The WikiLeaks Grand Jury and the still escalating War on Whistleblowing - Glenn Greenwald. The contrast between these two headlines from this morning tells a significant story: From The Guardian (click image to enlarge): As Julian Assange wins the Sydney Peace Prize for “exceptional courage in pursuit of human rights,” NPR reports that “a federal grand jury in Virginia is scheduled to hear testimony on Wednesday from witnesses” in the criminal investigation of his whistle-blowing group, as “prosecutors are trying to build a case against [the] WikiLeaks founder [] whose website has embarrassed the U.S. government by disclosing sensitive diplomatic and military information.” The NPR story — based in part on my reporting of a Grand Jury Subpoena served two weeks ago in Cambridge — explains what has long been clear: that “the WikiLeaks case is part of a much broader campaign by the Obama administration to crack down on leakers.”
And that does not count the impact of these revelations on the people most touched by them. As the ACLU succinctly put it: There you have it. The moral standards of WikiLeaks critics - Glenn Greenwald. (updated below - Update II) The WikiLeaks disclosure has revealed not only numerous government secrets, but also the driving mentality of major factions in our political and media class.
Simply put, there are few countries in the world with citizenries and especially media outlets more devoted to serving, protecting and venerating government authorities than the U.S. Indeed, I don't quite recall any entity producing as much bipartisan contempt across the American political spectrum as WikiLeaks has: as usual, for authoritarian minds, those who expose secrets are far more hated than those in power who commit heinous acts using secrecy as their principal weapon.
First we have the group demanding that Julian Assange be murdered without any charges, trial or due process. The way in which so many political commentators so routinely and casually call for the eradication of human beings without a shred of due process is nothing short of demented. Those who demand that the U.S. Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks. Wikileaks. #wikileaks. WikiLeaks. About WikiLeaks. WIKILEAKS PHENOMENA. Wikileaks. Wikileaks - Cablegate / Statelogs. How Many Lives Will WikiLeaks Save? August 18, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. If independent-minded Web sites, like WikiLeaks or, say, Consortiumnews.com, existed 43 years ago, I might have risen to the occasion and helped save the lives of some 25,000 U.S. soldiers, and a million Vietnamese, by exposing the lies contained in just one SECRET/EYES ONLY cable from Saigon.
I need to speak out now because I have been sickened watching the herculean effort by Official Washington and our Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) to divert attention from the violence and deceit in Afghanistan, reflected in thousands of U.S. After all the indiscriminate death and destruction from nearly nine years of war, the hypocrisy is all too transparent when WikiLeaks and suspected leaker Manning are accused of risking lives by exposing too much truth. Besides, I still have a guilty conscience for what I chose NOT to do in exposing facts about the Vietnam War that might have saved lives. CHOMSKY on WIKILEAKS. Obama officials caught deceiving about WikiLeaks - Glenn Greenwald. Whenever the U.S. Government wants to demonize a person or group in order to justify attacks on them, it follows the same playbook: it manufactures falsehoods about them, baselessly warns that they pose Grave Dangers and are severely harming our National Security, peppers all that with personality smears to render the targeted individuals repellent on a personal level, and feeds it all to the establishment American media, which then dutifully amplifies and mindlessly disseminates it all.
That, of course, was the precise scheme that so easily led the U.S. into attacking Iraq; it’s what continues to ensure support for the whole litany of War on Terror abuses and the bonanza of power and profit which accompanies them; and it’s long been obvious that this is the primary means for generating contempt for WikiLeaks to enable its prosecution and ultimate destruction (an outcome the Pentagon has been plotting since at least 2008). Wikileaks, Antipolitics, and the Post Modern State. Talking-point politics, taken for political discourse is delusion. It's akin to the cunning nature of chatter in the mind of a neurotic. It masquerades itself as thinking. I will not offer the reader a well-intentioned flag to die under. It's contrary to my nature to send anyone to my gallows. If I were asked who the most relevant and important voices in post-modern political thought are, I would say former Eastern European dissidents.
If the success or failure of ‘antipolitics’ is predicated on the ‘antipoliticians’ ownership of power – in other words, that to be successful, or live successfully or justly, I have to be the subject of a just regime - or more truthfully the ruler himself, then clearly 'antipolitics', a term I might add the 'antipoliticians' rejected, were failures; just as Socrates would have also been, since he was executed by the Athenian regime. 'Antipoliticians,' are not interested in being, "masters over others for the sake of averting harm.
" Sources: WORLD AFTER WIKILEAKS. Archive Director Tom Blanton decries "Wikimania"