Credit: craigmdennis @ flickr

I, Mike Gogulski, hereby pledge that if Julian Assange should call upon me in need of a place to stay, I will provide it to him with no questions asked, indefinitely, and with the highest degree of security and confidentiality I can provide. I’m easy to get a hold of.

Now it’s your turn. Simply replace my name with yours and publish. Link here if you wish, but publish.

The entire US government is lining up against this courageous young Army Private, including calls for his death, but we’re building a “Stand with Brad” campaign to give voice to the millions who understand what’s really going on here.

“We stand for truth, for government transparency, and for an end to our tax-dollars funding endless occupation abroad… We stand with accused whistle-blower US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning”, begins our statement at http://standwithbrad.org.

1. Please sign the statement yourself.

2. I’m hoping you can encourage a few friends to also add their name.

3. When talking to folks about this, let them know there is a grassroots support network that has taken responsibility for Bradley’s legal defense expenses… and Bradley could really use their support. http://couragetoresist.org/bradley

For every statement signer, an individual copy is printed and mailed to Army officials on their behalf, regardless of their ability to make a donation.

Thank you.

Peace,
Mike

Wikileekz cat iz in ur dokumentz... leekin'...

Here’s Jim Barnett, writing for the Nieman Journalism Lab at establishment pillar Harvard University:

“If WikiLeaks really wants to promote transparency, it should start with its own operations.”

John “WikiLeaks > Cryptome = sour grapes” Young, quoted in a rather insane article suggesting, among other things, that WikiLeaks is a CIA/Mossad front organization, says:

“The principal deficiency of Wikileaks is its lack of transparency about its operators and funds, characteristics of spies and secret societies up to no good and whose main purpose is to hide from public accountability and conceal corruption and criminality.”

Into the midst of an otherwise decent-looking piece of journalism, Jeanne Whalen and David Crawford, writing for establishment mouthpiece The Wall Street Journal, inject:

“WikiLeaks’s lack of financial transparency stands in contrast to the total transparency it seeks from governments and corporations.”

It’s hard to separate out the stupid from the evil here, and I’m not going to try. But let’s break it down. What’s being said here is that since it represents itself as a champion of transparency among governments and giant corporations, WikiLeaks ought to eat its own dog food and be transparent itself.

Has a nice sort of happy-symmetry ring to it, doesn’t it? But it’s wrong.

What WikiLeaks (and sites like it, including, to his credit, John Young’s cryptome.org) brings to the world is a mechanism for subjecting the most powerful, wealthiest and least accountable institutions on the planet to the merciless light of public scrutiny so that they cannot continue enjoying the benefit of secrecy in exploiting people and planet.

It should be blindingly obvious to these and other like-minded commentators that the “transparency” logic simply does not apply to such an organization. The public has no need whatever to know the internal workings of a volunteer, donation-funded organization that heroically stands up to the world’s greatest powers. Additionally, the more information that’s public about such a group’s inner workings, the more opportunity for those powers to subvert, corrupt, disrupt, discredit and destroy it.

Maybe that’s just not obvious to them, in which case I call them stupid. But maybe it is obvious to them. If so, that strongly suggests to me that they’re in the service of evil, if not evil themselves.

Army: Leak All You Can Leak: Find Your Future In The Army

Inspiration: MichaelMoore.com

Manning, 22, is presently said to be detained by the US military in Kuwait pending charges related to the release of the leaked classified video now known as “Collateral Murder“.

At present, the web services include a blog, a discussion forum and a wiki.

Your contributions and suggestions are most welcome.

According to Wired, via cryptogon.com:

[SPC Bradley] Manning came to the attention of the FBI and Army investigators after he contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail. Lamo had just been the subject of a Wired.com article. Very quickly in his exchange with the ex-hacker, Manning claimed to be the Wikileaks video leaker.

“If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?” Manning asked.

From the chat logs provided by Lamo, and examined by Wired.com, it appears Manning sensed a kindred spirit in the ex-hacker. He discussed personal issues that got him into trouble with his superiors and left him socially isolated, and said he had been demoted and was headed for an early discharge from the Army.

When Manning told Lamo that he leaked a quarter-million classified embassy cables, Lamo contacted the Army, and then met with Army CID investigators and the FBI at a Starbucks near his house in Carmichael, California, where he passed the agents a copy of the chat logs. At their second meeting with Lamo on May 27, FBI agents from the Oakland Field Office told the hacker that Manning had been arrested the day before in Iraq by Army CID investigators.

You utter bastard, Lamo!

But it gets worse:

Lamo has contributed funds to Wikileaks in the past, and says he agonized over the decision to expose Manning — he says he’s frequently contacted by hackers who want to talk about their adventures, and he’s never considered reporting anyone before. The supposed diplomatic cable leak, however, made him believe Manning’s actions were genuinely dangerous to U.S. national security.

“I wouldn’t have done this if lives weren’t in danger[...]“

Lives most emphatically are in danger every day in Iraq. And in Afghanistan. And in Yemen and Somalia and all of the 75 countries where President “Change!” Obama has either deployed or opted to continue the deployment of US Special Forces — that is, the American Imperium’s elite death&destruction squads.

But Mr. Lamo is worried about “US national security”, meaning the ability of the American Imperium to continue tax-harvesting its free-range chattel submittizens, legalizing massive privilege to favored members of the American and global ruling classes, carrying out wanton, unlimited bloodletting overseas and generally making life a living hell for millions upon millions of people, all without challenge.

I am not one to praise soldiers, but Bradley Manning did one of the most admirable things he could do as a volunteer member of the gang of evil thugs calling itself the “United States Army” by leaking the video and the other information. Maybe we’ll find out what his reasons were, some day when he’s out of whatever dark hole the US Imperium’s “justice” system throws him into, but he did say some things in his chats with Lamo which interest me:

“Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning wrote.

[...]

“Everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed,” Manning wrote. “It’s open diplomacy. World-wide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”

Somehow, Adrian Lamo doesn’t think this is a good thing, and feels so strongly about it that he’s quite okay with Bradley Manning being kidnapped and caged with real criminals, possibly for a very long time.

Adrian Lamo, go die in a hole. Alone. Screaming. And take your “national security” with you.