Joseph Kishore
WSWS

US president Barack Obama added his own comments to the increasingly vitriolic campaign against WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, over the weekend. Obama called the actions by WikiLeaks, which have helped reveal Washington’s sordid machinations in various parts of the world, “deplorable.”

According to the White House, the president called Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip and “expressed his regrets for the deplorable action by WikiLeaks.” The White House said that the two leaders agreed the leaked cables—including thousands from the US embassy in the Turkish capital of Ankara—would “not influence or disrupt the close co-operation between the United States and Turkey.”

Obama made similar remarks in a telephone call to Mexican president Filipe Calderon.

The statements were the first direct comments from the president, who has allowed Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder to take the lead in attacking WikiLeaks and threatening prosecution. Holder said last week that American authorities were actively pursuing some means of charging Assange and WikiLeaks for the release of the cables. Assange’s lawyers have warned that a US indictment against their client may be imminent.

While condemning WikiLeaks, Obama has said nothing about the repeated calls from sections of the US media and political establishment for the assassination of Assange or the designation of WikiLeaks as a terrorist organization—thus tacitly legitimizing what amounts to an incitement to murder.

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Paul Craig Roberts
Vdare

The stuck pigs are squealing. To shift the onus from the US State Department, Hillary Clinton paints Wikileaks’ release of the "diplomatic cables" as an "attack on the international community." To reveal truth is equivalent in the eyes of the US government to an attack on the world.

It is Wikileaks’ fault that all those US diplomats wrote a quarter of a million undiplomatic messages about America’s allies, a.k.a., puppet states. It is also Wikileaks’ fault that a member of the US government could no longer stomach the cynical ways in which the US government manipulates foreign governments to serve, not their own people, but American interests, and delivered the incriminating evidence to Wikileaks.

The US government actually thinks that it was Wikileaks patriotic duty to return the evidence and to identify the leaker. After all, we mustn’t let the rest of the world find out what we are up to. They might stop believing our lies.

The influential German magazine, Der Spiegel, writes: "It is nothing short of a political meltdown for US foreign policy."

This might be more a hope than a reality. The "Soviet threat" during the second half of the 20th century enabled US governments to create institutions that subordinated the interests of other countries to those of the US government. After decades of following US leadership, European "leaders" know no other way to act. Finding out that the boss badmouths and deceives them is unlikely to light a spirit of independence. At least not until America’s economic collapse becomes more noticeable. -The question is: how much will the press tell us about the documents?

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James Cogan
WSWS

A special forces unit completing an early morning raid on Saturday gunned down seven men in the village of Rohani Baba, in Afghanistan’s eastern Paktia province. Abdul Rahman Mangal, the deputy governor of Paktia, told CNN that the victims were road construction workers. A press release by the US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) alleges that the men were employees of a private security company.

Details of the incident remain sketchy, but the ISAF statement claims that its troops had detained an alleged arms dealer and had moved on to “investigate suspected insurgent activity” at a housing compound in Rohani Baba. The seven men, some of whom were allegedly armed, were sitting in and around an SUV. After they were ordered in Pashtun to leave the compound, one man, carrying an AK-47, began to walk toward the occupation troops. He was shot dead. Some of the other men returned fire and in the resulting gun battle, all seven were killed.

The killings point again to the murderous character of the operations being conducted by the special forces units scouring Afghanistan. The underlying philosophy of these operations is to shoot first and ask questions later. Since September, ISAF claims it has killed or captured over 368 insurgent “leaders”. American commanders boasted last month that 24 rank-and-file insurgents are also being killed or captured every 24 hours by Special Forces. It is unknown how many were actually “Taliban” and how many, like the seven men in Rohani Baba, were simply people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

While ISAF claims it will “investigate” the killings, the activities of what can only be called death squads are aimed at terrorising and intimidating the Afghan population into submitting to the occupation.

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Stephen Lendman

Planned is death by a thousand cuts - aka "creeping normalcy," defined as a way to make major changes seem normal if happen slowly, incrementally like boiling a frog unaware it's dinner until cooked.

Social Security and Medicare are dinner. Yet both are insurance, not welfare, programs funded by (worker-employer) payroll tax deductions. They're contractual federal obligations to eligible recipients who qualify. You'd never know it the way both programs are publicly discussed, explaining everything but the truth. More on that below.

On August 14, 1935, the Social Security Act became law, known as the federal Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program (OASDI). It provides retirement, disability, survivorship, and death benefits. It's still America's most effective poverty reduction program that's worked remarkably well since inception. It exists to provide secure inflation-adjusted retirement or disability income, unlike risking personal savings to create private wealth that may end up losing it.

Despite bogus claims, it's not going bankrupt. When properly administered, it's sound and secure, needing only modest adjustments at times to assure it.

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Len Hart
The Existentialist Cowboy

The U.S. will try to prosecute Julian Assange under laws that violate the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, laws that were absurd when the U.S. entered World War I and more so now. These are laws that prohibit you from telling the truth about the U.S. government; these are laws that make it a crime to exercise your conscience.

Let's put aside the myth that we are guaranteed 'Freedom of Speech' in the U.S. Certainly, the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution makes such a guarantee but, in practice, we are often denied that right, most notably when it is the government that is sure to be embarrassed or exposed by the mere exercise of free speech. That is the case today! The U.S. Government has threatened to prosecute Julian Assange for violating the U.S. Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, the law that progressive labor champion Eugene Debs was accused of violating when he dared to oppose U.S. entry into World War I. The world's biggest idiot --Sarah Palin --has irresponsibly called for the assassination of Assange.

The legislation enacted in 1918 is commonly called the Sedition Act, actually a set of amendments to the Espionage Act.

The Espionage Act made it a crime to interfere with the war effort or with military recruitment or to aid a nation at war with the U.S. The Sedition Act extended its provisions to cover a broader range of offenses, notably speech and the expression of opinion that cast the government or the war effort in a negative light or interfered with the sale of government bonds. One historian of American civil liberties has called it "the nation's most extreme antispeech legislation."[6] Those convicted under the act generally received sentences of imprisonment for 10 to 20 years.[7] ~ Sedition Act of 1918

The law prohibited MANY forms of speech.

...any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the... form of government of the United States...or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy.

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Larry Chin
Global Research

...Uncle Tom and Little Eva

In his now-infamous press conference defending his call to extend criminal Bush tax breaks for billionaires and corporations (and raise taxes on the poor), President Barack Obama angrily jabbed his finger at his critics, lambasting them as “sanctimonious”.

This telling moment dispelled all illusions about what interests Obama truly represents; whose side he is really on.

Obama’s Orwellian embrace of all things corporate and politically rightward has been deliberate, forceful and consistent throughout his career; not the product of cowardice, weakness, incompetence, naïve idealism, or bad timing. This is Barack Obama, as he has always been: a servile facilitator and protector of the political establishment; an insidious capitulator and “consensus man”; a sellout who piously sits back and lets others fight (while railing against their “bickering”), and then accepts whatever deal is politically expedient ---no matter what morals or principles he violates, no matter who or what he betrays. To the pious, sanctimonious and self-serving Obama, it is wrong to be a “purist”, but good to be “impure”; a muddler. A sellout.

It must be pointed out that Obama’s attack on the liberal political base is not shocking or unexpected. His mythical image and occasional populist rhetoric aside, the Obama has never been a liberal, or even a “centrist”. As evidenced by his record, he fully supports the destruction of liberalism

It is no surprise to find Obama aping the similarly corrupt Bill Clinton, whose political “triangulation” strategy in the 1990s continues to destroy to this day. (It is also no surprise that we Obama has enlisted Bill Clinton himself to help sell the Bush tax cut extension to the Democratic Party base that no longer trusts Obama.) (It will fail.)

For Wall Street’s billionaires, the Pentagon’s warmongers, and Washington’s most shamelessly corrupt, there has been no greater gift than Obama and his presidency. Obama is doing the job that was given to him, and he is as haughtily pleased with himself as George W. Bush was.

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Stephen Lendman

The criminal class in Washington is bipartisan. On core issues, Democrats are no different from Republicans. Expect more bluster before caving like Obama, enacting his deal with the devil worth up to $1 trillion dollars. The lion's share goes to corporations and America's wealthy, middle and low income workers getting crumbs. The fix is in. It'll happen, promoted as stimulus to create jobs and revive economic growth. Not so. More on that below.

Given the makeup of both Houses, their voting records aren't surprising. Getting reelected counts most. Under a corrupted electoral system, generous funding is needed, but wealthy and corporate donors expect lavish favors in return. They get them and much more.

As a result, Congress capitulates on virtually everything big money wants. Expect it again. Besides more handouts, preserving their tax breaks are key. Most congressional members, in fact, want their own kept. Otherwise, they'll face big increases they don't want and can avoid by benefitting from what they give millionaires, their own class. Read on.

Both the House and Senate are infested with millionaires. For some, their net worth exceeds $100 million.

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