John Pilger

WikiLeaks is a rare example of a newsgathering organisation that exposes the truth. Julian Assange is by no means alone.

Last December, I stood with supporters of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in the bitter cold outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Candles were lit; the faces were young and old and from all over the world. They were there to demonstrate their human solidarity with someone whose guts they admired. They were in no doubt about the importance of what Assange had revealed and achieved, and the grave dangers he now faced. Absent entirely were the lies, spite, jealousy, opportunism and pathetic animus of a few who claim the right to guard the limits of informed public debate.

These public displays of warmth for Assange are common and seldom reported. Several thousand people packed Sydney Town Hall, with hundreds spilling into the street. In New York recently, Assange was given the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award. In the audience was Daniel Ellsberg, who risked all to leak the truth about the barbarism of the Vietnam war.

Like Jemima Khan, the investigative journalist Phillip Knightley, the acclaimed film director Ken Loach and others lost bail money in standing up for Assange. “The US is out to crush someone who has revealed its dirty secrets,” Loach wrote to me. “Extradition via Sweden is more than likely...is it difficult to choose whom to support?”

No, it is not difficult.

In the New Statesman last week, Jemima Khan ended her support for an epic struggle for justice, truth and freedom with an article on Wiki­Leaks’s founder. To Khan, the Ellsbergs and Yoko Onos, the Loaches and Knightleys, and the countless people they represent, have all been duped. We are all “blinkered”. We are all mindlessly “devoted”. We are all “cultists”. In the final words of her j’accuse, she describes Assange as “an Australian L Ron Hubbard”. She must have known this would make a gratuitous headline, as indeed it did across the press in Australia.

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John V. Walsh

Just as Washington has involved NATO in its Afghanistan, Middle East and African wars, John V. Walsh explains Washington’s attempt to rope Japan into its military encirclement of China. Perhaps the Japanese will see in Washington’s effort to contain the rise of China the same policy that Washington used against Japan in the 1930s. Will Japan align with the rising power, the declining power, or stay neutral? — Paul Craig Roberts

At the height of the 2012 election campaign in late October, a U.S. delegation tiptoed into Japan and then China with scant media coverage. It was “unofficial,” but Hillary Clinton gave it her blessing. And it was headed by two figures high in the imperial firmament, Richard L. Armitage, who served as Deputy Secretary of State for George W. Bush; and Joseph S. Nye Jr., a former Pentagon and intelligence official in the Clinton administration and Dean Emeritus of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The delegation also included James B. Steinberg, who served as the Deputy Secretary of State in the Obama administration and Stephen J. Hadley, Bush Two’s national security adviser.

The delegation was billed as an attempt by the U.S. to defuse tensions between Japan and China over a number of small islands both claim. But was it? What is the outlook of these influential figures? Interestingly, Armitage and Nye provide us with a partial answer in a brief paper published the preceding August by the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS), entitled “The Japan-U.S. Alliance. Anchoring Stability in Asia,” the carefully crafted fruit of a CSIS Study Group they chaired. The strategy proposed therein, as outlined below, should be very distressing to the Chinese – as well as to the Japanese and Americans.

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William T. Hathaway

From the book
RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War
by William T. Hathaway

I received this letter from an ex-soldier.

Hi Mr. Hathaway,

I got your letter (forwarded) asking for information for your book. To answer your first question, Yes, I'm enjoying living in Holland. I'm becoming the little Dutch girl — the little Black Dutch girl, but that doesn't bother people here. They're very tolerant and internationally minded.

As for the rest of your questions, at first I didn't think I could answer them. They reminded me too much of an essay test in school. Plus it's not exactly pleasant to remember back on all this stuff, you know. I'm trying to leave it behind and start a new life.

But I kept thinking about it and finally decided I would forget the questions and just write about what happened. Like you said, people should know about this. Don't give anybody my address, though. The army still wants to put me in prison.

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