Posts by James George
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If you keep trawling through the blogs I'm sure that you will find even bettter examples of someone who wasn't in the room when these acts were alleged to have occurred, saying even more awful things about Mr Assange, which you will copy n paste into here in the interests of you know .... openess.
I can't help but notice that at every juncture the best interpretation possible is put on the doings of anyone who opposes Mr Assange, while the worst possible motives that can be imagined are assigned to Mr Assange.
If Julian Assange doesn't talk about the circumstances of these alleged sexual assaults, we are told it must be because his lawyer advised him not to, never that maybe he doesn't think the gutter press is best placed to aid clearly communicating his point of view, or more likely, that like many of us he isn't in the habit of discussing intimacies with strangers waving microphones and cameras.
Meanwhile we are instructed ad nauseum that there is nothing to support the contention that US operatives may have assisted in charges being laid. How could anyone, including Assange possibly know that neither of these women have any connection with US intelligence? The women's lawyer (surely an objective commentator - insert beer billboard cliche), states that as a fact. The statement is fallacious and completely insupportable. Why bother to copy n paste it?
The Canadian activist somehow manages to leave a vital incident out of her timeline. That is the the Chief Prosecutor, withdrew the charges because she believed there wasn't enough evidence to support a prosecution. The charges were then re-laid after the intervention of an elected official. So I wouldn't say that her post is worthy of anyone's attention since she so obviously has her own ax to grind.
The other thing we see in the canadian post and many others like it, is the attempt by those who appear to desperate to see that Mr Assange goes down like the proverbial lead balloon, to grab any statement, article or post which seeems to defend Assange, hang a few labels on the person who said/wrote it (leftie is typical even though some of the most vociferous support for Mr Assange has come from 'the right'. Raimondo and Co over at the libertarian antiwar.com for example). Another time place it should be thoroughly considered exactly why is that some reduce everything someone believes down to a simple metaphor about which side of the pre-revolutionary French National Assembly we think they may have sat.
Any defence of Assange by anyone, is ripped apart to find anything that could be considered 'anti-feminist'( eg my point that none of us were around when the condom broke in Sweden elicited a comment that I was trying to make light of rape, when the opposite was my intention)
The allegations of reactionary 'anti-feminism' once slapped on the defender are then hung around Assange's neck in a sort of guilt by association thing.
Assange is found to be deficient, not because of anything he may have said or done, but because of what some people who had the gall to defend him are alleged to have said or done.All classic lynch mob mentality stuff. The tricks that have enabled crooks & liars ever since peeps first fell for the old "I am your leader" scam.
THe the
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What an amazing capacity for self delusion some humans have. Pointing out that most of the known issues about the alleged rape centres on a broken condom and that therefore discussion of the circumstance is both pointless and ill-informed results in a litany of BS about mentioning the condom being an attempt to trivialise rape!
Following that my entreaty to at least discuss the one issue in all the cables that is more than a passing mention of NZ because it infers NZ troops are involving themselves in territory outside their region of responsibility, rouses 1 response dismissive of the cable's import before going back to hammering on the personality of one of the messengers.Is anyone even a little concerned that the Herald's reporting of the recent cable releases include 1 article boasting about how NZ was 'mentioned' at a conference in India, with no real indication of what 'we' said or what anyone said about 'us'. And another alleging that Hillary Clinton reckons the Southern Cross submarine cable is of strategic significance to the Pacific! Wow that's news!
When I was a kid who read too much growing up in 50's NZ, capital 'Z's always used to catch my eye because every now and again some foreign book would actually mention NZ! In the 70's if a celebrity arrived, he/she would be asked "What do you think of NZ? b4 they had gotten out of the Mangere terminal. (not that any answer the least bit negative would have been tolerated so why ask?)So far the reportage in NZ's media has been virtually all of that ilk and I see why from reading this thread.
I notice the newest PA thread is about the paucity of reporting on what exactly it is NZ is doing in Afghanistan, a thread which at the time I came past it into here to see if anyone had expended any effort considering the implication of NZ's military being portrayed by a US pro-consul as dutiful soldiers of empire, unlike 'old europe' who seemed more reluctant to have their citizens killed for the sake of a free trade agreement or whatever.
People prefer to avoid confronting NZ's involvement in the invasion and subjugation of others, same as everywhere; what is surprising is that they are so blatant about remaining ignorant of what is done in their name.
Hypocrisy is normally a shameful vice. -
What is crazy is that finally something substantive about NZ's role in Afghanistan has been found in the cables. A passage that shows NZ is being a lot more gung ho in it's dedication to furthering the the expansion of the US empire than other members of the 'Coalition of the Willing', yet people are still gossiping about peripheral issues of no import to us, that are none of our business. As if anyone commenting on this in here is party to 'what really happened' when a condom broke while two people were having sex in Sweden. Yet we all pay taxes in NZ that go to pay the costs of the NZ portion of the Afghani occupation forces.
None of us have skin in the game of let's play Assange not the issues, yet peeps are gossiping about that issue even when something that does need to be debated in NZ surfaces.
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Here is a url for that cable I excerpted
http://213.251.145.96/cable/2009/05/09KABUL1239.html -
Today’s tranche (well actually 3rd of December but just available) of cable releases includes at least 1 new one relevant to NZ. It is a cable from US Embassy Kabul back to the State Department in Washington. Dated May 9 2009, it attempts to address issues that a member of the US Provincial reconstruction team (PRT) observed during a trip to Afghanistan’s North Eastern region.
It is always worth remembering before reading these cables that just because the cables are genuine; it doesn’t mean they contain either truth or wisdom. As has been noted elsewhere much of the content appears to be little more than “telling the boss what she wants to hear”.
Anyway this particular cable is of interest to NZers because it claims that the force responsible for the Baghlan Province which adjoins Bamiyan where the kiwi PRT is located, is the Hungarian PRT, who operate under a completely different set of principles than the kiwis next door.
For example when anti-colonial forces based in Baglan crossed over into Bamiyan and attacked targets in Bamiyan, the Hungarian PRT did nothing. So the kiwis went into the Baglan region which wasn’t their allotted responsibility and dealt with the issue when the Hungarians wouldn’t. Top little coalition they’ve got going there eh! Anyway here is the relevant piece of the cable (Number 09KABUL1239, SUBJECT: AFGHANISTAN: A SNAPSHOT OF THE NORTHEAST )Province faces a different set of security challenges. As
the head of the UNAMA office for the region tells it, even
though Baghlan generally flies under the national radar, it
actually deserves to be labeled "the wild, wild west."
xxxxxxxxxxxx, behind-the-scenes
contests for power (including on the part of the provincial
chief of police); the influence of local strongmen and former
mujahedeen (particularly in northern Baghlan); unchecked
poppy cultivation in Andarab district; underlying
Tajik-Pashtun tensions; and criminality all combine to
undermine stability. Direct insurgent activity appears
limited, but criminal elements have fashioned links to the
Taliban. Locals have also made themselves available to
execute for-hire insurgent missions. The Hungarian PRT does
little to address any of these problems. They are not
permitted to fire their weapons except in self-defense, do
little more than patrol the main roads and undertake no
counter-narcotics activities. When two Hungarian de-miners
were killed doing their work, Budapest stopped sending mine
clearers to the PRT. When the security situation in
northeastern Bamyan Province was threatened by Baghlan-based
malefactors, it was the New Zealanders who had to cross into
Baghlan to address the problem. The PRT sees itself as
focused on humanitarian assistance and small-scale
development work. Again xxxxxxxxxxxx,
his nation's troops are looking to do their short stints in
Afghanistan and get back home unscathed. -
Alex Cockburn is also in top form this week http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12032010.html :
The irony is that the thousands of diplomatic communications released by WikiLeaks contain no earth-shaking disclosures that undermine the security of the American empire. The bulk of them merely illustrate the well-known fact that in every capital city round the world there is a building known as the U.S. Embassy inhabited by people whose prime function is to vanquish informed assessment of local conditions with swaddling cloths of ignorance and prejudice instilled in them by what passes for higher education in the United States, whose governing elites are now more ignorant of what is really happening in the outside world that at any time in the nation’s history. . .
snip
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This is not to downplay the great importance of this latest batch of WikiLeaks. Millions in America and around the world have been given a quick introductory course in international relations and the true arts of diplomacy – not least the third-rate, gossipy prose with which the diplomats rehearse the arch romans à clef they will write when they head into retirement.Years ago Rebecca West wrote in her novel The Thinking Reed of a British diplomat who, "even when he was peering down a woman's dress at her breasts managed to look as though he was thinking about India." In the updated version, given Hillary Clinton's orders to the State Department, the US envoy, pretending to admire the figure of the charming French cultural attaché, would actually be thinking how to steal her credit card information, obtain a retinal scan, her email passwords and frequent flier number. . .
snip
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last week Gareth Porter identified a diplomatic cable from last February released by WikiLeaks which provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the US suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or that Iran intends to develop such a capability. Porter points out that:"Readers of the two leading US newspapers never learned those key facts about the document. The New York Times and Washington Post reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles - supposedly called the BM-25 - from North Korea. Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the US view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence for the BM-25 from the US side.
"The Times, which had obtained the diplomatic cables not from WikiLeaks but from the Guardian, according to a Washington Post story Monday, did not publish the text of the cable. The Times story said the newspaper had made the decision not to publish 'at the request of the Obama administration'. That meant that its readers could not compare the highly distorted account of the document in the Times story against the original document without searching the Wikileaks website."
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The deliberately deceitful editorial in the Guardian is yet another example of opinion writers putting out their ideas without reading their own newspapers hard reporting.
So far Wikileaks (which was operating in an open, non-conspiratorial manner until US politicians called open season on WikiLeaks senior staff) has exposed all manner of nasty murderous behaviour by ‘diplomats’ operating out of US embassies around the world. And that from a tiny fraction of the number of cables which will eventually be released.
From [url|http://original.antiwar.com/fisher/2010/12/01/wikileaks-bolsters-claim-of-deadly-us-attack-in-yemen/] libertarian site Antiwar.com:A diplomatic cable published by whistleblowing platform WikiLeaks corroborates images released earlier by Amnesty International (AI) showing that the U.S. military carried out a missile strike in south Yemen in December 2009 that killed dozens of local residents, including women and children, the rights group says.
In the secret cable, written in January 2010, Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh is reported to have assured U.S. General David Petraeus that his government would "continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours".
According to the cable, this prompted Yemeni Deputy Prime Minister Rashad al-’Alimi "to joke that he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament that the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa were American-made but deployed by the ROYG [Republic of Yemen Government]".
Amnesty International is calling on the U.S. government to investigate the serious allegations of the use of drones by U.S. forces for targeted killings of individuals in Yemen and clarify the chain of command and rules governing the use of such drones.
Tom Parker, Amnesty’s policy director for terrorism, counter-terrorism and human rights, says that AI wrote to the Defense Department last May regarding the drone strike in Yemen. He said Amnesty raised a range of questions regarding that action, but never received a response.Or how about Ellen Knickmeyer the former Washington Post Baghdad Bureau Chief who wrote [ [url|http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-10-25/wikileaks-shows-rumsfeld-and-casey-lied-about-the-iraq-war/ ]]
During visits to Baghdad's morgue over the next two days, I saw Sunni families thronging to find the bodies of loved ones killed by the militias. The morgue's computer registrar told the grim-faced families and me that we would have to be patient; the morgue had taken in more than 1,000 bodies since the Samarra bombing, and was way behind on processing corpses.
Here's the thing, though: According to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commanders, it never happened. These killings, these dead, did not exist. According to them, reporters like myself were lying.
"The country is not awash in sectarian violence,'' the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey said, on talk show after talk show, making the rounds to tell the American home-front not to worry. Civil war? "I don't see it happening, certainly anytime in the near term,” he said, as he denied the surge in sectarian violence.
Casey had taken his own drive around Baghdad after the bombing of the Samarra mosque and had seen, not executed bodies in the streets but “a lot of bustle, a lot of economic activity. Store fronts crowded, goods stacked up on the street.”
Donald Rumsfeld held a news conference at the Pentagon to say that U.S. press reports of killings—such as mine that estimated 1,300 dead in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, based on what I had seen at the morgue, interviews with Sunni survivors, U.N. and Iraq health officials—were calculated "exaggerated reporting." Iraqi security forces, he said, “were taking the lead in controlling the situation,” everything he assured his listeners was “calming.”
. . .snip . . .
Thanks to WikiLeaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world, as the Iraq mission exploded.
The American troops, who were risking their lives on the ground, witnessed and documented it themselves.This is not just embarrassing or merely discreditable, if the truth about the awful violence across Iraq which had been let loose by the USuk invasion, had been widely accepted in western media public pressure would likely have forced a USuk withdrawal. Iraq left to its own devices, no particular group receiving arms and support from outsider., The Iraqis would have settled their internecine difference much sooner and a lot less humans would have been pointlessly slaughtered.
From the old Grauniad itself [ [url|http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-cables-cyprus-rendition-torture]]American officials swept aside British protests about secret US spy flights taking place from the UK's Cyprus airbase, the leaked diplomatic cables reveal.
Labour ministers said they feared making the UK an unwitting accomplice to torture, and were upset about rendition flights going on behind their backs.
The use of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus for American U2 spy plane missions over Hezbollah locations in Lebanon – missions that have never been disclosed until now – prompted an acrimonious series of exchanges between British officials and the US embassy in London, according to the cables released by WikiLeaks. The then foreign secretary David Miliband is quoted as saying, unavailingly, "policymakers needed to get control of the military".
. . . snip . . .
As the 2008 row escalated, the US rejected the British concerns over torture in unequivocal terms, with one senior official at the embassy in London baldly stating in one cable: "We cannot take a risk-avoidance approach to CT [counter-terrorism] in which the fear of potentially violating human rights allows terrorism to proliferate in Lebanon."The bar has dropped considerably since 911 but even given that I believe that being shown to have advocated torture of people whose involvement in any violent crime was far from proven, is still considered by most humans as more than merely embarrassing.
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I tried to re-edit my original post on Friedman and failed due to the usual technical incompetence so here it is anew
Jeez Brown is desperate quoting Friedman, globalism's compliant whore.
Since I wrote that in one of those rushes of blood the mere mention of Thomas Friedman's name can invoke amongst humans who care more about other humans than things, I thought it would be better if I provided some substance to the wet bus ticket slap.Matt Taibbi is one of the writers not in awe of Friedman who is still relatively extant on the net post the Oblamblam election cleanout of non-democratic left sites, so in order to give a bit of substance to what I wrote earlier I thought a wee excerpt from Taibbi's review of "The World is Flat" would convey the reason for my distinct antithesis towards Friedman and his work better than my own inarticulacy ever could (I have no idea if that word 'inarticulacy' exists and was going to check but then thought "why bother some resident PA pedant will do that for me").
Anyway from Matt Taibbi’s [ [http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html| New York Press review]] of "The World is Flat:The book's genesis is conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani causally mutters to Friedman: "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase the level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van on the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:
"As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: "The playing field is being leveled."
What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!"
This is like three pages into the book, and already the premise is totally fucked. Nilekani said level, not flat. The two concepts are completely different. Level is a qualitative idea that implies equality and competitive balance; flat is a physical, geographic concept that Friedman, remember, is openly contrasting ironically, as it were with Columbus's discovery that the world is round.
Except for one thing. The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the "flat world" into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. . .
I could go on about Friedman for days, many have but not only is the man a lightweight in drag he uses his limited talents exclusively for the purpose of saying whatever he believes the powerful would like him to say.
Yes China's a nasty place however at the moment WikiLeaks who have 'done' China from time to time in the past are attacking the moral turpitude of the american corporate state. Whenever there is the slightest hint of China leaning on NZ the media climbs on it as if some weekly journo special was on offer down the local wife shop.
The US diplomats have been revealed to be issuing orders to other sovereign states as if they were its vassals, which of course they are.Many people have pointed out that there are no surprises here and that is true in the sense that anyone with half a brain could see there have been many fitups at the UN for example. So it was really no surprise to discover that when all the UN diplomats of white western countries (NZ included) walked out at the commencement of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech to the General Assembly, that was the result of orders form the US State Department.
The point is generations of people in those countries have been told that they are no-one's vassal, that other countries oppress any dissent from the weaker but that is what separates the US from those other 'superpowers'. Now we know that to be a proven lie thanks to Wikileaks and we need to be much more wary of what it is our government does in our name. Is it really in our long term best interests is it just because our elected representatives have been taking orders from those who didn't elect them?
I view all of the talk this week about Assange or what China does is just more work done by citizens to further the interests of a foreign power. It is the usual corporate media attempt to distract from the issue that makes them uncomfortable. When I was a kid we used to laugh at Bill Anderson's made in Moscow suits, just as we laughed at Keith Jacka trying to scurry up the rear passage of any US politician. For what the right to poison Taranaki? cause that was what NZ got for its support of the US in Vietnam, a factory to manufacture Agent Orange for which kiwis born long after Agnew Johnson and Nixon shuffled off are still paying the price.
Instead of this endless dialogue about what a perfect Wikileaks should do, why not accept this is the only WikiLeaks we have and be proud that some people are trying to show the truth.
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Jeez Brown is desperate quoting Friedman, globalism's compliant whore.