| I just don't know why I cried for Assange, who is actually a stranger for me. But,for some reasons I feel that I am connected to him. I can feel his sufferings. This world has treated him unfair. I can't accept that he is on jail now. The court denied his bail. How come such a good person being treated like that? He deserves to get honors, instead. Who to blame? Off course, I blame all the forces which have made him suffering, including those two women who I hate the most. I just hate those two women because they have put so much trouble into Julian by accusing him a rapist. Hey you two idiots, are u satisfied now putting him on jail. You two are really disgusting. I am a woman but I don't support your action. You had sex with him consensually. You are not raped! What the heck you make such accusations! How much you two are paid by those dark forces which only have a goal to silence Assange? You are so cheap and unworthy. I hate you! Julian DOES NOT rape you, morons!I just can't believe Interpol facilitates arrest of a person who doesn't use condom. This is really made-up allegation to make my Julian suffering. I am so sad to see this injustice. Enough is enough...I can't bear this anymore.. Sorry I put some harsh words in this blog..I am so emotionally afected by what has happened to Julian Assange. I wish I could accompany him during his arrest. I like him so much. Julian, pls be strong and don't give up. No one can stop the truth. |
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Julian, you are not alone
I ♥ Julian Paul Assange
| Julian, thank you for bringing us the truth. I am on your side. You are a real hero in this everything-can-be-manipulated era...Btw, I feel sick into stomach after knowing that visa and master card also discontinued #wikileaks payments as PayPal did earlier. What the heck are they doing?How come you all do such things? I dunno how to retaliate for their action. I am now in the muddle because all my debit and credit cards are under those names. I can't completely ban them as I did to PayPal and Amazon.♦Though,I'll try to minimize the use of those cards. ☆Hope Julian is strong to deal with all the dark forces wanting to silence him. ♥Julian♥, keep fighting. |
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Assange just wrote an op-ed for The Australian
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wrote this Op-Ed for The Australian today:
Key lines:
* WikiLeaks is fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.
* The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.
* (My idea is) to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.
* People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars.
* The Gillard government (Australia) is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn’t want the truth revealed.
Text follows:
IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s The News, wrote: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.”
His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch’s expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.
Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.
I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.
These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia , was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.
WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?
Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.
People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.
If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, any of the US embassy cables or any of the stories about the things WikiLeaks has reported, consider how important it is for all media to be able to report these things freely.
WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain ‘s The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.
Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be “taken out” by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be “hunted down like Osama bin Laden”, a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a “transnational threat” and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister’s office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.
And Australians should observe with no pride the disgraceful pandering to these sentiments by Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.
We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn’t want the truth revealed, including information about its own diplomatic and political dealings.
Has there been any response from the Australian government to the numerous public threats of violence against me and other WikiLeaks personnel? One might have thought an Australian prime minister would be defending her citizens against such things, but there have only been wholly unsubstantiated claims of illegality. The Prime Minister and especially the Attorney-General are meant to carry out their duties with dignity and above the fray. Rest assured, these two mean to save their own skins. They will not.
Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with the State Department: “You’ll risk lives! National security! You’ll endanger troops!” Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can’t be both. Which is it?
It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US , with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone.
US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan . NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn’t find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.
But our publications have been far from unimportant. The US diplomatic cables reveal some startling facts:
The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US Officials in Jordan and Bahrain want Iran ‘s nuclear program stopped by any means available.
Britain’s Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect “US interests”.
Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept from parliament.
The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay . Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.
In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government”. The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.
Julian Assange is the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.
Tuesday, December 07, 10 (09:55 pm)
FULL TEXT HERE
Julian Assange has written an Op-Ed, to be published in The Australian tomorrow. It was due to go live at midnight AEST, and it is already in early editions of the newspaper, due on the streets at 2am.
Now we hear reports that Mr Assange has been arrested. I have permission from my Editor in Chief to publish a snippet of what will go live at midnight.
Mr Assange begins by saying: `In 1958, a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s The News, wrote: `In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.’’
It goes on to say a few more things about freedom of speech; the `dark days’ of corrupt government in Queensland (where Assange was raised); the Fitzgerald inquiry; and it says much about his upbringing in a country town, ``where people spoke their minds bluntly.’’
It says that Australian politicians are chanting a ``provably false chorus’’ with the US State Department of ``You’ll risk lives! You’ll endanger troops!’’ by releasing information, and ``then they say there is nothing of importance in what Wikileaks publishes. It can’t be both.’’
I do not know where the Australian got it; whether Mr Assange contacted
us or the other way around. I think I can also say it’s a passionate
defence of his methods, and his goals. That’s all I have for now.
Tuesday, December 07, 10 (04:16 pm)
MY favourite line from Greg Hywood’s email to Age staff today:
Don Churchill has ``the full support of the entire board - including me.’’
Well, it was responsible for one of their best ever rating nights ....
It's bad news for the deficit
Ezra Klein - An imperfect, but not-that-bad, deal on the tax cuts
The White House and the Republicans are pretty close to a final deal on the Bush tax cuts. Here are the specifics, though it's worth saying that as near as this is to completion, it's still not done, and so it could change:
1) The Bush tax cuts get extended for two years -- with one ugly surprise: For the next two years, estates up to $5,000,000 will be protected from the estate tax, and the tax rate for the few estates that are taxed will be 35 percent. That's worse than the 2009 estate tax ($3.5 million exemption, 45 percent rate), though better than this year's "no estate tax at all." The difference in expected revenue between the 2009 levels and the compromise levels is $10 billion or so.
2) The refundable tax credits are extended: The Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit and the American Opportunity Tax Credit were all pumped up in the stimulus, but set to expire this year. All of them will be extended. Price tag? $40 billion or so.
3) Unemployment insurance gets extended for 13 months: Most observers -- myself included -- thought the federal boost to unemployment insurance (which allowed jobless workers in states with high levels of unemployment to collect insurance for up to 99 weeks) would lapse. At best, there'd be another two- or three-month extension. In perhaps the most important part of the deal, there's going to be a 13-month extension at a cost of $56 billion.
4) A 2 percent cut in the payroll taxes paid by employees: This is perhaps the most unexpected part of the compromise. Rather than extending the administration's Making Work Pay tax credit for two years, which would've been worth about $60 billion a year, they've agreed to a one-year cut in the payroll taxes paid by employees, which'll raise $120 billion in 2011. That's a much stronger boost over the next year, and of course these tax cuts have a tendency to get extended ...
5) Business expensing: Remember back in September, when the White House announced a proposal to give businesses two years in which they could deduct 100 percent of the cost of new investments? That's in the deal, too. The cost of this is a bit complicated -- it's $30 billion over 10 years, but it works by offering huge tax cuts in the next two years and then paying that back over the next eight. So we're basically trying to shift business investment forward to 2011 and 2012. Over those two years, the tax breaks should be around $200 billion, though because it's a shift rather than a cut, it will have less than $200 billion in impact.
So is this a good deal? It's a lot better than I would've told you the White House was going to get if you'd asked me a week ago. There's some new stimulus in the form of the payroll-tax cut and the expensing proposals. The older stimulus programs that are getting extended -- notably the unemployment insurance and the tax credits -- probably would've expired outside of this deal. The tax cuts for income over $250,000 are a bad way to spend $100 billion or so, and the estate tax deal is really noxious.
It's bad news for the deficit, though the White House and Congress are right to make the deficit less of a priority than economic recovery. And speaking of that economic recovery? This isn't enough, and it's not well targeted. The deal amounts to the White House throwing some bad money after good. But the end result is between $200 and $300 billion more in tax breaks, tax credits and unemployment insurance than there would've been if not for this deal (I say $200-$300 billion because of the uncertainty over what would've been extended in the absence of this package). That's better than nothing -- or to be more specific, better than backsliding.
Most of the money just keeps programs that are currently in effect from expiring, so in some ways, it would be more accurate to say that this money is anti-contractionary rather than stimulative. It's important that the White House doesn't repeat the mistake it made in the original stimulus and overpromise how much this will do for the economy. What you can say about this policy is that, for the moment, it doesn't make things much worse, and it probably makes them a bit better. This is not the government making a major new commitment to the recovery. It's the government not getting in the way, and maybe doing a bit to help, the horribly slow recovery that's happening anyway.
It also, importantly, holds the extensions to two years. The tax cuts for income over $250,000 and the new estate tax rates will expire in 2012. The White House thinks that this'll be a good election issue for them, as it combines a popular, populist stance on taxes with a deficit-reduction message. Whether they're right -- and whether they'll fight in 2012 in the way people hoped they'd fight in 2010 -- remains to be seen. But on a policy level, two-year extensions of bad tax cuts are much preferable to 10-year extensions of bad tax cuts.
And finally, it's something of a hopeful sign: The White House sat in a room with Republicans and Democrats and managed to negotiate an actual compromise. The final deal includes some things that Democrats will like and some things they won't like, and it includes some things Republicans will like and some things they won't like. But it's a deal, and a better one than many -- myself included -- thought they'd reach. These tax cuts were a bit of a special legislative case, as their scheduled expiration forced action, but if you want to be optimistic, this process suggests that the next two years might be a bit more productive than some of us have been predicting.
WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange to Meet with UK Police
The WikiLeaks founder is calling for supporters to contribute to his bail fund; he will need between £100,000 and £200,000. The exact amount is to be negotiated in court today.
Various governments and corporations have been putting some pressure on WikiLeaks and Assange over the past several weeks. The site’s DNS service, web servers and even bank accounts have all been shuffled around as high-profile entities such as Amazon, MasterCard and Paypal refused to work with WikiLeaks.
The site’s whistleblower mission has also been under particular scrutiny since its recent leak of more than 250,000 cables to and from U.S. embassies and diplomats, some of which expose the names of active operatives in secret and critical situations.
Assange has said he believes the United States is behind the arrest warrant and extradition attempt; indeed, many U.S. politicians have not had kind words for Assange in recent days. Several conservatives, including Sarah Palin, have even said he should be assassinated.
We’ll continue to follow WikiLeaks news as it unfolds, but at this point, even we’re wondering if the level of vitriol coming from U.S. politicians is enough to make Assange feel safer in the custody of police than on the street.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)