimed in with their own proposals to target
Wikileaks. According to a report Wednesday in the New
York Times, two Senate Democrats, Charles Schumer of New York and Diane
Feinstein of California, are drafting an
amendment to the “media shield” legislation now being considered in
Congress “to make clear that the bill’s protections extend
only to traditional news-gathering activities and not to web sites
that
serve as a conduit for the mass dissemination of secret
documents.”
The bill was originally drafted in response to a series of cases in
which reporters were jailed for refusing to disclose their
sources to judges, prosecutors or plaintiffs in lawsuits. In order
to
avoid WikiLeaks taking advantage of such a shield law,
Schumer and Feinstein want to specifically exclude whistleblower sites.
The Times quoted Paul J. Boyle, senior vice president for public policy
at the Newspaper Association of America, the industry
trade group, endorsing such a policy, which would reserve this type
of
First Amendment protection for “traditional news
organizations subject to American law and having editorial controls
and
experience in news judgment.” In other words, such
safeguards would be reserved to the corporate-controlled media, run
by
people loyal to the American ruling elite and the
capitalist state.
The major concern of those targeting WikiLeaks and Private Manning is
that the leaks of internal government documents
provide evidence to justify war crimes prosecution of US government
officials, past and present. To save their own skins, they
want to criminalize the exposure of these atrocities, rather than the
atrocities themselves.
The language being employed in media and official circles is dangerous
and chilling. It makes clear that nine years of
uninterrupted military aggression have provided the basis for major
attacks on democratic rights in the United States and the
preparation of more openly dictatorial forms of rule.
Launched on the basis of systematic lying, both about the 9/11 terrorist
attacks and the supposed danger of “weapons of mass
destruction,” these wars are criminal in every sense of the word.
Millions have been killed, maimed or driven from their homes,
and more than five thousand Americans have died to advance the interests
of US imperialism in the oil rich Persian Gulf and
Central Asia.
Officials of the Bush and Obama administrations are manifestly guilty
of
war crimes, ranging from launching aggressive
war—the core charge against the Nazis in Nuremberg—to the systematic
assassination of opponents in both Iraq and
Afghanistan. This last practice, documented by WikiLeaks in the
activities of Army Task Force 373 in Afghanistan, is a
full-scale repetition of one of the principal horrors of the Vietnam
War, the CIA’s Phoenix Program, which murdered 20,000
suspected supporters of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front.
After the Phoenix Program was exposed in the US media, including the
publication of the Pentagon Papers,
government-sponsored assassination became politically discredited and
was officially outlawed—until the onset of the “war on
terror.” Now such methods are being effectively legalized, as
politicians of both parties, backed by their media apologists,
boast of their right to “take out” opponents, using bombs, missiles
or
direct hand-to-hand violence.
WikiLeaks and Private Manning are being targeted because they have done
what a cowardly and spineless media has refused
to do—tell the truth about the crimes of American imperialism. Working
people in the United States and around the world must
demand the dropping of all threats and charges against WikiLeaks, an
end
to the government harassment and targeting of
whistleblowers, and the immediate release of Private Bradley Manning.
POSTER of this piece is ANITA SANDS HERNANDEZ, Los Angeles Writer,
Futurist and Astrologer. Catch up with her websites TRUTHS
GOV WILL HIDE & NEVER TELL YOU,
also The
FUTURE, WHAT'S COMIN' AT YA! & HOW TO SURVIVE
the COMING GREAT DEPRESSION, and
Secrets of Nature, HOLISTIC, AFFORDABLE HEALING. Also HOW TO LIVE
on A NICKLE, The
FRUGAL PAGE.* Anita is at astrology@earthlink.net
). Get a 15$ natal horoscope "my money/future life" reading now + copy
horoscope as a Gif file graphic!
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