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Tag Archives: Wikileaks
Shoot the prick???? or has Julian been reading too much John le Carre?
Am I the only one who is utterly sick and tired of hearing about this sad little prick Julian Assange? While I don’t advocate that his actions deserve a capital sanction it seems that many in the USA would be happy to apply rule “303” to the ex-pat Aussie.
What has surprised me is that only now has a whole mess of keyboard warriors swung into action to make Wikileaks a pariah of the internet. Frankly I don’t know why this has not happened sooner. The question is can this site be driven to the same sort of locations as that other most undesirable stuff of the ether? In other words how long will it be before this site has to share servers with the purveyors of child pornography? Which is just a little more welcome than the trivial trash that this site has been recently infesting the web with. My Latte-sipping™ friends are of course falling over themselves to offer fawning excuses for this idiot thinking that he is doing something good and noble.
There has been chatter in technology circles that the attacks are the work of governments displeased with WikiLeaks, though that is impossible to prove, given the anonymity of the web.
Someone portraying himself as an American patriot took credit for the first spate of disruptions to the site, a claim that security experts said was credible.
On Friday, the French government moved to ban WikiLeaks from servers there, saying it was ”unacceptable” that companies in France were hosting a ”criminal” website.
And the US-based online financial transactions service PayPal has said it will stop taking donations for WikiLeaks, a move that WikiLeaks blamed on ”US government pressure”.
As the cyber attacks increased last week, WikiLeaks sought refuge on the servers of the bookseller Amazon, only to be booted at the request of the US Democratic senator Joe Lieberman.
As WikiLeaks moved around the web, Mr Assange hit back at moves by the Australian government to aid in his prosecution.
”[The federal Attorney-General] Robert McClelland is a US suckhole, worse than [John] Howard on [David] Hicks, and needs to go,” he wrote on his Twitter account, which is followed by about 360,000 people.
On Saturday, Mr Assange said it was ”impossible” to return to Australia because of comments by Mr McClelland and the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, who labelled his actions ”illegal”.
But yesterday Mr McClelland seemed to offer some concession to the Townsville-born former hacker, saying: ”Mr Assange is entitled to the same rights as any other Australian citizen.
”This includes the right to return to Australia and also to receive consular assistance while he is overseas if that is requested.”
Mr Assange also revealed that more than 100,000 people had downloaded an ”insurance” file containing an encrypted version of the cables, and the key to that code would be released if ”something happens to us”.
To the Latte-sipping™ set he has become something of a hero but looking at the the bigger picture has he actually made any part of the world a better place? Has any thing so far revealed been a catalyst for some greater good? The last thing that made a big splash was that gun sight recording from Iraq and I think that the only thing that it ended up showing was that mistakes are made in the heat of battle. Well Doh! Like we did not already know that 🙄
The part that I have emboldened in the above should once and for all prove that this man is nothing but a self serving blackmailer who has been reading too many John Le Carre novels. Frankly there is only one thing to say to such blackmail and that is “fuck you!”. If he has a case to answer in Sweden then lets see him before a court there and if he has broken any US law lets see him swiftly extradited because I am sure that they have a vacancy in one of their comfy federal prisons….
Cheers Comrades
Heroic wistleblower, idiot or traitorous villain ?
This one will get poor JM into a lather as it seems that the man who leaked that vid to Wikileaks has outed himself and has of course been arrested and faces many years in a military prison as a result of his treachery.
But Californian Adrian Lamo, a former hacker turned journalist and security consultant, who once infiltrated The New York Times computer system, dobbed the soldier in to authorities after Manning started discussing classified information.
”He just wanted somebody to talk to, somebody he could confide in, and I wish to God he had left it to that instead of going on to discuss classified material with me,” Mr Lamo said.
A spokesman for WikiLeaks declined on Monday to say whether Specialist Manning had been a source but said he believed that the person behind the leak ”whoever it is, is protected by law”.
In messages via Twitter, the group elaborated: ”We never collect personal information on our sources, so we are unable as yet to confirm the Manning story.” It noted, however, that ”if Brad Manning is the … whistleblower then, without doubt, he’s a national hero”.
But WikiLeaks said suggestions that it had received 260,000 documents ”are, as far as we can tell, incorrect”.
Relatives of civilians killed in the gunship attack criticised Specialist Manning’s detention. ”Justice was what this US soldier did by uncovering this crime against humanity,” said Nabil Noor-Eldeen, whose brother, Namir, was one of the Reuters employees killed in the strike. ”The American military should reward him, not arrest him.”
Personally I come down on the traitorous villain (or idiot) side of the argument, there are ways to bring concerns about the behaviour of your fellow soldiers to the attention of those further up the hierarchy if you think that they have done the wrong thing but if the claims that Army Specialist Bradley Manning has passed on thousands of pages of classified documents to wikileaks then he has committed the most serious treason and perhaps throwing away the key is the best that he should hope for.
Cheers Comrades
😉
Yeah, I watched the footage
I was just as horrified as anyone that these men turned out to not be insurgents but (and its a big but here) listen to the dialogue the chatter between the pilots and their controller, they clearly believed that these men were insurgents and that they were justified in taking them out. It is truly fucked up that Apache helicopter pilots could not tell with 100% accuracy just who the bad guys are in the Iraq war but show me a war where no soldier fires upon and kills the innocent and I will show you a very unrealistic computer game designed by a self righteous lefty with no experience in the military.
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A group of men in the streets of New Baghdad just prior to being fired upon by a US Apache helicopter. Among those believed to be killed in the attack was Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and his driver Saeed Chmagh, 40. Picture: AP Source: AP
Since 2007, we acknowledged everything that’s in the video,” the official said. “We acknowledged that the strike took place and that there were two Reuters employees (killed).”
“We know that two kids were injured,” the official said.
“The RPG in the video is real,” the official added. “We had insurgents and reporters in an area where US forces were about to be ambushed.
“At the time we weren’t able to discern whether (the Reuters employees) were carrying cameras or weapons,” the official said.
In a statement, Reuters news editor-in-chief David Schlesinger said “the deaths of Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh three years ago were tragic and emblematic of the extreme dangers that exist in covering war zones.
“The video released today via Wikileaks is graphic evidence of the dangers involved in war journalism and the tragedies that can result,” he said.
In war some very bad mistakes are made and people die as a result. If you lose sight of that as you climb onto your high horse of moral indignation it is probably because you have your head right up your arse.
Until next time Comrades.
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Iain Hall's SANDPIT 