The Case Against Wikileaks – II

By Lila Rajiva | My Catbird Seat | December 15, 2010

In my earlier post at Veterans Today (The Case Against Wikileaks – I) I recapped the main problems I’ve had with alt media phenomenon Wikileaks and its co-founder, chief editor, and public face, Julian Assange.

I identified the problems as follows:

Wikileaks’ content - for tending to simply confirm what most experts have already suspected and directing most of its damaging revelations toward  the US and the Islamic world, but not toward Israel

WL’s goal – for demanding full transparency from even private outfits, and encouraging hacking to achieve it

WL’s modus operandi - for being megalomaniac, sensationalistic, unilateral, and ( in a most hypocritical way) secretive

WL’s strategy – for catering to the Zionist line on 9-11 and employing mainstream/establishment platforms that further Zionist goals

Assange’s theories – for  pseudo-libertarian posturing, betrayed by the authoritarian tendencies of JA’s life and work

But, first, let me  play devil’s advocate. All these problems with Wikileaks might have a perfectly reasonable explanation.

• The documents released so far might just be a preview of coming attractions; Assange might be holding back the really big stuff.

• The media blitz might signal marketing skill, not a sell-out.

• The deference to Zionist sensibilities might be a tactful acknowledgment of power, not servility to it.

• The philosophical contradictions could arise from complexity and growth, not deception.

OK. Let’s say that’s the case. So what?  Does that put Julian Assange in the clear?

Unfortunately, no.  Even if you accept the most benign explanation for every issue I’ve raised so far,  Wikileaksstill poses problems.

German city pares budget deficit with "sex tax"

Romanian prostitutes pose in a brothel in Schoenefeld, Germany April 15, 2009.

Credit: Reuters/Hannibal Hanschke

(Reuters Life!) - Challenged with a 100 million euro ($133 million) deficit, one western German city has introduced a day tax on prostitutes to help whittle down its budget gap.

The new "pleasure tax" requires prostitutes in Dortmund to purchase a 6 euro "day ticket" for each day they work, or face a potential fine. The city estimates that the new tax will add some 750,000 euros to its coffers each year.

"Dortmund has financial problems like many cities in Germany," city spokesman Michael Meinders told Reuters. "We considered several sex taxes but this was the most practical proposal."

The new tax went into effect in August but the day tickets have not been available until this week.

An alternative proposal was to charge a 1 or 2 euro fee to anyone entering Dortmund's red-light district, but this idea got little political support, Meinders said.

Such taxes are not unusual in Germany where prostitution is legal and sex workers must pay tax on their income. Cologne introduced a 150 euro "pleasure tax" on sex workers in 2004 and later added a 6 euro day tax option for part-time prostitutes.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; editing by Paul Casciato)

Michael Chossudovsky: Who is Behind Wikileaks?

Who is Behind Wikileaks?

by Michel Chossudovsky

http://www.globalresearch.ca/ December 13, 2010

“World bankers, by pulling a few simple levers that control the flow of money, can make or break entire economies. By controlling press releases of economic strategies that shape national trends, the power elite are able to not only tighten their stranglehold on this nation’s economic structure, but can extend that control world wide. Those possessing such power would logically want to remain in the background, invisible to the average citizen.” — (Aldus Huxley)
Wikleaks is upheld as a breakthrough in the battle against media disinformation and the lies of the US government.

Unquestionably, the released documents constitute an important and valuable data bank. The documents have been used by critical researchers since the outset of the Wikileaks project. Wikileaks earlier revelations have focussed on US war crimes in Afghanistan (July 2010) as well as issues pertaining to civil liberties and the “militarization of the Homeland” (see Tom Burghardt, Militarizing the “Homeland” in Response to the Economic and Political Crisis, Global Research, October 11, 2008)

In October 2010, WikiLeaks was reported to have released some 400,000 classified Iraq war documents, covering events from 2004 to 2009 (Tom Burghardt, The WikiLeaks Release: U.S. Complicity and Cover-Up of Iraq Torture Exposed, Global Research, October 24, 2010). These revelations contained in the Wikileaks Iraq War Logs provide “further evidence of the Pentagon’s role in the systematic torture of Iraqi citizens by the U.S.-installed post-Saddam regime.” (Ibid)

Progressive organizations have praised the Wikileaks endeavor. Our own website Global Research has provided extensive coverage of the Wikileaks project.

The leaks are heralded as an immeasurable victory against corporate media censorship.

But there is more than meets the eye.

Even prior to the launching of the project, the mainstream media had contacted Wikileaks.

There are also reports from published email exchanges that Wikileaks had entered into negotiations with several corporate foundations for funding. (Wikileaks Leak email exchanges, January 2007).

The linchpin of WikiLeaks’s financial network is Germany’s Wau Holland Foundation. … “We’re registered as a library in Australia, we’re registered as a foundation in France, we’re registered as a newspaper in Sweden,” Mr. Assange said. WikiLeaks has two tax-exempt charitable organizations in the U.S., known as 501C3s, that “act as a front” for the website, he said. He declined to give their names, saying they could “lose some of their grant money because of political sensitivities.”

Lila Rajiva: The Case Against Wikileaks – I

IS WIKILEAKS “SUBLIMINAL PREPPING” BY AN INTELLIGENCE AGENCY?

By Lila Rajiva STAFF WRITER

Let me first say that harassing Julian Assange for having published leaked government documents is completely wrong. There’s no evidence so far that anyone has been injured directly because of the leaks. National security (even as understood by mainstream statists) hasn’t been damaged. As for the embarrassment some officials might be feeling, tough. Governments routinely subject their citizens to much worse for no valid reason.  As for diplomacy, there’s none worth the name.  In high office, all we have are blackmailers, bullies, and bandits. Some outing and shaming of their public actions is in order. Exposing the crimes and blunders of the state is not only a right of citizens, but a duty.

As enough people have argued, Assange is obviously not guilty of treason, since he’s not a citizen of the US. And, although some people think he’s guilty of espionage, that’s doesn’t seem true either.  He didn’t hack any state computer or blow any agent’s cover to get his information. It was mostly given to him voluntarily by whistle-blowers and leakers.  All he did was publish it. And, since New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), US law has protected the right of publishers to publish politically sensitive information without “prior restraints,” as long as it doesn’t cause “grave and irreparable damage” to the public.

Having said that, though, I must admit that for almost a year now, as I’ve blogged, I’ve found the whole Wikileaksoperation strange, if not a bit fishy. Let me recount the ways.

1. Most of the documents seems to cover material already fairly well-known to informed people.  The new material is mostly embarrassing stuff, nothing truly revelatory, say dozens of critics. Now, mainstream critics might just be trying to do damage control, but why would respected alternative investigators who are outspoken critics of war and the police state, people like Wayne Madsen or co-founder John Young or Chris Floyd, among many others, also come to that conclusion? [Floyd seems to have "gone wobbly" since then].

By Assange’s own account in the  The Australian, here are the most important revelations from Wikileaks:

CIA implanted electrodes in brains of unsuspecting soldiers, lawsuit alleges

A group of military veterans are suing to get the CIA to come clean about allegedly implanting remote control devices in their brains.

It's well known that the CIA began testing substances like LSD on soldiers beginning in the 1950s but less is known about allegations that the agency implanted electrodes in subjects.

A 2009 lawsuit (.pdf) claimed that the CIA intended to design and test septal electrodes that would enable them to control human behavior. The lawsuit said that because the government never disclosed the risks, the subjects were not able to give informed consent.

Bruce Price, one plaintiff in the lawsuit, believes that MRI scans confirm that the CIA placed a device in his brain in 1966.

At one point, Bruce was ordered to visit a building with a chain link fence that housed test animals, including dogs, cats, guinea pigs and monkeys. After reporting, Bruce was strapped across his chest, his wrists, and his ankles to a gurney. Bruce occasionally would regain consciousness for brief moments. On one such instance, he remembers being covered with a great deal of blood, and assumed it was his own, but did not really know the source. Also portions of his arms and the backs of his hand were blue. His wrist and ankles were bruised and sore at the points where he had been strapped to the gurney. Bruce believes that this is the time period during which a septal implant was placed in his brain.

DEFENDANTS placed some sort of an implant in Bruce’s right ethmoid sinus near the frontal lobe of his brain. The implant appears on CT scans as a “foreign body” of undetermined composition (perhaps plastic or some composite material) in Bruce’s right ethmoid, as confirmed in a radiology report dated June 30, 2004.

According to a 1979 book by former State Department intelligence officer John Marks, The CIA and the Search for the Manchurian Candidate, an internal 1961 memo by a top agency scientist reported that "the feasibility of remote control of activities in several species of animals has been demonstrated... Special investigations and evaluations will be conducted toward the application of selected elements of these techniques to man."