Thursday 9 December 2010

Information Terrorists The Vile Campaign Against Julian Assange and Wikileaks

The Vile Campaign Against Julian Assange and Wikileaks

Information Terrorists?

By DAVE LINDORFF

December 7, 2010

WikiLeaks is under concerted attack from the US government. Also under attack by the US government is the whole idea of freedom of thought and of information.

It is increasingly clear that the "rape" charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange are trumped-up affairs resulting from pressure by the US government and intelligence agencies on Swedish authorities. The main allegation of rape is being made by a Swedish woman, Anna Ardin, who admits she had consensual sex with Assange, but claims he failed to halt their love-making when a condom allegedly failed. Calling such a situation "rape"--if it even happened--makes a mockery of the term.

The idea of an international arrest warrant through Interpol on such a flimsy and in any case virtually unprovable charge is an insult to all the victims of real rape whose cases in the US and elsewhere around the world are regularly left unprosecuted. In addition, the woman making the allegation has a connection to a CIA-linked anti-Castro organization and a brother in Swedish intelligence who was a liason in Washington to US intelligence services, raising further questions about the whole "incident." A second woman's charges against Assange are even more specious--amounting essentially to a claim that Assange didn't answer the woman's phone calls after spending the night with her, or mention that he'd slept with someone else a while earlier.

For a great expose of the sham charges of rape (which are being reported in the US as if they were acts of violence or abuse), read this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, which points out that Swedish law, which essentially makes having sex without a condom legally form of rape, even if consensually done, is about to make that country a "laughing stock," which further shows that Ardin threw a party for Assange the day after the alleged "rape", and which also shows that both women were boasting on twitter about their "conquests" of Assange after the alleged "violations" occurred.

The Obama administration has sunk to a new low in pursuing Assange, and is now having its so-called Justice Department try to manufacture a crime with which to prosecute Assange for doing precisely what real journalists should have been doing--namely exposing the criminal activities of the US government in engaging in acts of wars in countries like Yemen and Pakistan where the US is not legally at war, in pressuring foreign allies like Spain on behalf of US companies, in trying to trump up arguments to attack Iran with false information about alleged importation of long-range missiles from North Korea, etc.

The US is almost certainly also behind efforts to shut down WikiLeaks by closing down its DNS account, by attacking its servers through sophisticated hacking techniques, and by putting pressure on banks and payment systems like Paypal to get them to stop handling donations of support. Paypal, for instance, which was a major vehicle for donating to WikiLeaks, suddenly cut off the organization, saying it had violated Paypal policies by engaging in "illegal" activity, though nothing that WikiLeaks has done has violated any law. The hand of the US government is clearly visible in this decision, too.
WikiLeaks has currently found a new home at www.WikiLeaks.ch, thanks to the Pirate Party, a small independent political organization in Switzerland committed to freedom of information. Go there to make a donation of support, which can still be accomplished by credit card through an online transaction at a Swiss bank, or by wire transfer.

This is a critically important struggle. We can now see graphically illustrated the horrible reality that was created when President Obama issued his outrageous executive order claiming the right to order the extra-judicial execution of Americans overseas--an order the White House is now aggressively defending in federal court. We now have American political figures like Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, both former and current presidential aspirants, openly calling for the killing of someone simply because he has opened up government secrets, and a depressingly large percentage of Americans are reportedly okay with that idea. If this kind of thinking continues unchallenged, none of us who espouse open government and freedom of the press will be safe for long.

To give an idea of how grave the situation has already become, I received an email today from a TCBH reader warning that with some people in Congress and the media suggesting, rather ludicrously, that Wikileaks and its members, including Assange, should be classified as "information terrorists," writing articles telling people how to contribute to the organization might, under the Patriot Act, be then construed as "aiding terrorism," which could lead to a forced one-way trip to Guantanamo or worse. If that sounds pretty paranoid, consider that Columbia University, a leading Ivy League institution, has warned its students not to view Wikileaks or to write favorably about it, for fear that this could "hurt job prospects" of graduates in the future.

It needs to be clearly understood by all Americans, and especially by anyone in the media who takes the profession seriously, that the attacks on WikiLeaks by the US government--attacks which have included heavy pressure on companies like Paypal, Amazon Books, Visa and Mastercard, all of which have closed their accounts with the organization, making it difficult if not impossible for Assange and his team to raise money, and on internet servers, making it harder for WikiLeaks to stay online--could as easily be used against news organizations and political organizations. If the government gets away with pressuring a server to close out an organization it doesn't like, it could as easily pressure a print shop not to publish a magazine, a news distributor not to distribute newspapers, or a power company not to provide juice to a broadcaster. If the government can pressure banks to close WikiLeaks' accounts, it could pressure banks to close a book publisher's account. And if the government can, as Attorney General says he is doing, tries to create a law with which to arrest and punish Assange, it can as easily trump up a "crime" and arrest a print publisher or radio network owner. These actions are not the actions of a democracy. They are the lawless actions of a dictatorship.

The darkness is rapidly closing in during this administration that once claimed to be about "hope and change."


The Arrest of Julian Assange Truth in Chains

The Arrest of Julian Assange

Truth in Chains

By CHRIS FLOYD

London.

December 7, 2010

Well, they got him at last. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the target of several of the world’s most powerful governments, turned himself into British authorities today and is now at the mercy of state authorities who have already shown their wolfish – and lawless – desire to destroy him and his organization.

It has been, by any standard, an extraordinary campaign of vilification and persecution, wholly comparable to the kind of treatment doled out to dissidents in China or Burma. Lest we forget, WikiLeaks is a journalistic outlet – just like The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, all of whom are even now publishing the very same material – leaked classified documents -- available on WikiLeaks. The website is also a journalistic outlet just like CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox and other mainstream media venues, where we have seen an endless parade of officials – and journalists! – calling for Assange to be prosecuted or killed outright. Every argument being made for shutting down WikiLeaks can – and doubtless will – be used against any journalistic enterprise that publishes material that powerful people do not like.

And the leading role in this persecution of truth-telling is being played by the administration of the great progressive agent of hope and change, the self-proclaimed heir of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama. His attorney general, Eric Holder, is now making fierce noises about the “steps” he has already taken to bring down WikiLeaks and criminalize the leaking of embarrassing information. And listen to the ferocious reaction of that liberal lioness, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who took to the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal to call for Assange to be put in prison – for 2,500,000 years:

“When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released his latest document trove—more than 250,000 secret State Department cables—he intentionally harmed the U.S. government. The release of these documents damages our national interests and puts innocent lives at risk. He should be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.

“The law Mr. Assange continues to violate is the Espionage Act of 1917. That law makes it a felony for an unauthorized person to possess or transmit "information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation." ... Importantly, the courts have held that "information relating to the national defense" applies to both classified and unclassified material. Each violation is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.”

So there you have it. Ten years for each offense; 250,000 separate offenses; thus a prison term of 2.5 million years. Naturally, tomorrow the same newspaper will denounce Feinstein for being such a namby-pamby terrorist-coddling pinko: “Why didn’t she call for Assange to be torn from limb to limb by wild dogs, as any right-thinking red-blooded American would do!?”

Meanwhile, corporate America and its international allies continue to do their bit. Joining PayPal and Amazon, who had already cut off their services to WikiLeaks, most of the remaining venues through which the internet journal is funded are also freezing out the organization -- MasterCard, Visa, and a Swiss bank that WikiLeaks used to process donations. All of these organizations are obviously responding to government pressure.

What is perhaps most remarkable is that this joint action by the world elite to shut down WikiLeaks – which has been operating for four years – comes after the release of diplomatic cables, not in response to earlier leaks which provided detailed evidence of crimes and atrocities committed by the perpetrators and continuers of Washington’s Terror War. I suppose this is because the diplomatic cables have upset the smooth running of the corrupt and cynical backroom operations that actually govern our world, behind the ludicrous lies and self-righteous posturing that our great and good lay on for the public. They didn’t mind being unmasked as accomplices in mass murder and fomenters of suffering and hatred; in fact, they were rather proud of it. And they certainly knew that their fellow corruptocrats in foreign governments – not to mention the perpetually stunned and supine American people – wouldn’t give a toss about a bunch of worthless peons in Iraq and Afghanistan getting killed. But the diplomatic cables have caused an embarrassing stink among the closed little clique of the movers and shakers. And that is a crime deserving of vast eons in stir – or death.

But before Assange was taken into custody, he fired off one last message to the world, in The Australian, a newspaper in his native land. With supreme irony, he tied WikiLeaks’ operation to the roots of the Murdoch media empire, which began by speaking truth to murderous and wasteful power – and now, of course, is one of the most powerful and assiduous instruments of murderous and wasteful power itself. Assange writes:

“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. … 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.

“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.”

These, of course, are the defenders of Western Civilization, that pinnacle of human progress, that bulwark against savagery like murder and torture, that bastion of temperance and reason. But in his piece, Assange once more gives the lie to the ferocious canards of Feinstein, Holder, Obama and Palin about the “great harm” the leaks have done:

“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.”

Yes, how many thousands of people, how many tens of thousands, have been killed by our bipartisan Terror Warriors in the four years of WikiLeaks’ existence? How many millions have been “harmed” not only by the direct operations of the Terror War, but by the ever-widening, ever-deepening violence, hatred and turmoil it is spreading throughout the world? (Not to mention the accelerating collapse of American society, which has been financially, politically and morally bankrupted by the acceptance of aggressive war, torture, elite rapine and authoritarian rule.)

But none of the perpetrators of these acts, past or present, are in jail, or have even been prosecuted, or investigated, or inconvenienced in any way. Yet Assange is in a British prison tonight – and it is certainly not for the “sexual misconduct” charges that were filed against him in August, which then became the basis of an unprecedented worldwide arrest order of the type ordinarily reserved for war criminals – for those, in fact, accused of aggressive war, torture, elite rapine and authoritarian rule. The judge refused to grant bail, saying that Assange had “access to financial means” and could flee the country – perhaps a bitter joke on milord’s part, aimed at a man whose means of financial support are being systematically shut down by the most powerful government and corporate forces in the world. Journalist John Pilger and filmmaker Ken Loach were among those who appeared in court ready to stand surety for Assange, but to no avail.

WikiLeaks will doubtless try to struggle on. And Assange says he has given the entire diplomatic trove to 100,000 people. By dribs and drabs, shards of truth will get out. But the world’s journalists – and those persons of conscience working in the world’s governments – have been given a hard, harsh, unmistakable lesson in the new realities of our degraded time. Tell a truth that discomforts power, that challenges its domination over our lives, our discourse, our very thoughts, and you will be destroyed. No institution, public or private, will stand with you; the most powerful entities, public and private, will be arrayed against you, backed up by overwhelming violent force. This is where we are now. This is what we are now.


Julian Quixote Wikileaks vs. the Empire

Wikileaks vs. the Empire

Julian Quixote

December 8, 2010

By ERIC WALBERG

It was United States president Woodrow Wilson who called for "open diplomacy" — number one of his fourteen points in 1918 — so that "diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view." He would surely approve of Wikileaks' efforts at open diplomacy, though current US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called them "an attack on America's foreign-policy interests" and indeed on "the international community", though she failed to specify which particular community members were the victims, or what they were the victims of.

On 7 December, the bane of US empire voluntarily gave himself up to Scotland Yard and will face trial and extradition to Sweden possibly by the end of the year, accused of "rape, unlawful coercion and two counts of sexual molestation", alleged to have been committed in August 2010. The trumped-up cases involve consensual relations, one an obvious "honey trap" by a CIA plant and the other a spurned Lewinsky-like groupie.

Assange is nothing short of a legend after a year of leaks, especially an April video taken from a US helicopter in Iraq in 2007 showing GIs shooting at least 12 innocent Iraqis like rabbits. Starting in July, he issued 500,000 US military documents on the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The straw for the imperial camel was a batch of 250,000 US diplomatic notes (1966-2009) in November, revealing a US diplomatic world increasingly acting as a branch of the CIA, and the cynicism of both Western and Arab regimes anxious to destroy Iran.

The leaks have been hailed as a blow to US criminal activity by people around the world, including staunchly American US Congressman Ron Paul, and condemned by lovers of US empire such as former US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who called for Assange to be "pursued with the same urgency we pursue Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders". Former UK Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind said WikiLeaks' actions were "active assistance to terrorist organisations", neglecting to reflect on the UK's own long history of worldwide terrorist activities.

The 39-year-old Assange is an Australian citizen, though his Prime Minister Julia Gillard has threatened to cancel his passport. He is described by colleagues as charismatic, driven and highly intelligent, with an exceptional ability to crack computer codes. To his critics, he is just a publicity-seeker and womaniser.

In 1995 he was accused with a friend of dozens of hacking activities and fined, promising to be a good boy. He quietly co-authored Underground with Suelette Dreyfus, dealing with the subversive side of the Internet. Dreyfus described Assange as "quite interested in the concept of ethics, concepts of justice, what governments should and shouldn't do".

He began Wikileaks in 2006 as a "dead-letterbox" for would-be leakers — the real heroes of this saga, the unknown soldiers disgusted with their role as hired killers. His collective developed a Robin Hood guerrilla lifestyle, moving communications and people from country to country to make use of laws protecting freedom of speech. Co-founder Daniel Schmitt describes Assange as "one of the few people who really care about positive reform in this world to a level where you're willing to do something radical".

Wikileaks was forced this year to switch to a Swiss host server after several US Internet service providers shut him down, claiming he was endangering lives, though he made clear he was careful to vet the military cables from Afghanistan and Iraq precisely to avoid this. His site also came under cyber attack and PayPal cut off his ability to raise funds.

There is no doubt that Gillard, the Swedish prosecutor, PayPal, etc are all being pressured by the US government to help snuff out this ray of light exposing its many crimes. Only French Internet service provider OVH said it had no plans to end the service it provides to Wikileaks, and a judge threw out Industry Minister Eric Besson's case to force it to.

Hackivist admirers of Mr Quixote have set up mirror sites faster than traditional servers can shut Wikileaks down and are launching denial-of-service attacks targetting its Internet enemies. Coldblood, a member of the computer group Anonymous, told BBC, "Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets. We feel that Wikileaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs the government."

The Man of La Mancha fought off more than "100 legal attacks" before his arrest, including one by Swiss banks whose illicit offshore activities were exposed. That case too was dismissed and left the bankers to scramble to protect their ill-gotten gains.

The show goes on. Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said Assange's arrest was an attack on media freedom but assured, "Wikileaks is operational. We are continuing on the same track as laid out before." Assange — or his colleagues still at large — hopes to set up a number of "independent chapters around the world" as well as to act as a middle-man between sources and newspapers.

Strangely, he has been attacked on the left as a stooge of the CIA or Israel, though the former makes no sense at all. True, the latter comes off relatively clean amidst the diplomatic cesspool. But what the few tight-lipped US diplo leaks relating to Israel really show is the fear that US diplomats have of saying anything negative about Israel. Perhaps they fear they will be passed over for their "anti-Semitism" or perhaps they fear that all their missives are read by Mossad as a matter of course.

A terse cable from the US embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan compares Israeli-Azeri relations ominously to an "iceberg with nine-tenths unseen". Another polite one from Tel Aviv reveals that several "OT" (organised crime) figures applied for visas to attend a "security conference" in Los Vegas but thankfully didn't come back when asked for their prison records in Russia.

An interesting comparison is between Assange and another exposer of US military secrets, Jonathan Pollard, the (only) US-Israel spy serving a life sentence he received in 1987 for revealing US military secrets. The big difference, of course, is Pollard did not apply the "open diplomacy" principle. If he had blacked out the sensitive names, and exposed the secrets to broad daylight, like Assange, he could have had a beneficial influence on world politics. Instead he sold the secrets to Israel, and uncounted CIA agents lost their lives in the Soviet Union as a result.

Another worthy comparison is with the legendary Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, who like Assange, gave himself up and faced the music, which turned out to be sweet. The judge dismissed all charges against him in 1973 and the New York Times pompously applauded him in 1996, saying that the papers demonstrated "that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied" about "a subject of transcendent national interest and significance."

Ellsberg and Assange, following the advice of Woodrow Wilson, are heroes. Pollard, truly a villain, is worshipped today in Israel, where his 9000th day in prison last year was commemorated with a light show on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. Last month 39 Congressmen petitioned US President Barack Obama to pardon him. Last summer, Netanyahu had the gall to offer to hold off a few more months on settlements if Obama freed him.

Will Assange suffer the fate of Pollard or Ellsberg? The US military machine was in disarray in 1971 and Ellsberg gave it a brave shove and helped bring the troops home. But this is 2010. The open calls to free Pollard are treated as a matter of course. While the Hillaries and Sarahs are calling to assassinate Assange for doing something noble, their like are calling to free a traitor who was responsible for betraying his country and causing untold deaths of US officials.

The sides are lining up, much like Bush predicted in 2001 with his "You are with us or against us." A brave Aussie, a principled French judge, an American libertarian congressman, a youthful computer nerd — the enemies of empire come in all shapes and sizes.


Wikileaks and the New Global Order

Wikileaks and the New Global Order

By JONATHAN COOK

November 30, 2010

The Wikileaks disclosure this week of confidential cables from United States embassies has been debated chiefly in terms either of the damage to Washington’s reputation or of the questions it raises about national security and freedom of the press.


The headlines aside, most of the information so far revealed from the 250,000 documents is hardly earth-shattering, even if it often runs starkly counter to the official narrative of the US as the benevolent global policeman, trying to maintain order amid an often unruly rabble of underlings.


Is it really surprising that US officials appear to have been trying to spy on senior United Nations staff, and just about everyone else for that matter? Or that Israel has been lobbying strenuously for military action to be taken against Iran? Or even that Saudi Arabia feels threatened by an Iranian nuclear bomb? All of this was already largely understood; the leaks have simply provided official confirmation.


The new disclosures, however, do provide a useful insight, captured in the very ordinariness of the diplomatic correspondence, into Washington’s own sense of the limits on its global role -- an insight that was far less apparent in the previous Wikileaks revelations on the US army’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.


Underlying the gossip and analysis sent back to Washington is an awareness from many US officials stationed abroad of quite how ineffective -- and often counter-productive -- much US foreign policy is.


While the most powerful nation on earth is again shown to be more than capable of throwing its weight around in bullying fashion, a cynical resignation nonetheless shines through many of the cables, an implicit recognition that even the top dog has to recognise its limits.


That is most starkly evident in the messages sent by the embassy in Pakistan, revealing the perception among local US officials that the country is largely impervious to US machinations and is in danger of falling entirely out the ambit of Washington’s influence.


In the cables sent from Tel Aviv, a similar fatalism reigns. The possibility that Israel might go it alone and attack Iran is contemplated as though it were an event Washington has no hope of preventing. US largesse of billions of dollars in annual aid and military assistance to Israel appears to confer zero leverage on its ally’s policies.


The same sense of US ineffectiveness is highlighted by the Wikileaks episode in another way. Once, in the pre-digital era, the most a whistleblower could hope to achieve was the disclosure of secret documents limited to his or her area of privileged access. Even then the affair could often be hushed up and make no lasting impact.


Now, however, it seems the contents of almost the entire system of US official communications is vulnerable to exposure. And anyone with a computer has a permanent and easily disseminated record of the evidence.


The impression of a world running out of American control has become a theme touching all our lives over the past decade.


The US invented and exported financial deregulation, promising it to be the epitome of the new capitalism that was going to offer the world economic salvation. The result is a banking crisis that now threatens to topple the very governments in Europe who are Washington’s closest allies.


As the contagion of bad debt spreads through the system, we are likely to see a growing destabilisation of the Washington order across the globe.


At the same time, the US army’s invasions in the Middle East are stretching its financial and military muscle to tearing point, defining for a modern audience the problem of imperial over-reach. Here too the upheaval is offering potent possibilities to those who wish to challenge the current order.


And then there is the biggest crisis facing Washington: of a gradually unfolding environmental catastrophe that has been caused chiefly by the same rush for world economic dominance that spawned the banking disaster.


The scale of this problem is overawing most scientists, and starting to register with the public, even if it is still barely acknowledged beyond platitudes by US officials.


The repercussions of ecological meltdown will be felt not just by polar bears and tribes living on islands. It will change the way we live -- and whether we live -- in ways that we cannot hope to foresee.


At work here is a set of global forces that the US, in its hubris, believed it could tame and dominate in its own cynical interests. By the early 1990s that arrogance manifested itself in the claim of the “end of history”: the world’s problems were about to be solved by US-sponsored corporate capitalism.


The new Wikileaks disclosures will help to dent those assumptions. If a small group of activists can embarrass the most powerful nation on earth, the world’s finite resources and its laws of nature promise a much harsher lesson.


Why Wikileaks is Good for Democracy

Why Wikileaks is Good for Democracy

By BILL QUIGLEY

November 30, 2010

“Information is the currency of democracy.”
-- Thomas Jefferson.

Since 9-11, the US government, through Presidents Bush and Obama, has increasingly told the US public that “state secrets” will not be shared with citizens. Candidate Obama pledged to reduce the use of state secrets, but President Obama continued the Bush tradition. The Courts and Congress and international allies have gone meekly along with the escalating secrecy demands of the US Executive.

By labeling tens of millions of documents secret, the US government has created a huge vacuum of information.

But information is the lifeblood of democracy. Information about government contributes to a healthy democracy. Transparency and accountability are essential elements of good government. Likewise, “a lack of government transparency and accountability undermines democracy and gives rise to cynicism and mistrust,” according to a 2008 Harris survey commissioned by the Association of Government Accountants.

Into the secrecy vacuum stepped Private Bradley Manning, who, according to the Associated Press, was able to defeat “Pentagon security systems using little more than a Lady Gaga CD and a portable computer memory stick.”

Manning apparently sent the information to Wikileaks – a non profit media organization, which specializes in publishing leaked information. Wikileaks in turn shared the documents to other media around the world including the New York Times and published much of it on its website.

Despite criminal investigations by the US and other governments, it is not clear that media organizations like Wikileaks can be prosecuted in the US in light of First Amendment. Recall that the First Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Outraged politicians are claiming that the release of government information is the criminal equivalent of terrorism and puts innocent people’s lives at risk. Many of those same politicians authorized the modern equivalent of carpet bombing of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, the sacrifice of thousands of lives of soldiers and civilians, and drone assaults on civilian areas in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. Their anger at a document dump, no matter how extensive, is more than a little suspect.

Everyone, including Wikileaks and the other media reporting the documents, hopes that no lives will be lost because of this. So far, that appears to be the case as McClatchey Newspapers reported November 28, 2010, that ‘US officials conceded that they have no evidence to date that the [prior] release of documents led to anyone’s death.”

The US has been going in the wrong direction for years by classifying millions of documents as secrets. Wikileaks and other media which report these so called secrets will embarrass people yes. Wikileaks and other media will make leaders uncomfortable yes. But embarrassment and discomfort are small prices to pay for a healthier democracy.

Wikileaks has the potential to make transparency and accountability more robust in the US. That is good for democracy.

Bill Quigley is Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans.