Articles about WikiLeaks from three Danish newspapers: Information, Politiken and Berlingske. Information was the only Danish media to get early access to the Iraq war logs.
So where does that leave Adrian “my sincere desire” Lamo? Or Jonah “it’s a serious question” Goldberg, John “rattle a bullet around his skull” Hawkins, Christian “non-judicial actions” Whiton, and Marc “wide range of options” Thiessen?
Watching our world come under the grip of a worldwide organized crime syndicate, where everyone is denying anything is happening or denying that anything can be done, has been sitting like a giant weight, crushing us all. But the Wikileaks releases of this year have been our training period, a progressive course in getting the truth out and acting on it. We are now the strongest force the world has ever seen, a truly informed worldwide populace, the worst nightmare of a fascist world government. This week, the weight is lifted, and chaos is king. Out of chaos can come a new order.
The Svea Court of Appeals requested prosecutor Marianne Ny to provide additional information today. There has been no announcement yet as to whether a decision will be made today in the appeal case.
Update 1: Expressen reports that the court has reached a decision at 15:00 local time, but it will need to be written and published.
Update 2: Svea Court of Appeals decided to uphold the warrant issued by the Stockholm District Court. However, the charges have been downgraded.
Update 3: Björn Hurtig tells Aftonbladet that he will take the case to the Supreme Court.
In further reactions to the case, Marcus Fridholm at Sagor från livbåten argues that the Sweden justice system needs significant reform in an article highly critical of the "legal circus" around the case.
Expressen has obtained part of the declassified legal brief filed for the appeal.
The Sweden justice system has failed, again, to provide actual justice. Now more than ever, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks need our support. This fight is not over.
Please find below a list of blogs maintained by some of our editors and contributors:
For a list of the latest blog posts, please click here.
The Telegraph: WikiLeaks release: Timeline of the key WikiLeaks revelations
The Telegraph's John Swaine looks at nine WikiLeaks releases, including the Guantanamo Bay operating procedures, the BNP membership list, the Trafigura report, 'Climategate' emails, war logs and more.
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El Mundo: El destape en periodismo
Hernan Mira on investigative journalism and why WikiLeaks provides a much needed service: "The indignation at the [Iraq] leaks is not the most relevant issue, points out journalist Enrique Valiente, with whom I agree. What is absurd is to minimize the facts revealed. The kind of journalism that makes public the behavior of governments is very important. Access to information and transparency are essential to a free society. It is as if people had allowed torture and murder to "put on a form of suicide, which is the suicide of one's values," said Valiente."
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The Voice of Russia: WikiLeaks, Part 2: Extracts of GI reports
Ignat Kulagin's second installment looking at cases from the Iraq War Logs delves into civilian death incidents. "It’s not hard to hide information about civilian losses during wartime. It is enough just to lay blame on insurgents. In fact, this gets two birds with one stone: you reaffirm the righteous path of the war machine, both with the local civilians and the world community, all the while “cleaning up” the statistics, since soldiers are penalized for civilian casualties."
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Upcoming release coverage
The international press has picked up quickly on the WikiLeaks statements on Twitter about their upcoming release, prompting massive speculation about the nature and subject of the release, and sometimes making assumptions presented as fact. While we have listed a few articles on the topic in previous posts here and here, please find below some additional references:
USA Today: WikiLeaks says next release will be 7 times larger than Iraq war logs
TIME: WikiLeaks: You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet
CTV: WikiLeaks says next leak 7 times size of Iraq files
Sydney Morning Herald: WikiLeaks to drop another bombshell
Antiwar News: WikiLeaks Promises ‘Seven Times Bigger’ Leak
Truthdig: WikiLeaks Promises Biggest-Ever Leak
Nouvel Observateur: WikiLeaks annonce la publication "dans les prochains mois" de nouveaux documents
France 24: WikiLeaks promet de nouvelles révélations fracassantes
El País: WikiLeaks anuncia que publicará nuevos documentos en los próximos meses
El Universal: WikiLeaks advierte que próxima filtración será siete veces mayor que la de Irak
La Tercera: WikiLeaks anuncia nueva difusión masiva de documentos secretos
Netzwoche: WikiLeaks will die Geschichte neu schreiben
Netzwelt: WikiLeaks: Veröffentlichung von 2,8 Millionen Dokumenten geplant (Update)
Once upon a time, the citizens of a country looked up to the members of its ruling class. What they wore, what they said, who they married, who they were friends with and who they fought with. If someone was overlooked for a favour, there would be conversations behind hands about a woman they both loved, or a piece of land in dispute. Gossipy, yes, but useful information, especially in a dictatorship where it paid to know who was in and who was out. Who has the ear of the king, could indicate this year’s laws. Very useful.
Common Sense
(calm down you damn fools!)
Originally, I wrote a rather lengthy research paper entitled: Applied Linguistics using Information Theory Modals with three data sets:Wikileaks, Julian Assange and Western Media / Government Information Control. After spending many coffee fueled nights and countless hours of research, I realized I had essentially written my doctoral dissertation. So, instead of wasting valuable time and bytes; I decided to submit it here, in the hopes of actually graduating sometime this century.
However, not to be outdone by my own propensity to wordiness; I have written a much condensed and mathematical proof free version here with the fitting title; Common Sense (calm down you damn fools!) If you are unfamiliar with the area of applied linguistics and or information theory, a good primer can be found at the University of Bielefeld. So, with all that said, I humbly present two interesting (and tale telling) outcomes of the research.
1.Denial of Residency to Julian Assange by the Swedish Board of Immigration.
A: Residency was denied by SIB because of complicity with US wishes. (JA)
Everything is interconnected. In some disciplines and particularly in hard sciences that is rather an obvious and therefore useless statement than a secret. But in the area I have been trained—literature, but I could use general terms like art or simply culture—the same obvious statement is often forgotten or decisively denied. The academic studies of culture and even sometimes the very products of high culture—poetry, philosophy, art—ignore, both purposely and accidentally, the connection between their abstractions and the riddle of power. Due to a good reason, though: the abstract thinking that rules high culture and the specificity of the academic studies of culture demand focusing. There is no room here for an extended explanation of this point, so I will be satisfied with the words copied from a letter of Maurice Blanchot, a radical writer of the kind that embraces its own isolation by creating a sort of exclusive language: “One [of the two impulses of a writer] is the passion, the realization, and the speech of the whole in dialectical accomplishment”, he says: the prosecution, the chase—that is what it is—of the whole.
The US president orders the assassination of a US citizen without a trial. The Canadian prime minister signs Canada up for another three plus years of war, after explicit promises not to, and says he does not have to ask parliament. The Swedish justice system, in full view of the eyes of the world, railroads a private foreign citizen through a kangaroo court with no due process. What on earth is going on, you may ask, if you haven’t been paying attention.
Coverage and web record in May:
Coverage in April:
Financial Express: In Search of Truth
Shamsher Chowdhury writes in the FE editorial: "Since the beginning of the modern-day civilization one of the most frequently made statements by politicians and civil society members alike has been, "Truth shall prevail". But to be truthful, for decades now, truth has been a major victim in all societies of the East and the West, including that of Bangladesh. But in recent years the lone superpower exceeded them all. Recall the extensive lies and twisting of facts that it resorted to prior to the invasion of Iraq. One might, however, say now that the truth has finally prevailed with the exposition of the facts from the originally recorded US files on Iraq by WikiLeaks."
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The Voice of Russia: WikiLeaks, Part 1. Full-blown protection
Ignat Kulagin looks at one of the cases disclosed in the Iraq War Logs: "As part of its propaganda campaign, the Pentagon frequently showed images of surrendering insurgents on Iraqi TV. The spin was thus – they come to us and say: “I want to give my country freedom, but terrorists just get in the way of the establishment of an Iraqi democracy, so I’m going to be on the side of the US”. Yet the reported instances, where insurgents are ready to lay down their guns but are still shot at, don’t get any news coverage."
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ABC (Paraguay): WikiLeaks: ¿qué importa al periodismo?
"WikiLeaks has been enshrined as one of the sites with the most relevant documents internationally. Among its contents are confidential information about the war in Iraq and others that the United States would have preferred not to come to light. Today, the site, which does not even need advertising to survive, is a great source for the media.[...]
Paraguayan journalist Eduardo Quintana, from the international desk of ABC Color, said: "The phenomenon is WikiLeaks is for journalism a bucket of cold water and a challenge at the same time. The portal should serve as an example for journalism because, thanks to their findings, not only can international politics be laid bare, but they affect several governments as well. They also demonstrate that there is still news to tell the world (...) They help us to rethink, as journalists, politicians and citizens, the line between freedom of expression and security."
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Arab News: A Different War
"Julian Assange, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, is being framed with multiple charges with the motive of silencing him. [...] There is an all out war going on against this fearless whistleblower by the affected parties and the question is who will come to his rescue and how powerful the pressure is? We have heard of “war on terror” but this is “war on one who exposes crimes”.
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The Voice of Russia: WikiLeaks case – state interests or democratic values?
According to Alexander Perendzhiyev, Deputy Chairman of the Association of military political analysts, it is unlikely that the charges against Assange are coincidence. Before the scandalous publication [of the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs] there had been no accusations against the journalist.
"I am confident that the US administration is making pressure on the founder of the website. In this case even the great American democracy shows that the interests of the state are placed above the proclaimed common democratic values. The publication and the prosecution are definitely linked. He was not accused of anything before the publication. Secondly, there had been statements already that the actions of Assange threaten the national security of the US."
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IT Wire: Assange pokes tiger, tiger pokes back
Julian Assange has done a lot to annoy authorities through his website WikiLeaks. Aside from all the commercial information that a variety of companies would have preferred wasn't released, there was the "Collateral Murder" and the more recent "Iraq War Logs".
All of this way well be seen as 'tiger poking' by many authorities. With the latest news, it seems the tigers are starting to poke back.
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Anyone who does not believe the global community is governed by symbol and metaphor is a complete dork. Case in point: Wiki-leaks, Julian Assange and Western Narrative. The western narrative makers have been in a flurry of late, painting Julian Assange and by extension, Wiki-leaks as the evil overlords of all that is abhorrent. From the metaphorical “blood on his hands” to allegations of rape and molestation, our hesiodic tale weavers have created a web 2.0 version of a Goldstein, a Red, a Dirty Devil.
For decades we in North America have watched anything intelligent viewed with deep suspicion. From high school clichés, to ‘charisma’ politicians, the mainstream has marginalized the intelligentsia.
Some days I really miss George Carlin.
Today, at my gas station, I was offered a blob of sugar, red food dye, preservatives and artificial flavours in the shape of a ribbon on a plastic stick. My department store wanted me to buy a nitrate and who knows what stuffed wiener in a sugar and extra gluten plus preservative laced bun, with some brightly coloured condiments that did not look like they had ever met a tomato or a mustard seed. And my neighbour wanted me to buy some pink plastic crap from Avon.
I’ve been feeling so conflicted about Remembrance Day. For years I have been telling myself to just remember the things I’m proud of, the feeling I got reading Rilla of Ingleside and hearing about the brave and innocent Canadian boys who went off in World Wars I and II to countries they had probably never heard of, just because they were told it was right and their duty. Sad, but very noble, and something missing from today’s mostly narcissistic society. Or I concentrate on the brave peacekeepers, medics, true journalists, etc., who are fighting for peace. And I smile and wear my poppy.
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