Julian Assange, founder of Wickileaks is today's sole interviewee of Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. It's a fascinating, heartfelt and penetrating discussion of the what and why of the documents release and a powerful rejoinder to the self-serving critiques of the right and the administration. Including the charge that it doesn't include Obama and the pentagon's latest strategy. This is one not to be missed. -Ed
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/27 Wikileaks: Time to Celebrate, Time to Mourn by Jeff Cohen CommonDreams.org: July 27, 2010 It's time to celebrate. It's a big win for Internet-based indy media that WikiLeaks.org posted its "Afghan War Diary" based on 90,000 leaked U.S. military records detailing a failing war in which U.S. and allied forces have repeatedly killed innocent civilians. This on-the-ground material is vaster than the Daniel Ellsberg-leaked Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, and was much faster in reaching the public. Thanks to the Internet and new technologies, it's easier than ever for a whistleblower to anonymously leak documents exposing official abuses and deception, easier to copy and disseminate vast quantities of material, and easier for journalists and citizens to cull through all the data. I spent hours with Dan Ellsberg this weekend at the Progressive Democrats meeting in Cleveland, where he spoke after a screening of the brilliant documentary, "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers". In 1971, it was Henry Kissinger who called Ellsberg "the most dangerous man in America." The movie shows how Ellsberg (aided at times by his own kids and pal Tony Russo) laboriously copied 7,000 pages of classified high-level documents - which exposed that every president from Truman to Johnson had publicly lied about Vietnam. It took many months before a newspaper published the documents and much longer before they all were gathered in a book. Today, the "most dangerous man in the world" may be Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. At least that's how he's seen by the various governments that have threatened to prosecute him for revealing their secrets. But as a stateless and office-less news organization operating in cyberspace, WikiLeaks is almost untouchable. Throughout this decade of war, Ellsberg has been an evangelist beseeching government employees to engage in leaking and "unauthorized truth telling". His prayers have now been partially answered - with Assange boasting that the 2004-2009 Afghan war logs constitute "the most comprehensive description of a war to have ever been published during the course of a war." The Internet has changed the game since the Pentagon Papers, says Assange: "More material can be pushed to bigger audiences, and much sooner." If Ellsberg is the most important whistle-blower in U.S. history, Internet activist Assange is probably the most important aider-and-abetter of whistle-blowers - using technology that Ellsberg couldn't have imagined as he labored over his now ancient Xerox machine. Launched less than four years ago with a focus on helping Chinese dissidents, the donation-supported WikiLeaks has continuously posted material embarrassing to business and governments. In April, WikiLeaks posted horrific video of a 2007 U.S. Apache gunship attack in Baghdad that killed a dozen civilians, including two Reuters journalists. The video leak led to the jailing of 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning - suspected now in the Afghan leak. To its credit, WikiLeaks is raising money for Manning's defense. This is also a time to mourn. Because some things don't seem to change - like endless war, based on deceit. Nearly forty years after the Pentagon Papers were leaked by Democratic military analyst Ellsberg, a Democratic White House seems bent on public deception and cheerleading on behalf of an immoral war that can't be won. Team Obama decided to escalate the Afghanistan folly, knowing all that the public now has access to thanks to WikiLeaks - such as NATO killing of so many civilians ("blue on white" events); Task Force 373, a "black" special forces unit that sometimes kills kids or Afghan allies as it hunts down insurgents; widespread Afghan animosity toward U.S. forces; allied troops firing on each other ("blue on blue" incidents); a steady increase in Taliban attacks. All the color-coded military jargon can't obscure the reality that dishonesty often infects the original incident reports or intervenes soon after, before any public statements are issued. Remember the lies about Pat Tillman's death. >From Vietnam through Afghanistan, deceiving the public has been the government's knee-jerk response. The Ellsberg documentary shows U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara going before TV cameras and boldly lying about all the military progress in Vietnam - just minutes after McNamara had told Ellsberg privately that he agreed there'd been no progress. When Ellsberg leaked the papers, the Nixon White House prosecuted him for espionage and burglarized his psychiatrist's office searching for dirt - after failing in court to prevent newspapers from publishing the papers. The Obama White House didn't try to stop the New York Times from publishing the Afghan logs (hopeless since WikiLeaks had also provided them to foreign publications - Germany's Der Spiegel and the British Guardian, whose initial coverage focused much more on civilian casualties than did the Times.) But the Obama administration denounced WikiLeaks as "irresponsible" and non-objective - and argued that the president had announced "a new strategy" for Afghanistan last December "precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years." The "new strategy" claim is hardly more credible than Nixon's claim in 1968 that he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. Asked by Der Speigel whether he, following in Ellsberg's footsteps, was "today's most dangerous man," Assange responded: "The most dangerous men are those who are in charge of war. And they need to be stopped." Obama recently asked Congress for $33 billion more to pay for his 30,000 increase in U.S. troops to Afghanistan. That vote could happen any day. Will they be stopped? Jeff Cohen is an associate professor of journalism and the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, founder of the media watch group FAIR, and former board member of Progressive Democrats of America. In 2002, he was a producer and pundit at MSNBC (overseen by NBC News). His latest book is Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. *** http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/science/earth/24plume.html?ref=us Scientists Confirm Underwater Plumes Are From Spill By John Collins Rudolf NY Times: July 23, 2010 Florida researchers said Friday that they had for the first time conclusively linked vast plumes of microscopic oil droplets drifting in the Gulf of Mexico to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The scientists, from the University of South Florida, matched samples taken from the plumes with oil from the leaking well provided by BP. The findings were the first direct confirmation that the plumes were linked to the spill, although federal scientists had said there was overwhelming circumstantial evidence tying them to BP's well. The discovery of the plumes several weeks into the oil leak alarmed scientists, who feared that clouds of oil particles could wreak havoc on marine life far below the surface. Plumes have been detected as far as 50 miles from the wellhead, although oil concentrations at those distances are extremely low, about 750 parts per billion. This is well below the level considered acutely toxic for fish and marine organisms, but could still affect eggs and larvae, the scientists fear. "There are a lot of things that are potentially at risk," said David Hollander, an oceanographer with the University of South Florida who is studying the plumes. "There's not a lot known of the toxic effects of oil on organisms living in deeper waters." The announcement by the Florida researchers came as federal scientists released their own report on the oil formations. The multiagency report describes the presence of large plumes of microscopic oil droplets within several miles of the wellhead at a depth of 3,280 to 4,265 feet. Oil concentrations there are as high as 10 parts per million, or the equivalent of one tablespoon of oil in 130 gallons of water. The plumes closest to the well may be concentrated enough to pose a threat to nearby deepwater coral reefs, which host a diversity of ocean life, said Steve Murawski, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's chief scientist for the spill response. "We know that even low concentrations can be harmful to the eggs and larvae of the deep coral," he said. The federal report also described a drop in dissolved oxygen levels in deep water near the well, which it said probably resulted from the rapid reproduction of oil-eating microbes. Yet the reduction did not signal conditions that could cause a die-off in sea life, the report concluded. The ultimate impact of the oil plumes on sea life in the gulf remains open to debate. A plume has been found near DeSoto Canyon, an underwater valley south of the Florida Panhandle where ocean currents push nutrient-rich water up onto the continental shelf. Some scientists fear that oil, even in the low concentrations found in the plumes, could be driven into the shelf's life-rich shallow waters and cause harm. "It's almost an express route up there," Dr. Hollander said. "That's what raises the concerns of the biologists." Yet federal scientists say they believe that the oil concentrations in the deepwater plumes are too low to have much of an effect on the gulf's commercially valuable fisheries. ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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