Something from a pair of names people who believe in democracy should know:

Mixed Media

Assange and Posada in the Propaganda System

By EDWARD S. HERMAN and DAVID PETERSON
CounterPunch
January 26, 2011

EXCERPT...

Posada, now 82, is a self-confessed terrorist, Bay of Pigs veteran, School of the Americas graduate, and CIA operative who has been credibly placed at two meetings where the plan was hatched for the October 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed all 73 civilians aboard. He also has been implicated in numerous other terrorist acts in which people were killed or injured and property destroyed, and he played a role in the United States' arms-smuggling network in Central America that eventually came to light in the Iran-Contra investigations.

"The CIA taught us everything," Posada told the New York Times in 1998. "They taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb, trained us in acts of sabotage." Posada was a star pupil. But as a longtime CIA asset and, until the past decade, the "most notorious commando in the anti-Castro underground," the U.S. justice system has never charged Posada with a crime related to terrorism or the death of civilians, even though a former FBI counterterrorism expert who investigated the Cuban airliner bombing claims that Posada was "up to his eyeballs" in its planning. Surely this is because his killings and bombings were carried out against targets of U.S. policy, and because he almost certainly would have implicated the CIA.

SNIP...

Julian Assange, by contrast, has not killed anybody, or so far even broken any law, and key U.S. military officials have denied claims that information released into the public realm via WikiLeaks has resulted in anybody's death. In early August 2010, a Pentagon spokesman told theWashington Post that "We have yet to see any harm come to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the documents," and as late as November 28, a different Pentagon official who "didn't want to be named because of the issue's sensitivity" told the McClatchy newspapers that the "military still has no evidence that the leaks have led to any deaths." Even Secretary of Defense Robert Gates admitted that though WikiLeaks has proven "embarrassing" and "awkward," its "consequences for U.S. foreign policy (are) fairly modest."

Assange is nominally under attack in Britain because of allegations against him in Sweden that led to a European arrest warrant being served on him in London for questioning in relation to "rape, sexual molestation and forceful coercion," and for which he now faces an extradition hearing on February 7. But these charges increasingly appear to be a cover for a political assault on WikiLeaks, helped along by the now-pliable right-wing Swedish political establishment, and they have been convincingly exposed as such. (See, e.g., Al Burke, "Sweden, Assange and the USA," Nordic News Network, December 28, 2010.) Assange's real crime is the "exposure and embarrassment of the political class," as John Pilger put it. That and the threat that WikiLeaks will keep doing this.

CONTINUED...

http://counterpunch.org/herman01262011.html

PS: You are most welcome, WillyT!

And right here at DU, even.

I guess Milgram's number can't all be Republicans.

The authoritarians are friends of the military industrial complex on Facebook.

The Chinese are modern masters. And the bastard BFEE were clinking champagne toasts a few days after the massacre at Tiananmen Square put down China's fledgling democracy movement.

Know your BFEE: Olympic Games Show Who s Best Friends Forever with Authoritarians and Dictators



As for Milgrammies on DU -- they're busy getting the last word because that's what they're trained to do. From the J-REF Amazing Randi forum:

"Remember that the goal of conspiracy rhetoric is to bog down the discussion, not to make progress toward a solution" Jay Windley

Anyone wondering where the jobs went?

They did not review most of them, just threw them out there, putting soldiers and diplomats and spies at risk.

If this was investigative journalism, I would be all for Assange and Wikileaks. But most of the Wikileaks operators were AGAINST the document dump for this very reason. It was Assange who insisted on throwing everything out, consequences be damned.

Yes, some good came of those releases. No doubt some bad came of it, also.

If you know of an honest report where military or civilians were injured or killed, please post the link. Otherwise, I'll err with Assange over Bush et al.

They fucked up and let the documents be 'leaked' into the public sphere.

I'm not saying the documents did not do some good. They did. But to say that all 250,000 of them were reviewed is ludicrous. They were leaked from Wikileaks. Ironic, isn't it?

This was not investigative journalism. This was a document dump. At least call it for what it is.

On edit: And no, I DON'T personally know of anyone whose life was put in danger. But then I don't have the time to review 250,000 documents, either.

Gee. None of the documents contained military information. Yet, the warmonger set says otherwise.

Obama and GOPers Worked Together to Kill Bush Torture Probe

A WikiLeaks cable shows that when Spain considered a criminal case against ex-Bush officials, the Obama White House and Republicans got really bipartisan.

By David Corn on Wed. December 1, 2010 3:47 PM PDT
Mother Jones
Zuma/Paul Morse

In its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies the that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. A "confidential" April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department—one of the 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks—details how the Obama administration, working with Republicans, leaned on Spain to derail this potential prosecution.

The previous month, a Spanish human rights group called the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners had requested that Spain's National Court indict six former Bush officials for, as the cable describes it, "creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture." The six were former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; David Addington, former chief of staff and legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney; William Haynes, the Pentagon's former general counsel; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy; Jay Bybee, former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel; and John Yoo, a former official in the Office of Legal Counsel. The human rights group contended that Spain had a duty to open an investigation under the nation's "universal jurisdiction" law, which permits its legal system to prosecute overseas human rights crimes involving Spanish citizens and residents. Five Guantanamo detainees, the group maintained, fit that criteria.

http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2010/12/wikileaks-cable-obama-quashed-torture-investigation

What a sickening looking photograph, just like the the rest of them are.

FTR: Greg Mitchell got fired from "Editor & Publisher" after the magazine was purchased by the Carlyle Group.

ah Carlyle Group.

Thanks for posting this