This Thursday at 19:30, a panel discussion titled "Crímenes de guerra y transparencia: los papeles de WikiLeaks" ("War Crimes and Transparency: The WikiLeaks Papers") will take place in Madrid. The speakers will be war correspondent Olga Rodríguez, activist Javier Couso and Rafael Escudero Alday, professor of the philosophy of law at the University Carlos III in Madrid. Please see www.rebelion.org for the event details.
GENEVA, Nov 16 (Reuters) - The new U.N. torture expert urged the United States on Tuesday to conduct a full investigation into torture under the Bush administration and prosecute offenders as well as senior officials who ordered it.
Juan Ernesto Mendez told Reuters he also hoped to visit Iraq to probe a "very widespread practice of torture" of detainees with the help of coalition forces, revealed in confidential U.S. files issued by WikiLeaks.
"The United States has a duty to investigate every act of torture. Unfortunately, we haven't seen much in the way of accountability," said Mendez, himself a former torture victim, in the wide-ranging interview at the United Nations in Geneva.
Read the full article here: Reuters
"WikiLeaks revelations clearer outside the United States": Andrew Oxford looks at how US media reporting of the WikiLeaks Iraq War Logs has been strikingly different from the rest of the world.
"When five news organizations - including Der Spiegel and Al Jazeera — were granted access to WikiLeaks’ Iraq War Logs before they were published online on October 22, only The Times avoided drawing the same conclusions as its colleagues abroad. The Guardian’s coverage featured headlines such as “Secret Files Show How U.S. Ignored Torture” and “How Friendly Fire Became Routine,” while Le Monde was no less dramatic. Der Spiegel, the German news weekly, published a lengthy editorial titled, “Dumb War: Taking Stock of the Iraq Invasion,” which concluded that the WikiLeaks documents confirm that the war was a failure.
Meanwhile, The Times’ front-page headline assured us “Detainees Fared Worse in Iraqi Hands.” Other American newspapers seemed similarly unimpressed by WikiLeaks’ latest publication of nearly 400,000 classified military documents. The Washington Post printed an editorial declaring that the Iraq War Logs offered no new insights."
Read the full article at In These Times
The Afghanistan documents released by Wikileaks were criticized for not having enough material redacted. The Iraq documents are criticized for having too much redacted. The US government says there is nothing interesting or newsworthy in any of the information. The US military says the information contains important secrets that the public should not know. Some members of the public say they contain important secrets that we all desperately need to know. Have we all completely forgotten?
The medium is the message.
This summer, while private citizens around the world are facing the most privacy eradicating laws and policies ever enacted, some media have been trying to get people outraged about the publication of secrets from public organizations. I’m not feeling it. Government secrets are not our secrets. Military secrets are not our secrets. Industry secrets are not our secrets. None of these secrets benefit society.
Julian Assange, David Aaronovitch, and Jonathan Dimbleby debated this topic in London today. I wasn’t there, and there was no live feed, so this is all based on comments tweeted by the audience, mostly City students. In retrospect, this may have been the interesting part, since the speakers seem to have just recycled old topics. This time we get an insight into what the audience thought. So here are what the predominant tweets said, and my opinions as answers.
Another limb has been severed from the Wikileaks body. Another strong willed, opinionated, brave and presumably hugely talented insider has left, or been asked to leave, and come forth into the media spotlight full of ideas of how the organization ought to be run. He says there are more to come soon. Wonderful news, I say.
The Wikileaks activist was arrested in absentia, not arrested, investigated but free to leave, defamed but not actually charged, with rape, sexual molestation, and plain molestation in various combinations over the last few weeks, by two women who did not know they were assaulted until they discussed it days later with their lawyer. That is not the curious part.
You can still vote for Julian Assange in TIME Magazine's Person of the Year poll. He took an early lead when the poll was announced on Wednesday, November 10, and had the top spot for most of the time in between. Help him stay on top and go vote, WikiLeaks Nation! This is a chance for us to be heard, loudly.
Selected media coverage:
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