Time to stand up and fight. Defend Wikileaks and free speech

The war on Wikilieaks and Julian Assange could well be a historical turning point; the point at which capitalism and the technological revolution that has taken place over the last 20 years clash head on. It seems they will not be able to stop the leaking of information.

They have arrested Assange and he has been refused bail. The respected Australian Journalist John Pilger and British filmmaker, Ken Loach have pledged support. Australian minister of Foreign Affairs, and former Prime Minister, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, has pledged his support for Assange also. Rudd was heavily criticized by the US in leaked cables but “doesn't give a damn re Wikileaks” cables and “offers to help Julian Assange” the Australian newspaper reports.

Assange has a piece in today’s Australian. He writes:
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.

Assange continues:
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.”

Chris Floyd, an American journalist residing in London wrote an excellent piece and quotes that darling of the liberals and Labor officials Dianne Feinstein writing in  Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. You know, Rupert Murdoch? Fox News? Fensitein writes:
“When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released his latest document trove—more than 250,000 secret State Department cables—he intentionally harmed the U.S. government. The release of these documents damages our national interests and puts innocent lives at risk. He should be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.” So says the wife of speculator and moneylender Richard Blum who, incidentally, is a regent of the University of California and spends much of his energy destroying public education here in the US.

The Feinstein's home: you don't get this through hard work

Feinstien continues: “The law Mr. Assange continues to violate is the Espionage Act of 1917. That law makes it a felony for an unauthorized person to possess or transmit "information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation." ... Importantly, the courts have held that "information relating to the national defense" applies to both classified and unclassified material. Each violation is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.”

Assange and Wikileaks have blown their cover, exposing to the world that behind the sickening diplomacy and professionalism are liars, murderers and thieves. He has revealed nothing we don’t know already. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are violent wars of occupation and oppression against former colonies. They have nothing to do with democracy. Up until 1999, every Taliban official was on the payroll of the US government. This is kept from the American people. Most Americans would never know that the US overthrew the Guatemalan and Iranian governments in 1953. It deposed democratic regimes and installed dictatorial murderous ones.

US capitalism orchestrated the coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvadore Allende in Chile in 1973. The Chilean constitutionalist general Rene Schneider was assassinated with the support of Kissinger and the CIA. According to the US Senate Subcommittee on Refugees, in the four years from 1968 to 1972 more than 3,000,000 Vietnamese civilians were “killed, injured or rendered homeless. In the same four years the US dropped 4,500.000 tons of high explosives on Indochina.” In the illegal raids flown over Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam war that were kept from the US public, some 350,000 civilians in Laos and 600,000 in Cambodia lost their lives. *
And Hilary Clinton and Barak Obama strut around the globe preaching democracy.   Believe me, millions of ordinary people, especially those who have been victims in one way or another of US foreign policy are nauseated by this hypocrisy.

The war in Vietnam also took the future from a whole generation of US youth. Not just the 67,000 or more that died, but fathers from wives and children and from their mothers and fathers. The young men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan are not there to defend democracy and we will not know the level of demoralization that exists in the US military until it erupts. It is damaging these young people and the US government will abandon them when they return with their mental illness. Unemployment increases the pool of candidates for their wars; it will not be the children of the Feinstein’s Bush’s or Obama’s of this world that return in such a damaged condition because they don’t go.

Go see "The Tillman Story."  The Feinsteins, Obamas, Bush’s Palins, Hilary Clinton, they don’t care about American workers; they don’t put life before their class interests; before profit. Pat Tillman was assassinated, I am convinced of it. See how his family were treated and lied to. Remember what that thug Madeline Albright said about the 500,000 or so Iraqi children that were estimated to have died due to the US led sanctions: she said these deaths were “worth it”. And so they were, they were collateral damage in US capitalism’s pursuit of profit.

War Criminal Dick Cheney

Dianne Feinstein, Mike Huckabee, Barak Obama, conservative and liberal alike, Democrat and Republican, are calling for Assange’s head. But what about Valerie Plame Wilson? She was outed by the Bush regime, a CIA agent whose identity was purposefully exposed to the world because her husband wouldn’t go along with the their murderous lies about Iraq. "It was abundantly clear to me that (the White House and their allies) were out to destroy me, and to destroy my family, and that the only way to deal with it was to take them on," said Wilson’s husband.

Valerie Wilson herself said that what happened to her was “So insidious," "It's not just me and my career — that's one thing — but it deeply affects the network of assets with whom I had worked. It places them in jeopardy, not to mention the ripple effect of future sources of critical information of the most vital quality."

Joseph Wilson told CBS news:
"I felt that... however abominable the decision might be, it was rational that if you were an administration and did not want people talking about the intelligence or talking about what underpinned the decision to go to war, you would discourage them by destroying the credibility of the messenger who brought you the message. And this administration apparently decided the way to do that was to leak the name of my wife."

Sound familiar? It’s exactly what is happening to Assage for telling the truth. And no one went to jail for outing Ms Plame Wilson. The only pesron who did went for different reasons and had his sentence commuted by Bush.

I write this all to remind myself and anyone else of the rotten nature of these murderers and their regimes. The US is not the only one, I am not engaging in US bashing for the sake of it. But it is the most powerful, the one whose actions have the most effects. It is the only country and the Democrats are the only political party to have used nuclear weapons on innocent civilians. How dare we complain about Vietnamese or Laotians or any other immigrants coming here.  Vietnam didn't invade the US did it?  We need to build solidarity with the workers of the world against the capitalists of the world, prime among them, US capitalism.  The Chinese are no better; they would have executed Assange by now.

The US capitalist class and all of them throughout the world are worried as an earlier piece pointed out, that there might be a generalized response to these details; that it might be the spark that ignites a movement against them. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not popular. The bankers are hated; the politicians are hated, the system is suspect. Wikileaks has refused to back off and they are unsure what to do as it is causing all sorts of divisions among them.

It is definitely a serious moment of weakness for the capitalist class. Could it be said that this event is shifting the balance of class forces in the favor of the working class? I think that can’t be ruled out.

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* The Trial of Henry Kissinger: Christopher Hitchins