Damn, this guy is smart. Richard Seymour has written the single best piece I've seen on the Swedish sex allegations against Julian Assange, and the discussion in comments is worth looking over too: in addition to Seymour's debates with some of his readers, it contains a lot of useful links. (And for Cthulhu's sake, will people stop confusing Naomi Wolf with Naomi Klein?) Now I don't have to try to write about it; he's said what I would have, and done it better.
Though I want to mention also this post from the FAIR blog, in which the Washington Post's insufferable Obama flack Dana Milbank functions as metonym for every media fool who has assumed that Julian Assange is Wikileaks, and that his personality is the important thing -- that by calling him an egoist or an egomaniac, they've discredited all the material that Wikileaks has published. (I hope to spend more time later on a fatuous article by sf writer Bruce Sterling on Wikileaks, Assange, and accused leaker Bradley Manning, though it has been pretty well shredded just in its own comments.)
Showing posts with label julian assange. Show all posts
Showing posts with label julian assange. Show all posts
To the Sweden Station
Damn, this guy is smart. Richard Seymour has written the single best piece I've seen on the Swedish sex allegations against Julian Assange, and the discussion in comments is worth looking over too: in addition to Seymour's debates with some of his readers, it contains a lot of useful links. (And for Cthulhu's sake, will people stop confusing Naomi Wolf with Naomi Klein?) Now I don't have to try to write about it; he's said what I would have, and done it better.
Though I want to mention also this post from the FAIR blog, in which the Washington Post's insufferable Obama flack Dana Milbank functions as metonym for every media fool who has assumed that Julian Assange is Wikileaks, and that his personality is the important thing -- that by calling him an egoist or an egomaniac, they've discredited all the material that Wikileaks has published. (I hope to spend more time later on a fatuous article by sf writer Bruce Sterling on Wikileaks, Assange, and accused leaker Bradley Manning, though it has been pretty well shredded just in its own comments.)
Though I want to mention also this post from the FAIR blog, in which the Washington Post's insufferable Obama flack Dana Milbank functions as metonym for every media fool who has assumed that Julian Assange is Wikileaks, and that his personality is the important thing -- that by calling him an egoist or an egomaniac, they've discredited all the material that Wikileaks has published. (I hope to spend more time later on a fatuous article by sf writer Bruce Sterling on Wikileaks, Assange, and accused leaker Bradley Manning, though it has been pretty well shredded just in its own comments.)
Labels:
julian assange,
rape,
richard sWeymour
Housekeeping
I've been waiting for a two-males version of this song for a long time. (Our community radio station often plays whole sets of heteros doing it. Give it a rest, it's been done!) And this is a good one, though as Avedon says, they fall down on the harmonies, and as I'm saying, there's a bit too much camera movement; were they hoping to distract the frothers from Teh Gey flirtation going on? It's great to have a sympathetic sissy character on TV, though I'm put off personally by the way Chris Colfer's upper lip won't uncover his front teeth. I'm not sure why it bothers me, but it does. I'll live, though. We old queens are surprisingly tough, as the grizzly bear discovered.
Ahem. I recently made some changes in the "What I Read Online" sidebar, which is not really a blogroll (I suppose I need one) and isn't even strictly accurate, since I hardly ever read some of the sites listed anymore; I most often use it myself, especially when I'm not using my own computer, so I can jump right to sites I'm likely to need. I should update it more often, but I'm lazy.
With that in mind, I'm adding Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog (h/t to a Random Link at Corrente Wire), because it looks like something I'll find useful for links. (This post pointed me to Derailing For Dummies, which also looks useful.) I wish I'd had this post on rape culture to hand when I wrote these posts, for example. I'll probably turn to this FAQ on "slut-shaming" the next time I have to deal with someone who complains about immodest females. Feminism 101 might come in handy when certain subjects come up on blogs by liberal males, who just can't see why some women don't think it's "extremely funny" to suggest that a man seeks the US Presidency because his DNA drives him to do it, in hopes of connecting with some hot female DNA once he's arrived.
But here's what Obama's DNA did not foresee: HE CAN'T. As the first Democratic president since Bill Clinton was impeached, HE ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT.Isn't that just a scream? A manly scream, of course, we're all heterosexual males around here. Oddly, or probably not so oddly, the same blogger doesn't seem to think it's funny that Julian Assange's DNA, which presumably has the same motives, has been hoist on its own petard. But biological determinism is like any other religion -- you don't get to apply it selectively. If Schwarz were correct about the evolutionary history behind all this (though he isn't, it's just a popular fantasy among heterosexual males, perhaps especially Betas), then it's hard to see how males have survived this long: their DNA points them into rather disastrous dead-ends. If their DNA drives all males to seek power and notoriety to make them more attractive to women -- and why did Hillary seek the Presidency, I wonder? -- then we have to laugh at Julian Assange's DNA no less than Barack Obama's. Comments are closed on those posts now, or I'd be looking for some relevant links at Feminism 101. But something tells me there will be need again in the not-so-distant future.
I think most men can appreciate that being in this situation must be its own unique form of torture. So when I see Obama letting torturers walk, I enjoy the fact that at least he's suffering himself. I'm not kidding or making light of it when I say that if I myself had to choose between the two situations, I might rather be waterboarded.
P.S. Ellen Willis: “Humorless is what you are if you do not find the following subjects funny: rape, big breasts, sex with little girls. It carries no imputation of humorlessness if you do not find the following subjects funny: castration, impotence, vaginas with teeth.” Can't repeat that one enough.
Housekeeping
I've been waiting for a two-males version of this song for a long time. (Our community radio station often plays whole sets of heteros doing it. Give it a rest, it's been done!) And this is a good one, though as Avedon says, they fall down on the harmonies, and as I'm saying, there's a bit too much camera movement; were they hoping to distract the frothers from Teh Gey flirtation going on? It's great to have a sympathetic sissy character on TV, though I'm put off personally by the way Chris Colfer's upper lip won't uncover his front teeth. I'm not sure why it bothers me, but it does. I'll live, though. We old queens are surprisingly tough, as the grizzly bear discovered.
Ahem. I recently made some changes in the "What I Read Online" sidebar, which is not really a blogroll (I suppose I need one) and isn't even strictly accurate, since I hardly ever read some of the sites listed anymore; I most often use it myself, especially when I'm not using my own computer, so I can jump right to sites I'm likely to need. I should update it more often, but I'm lazy.
With that in mind, I'm adding Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog (h/t to a Random Link at Corrente Wire), because it looks like something I'll find useful for links. (This post pointed me to Derailing For Dummies, which also looks useful.) I wish I'd had this post on rape culture to hand when I wrote these posts, for example. I'll probably turn to this FAQ on "slut-shaming" the next time I have to deal with someone who complains about immodest females. Feminism 101 might come in handy when certain subjects come up on blogs by liberal males, who just can't see why some women don't think it's "extremely funny" to suggest that a man seeks the US Presidency because his DNA drives him to do it, in hopes of connecting with some hot female DNA once he's arrived.
But here's what Obama's DNA did not foresee: HE CAN'T. As the first Democratic president since Bill Clinton was impeached, HE ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT.Isn't that just a scream? A manly scream, of course, we're all heterosexual males around here. Oddly, or probably not so oddly, the same blogger doesn't seem to think it's funny that Julian Assange's DNA, which presumably has the same motives, has been hoist on its own petard. But biological determinism is like any other religion -- you don't get to apply it selectively. If Schwarz were correct about the evolutionary history behind all this (though he isn't, it's just a popular fantasy among heterosexual males, perhaps especially Betas), then it's hard to see how males have survived this long: their DNA points them into rather disastrous dead-ends. If their DNA drives all males to seek power and notoriety to make them more attractive to women -- and why did Hillary seek the Presidency, I wonder? -- then we have to laugh at Julian Assange's DNA no less than Barack Obama's. Comments are closed on those posts now, or I'd be looking for some relevant links at Feminism 101. But something tells me there will be need again in the not-so-distant future.
I think most men can appreciate that being in this situation must be its own unique form of torture. So when I see Obama letting torturers walk, I enjoy the fact that at least he's suffering himself. I'm not kidding or making light of it when I say that if I myself had to choose between the two situations, I might rather be waterboarded.
P.S. Ellen Willis: “Humorless is what you are if you do not find the following subjects funny: rape, big breasts, sex with little girls. It carries no imputation of humorlessness if you do not find the following subjects funny: castration, impotence, vaginas with teeth.” Can't repeat that one enough.
Kid -- We Don't Like Your Kind
Back in the Sixties, in his epic Alice's Restaurant Massacree, Arlo Guthrie told how he'd been rejected for military service because of his criminal record -- for littering.
This exchange increases my admiration for Assange, who remains remarkably calm and rational. He puts the interviewer on the defensive immediately and keeps her there throughout. The interviewer's performance is contemptible; no doubt she was Just Following Orders, as we used to say, and CNN's treatment of these important issues is, as Assange says, completely disgusting. "I'm going to walk," he says calmly, "if you're going to contaminate us revealing the deaths of 104,000 people with attacks against my person." And then he walks.
Also disgusting has been the conduct of the US government in response to these new documents. First there was the bogus claim, recycled from the release of the Afghanistan documents (via), that Assange and Wikileaks 'potentially have blood on their hands' because the documents put US personnel and local informants and collaborators at risk -- outrageously shameless coming from a government that is wading in the blood of thousands of innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The claim about Afghanistan has been shown to be false, and so probably will be the current one about Iraq.
I imagine the CNN interviewer really felt as baffled by Assange's refusal to go along with her script as she claimed she was. CNN, like most American media, are basically tabloids, preferring to dodge issues in favor of personalities. In The Bush Dyslexicon Mark Crispin Miller describes at length how, after the third debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush in October 2000,
But even a lot of liberals and progressives distrust Assange and Wikileaks and are willing to focus more on Assange's personality than on US crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Assange was accused (inaccurately, if not outright falsely) of rape in Sweden a couple of months ago, I remember some writer (on Salon, maybe? I can't find it) saying that maybe Assange just likes "rough" sex, as some aggressively intellectual or political men do, so maybe there was a misunderstanding between him and one of his partners. This writer had, if I recall correctly, no basis for the speculation that Assange likes "rough" sex; it was as if the writer was trying to give as much benefit of the doubt as possible to the people who were trying to smear and discredit him, while technically asserting his quasi-innocence. I have no idea what kind of sex Assange likes, any more than I know what kind of sex, say, Dan Choi likes. I'm quite willing to investigate personally in both cases, but until I can do so, I prefer to refrain from irrelevant speculations.
It's also irrelevant whether Assange is "imperious," at one commenter claimed at Salon.com, linking to an article from Der Speigel. If he is, that would not diminish by even one the death toll of American and American-supported violence in Iraq or Afghanistan. It would not affect the value, for better or worse, of the documents Wikileaks has released. If Assange's motives or mental state should be subjected to such scrutiny, why not extend that scrutiny to Presidents Bush and Obama, their administrations, and their many apologists? Obama has told us at length about his father issues, in print. Why not use this information to analyze his relationship with, say, Hamid Karzai? Why not speculate about the psychic health of the Bloomberg reporters who wrote about cash from Iran being funneled to the Karzai regime but managed to avoid mentioning cash Karzai receives from the US, and reported with straight faces a State Department spokesman's rebuke that "Iran should not interfere with the internal affairs of the Afghan government"? Oh no, only the US is allowed to interfere with the internal affairs of the Afghan government. But I'm being facetious.
I imagine there's a lot of stress at Wikileaks these days. The US government, along with others, will try to exploit it. It's standard operating procedure to try to discredit dissidents by calling them crazy, delusional, paranoid. But no one should fall for their game.
I went over to the sergeant, said, "Sergeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug."Julian Assange of Wikileaks walked out of a CNN interview yesterday (h/t) when the interviewer insisted on asking questions about "internal disputes within Wikileaks" instead of the issues raised by the latest cache of documents released by Wikileaks last week, on the US war in Iraq, as he had evidently been led to believe it would be.
This exchange increases my admiration for Assange, who remains remarkably calm and rational. He puts the interviewer on the defensive immediately and keeps her there throughout. The interviewer's performance is contemptible; no doubt she was Just Following Orders, as we used to say, and CNN's treatment of these important issues is, as Assange says, completely disgusting. "I'm going to walk," he says calmly, "if you're going to contaminate us revealing the deaths of 104,000 people with attacks against my person." And then he walks.
Also disgusting has been the conduct of the US government in response to these new documents. First there was the bogus claim, recycled from the release of the Afghanistan documents (via), that Assange and Wikileaks 'potentially have blood on their hands' because the documents put US personnel and local informants and collaborators at risk -- outrageously shameless coming from a government that is wading in the blood of thousands of innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The claim about Afghanistan has been shown to be false, and so probably will be the current one about Iraq.
I imagine the CNN interviewer really felt as baffled by Assange's refusal to go along with her script as she claimed she was. CNN, like most American media, are basically tabloids, preferring to dodge issues in favor of personalities. In The Bush Dyslexicon Mark Crispin Miller describes at length how, after the third debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush in October 2000,
the "analysts" at CNN said not one word about the substance of the candidates' exchange but just kept harping on the general "statements" were putatively "trying" to make about themselves through their tone and body language.This session, featuring Sam Donaldson, George Stephanopoulos, Cokie Roberts, and George Will, "captures perfectly the the barbarous synergy between the right and TV news, each feigning populism for its own elitist purposes." Roberts complained that the issue debated by the candidates wasn't "the important point there. ... Because that's not what comes across when you're watching the debate. What comes across when you're watching the debate is this guy from Washington doing Washington-speak" [pages 68-69]. The irony of four Beltway media insiders denouncing Al Gore for being a Beltway insider, while delicious, was totally lost on Roberts. It's a reminder of how little facts matter, but personalities do matter, to the corporate media. The New York Times' hatchet job on accused leaker Bradley Manning is another reminder.
Although a waste of time, the postdebate bull session was at least not strongly biased, nor was its anti-intellectualism too pronounced. On ABC there was a far more noxious session on the subject of the third debate.
But even a lot of liberals and progressives distrust Assange and Wikileaks and are willing to focus more on Assange's personality than on US crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Assange was accused (inaccurately, if not outright falsely) of rape in Sweden a couple of months ago, I remember some writer (on Salon, maybe? I can't find it) saying that maybe Assange just likes "rough" sex, as some aggressively intellectual or political men do, so maybe there was a misunderstanding between him and one of his partners. This writer had, if I recall correctly, no basis for the speculation that Assange likes "rough" sex; it was as if the writer was trying to give as much benefit of the doubt as possible to the people who were trying to smear and discredit him, while technically asserting his quasi-innocence. I have no idea what kind of sex Assange likes, any more than I know what kind of sex, say, Dan Choi likes. I'm quite willing to investigate personally in both cases, but until I can do so, I prefer to refrain from irrelevant speculations.
It's also irrelevant whether Assange is "imperious," at one commenter claimed at Salon.com, linking to an article from Der Speigel. If he is, that would not diminish by even one the death toll of American and American-supported violence in Iraq or Afghanistan. It would not affect the value, for better or worse, of the documents Wikileaks has released. If Assange's motives or mental state should be subjected to such scrutiny, why not extend that scrutiny to Presidents Bush and Obama, their administrations, and their many apologists? Obama has told us at length about his father issues, in print. Why not use this information to analyze his relationship with, say, Hamid Karzai? Why not speculate about the psychic health of the Bloomberg reporters who wrote about cash from Iran being funneled to the Karzai regime but managed to avoid mentioning cash Karzai receives from the US, and reported with straight faces a State Department spokesman's rebuke that "Iran should not interfere with the internal affairs of the Afghan government"? Oh no, only the US is allowed to interfere with the internal affairs of the Afghan government. But I'm being facetious.
I imagine there's a lot of stress at Wikileaks these days. The US government, along with others, will try to exploit it. It's standard operating procedure to try to discredit dissidents by calling them crazy, delusional, paranoid. But no one should fall for their game.
Labels:
cnn,
contamination,
julian assange,
wikileaks
Kid -- We Don't Like Your Kind
Back in the Sixties, in his epic Alice's Restaurant Massacree, Arlo Guthrie told how he'd been rejected for military service because of his criminal record -- for littering.
This exchange increases my admiration for Assange, who remains remarkably calm and rational. He puts the interviewer on the defensive immediately and keeps her there throughout. The interviewer's performance is contemptible; no doubt she was Just Following Orders, as we used to say, and CNN's treatment of these important issues is, as Assange says, completely disgusting. "I'm going to walk," he says calmly, "if you're going to contaminate us revealing the deaths of 104,000 people with attacks against my person." And then he walks.
Also disgusting has been the conduct of the US government in response to these new documents. First there was the bogus claim, recycled from the release of the Afghanistan documents (via), that Assange and Wikileaks 'potentially have blood on their hands' because the documents put US personnel and local informants and collaborators at risk -- outrageously shameless coming from a government that is wading in the blood of thousands of innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The claim about Afghanistan has been shown to be false, and so probably will be the current one about Iraq.
I imagine the CNN interviewer really felt as baffled by Assange's refusal to go along with her script as she claimed she was. CNN, like most American media, are basically tabloids, preferring to dodge issues in favor of personalities. In The Bush Dyslexicon Mark Crispin Miller describes at length how, after the third debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush in October 2000,
But even a lot of liberals and progressives distrust Assange and Wikileaks and are willing to focus more on Assange's personality than on US crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Assange was accused (inaccurately, if not outright falsely) of rape in Sweden a couple of months ago, I remember some writer (on Salon, maybe? I can't find it) saying that maybe Assange just likes "rough" sex, as some aggressively intellectual or political men do, so maybe there was a misunderstanding between him and one of his partners. This writer had, if I recall correctly, no basis for the speculation that Assange likes "rough" sex; it was as if the writer was trying to give as much benefit of the doubt as possible to the people who were trying to smear and discredit him, while technically asserting his quasi-innocence. I have no idea what kind of sex Assange likes, any more than I know what kind of sex, say, Dan Choi likes. I'm quite willing to investigate personally in both cases, but until I can do so, I prefer to refrain from irrelevant speculations.
It's also irrelevant whether Assange is "imperious," at one commenter claimed at Salon.com, linking to an article from Der Speigel. If he is, that would not diminish by even one the death toll of American and American-supported violence in Iraq or Afghanistan. It would not affect the value, for better or worse, of the documents Wikileaks has released. If Assange's motives or mental state should be subjected to such scrutiny, why not extend that scrutiny to Presidents Bush and Obama, their administrations, and their many apologists? Obama has told us at length about his father issues, in print. Why not use this information to analyze his relationship with, say, Hamid Karzai? Why not speculate about the psychic health of the Bloomberg reporters who wrote about cash from Iran being funneled to the Karzai regime but managed to avoid mentioning cash Karzai receives from the US, and reported with straight faces a State Department spokesman's rebuke that "Iran should not interfere with the internal affairs of the Afghan government"? Oh no, only the US is allowed to interfere with the internal affairs of the Afghan government. But I'm being facetious.
I imagine there's a lot of stress at Wikileaks these days. The US government, along with others, will try to exploit it. It's standard operating procedure to try to discredit dissidents by calling them crazy, delusional, paranoid. But no one should fall for their game.
I went over to the sergeant, said, "Sergeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug."Julian Assange of Wikileaks walked out of a CNN interview yesterday (h/t) when the interviewer insisted on asking questions about "internal disputes within Wikileaks" instead of the issues raised by the latest cache of documents released by Wikileaks last week, on the US war in Iraq, as he had evidently been led to believe it would be.
This exchange increases my admiration for Assange, who remains remarkably calm and rational. He puts the interviewer on the defensive immediately and keeps her there throughout. The interviewer's performance is contemptible; no doubt she was Just Following Orders, as we used to say, and CNN's treatment of these important issues is, as Assange says, completely disgusting. "I'm going to walk," he says calmly, "if you're going to contaminate us revealing the deaths of 104,000 people with attacks against my person." And then he walks.
Also disgusting has been the conduct of the US government in response to these new documents. First there was the bogus claim, recycled from the release of the Afghanistan documents (via), that Assange and Wikileaks 'potentially have blood on their hands' because the documents put US personnel and local informants and collaborators at risk -- outrageously shameless coming from a government that is wading in the blood of thousands of innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The claim about Afghanistan has been shown to be false, and so probably will be the current one about Iraq.
I imagine the CNN interviewer really felt as baffled by Assange's refusal to go along with her script as she claimed she was. CNN, like most American media, are basically tabloids, preferring to dodge issues in favor of personalities. In The Bush Dyslexicon Mark Crispin Miller describes at length how, after the third debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush in October 2000,
the "analysts" at CNN said not one word about the substance of the candidates' exchange but just kept harping on the general "statements" were putatively "trying" to make about themselves through their tone and body language.This session, featuring Sam Donaldson, George Stephanopoulos, Cokie Roberts, and George Will, "captures perfectly the the barbarous synergy between the right and TV news, each feigning populism for its own elitist purposes." Roberts complained that the issue debated by the candidates wasn't "the important point there. ... Because that's not what comes across when you're watching the debate. What comes across when you're watching the debate is this guy from Washington doing Washington-speak" [pages 68-69]. The irony of four Beltway media insiders denouncing Al Gore for being a Beltway insider, while delicious, was totally lost on Roberts. It's a reminder of how little facts matter, but personalities do matter, to the corporate media. The New York Times' hatchet job on accused leaker Bradley Manning is another reminder.
Although a waste of time, the postdebate bull session was at least not strongly biased, nor was its anti-intellectualism too pronounced. On ABC there was a far more noxious session on the subject of the third debate.
But even a lot of liberals and progressives distrust Assange and Wikileaks and are willing to focus more on Assange's personality than on US crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Assange was accused (inaccurately, if not outright falsely) of rape in Sweden a couple of months ago, I remember some writer (on Salon, maybe? I can't find it) saying that maybe Assange just likes "rough" sex, as some aggressively intellectual or political men do, so maybe there was a misunderstanding between him and one of his partners. This writer had, if I recall correctly, no basis for the speculation that Assange likes "rough" sex; it was as if the writer was trying to give as much benefit of the doubt as possible to the people who were trying to smear and discredit him, while technically asserting his quasi-innocence. I have no idea what kind of sex Assange likes, any more than I know what kind of sex, say, Dan Choi likes. I'm quite willing to investigate personally in both cases, but until I can do so, I prefer to refrain from irrelevant speculations.
It's also irrelevant whether Assange is "imperious," at one commenter claimed at Salon.com, linking to an article from Der Speigel. If he is, that would not diminish by even one the death toll of American and American-supported violence in Iraq or Afghanistan. It would not affect the value, for better or worse, of the documents Wikileaks has released. If Assange's motives or mental state should be subjected to such scrutiny, why not extend that scrutiny to Presidents Bush and Obama, their administrations, and their many apologists? Obama has told us at length about his father issues, in print. Why not use this information to analyze his relationship with, say, Hamid Karzai? Why not speculate about the psychic health of the Bloomberg reporters who wrote about cash from Iran being funneled to the Karzai regime but managed to avoid mentioning cash Karzai receives from the US, and reported with straight faces a State Department spokesman's rebuke that "Iran should not interfere with the internal affairs of the Afghan government"? Oh no, only the US is allowed to interfere with the internal affairs of the Afghan government. But I'm being facetious.
I imagine there's a lot of stress at Wikileaks these days. The US government, along with others, will try to exploit it. It's standard operating procedure to try to discredit dissidents by calling them crazy, delusional, paranoid. But no one should fall for their game.
Labels:
cnn,
contamination,
julian assange,
wikileaks
The "How Many Times Have I Heard That One Before?" Department
From the Daily Beast, via Antemedius, via Sideshow:
Right now the US is also apparently convinced that Iran has Weapons of Mass Destruction that it can toss across the flimsy, unguarded Iran-US border with nothing to protect us. (Also that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship, which the US of course deplores.) Also that Hamas seized control of Gaza in a brutal coup against the Palestinian authority.
This doesn't mean, of course, that the US is never correctly convinced about anything. But how do you tell? Generally it's wiser to assume that the American government (like any government) is lying at the outset.
The US is apparently convinced that whistleblower Bradley Manning, who was arrested two weeks ago, did indeed hand over 260,000 US diplomatic cables concerning the Middle East over to Wikileaks....Gee, that sounds familiar. Remember when the US was apparently convinced that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Al-Qaeda and had Weapons of Mass Destruction that he could toss across the unfortified Iraq-US border in, like five minutes? (We'd have liked to have Mr. Hussein's cooperation in this, too.) Remember when the US was apparently convinced that the American scientist Wen Ho Lee had given our nuclear secrets to the Chi-coms? (Cooperation, Dr. Lee?) For an oldie but goodie, remember when the US was apparently convinced that Ho Chi Minh was a willing puppet of the Russkies? (It's in your own interests to cooperate, Mr. Ho.)
American officials would not discuss the methods being used to find Assange, nor would they say if they had information to suggest where he is now. "We'd like to know where he is; we'd like his cooperation in this," one U.S. official said of Assange.
Right now the US is also apparently convinced that Iran has Weapons of Mass Destruction that it can toss across the flimsy, unguarded Iran-US border with nothing to protect us. (Also that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship, which the US of course deplores.) Also that Hamas seized control of Gaza in a brutal coup against the Palestinian authority.
This doesn't mean, of course, that the US is never correctly convinced about anything. But how do you tell? Generally it's wiser to assume that the American government (like any government) is lying at the outset.
Labels:
bradley manning,
julian assange,
us government lies,
wikileaks
The "How Many Times Have I Heard That One Before?" Department
From the Daily Beast, via Antemedius, via Sideshow:
Right now the US is also apparently convinced that Iran has Weapons of Mass Destruction that it can toss across the flimsy, unguarded Iran-US border with nothing to protect us. (Also that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship, which the US of course deplores.) Also that Hamas seized control of Gaza in a brutal coup against the Palestinian authority.
This doesn't mean, of course, that the US is never correctly convinced about anything. But how do you tell? Generally it's wiser to assume that the American government (like any government) is lying at the outset.
The US is apparently convinced that whistleblower Bradley Manning, who was arrested two weeks ago, did indeed hand over 260,000 US diplomatic cables concerning the Middle East over to Wikileaks....Gee, that sounds familiar. Remember when the US was apparently convinced that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Al-Qaeda and had Weapons of Mass Destruction that he could toss across the unfortified Iraq-US border in, like five minutes? (We'd have liked to have Mr. Hussein's cooperation in this, too.) Remember when the US was apparently convinced that the American scientist Wen Ho Lee had given our nuclear secrets to the Chi-coms? (Cooperation, Dr. Lee?) For an oldie but goodie, remember when the US was apparently convinced that Ho Chi Minh was a willing puppet of the Russkies? (It's in your own interests to cooperate, Mr. Ho.)
American officials would not discuss the methods being used to find Assange, nor would they say if they had information to suggest where he is now. "We'd like to know where he is; we'd like his cooperation in this," one U.S. official said of Assange.
Right now the US is also apparently convinced that Iran has Weapons of Mass Destruction that it can toss across the flimsy, unguarded Iran-US border with nothing to protect us. (Also that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship, which the US of course deplores.) Also that Hamas seized control of Gaza in a brutal coup against the Palestinian authority.
This doesn't mean, of course, that the US is never correctly convinced about anything. But how do you tell? Generally it's wiser to assume that the American government (like any government) is lying at the outset.
Labels:
bradley manning,
julian assange,
us government lies,
wikileaks
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