James Cogan
WSWS

Kevin Rudd, the current Minister for Foreign Affairs and Julia Gillard, who
ousted him and now is Prime Minister of Australia. [- If looks could kill...]

The Australian Labor government has joined with the Obama administration in its attempt to manufacture criminal charges against Julian Assange, an Australian citizen and the editor of WikiLeaks.

"The treatment being meted out to Assange demonstrates the contempt for democratic rights and international law within the Australian ruling elite and its political parties. Not one figure in the Labor government, the conservative opposition or the Greens has even expressed concern, let alone condemnation, of the implied death threats against Assange."

On Monday, Attorney General Robert McClelland told a doorstop press conference that Australia “will support any law enforcement action that may be taken. The United States will be the lead government in that respect, but certainly Australian agencies will assist”. The Australian Federal Police, he stated, would “look at the issue as to whether any Australian laws have been breached as a specific issue as well”.

A taskforce, made of up personnel from various intelligence and police agencies, has been formed to scour through the leaked material to determine if Assange can be charged with releasing “national security-classified documents”.

McClelland indicated that the Australian government had not received a specific request from Washington to cancel Assange’s passport. This is likely because both the US and Australian governments hope he will emerge from hiding and attempt to travel, whereupon he can be detained on either the trumped-up rape charges brought by the Swedish government or whatever equally politically-motivated charges are ultimately laid in the US.

McClelland left no doubt that if Assange returned to Australia—where he is a citizen and supposedly protected from political persecution by other states—the Labor government would provide “every assistance” to his deportation and prosecution in the US.

In a separate statement, McClelland also made clear that the Australian government would demand that any country providing Assange refuge, before charges are laid in the US, hands him over to Swedish authorities. The prosecution in Sweden, he declared on Tuesday, “places an obligation on those countries that are part of the Interpol arrangements to actually detain him when he arrives”.

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Justin Raimondo
Antiwar

Rep. Peter King characterizes WikiLeaks as a “terrorist” organization, but who’s the real terrorist-supporter? Wasn’t it Rep. King who signed a statement of support for the “National Council of Resistance,” a front for the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), which appears on the State Department’s list of designated terrorist organizations? The MEK has killed American diplomatic personnel, and is described as a fanatic cult by many observers: its supporters, who adhere to a weird combination of Marxism and Islam, were succored by Saddam Hussein in Iraq before the US invasion, where they still persist (under US guard) to this day.

King’s support for terrorism doesn’t stop there, however: he is also a fervent booster of the “Real IRA,” an Irish Republican terrorist organization that plants bombs and assassinates its enemies. As a supporter of Irish Northern Aid, King lent his name and prestige to a group that was buying weapons for the “Real” IRA, which were used to murder civilians as well as British government officials and police.

If anyone should be accused of support for terrorism – material support – it’s King, and the only reason he’s not been charged is because there are two sets of laws in this country, one for us lowly plebs, who might travel to, say, Colombia, or Palestine, and meet with someone our government doesn’t approve of, and another set of laws for the political class, the members of which can do anything [.pdf] they damn well please as long as they don’t inconvenience higher-ups in the DC food chain.

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Stephen Lendman

The Pew Charitable Trusts "uses public opinion polling and other research tools to produce reports that track important issues and trends." Its new report is titled, "Collateral Costs: Incarceration's Effect on Economic Mobility," focusing on America's burgeoning prison population and enormous cost. Now over $50 billion annually, it "consum(es) 1 in every 15 general fund dollars."

The nation spends recklessly on harshness, leaving little little left for society's needs. No wonder Pew found that people today are worse off than their parents at the same age, and "42 percent of Americans whose parents were in the bottom fifth of the income ladder remain there themselves as adults." As for race, Americans of color, especially Blacks, fare significantly worse than whites.

Pew studied the relationship between incarceration and mobility, asking to what extent does it create lasting impediments to economic progress. Overall, how does America's burgeoning prison population affect the American dream? Negatively, in fact, for the vast majority because authorities make it so.

The Growth, Scale and Concentration of Incarceration in America

Over 2.4 million prisoners are in federal and state facilities, local jails, Indian, juvenile and military ones, US territories, and numbers held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities (ICE). Half are for nonviolent offenses, many for political activism, and thousands there are immigrant Latinos forced north because NAFTA destroyed their livelihoods and way of life. They're now persecuted ruthlessly by a repressive nation.

Today, America's prison population is the world's largest, exceeding China's at four times the population and the top 35 European countries combined. It wasn't by accident. It followed the last 30 year shift to the right, the war on drugs, get tough on crime policies, three strikes and you're out, a guilty unless proved innocent mentality, and overall judicial unfairness. It's especially impacted society's poor and disadvantaged, people of color mostly, comprising two-thirds of those imprisoned.

As a result, "Incarceration has become a prominent American institution with substantial collateral consequences for families and communities, particularly among the most disadvantaged." Black male high school dropouts are especially impacted. Over one-third aged 20 - 34 are behind bars, three times the rate for whites in the same category.

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Saman Mohammadi
The Excavator

The war on terrorism was not ill-conceived, it was criminally conceived. Attacking Iraq was not an error, it was a crime against humanity. President Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan not because he was pressured by his military advisers, but because he, like Bush, is without a conscience and doesn't respect human life.

Don't be fooled by Obama's smile or Bush's cowboy talk, they are both evil criminals who don't mind being the face of an evil empire that has killed millions of innocent people since the end of World War II. Politicians like Obama and Bush believe in power for power's sake. Freedom, peace, justice, and truth don't enter their calculations.

The forces of power captured Obama when he was young; read Obama's own writing about how he was led by his Indonesian stepfather Lolo onto power's trail. "Better to be strong,” Lolo told a young Obama. Obama couldn't resist the seductive pull of power because he didn't have the spiritual strength that leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln all had.

If given the ring of power, or coming across it on power's trail, Obama would put it on his finger in a matter of seconds. He wouldn't even blink.

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zunguzungu
zunguzungu

“To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.” ~ Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies”

The piece of writing (via) which that quote introduces is intellectually substantial, but not all that difficult to read, so you might as well take a look at it yourself. Most of the news media seems to be losing their minds over Wikileaks without actually reading these essays, even though he describes the function and aims of an organization like Wikileaks in pretty straightforward terms. But, to summarize, he begins by describing a state like the US as essentially an authoritarian conspiracy, and then reasons that the practical strategy for combating that conspiracy is to degrade its ability to conspire, to hinder its ability to “think” as a conspiratorial mind. The metaphor of a computing network is mostly implicit, but utterly crucial: he seeks to oppose the power of the state by treating it like a computer and tossing sand in its diodes.

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