U.S. Congressman Calls For Execution Of Wikileaks Whistleblower : Plus…

U.S. Congressman Calls For Execution Of Wikileaks Whistleblower : Plus…

WHO BENEFITS FROM ISRAELI OCCUPATION?

WHO BENEFITS FROM ISRAELI OCCUPATION?

Making Gaza a 'European ghetto'
Aljazeera.net
By Lamis Andoni While most Israeli leaders are resistant to fully lifting the blockade of Gaza, Avigdor Lieberman, the right-wing foreign minister, ...See all stories on this topic »

Americans Ignorant of Nature of Right Wing and Their Own History

 

The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, Jr. was the latest national commentator to lose it over the insanity which has overtaken American politics.

In a column this week, Dionne threw up his hands and called Americans "incorrigibly stupid."  Good for E.J., because we are.  

How can we possibly be taken seriously by the rest of the world, E.J. wants to know, if we can muster the courage to fight two wars but can't find the political will to ask American taxpayers to pay for them? How did we allow ourselves to be boxed into a corner by Ronald Reagan and his progeny on the right into convincing us that we could be a global superpower that hates "Big Government" at the same time?  And why are the only Republicans willing to say that theirs is a party of slogans and talking points -- but not good ideas -- the ones who've already left the party or been kicked out?

"We need a new conservatism in our country that is worthy of the name," laments Dionne as he surveys the wreckage of the modern Republican Party. "We need liberals willing to speak out on the threat our daft politics poses to our influence in the world. We need moderates who do more than stick their fingers in the wind to calculate the halfway point between two political poles."

As the proprietors of the world's oldest participatory democracy, the American people are astonishingly ignorant about their own history and politics, and it's time we starting saying so without fear of being called "elitist."  

Because the reality is that the newly empowered right wing factions who want to steal our democracy and give it over to those approved authorities that have always governed conservative societies in the past, premise their grab for power on the public's basic ignorance. America's right wing is perfectly ready, willing and able to exploit the people's lack of learning for their own partisan purposes, while double-daring the rest of us to call them on their manipulations with the threat we'll be accused of being "condescending liberal elites" who think Americans are fools easily led to the slaughter, which sometimes they are.

When 40 or 50 or 60% of the public - and overwhelming majorities of the conservative public - believe in fantasies that are demonstrably false, then it's time to wave goodbye to the flattering self-conceit that vox populi, vox dei - "the Voice of the People is the Voice of God."

It's a basic truth of therapy. Real healing does not begin until the demons that torment us are identified, embraced and finally forgotten.  Denied fundamental insight into our preconceptions and the inner-workings of our own mind, epiphany or catharsis is impossible. 

We are condemned instead to wander aimlessly in a fog of make-believe, mistaking friend for foe, unknowingly embracing our enemies, and creating alternative realities without cognizance, or even care, of the disastrous consequences that are the bitter fruit of our own ignorance.

This applies to nations as well as individuals. And so at the most basic level, the task for America today is to re-learn who we really are. 

And that begins by acknowledging how little Americans know about their own history - and how little America has been touched by history itself.  

Some conservatives like to call this "American Exceptionalism" and pretend it means that the rules which apply to everyone else don't apply to us. But what it really means is that, despite all that has taken place over the past 250 years or more -- despite all of the stirring events Americans have experienced  -- America has never yet had a genuine rendezvous with human destiny. And that is because, as professor Louis Hartz says in his famous The Liberal Tradition in America, our "ironic flaw" is that America has "never had a real conservative tradition."   … 

Updating The WikiLeaks News And Views

U.S. Congressman Calls For Execution Of Wikileaks Whistleblower

What should happen to PFC Bradley Manning, the young man now charged with the unauthorized access of and subsequently leaking of classified military information, namely the video that Wikileaks released under the title “Collateral Murder”? Should the United States government execute him? If your name is Congressman Mike Rogers, then you believe that yes, the young man should be put to death.

The congressman, appearing on a local radio station in Michigan, said that Manning’s actions (still alleged at this point—he hasn’t been convicted yet) qualify as treason in a time of war, and thus should be considered capital crimes. That is, crimes punishable under pain of death.

You ought to listen to the entire interview (it’s available online, and it only 17 minutes long) before forming any opinion on what the congressman said. I’m not a fan of taking a few words here and there, presenting them out of context, then claiming that the sky is green.

One odd thing: Rogers seems to be working under the assumption that Manning, who has sizable support online, was also responsible for the Afghanistan war logs. To my knowledge Manning is only in custody over the leak of the “Collateral Murder” video, and not the war logs. Not yet, at least.

The congressman, who represents Michigan’s 8th district and who sits on the House Intelligence Comittee, said that if Manning isn’t charged with treason then he should be charged with murder.

Why is this on a tech site? Because Wikileaks is testing the very barriers of information and access and, as such, is an important story in both the science and art of fact gathering.

The site has recently joined Flattr, the online payment system started by Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde. The idea is to setup a Flattr account, maintain a monetary balance in there (currently, the beta’s minimum is 2 euros per month), then every site you “Flattr” (sorta like clicking on a Digg or Retweet button on a site) gets a piece of that minimum balance. The point is to help prevent the type of funding shortfalls that the site has run into in the past.

Now, funding the freedom of information is as easy as Flattr-ing the site.

Again, you can listen to the interview yourself and form your own opinion.

Note:

The idea that the average American is overtaxed is a nice piece of populist pandering. In fact, federal taxes as a percentage of the economy are at their lowest level since the presidency of Harry Truman. Chuck Marr and Gillian Brunet of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have calculated that a family of four at the exact middle of the income spectrum will pay only 4.6 percent of its income in taxes. Remember, almost half of the country pays no income taxes at all. The top 3 percent of Americans contribute almost 50 percent of federal income taxes.

 

WikiLeaks And More; Can You Handle The Truth?

WikiLeaks And More; Can You Handle The Truth?

Latest Results For Wikileaks

Pentagon Returns Wikileaks Suspect To U.S.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/30/us.wikileaks.investigation/index.html

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A military intelligence analyst suspected in the leak of more than 90,000 classified field reports from Afghanistan was returned to the United States from a base in Kuwait Thursday, an Army spokesman said

"U.S. Army officials transferred PFC Bradley Manning from the Theater Field Confinement Facility in Kuwait to the Marine Corps Base Quantico Brig in Quantico, Virginia, on July 29," Major Bryan Woods, an Army spokesman, said in a statement e-mailed to reporters.

Preliminary charges were filed against Manning back on July 5 in connection with the leak of a classified video to Wikileaks depicting the killing of a Reuters photographer by U.S. forces. He was also charged with leaking more than 50 diplomatic cables and downloading more than 150,000 of them in violation of military rules. At least some of that material seems to have made it to Wikileaks, though the web site's founder Julian Assange has said it does not have the larger cache.

Military officials said this week that Manning is now a "person of interest" in the highly-publicized leak of the Afghanistan reports--a leak which top Pentagon officials have said could result in the deaths of U.S. soldiers or Afghans.

"Manning remains in pretrial confinement pending an Article 32 investigation into the charges preferred against him on July 5. Manning was transferred because of the potential for lengthy continued pretrial confinement given the complexity of the charges and ongoing investigation," Woods said.

Assange has called Manning a "political prisoner" and compared his detention outside the U.S. to the detention of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

Gates Assails WikiLeaks Over Release of Reports

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: July 29, 2010

 

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Thursday denounced the disclosure this week of 75,000 classified documents about the Afghanistan war by the Web site WikiLeaks, asserting that the security breach had endangered lives and damaged the ability of others to trust the United States government to protect their secrets

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, Mr. Gates portrayed the documents as “a mountain of raw data and individual impressions, most several years old” that offered little insight into current policies and events. Still, he said, the disclosures — which include some identifying information about Afghans who have helped the United States — have “potentially dramatic and grievously harmful consequences.”

“The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships and reputation in that key part of the world,” he said. “Intelligence sources and methods, as well as military tactics, techniques and procedures, will become known to our adversaries.”

Mr. Gates said the documents’ disclosure had prompted a rethinking of a trend nearly two decades old, dating from the Persian Gulf war of 1991, of trying to make intelligence information more accessible to troops in combat situations so they can respond rapidly to developments.

“We endeavor to push access to sensitive battlefield information down to where it is most useful — on the front lines — where as a practical matter there are fewer restrictions and controls than at rear headquarters,” he said. “In the wake of this incident, it will be a real challenge to strike the right balance between security and providing our frontline troops the information they need.”

The military has charged an intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, with downloading large amounts of classified information from a computer at a base in Iraq and sending it to WikiLeaks, which operates from servers scattered across multiple countries and solicits “classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance.”

Military officials have said that Army investigators also consider Private Manning a “person of interest” in the investigation into the Web site’s most recent disclosures. They said Thursday that he was being moved from Kuwait to Quantico, Va., where he would remain in military confinement as he awaits further judicial steps. WikiLeaks shared the documents with publications in Britain, Germany and the United States, including The New York Times, before posting them this week.

Julian Assange, an Australian computer specialist who founded WikiLeaks, has described the project as a form of journalism that seeks to protect whistle-blowers and enhance democracy by making public information that government officials would rather keep secret.

In a series of media appearances and interviews this week, he has defended the latest release as providing an unvarnished portrait of problems with the war in Afghanistan, while saying that his organization had held back about 15,000 documents for safety reasons.

But at Mr. Gates’s news conference on Thursday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, portrayed WikiLeaks as recklessly endangering people in order to satisfy its “need to make a point.”

“Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family,” Admiral Mullen said.

Mr. Gates said the military was taking steps to protect some Afghans identified in the documents, but he declined to specify them. He also declined to comment about the investigation beyond noting that he had enlisted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist Army investigators, a move that is seen as a precursor to potentially charging people who are not uniformed service members.

A person familiar with the investigation has said that Justice Department lawyers are exploring whether Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks could be charged with inducing, or conspiring in, violations of the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that prohibits the unauthorized disclosure of national security information.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 30, 2010, on page A8 of the New York edition.

THE DAILY BEAST Shocking allegations have surfaced that link the Oscar winner, George Clooney’s Italian girlfriend to the bust of a drug-and-prostitution ring at two of Milan’s hottest clubs. Barbie Latza Nadeau reports.

Tea Partying 'Patriots' Ginning Themselves Up For A Shooting War ...
By David Neiwert
Pelosi & democrats refused to impeach Bush/Cheney... Pelosi talk the BS she had nothing to go on. This was even after Kucinich introduced a bill for impeachment of over 30 items and it was put on the shelf. ...
Crooks and Liars - http://crooksandliars.com/

This Fall's Most Promising Camera Announcements

Need to know about the newest camera offerings from Fujifilm, Panasonic, Samsung, and Sony? Keep track of all the fall camera announcements here.

Arizona's Immigration Law Slowly Drains Economy

Arizona's Immigration Law Slowly Drains Economy

A key part of Arizona's immigration law was temporarily blocked by a federal judge Wednesday. For now, police won't be able to question people about their immigration status. For many businesses, the damage from the controversy is already done. Reduced spending in restaurants, grocery and retail stores has triggered a domino effect among businesses in the metro Phoenix business community and throughout Arizona.

 Anecdotal evidence from business owners, real estate agents and community leaders indicates the mere specter of the bill has created a culture of fear among Hispanics in Arizona that's slowly paralyzing sectors of the economy. In addition, economic boycotts adopted by other states and cities have hit Arizona's meeting and convention business. Since groups nationwide began announcing boycotts of the state because of SB 1070, at least 40 meetings have been canceled, which resulted in the loss of $12 million in lodging alone, according to Kristen Jarnagin, spokeswoman for the Arizona Hotel & Lodging Association.  Full Story

·         Parts of controversial Arizona immigration law take effect

·         What's next for the Arizona immigration law? 

·         Immigration policies in the United States

·         iReport: Tell us what you think about immigration

Phoenix, Arizona (CNN) -- Jairo Tellez's seafood distribution business is a family affair. In the industrial warehouse that houses J and V Mariscos on the west side of Phoenix, his wife, Vicki, and four of his seven children load trucks, take phone calls, enter data and help care for his infant grandson, who has a playpen in Tellez's office.

But with portions of Arizona's controversial immigration enforcement law set to take effect Thursday, the business is in limbo.

"If people are not eating, we're not selling," said Wendy Cisneros, a family friend who works in the back office. "We've lost 60 percent of sales, and right now the future's uncertain. We don't know if we're going to stay in the state; we don't know if we're going to close the business. Everything's up in the air."

Most of their clients cater to the Latino community, which has effectively gone into hiding amid concerns that they may have to leave the state as soon as the bill becomes law, Cisneros said.

A key part of Arizona's immigration law was temporarily blocked by a judge Wednesday. This means police won't be required to ask people about their immigration status.

Toobin: What does Arizona immigration ruling mean?

But for the Tellez family business and others like it, the damage from the controversy already is done. Reduced spending in restaurants, grocery and retail stores has triggered a domino effect among businesses in the metro Phoenix business community and throughout Arizona.

To stay afloat even as their clients disappear or reduce inventory orders, the business has reduced employees' hours and cut back operations in the industrial warehouse, home to several large freezers and forklifts and an office sparsely decorated with posters of illustrated fish and cuts of meat.

Perhaps the toughest decision was to halt lines of credit to customers, even those with good history, she said.

"We can't really offer credit anymore because we don't know if next week they're going to close the business," Cisneros said. "But it's also a downside because some customers need that credit to operate."

Firm numbers illuminating the economic fallout of SB 1070 are hard to come by as the bill has yet to take effect. Also, summer tends to be slow for business and tourism in Arizona because it's so hot.

But anecdotal evidence from business owners, real estate agents and community leaders indicates the mere specter of the bill has created a culture of fear among Hispanics in Arizona that's slowly paralyzing sectors of the economy. Hispanics make up 30 percent of the state's population.

The state's unemployment rate in June rose for the third month in a row, to 9.7 percent. Gov. Jan Brewer signed the bill in April.

Traditionally, community groups look to indicators such as the housing market, school enrollment and data from utility companies to track economic fluctuations within a certain group, said Edmundo Hidalgo, president and CEO of Chicanos Por La Causa, a community outreach program in Phoenix.

Based on feedback from clients and preliminary data, Hidalgo said his group estimates that rental vacancies in predominantly Latino neighborhoods will be 10 to 15 percent higher than the normal rate of 12 percent.

"People are scared, and they don't want to wait around to find out what's going to happen with SB 1070," said Hidalgo, whose group offers housing, economic and education services to low-income families and individuals, both undocumented and U.S.-born.

"Regardless of their status, people are frustrated with an environment that's not accepting and potentially threatening, and they're fed up with being targeted and singled out by law enforcement. It's driving them out of the state, and not necessarily to better situations."

Reactions to the Arizona immigration law injunction

The Arizona housing market, which was already suffering from one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, has also taken an extra hit since the passage of the law, according to real estate agents who spoke with CNN.

Some homeowners who purchased property in the past year are looking to unload, according to Saul Pua, a real estate agent who sells residential properties in neighborhoods in Phoenix's Latino communities.

"Most families usually have one person who doesn't have papers, and they don't want to risk being arrested and splitting up the family by staying in Arizona," said Pua, who is married to one of the daughters of Tellez, the owner of J and V Mariscos.

Even during the recession, Pua said business was good because property was cheap, and that in better times, he closed an average of five transactions a month. Since the beginning of the year, however, he has been lucky to sell two properties in a month, and in July, he hasn't closed a single deal.

"I had investors buying properties, but now's who gonna rent them?" he said.

Commercial real estate developer Michael Pollack was in the same situation leading up to Wednesday's ruling. Since April, clients in predominantly Latino neighborhoods across the state had been pulling out of properties or calling to relay concerns over whether they should stay if the law goes into effect.

Today, Pollack said he received several calls from clients expressing relief and letting him know they intended to stay.

"The ruling today has definitely been a move in the right direction for commercial tenants and their customers, who've been scared that Arizona wasn't going be friendly to Hispanic community," he said.

"This gives the federal government to get to work implementing an immigration policy that the American people will support unanimously and deals with the situation at the border, which is where the real problem is."

Phoenix's sprawling concrete landscape bears testimony to the abundance of vacant residential and commercial property.

"For sale" signs in English and Spanish adorn brown, sun-scorched lawns and dilapidated parking lots alike, from the heart of downtown Phoenix to as far as Chandler and Mesa -- the district of SB 1070's sponsor, Republican Sen. Russell Pearce. Boarded-up big-box stores loom large in their vast emptiness, and rows of abandoned strip mall storefronts outnumber those that are occupied in some parts.

Not only businesses targeting the Latino community are suffering. Economic boycotts adopted by other states and cities have hit Arizona's meeting and convention business.

Since groups nationwide began announcing boycotts of the state because of SB 1070, at least 40 meetings have been canceled. That's resulted in the loss of $12 million in lodging alone, according to Kristen Jarnagin, spokeswoman for the Arizona Hotel & Lodging Association.

Summer is typically the low season, she noted, and pointed out that tourism was up 8 percent statewide in June 2010 compared with June 2009, which was one of the "worst summers ever" because of the recession.

Despite that slight uptick, more telling is the lack of inquiries for future bookings, she said.

"What we're hearing from meeting planners now is they won't and can't consider Arizona for 2011, 2012 meetings not necessarily because of their own stance on SB 1070 or the boycott but just because they want to avoid the controversy and don't want to risk losing attendance," she said.

The absence of meetings and conventions not only affects the hotel industry and its 200,000 employees, but also ancillary businesses such as restaurants, retailers and taxis, Jarnagin said.

It seems that not even fast-food joints are immune to the encroaching economic fallout of SB 1070.

As the four Tellez children stood with their parents in their office Wednesday, recounting tales of friends and relatives who have left town or seen families torn apart, daughter Nikki noted her surprise at seeing a shuttered Burger King.

"I was driving down Camelback with my dad and Burger King was closed, and I was like, when have you seen that? Like Burger King -- everybody goes to Burger King, and that was closed down."