Bill being Drafted to Bar International Peace Activists from Entering Israel
Alternative Information Center | January 4, 2010
Knesset Member Yariv Levin, of the right-wing Likud party, together with the pro-settlement group The Legal Forum for the Land of Israel, are currently working on an “anti-subversive” bill aimed at anarchists and supporters of the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).
If approved the law would allow Israel’s Interior Ministry to bar international activists from entering Israel. The law would apply restrictions to anyone who acts against Israel, denies the Holocaust, works to boycott Israel and/or attempts to place Israeli leaders on international trial for what they did in the line of duty, reported Arutz Sheva.
“The suggested legislation would apply to anyone who incites against the country, carries out verbal or physical attacks, organizes hostile activities or tries to interfere with foreign diplomatic and trade relations,” the news daily reported.
“The aim of the bill is to give the country the tools to deal with hostile elements that work against Israel from within the country and who endanger the security of Israeli citizens as well as foreign trade and diplomatic ties,” explained MK Levin.
“Many people why call themselves call themselves ‘peace activists’, along with all other Israel-haters who often are called ‘human rights activists,’ often act against the rights of Israeli citizens and are free to travel in the country without any restrictions,” added Nochi Eyal, director of the Legal Forum.
This is not the first anti-freedom of speech bill aimed at those critical of Israeli policies.
In summer 2010 the Knesset began hearings on a “Boycott Bill” that was meant to discourage participation, particularly by Israelis, in boycotts of Israel.
Under the new law, any group could sue for damages of up to NIS 30,000 from anyone who launched a boycott against them, or incited for boycott, without having to prove that damage was indeed caused, according to the Israeli news daily Haaretz. An additional sum could then be demanded once damages were proven.
The proposal has yet to move past the initial hearing phase.
A Tiny Slice of the Palestinian Experience
By Alex Kane | January 2, 2010
Ramallah, West Bank–It’s a far cry from the daily checkpoints, beatings, tear-gassing and harassment that Palestinians have to go through, but today I can say that a tiny slice of the Palestinian experience became alive to me.
My arrival at Ben-Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, Israel early today was the start of a long trip down Israeli security harassment lane. After I showed my passport to an Israeli immigration agent, I was taken to a holding room, where I joined Palestinians trying to visit family and other–mostly non-white–people. Three hours later, I was taken to a separate room, where I was questioned by a bald Israeli who said he was from the Ministry of Defense.
They immediately knew that my back story of why I came to Israel was false, and I had to admit I planned on visiting the West Bank. After that came questions about my trip last year to Gaza, who I met with there, what I wanted to do in the West Bank and what the delegation I joined today was all about. Absurdly, the defense official hinted that I was suspected of “terrorism”–the term used by Israel and the U.S. to smear anyone who dissents against their inhumane policies of occupation and war. The agent also was curious to find out why I–as a Jew–was on the “Palestinian side,” working “against my homeland and my father’s,” to which I responded that Israel is not my homeland, and that I was for the human rights of all people, including Palestinians. While these questions were fired at me, pictures of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres stared down at me, as if to mock me.
I was sent back to the holding room without my passport, where I spent the rest of my time sleeping, watching Curb Your Enthusiasm (a perfect mood-lifter) and messaging Israeli blogger Didi Remez over Twitter with updates on what was going on.
Five hours later, after I though I was to be deported or detained, I was let out of the grasp of Israeli security on the condition that I not enter the Palestinian territories. As I drove to Ramallah, I passed by countless West Bank settlements–with their gleaming lights–and Palestinian villages surrounded by the illegal colonies. There was no discernible difference between Israel proper and settlement areas over the Green Line, something that I marveled at even though I knew that was the case.
And now I’m here, back in Palestine after one year. One can only be amazed that the Palestinian people remain so strong and steadfast after enduring 62 years of Israeli security harassment far worse than what I went through today.
Judge warns of ‘Orwellian state’ in warrantless GPS tracking case
By Daniel Tencer and Stephen C. Webster | Raw Story | December 30th, 2010
Police in Delaware may soon be unable to use global positioning systems (GPS) to keep tabs on a suspect unless they have a court-signed warrant, thanks to a recent ruling by a superior court judge who cited famed author George Orwell in her decision.
In striking down evidence obtained through warrantless GPS tracking, Delaware Judge Jan R. Jurden wrote that “an Orwellian state is now technologically feasible,” adding that “without adequate judicial preservation of privacy, there is nothing to protect our citizens from being tracked 24/7.”
The ruling goes against a federal appeals court’s decision last summer that allowed warrantless tracking by GPS.
Jurden was ruling on the case of Michael D. Holden, who police say was pulled over with 10 lbs. of marijuana in his car last February. Holden was allegedly named by a DEA task force informant in 2009, and in early 2010, without obtaining a warrant, police placed a GPS device on his car, allowing them to follow him whenever he used the vehicle.
Police investigators say they had the GPS on Holden’s car for 20 days when they saw what they believed to be a cash-for-drugs exchange involving Holden in New Jersey. Police stopped him on a bridge crossing into Delaware and arrested him.
Unless there are special circumstances, “the warrantless placement of a GPS device to track a suspect 24 hours a day constitutes an unlawful search,” Judge Jurden wrote in her ruling (PDF). “In this case, there was insufficient probable cause independent of the GPS tracking to stop Holden’s vehicle where and when it was stopped, and therefore, the evidence seized from Holden’s vehicle must be suppressed.”
Prosecutors were forced to drop marijuana trafficking charges as a result.
Jurden argued that the same legal principle that allows officers to tail a suspect in traffic, without a warrant, doesn’t apply to GPS because the devices reveal far more about a person under surveillance than physical surveillance could — and more than police need.
“Prolonged GPS surveillance provides more information than one reasonably expects to ‘expose to the public,'” she wrote. “The whole of one’s movement over a prolonged period of time tells a vastly different story than movement over a day as may be completed by manned surveillance.”
She added, “It takes little to imagine what constant and prolonged surveillance could expose about someone’s life even if they are not participating in any criminal activity.”
Wesley Oliver, an associate law professor at Widener University, told the Wilmington News Journal that the ruling falls in line with judicial opinions in New York, Massachusetts and elsewhere.
“Without such restrictions, Oliver said, an incumbent candidate for sheriff could track an opponent with a GPS device — searching for visits to a strip club, mistress’ house or clinic — and be perfectly within the law,” the paper reported.
But the issue is far from settled. The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling last August effectively allowing the use of GPS tracking without a warrant. Law enforcement agencies in the nine western US states covered by the Ninth Circuit now have the ability to use GPS without a warrant
A dissenting judge in that case also referred to Orwell in his dissenting opinion.
“1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last,” Chief Judge Alex Kozinski wrote.
That ruling is expected to be appealed to the Supreme Court.
‘The FBI raids and subpoenas . . . [are] best understood as backlash aimed at silencing our successful movement’
By Maureen Murphy | Mondoweiss | December 26, 2010
The following is a statement given by Maureen Murphy at a press conference on Thursday, December 23 about the government’s ongoing intimidation of anti-war and solidarity activism in the Midwest. Murphy is one of several activists with the Palestine Solidarity Group who have been subpoenaed, and one of several individuals across the city of Chicago and the Twin Cities who are being targeted for Palestine solidarity activism. For more information, and to get involved, see http://www.stopfbi.net/.
On Tuesday morning I experienced what more than twenty other activists across the US have experienced in the past few months — a knock on the door from the FBI. When I answered, one of the two agents outside my building identified himself and said he wanted to speak with me. When I declined, he informed me that I was being subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury on January 25.
I am among 22 other anti-war, labor and solidarity activists who have been subpoenaed and are facing a grand jury since the FBI raided several prominent organizers’ homes on September 24.
I’m proud of the movement we have built here in Chicago and I believe that the FBI raids and subpoenas and the ever-expanding grand jury witch hunt is best understood as backlash aimed at silencing our successful movement.
And if this grand jury fishing expedition is indeed aimed at intimidating our movement, what we have seen so far is that it has had the opposite effect. I’m extremely grateful for the outpouring of support that I and the other targeted activists have received. And as someone who has been leading the support work around the raids and subpoenas here in Chicago, I have seen first-hand that this is not about 23 individuals. There is a mass movement that understands that it is the rights of us ALL that are at stake here, and we have seen a broad condemnation of this attack on our right to peacefully advocate for a more just and less deadly US foreign policy.
I have no intention to participate in the government’s witch hunt. It is very clear that no crime has been committed and that the government’s motivation in issuing these subpoenas is to have us name the names of other activists not only here in the United States, but also in places like Palestine and Colombia, where many of us have traveled to learn about the human rights situations in those places. We can only assume that the US government shares intelligence with the governments of Israel and Colombia, whose repressive military rule the US bankrolls at the US taxpayer’s expense. And it is essentially a prison sentence or worse for human rights activists in Palestine and Colombia to be singled out and identified in this way. And I have no intention in playing any role in that.
I’m encouraged by the outpouring of solidarity from all corners of the Palestine solidarity movement and other social justice communities. I urge everyone to join in the pushback against this attack on our movement and our basic civil liberties.
TSA has no regular testing system for its pornoscanners
Cory Doctorow | Boing Boing | December 23, 2010
Many experts are skeptical that the TSA’s new backscatter pornoscanner machines are safe, but even the experts who endorse them are careful to bracket their reassurances with certain caveats: the safety of the machines depends heavily on their being properly maintained, regularly tested, and expertly operated. Whether or not you’re comfortable with the intended radiation emissions from the scanners, no one in their right mind would argue that a broken machine that lovingly lingers over your reproductive organs and infuses them with 10,000 or 100,000 times the normal dosage is desirable.
But when Andrew Schneider, AOL’s public health correspondent, contacted the TSA to find out what maintenance and testing is in place to ensure the safe operation of the scanners, he discovered that the TSA appears to have no regime at all to ensure that they are functioning within normal parameters. While the TSA claims that entities like the FDA, the US Army and Johns Hopkins all regularly inspect their machines, none of these groups agrees, and they all disavow any role in regularly maintaining and testing the TSA’s equipment (the Army has tested machines in three airports, but has not conducted any further testing). And Johns Hopkins denies that it has certified the machines as safe for operation in the first place — let alone taking on any ongoing testing and certification program.
AOL Investigation: No Proof TSA Scanners Are Safe
… For example, the FDA says it doesn’t do routine inspections of any nonmedical X-ray unit, including the ones operated by the TSA.
The FDA has not field-tested these scanners and hasn’t inspected the manufacturer. It has no legal authority to require owners of these devices — in this case, TSA — to provide access for routine testing on these products once they have been sold, FDA press officer said Karen Riley said…
Two-person teams from the Army unit performed surveys of the Advance Image Technology X-ray scanners at just three airports — in Boston, Los Angeles and Cincinnati, she said. And that was all that the TSA asked the Army to do this year…
“APL’s role was to measure radiation coming off the body scanners to verify that it fell within [accepted] standards. We were testing equipment and in no way determined its safety to humans,” Helen Worth, head of public affairs for the Johns Hopkins lab, told AOL News.
“Many news articles have said we declared the equipment to be safe, but that was not what we were tasked to do,” she added.
Moreover, the study said APL scientists were unable to test a ready-for-TSA scanner at their lab because the manufacturer would not supply one. Instead, the tests were performed on a scanner cobbled together from spare parts in manufacturer Rapiscan Systems’ California warehouse. …
How Wikileaks Is Effecting American-Israeli Relations
By Hannah McKale | Desert Peace | December 18, 2010
The first and most important question to ask when approaching events on the geopolitical spectrum is to first ask the question, who is to benefit? In the case of the most recent Wikileaks dump that occurred at the end of November, the most obvious party with something to gain from the files and cables exposed is Israel. American and Israel relations have been quite close ever since the end of the second world war.
When the news first broke that Wikileaks would be making another massive dump of information, people could not help but wonder what it may be. Now, it has been revealed to the public, and while it is not nearly quite as scathing as a video of soldiers slaughtering innocent civilians, there is still a definite agenda behind the release of these embassy cables. The cables were between American embassies and embassies from a variety of Middle Eastern countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Israel.
A majority of the cables pertain to Iran and potential military actions against the country. Who has been calling for a precision military strike against Iran for months now, if not years? You guessed it. Israel, and at least a portion of the United States Government wishes to bring the surrounding region against Iran. While the overall image of the American government is tarnished a great deal by these leaks, Israels is not affected whatsoever.
While the US is forced to deal with scathing leaked information such as its meddling in Argentinian affairs, Israel’s own agenda is only gaining ground. Some have even postulated a potential Mossad or CIA connection to Julian Assange and Wikileaks.
According to the former Pakistani Chief of Intelligence, Hamid Gul, Wikileaks is designed to act as a controlled release of information, and disinformation designed to manipulate public opinion of Washington, and Iran.
Israel has cause for a strike against Iran in order to curtail its nuclear capabilities. The government of both America and Israel claim that Iran’s agenda for nuclear power will inevitably lead to a nuclear confrontation given that Iran acquires nuclear weaponry. This past August, the Iranian Busherh reactor was reportedly attacked by a virus which was said to be deployed against the installation by a government organization. Israel was fingered as the main culprit in this instance.
Israel and America have always maintained a close relationship in leadership. Both are proponents of the War on Terror, and both are also keenly interested in the Middle Eastern occupation. With Iran remaining one of the few independent states in the Middle Eastern area, Israel is looking to turn the rest of the Islamic world against Iran by using an indirect approach through information warfare. The most horrifying negative aspect of this most recent Wikileaks dump is the opportunity it gives the government to claim security measures are required for cyberspace. It was not entirely surprising how hostile some of the talking heads of the mainstream media appeared to be against Wikileaks, when it is exposing government corruption these imbeciles demand punishment for Assange, the shutdown of Wikileaks, and better control of information on the web.
It appears that the leadership schools of both the United States and Israel both have their agendas in full throttle in this Wikileaks situation. While Israel’s agenda of dominating the Middle East’s future is coaxed closer to the surface for those who have their eyes open, it also appears that segments of power within the United States government are attempting to mar the reputation of the nation in eyes of those around the world. Assange and Wikileaks will be demonized by the establishment, and methods of information control will be proposed by the government, all in the name of national defense.
Hanna McKale is a political scientist hailing from New York, NY. When she is not researching, she advocates for Online Education, and travels all over the world.
DHS Implementing No Work List: Citizens Must Get Government Approval to Work in Private Sector Jobs
You’ve heard of no fly and no buy lists – get ready for no work lists. Millions of workers now must apply to the DHS and prove they are not terrorists in order to be granted permission by the government to work.
By Kurt Nimmo | Infowars | December 16, 2010
On the Alex Jones Show today, a caller pointed to information posted on a union website for ironworkers spelling out details on the Department of Homeland Security’s TWIC and SWAC programs.
TWIC is short for Transportation Worker Identification Credential and SWAC stands for Secure Worker Access Consortium.
TWIC “is a biometric credential that ensures only vetted workers are eligible to enter a secure construction site, unescorted,” Ironworkers Local 361 in Ozone Park, New York, explains. “Before issuing a TWIC, TSA must conduct a security threat assessment on the TWIC applicant. An applicant who, as a result of the assessment, is determined to not pose a security threat, will be issued a TWIC card.”
In other words, construction workers in New York will need permission from the TSA and DHS in order to practice their profession and earn a living. It was much the same in the former Soviet Union and authoritarian states such as China where the government determines all aspects of an individual’s life and where even the mildly rebellious are severely punished.
SWAC is even more draconian. It is “a large-scale collaborative effort among public and private authorities, facility owners, contractors, and labor organizations who are partnering to prevent terrorist activity by creating a trusted contractor community. Over 500 organizations, including the Port Authority of NY and NJ, which manages and maintains the bridges, tunnels, bus terminals, airports, PATH, and seaports that are essential to the bi-state region’s trade and transportation capabilities, have joined this effort,” according to the union website.
SWAC also requires a background investigation by the government, so if construction, port workers, longshoremen, and truck drivers are involved in political activity frowned upon by the feds – for instance, 9/11 truth, considered dangerous and subversive by the State Department – it is likely they will have to find another line of work.
A SWAC PDF specifically mentions “treason” in an exhaustive list of crimes and misdeeds that will result in the federal government denying a person the right to earn a living.
The TWIC Disclosure and Certification form states the following: “I acknowledge that if TSA or other law enforcement agencies determine that I pose an imminent threat to national security or transportation security, my employer may be notified.”
The TSA no-fly list contains thousands of names, including journalists and political activists. If the government determines you hold the wrong political beliefs, according to the TWIC document, your employer will be told and you may lose your job and the ability to provide for your family.
The TWIC application also mentions “treason” and “sedition” as a criteria to put an end to an individual’s employment.
Sedition is defined as overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by officialdom to tend toward insurrection against the establishment. The Sedition Act of 1918 forbids the use of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States government, its flag, or its armed forces. The Sedition Act was updated on October 26, 2001, when Congress signed the USA Patriot Act into law. In the mid 70s, the Church Committee discovered that the government had carried out an aggressive campaign for decades to neutralize – as FBI director Hoover characterized it – political activity the establishment considered a threat to its monopoly on power.
As noted above, TWIC plans to force an expensive biometric ID on workers. This idea is hardly new. In 2002, the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the Department of Homeland Security in order to get details on then director Tom Ridge’s plan to introduce a biometric national ID card. Ridge and the government have stated repeatdly that “national security requirements would ultimately make such cards a reality.”
Earlier this year, Democrats pushed the idea making a biometric national ID card mandatory for all Americans. “Everyone would have to produce the card to get a job, or keep a job,” the UPI reported on May 9. “On a five-year timetable the biometric cards would replace Social Security cards and would be used to prove eligibility for employment. Card scanners would be issued to all U.S. employers. The cards would at least have the capability of being linked to a central data system.”
TWIC and SWAC represent an incremental effort by the national security state to introduce biometric ID as a prerequisite for employment. In the months ahead, we can expect more intrusions by the government on our rights as spelled out by the Declaration of Independence.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” that document states.
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, however, according to the government, will soon be predicated on a national biometric ID card and inclusion of our most private information in sprawling databases.
In the coming Brave New World Order, only citizens vetted by a totalitarian government will be allowed to work and feed their families. All others will be locked out of the system like the mutants in Total Recall, the dystopian movie based on a story by Phillip K. Dick.
Unprecedented: master’s thesis on Jewish white privilege and Israel attacked in Canadian legislature
By Cecilie Surasky | MuzzleWatch | December 10 2010
Canadian grad student, Jewish anti-Zionist activist, and descendant of Holocaust survivors Jenny Peto is breaking new ground with her University of Toronto master’s thesis The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education, though perhaps not in the way she intended.
The Canadian National Post reports:
It has provoked intense debate online, in academia and even the political realm. Progressive Conservative MPP Steve Clark raised it in the legislature Tuesday in response to sharp criticism in the Jewish community, calling it “shockingly anti-Semitic.” Citizenship and immigration minister Eric Hoskins likewise condemned the thesis in the legislature saying he was “greatly disturbed and, in fact, disgusted,” when he read media coverage about it.
These attacks (by some if not many who haven’t actually read it) on a master’s thesis, one that has already been through an academic review no less, are unprecedented. Also from The National Post:
Michiel Horn, a York University history professor and author of Academic Freedom in Canada: A History: “I know not of a single case where a master’s or a phD paper has been subject of discussion in the legislature of any province in Canada,” he said.
You can read Jenny Peto’s thesis yourself by downloading it here. Her abstract states:
This paper focuses on issues of Jewish identity, whiteness and victimhood within hegemonic Holocaust education. I argue that today, Jewish people of European descent enjoy white privilege and are among the most socio-economically advantaged groups in the West. Despite this privilege, the organized Jewish community makes claims about Jewish victimhood that are widely accepted within that community and within popular discourse in the West. I propose that these claims to victimhood are no longer based in a reality of oppression, but continue to be propagated because a victimized Jewish identity can produce certain effects that are beneficial to the organized Jewish community and the Israeli nation-state. I focus on two related Holocaust education projects – the March of the Living and the March of Remembrance and Hope – to show how Jewish victimhood is instrumentalized in ways that obscure Jewish privilege, deny Jewish racism and promote the interests of the Israeli nation-state.
I myself can’t wait to read it. There’s not a lot here that those seriously familiar with these Jewish institutions and Israeli history and politics could really argue with. For too long, the central organizing principle of much of institutional Jewry has been fear, which has been essential in, among other things, enabling an unaccountable Israel. And few programs more dramatically reflect this than the March of the Living which inflicts a proxy Holocaust trauma on Jewish teenagers (without proper context and support, so I hear from friends who have gone) as an essential right of passage into Jewishness.
To the young N. American Ashkenazi Jews especially who can’t help but notice that Jews as a whole occupy places of real economic and racial privilege in their communities, the messages of perpetual victimhood (and the implied privileges that might go with it, as in the case with the free pass that Israel tends to get) just don’t compute.
I’d imagine that in addition to her own experience, Peto had plenty to draw on from work and discussions happening in academic environments these days regarding Holocaust studies, Israeli politics, white privilege and so on. Is it possible that Peto’s crime is to have thought too complexly –in an academic setting.
Wikileaks: A Big Dangerous US Government Con Job
By F. William Engdahl | Global Research | December 10, 2010
The story on the surface makes for a script for a new Oliver Stone Hollywood thriller. A 39-year old Australian hacker holds the President of the United States and his State Department hostage to a gigantic cyber “leak,” unless the President leaves Julian Assange and his Wikileaks free to release hundreds of thousands of pages of sensitive US Government memos. A closer look at the details, so far carefully leaked by the most ultra-establishment of international media such as the New York Times, reveals a clear agenda. That agenda coincidentally serves to buttress the agenda of US geopolitics around the world from Iran to Russia to North Korea. The Wikileaks is a big and dangerous US intelligence Con Job which will likely be used to police the Internet.
It is almost too perfectly-scripted to be true. A discontented 22-year old US Army soldier on duty in Baghdad, Bradley Manning, a low-grade US Army intelligence analyst, described as a loner, a gay in the military, a disgruntled “computer geek,” sifts through classified information at Forward Operating Base Hammer. He decides to secretly download US State Department email communications from the entire world over a period of eight months for hours a day, onto his blank CDs while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga. In addition to diplomatic cables, Manning is believed to have provided WikiLeaks with helicopter gun camera video of an errant US attack in Baghdad on unarmed journalists, and with war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Manning then is supposed to have tracked down a notorious former US computer hacker to get his 250,000 pages of classified US State Department cables out in the Internet for the whole world to see. He allegedly told the US hacker that the documents he had contained “incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC.” The hacker turned him in to US authorities so the story goes. Manning is now incommunicado since months in US military confinement so we cannot ask him, conveniently. The Pentagon routinely hires the best hackers to design their security systems.
Then the plot thickens. The 250,000 pages end up at the desk of Julian Assange, the 39-year-old Australian founder of a supposedly anti-establishment website with the cute name Wikileaks. Assange decides to selectively choose several of the world’s most ultra-establishment news media to exclusively handle the leaking job for him as he seems to be on the run from Interpol, not for leaking classified information, but for allegedly having consensual sex with two Swedish women who later decided it was rape.
He selects as exclusive newspapers to decide what is to be leaked the New York Times which did such service in promoting faked propaganda against Saddam that led to the Iraqi war, the London Guardian and Der Spiegel. Assange claims he had no time to sift through so many pages so handed them to the trusted editors of the establishment media for them to decide what should be released. Very “anti-establishment” that. The New York Times even assigned one of its top people, David E. Sanger, to control the release of the Wikileaks material. Sanger is no establishment outsider. He sits as a member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Aspen Institute Strategy Group together with the likes of Condi Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA head John Deutch, former State Department Deputy Secretary and now World Bank head Robert Zoellick among others.
Indeed a strange choice of media for a person who claims to be anti-establishment. But then Assange also says he believes the US Government version of 9/11 and calls the Bilderberg Group a normal meeting of people, a very establishment view.
Not so secret cables…
The latest sensational Wikileaks documents allegedly from the US State Department embassies around the world to Washington are definitely not as Hillary Clinton claimed “an attack on America’s foreign policy interests that have endangered innocent people.” And they do not amount to what the Italian foreign minister, called the “September 11 of world diplomacy.” The British government calls them a threat to national security and an aide to Canada’s Prime Minister calls on the CIA to assassinate Assange, as does kooky would-be US Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.
Most important, the 250,000 cables are not “top secret” as we might have thought. Between two and three million US Government employees are cleared to see this level of “secret” document,[1] and some 500,000 people around the world have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRnet) where the cables were stored. Siprnet is not recommended for distribution of top-secret information. Only 6% or 15,000 pages of the documents have been classified as even secret, a level below top-secret. Another 40% were the lowest level, “confidential”, while the rest were unclassified. In brief, it was not all that secret.[2]
Most of the revelations so far have been unspectacular. In Germany the revelations led to the removal of a prominent young FDP politician close to Guido Westerwelle who apparently liked to talk too much to his counterpart at the US Embassy. The revelations about Russian politics, that a US Embassy official refers to Putin and Medvedev as “Batman and Robin,” tells more about the cultural level of current US State Department personnel than it does about internal Russian politics.
But for anyone who has studied the craft of intelligence and of disinformation, a clear pattern emerges in the Wikileaks drama. The focus is put on select US geopolitical targets, appearing as Hillary Clinton put it “to justify US sanctions against Iran.” They claim North Korea, with China’s granting of free passage to Korean ships despite US State Department pleas, sends dangerous missiles to Iran. Saudi Arabia’s ailing King Abdullah reportedly called Iran’s President a Hitler.
Excuse to police the Internet?
What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaks server in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken.
The process of policing the Web was well underway before the current leaks scandal. In 2009 Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and Republican Olympia Snowe introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.773). It would give the President unlimited power to disconnect private-sector computers from the internet. The bill “would allow the president to ‘declare a cyber-security emergency’ relating to ‘non-governmental’ computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat.” We can expect that now this controversial piece of legislation will get top priority when a new Republican House and the Senate convene in January.
The US Department of Homeland Security, an agency created in the political hysteria following 9/11/2001 that has been compared to the Gestapo, has already begun policing the Internet. They are quietly seizing and shutting down internet websites (web domains) without due process or a proper trial. DHS simply seizes web domains that it wants to and posts an ominous “Department of Justice” logo on the web site. See an example at http://torrent-finder.com. Over 75 websites were seized and shut in a recent week. Right now, their focus is websites that they claim “violate copyrights,” yet the torrent-finder.com website that was seized by DHS contained no copyrighted content whatsoever. It was merely a search engine website that linked to destinations where people could access copyrighted content. Step by careful step freedom of speech can be taken away. Then what?
Notes
1. BBCNews, Siprnet: Where the leaked cables came from, 29 November, 2010, accessed in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11863618
2. Ken Dilanian, Inside job: Stolen diplomatic cables show U.S. challenge of stopping authorized users, Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2010, accessed in http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sc-dc-1130-hackers-20101129,0,6716809.story
Peace Group not Allowed to Operate Stand at Ben-Gurion Airport
By Alessandra Bajec – IMEMC & Agencies – December 08, 2010
The group Artists Without Walls was denied authorization to set up a stand run by Jews and Arabs ‘who would be open to dialogue with passengers about coexistence.’ in Ben-Gurion airport on Tuesday, Ha’aretz reported.
Artists Without Walls, a joint Palestinian-Israeli peace group, had its request to run a stand at the passenger terminal at Ben-Gurion International Airport like the one operated by the Chabad movement rejected.
The Israeli representative of Artists Without Walls, Eitan Heller, addressed a letter to Israel Airports Authority saying the stand planned by the peace group would “serve free coffee and be managed by Jews and Arabs, who would be open to dialogue with passengers about coexistence and tolerance.”
Heller said having noticed, on his regular journeys abroad, the presence of the Chabad stand, where passersby are asked to put on phylacteries. While claiming to have nothing against Chabad, he stated: “But I cannot understand why a specific religious group has its own stand in an open area in an international air terminal,” he said. “This is a phenomenon I have not experienced anywhere else in the world.”
One of the world’s largest and best-known Hasidic movements in Orthodox Judaism, Chabad maintains thousands of institutions around the world providing outreach and educational activities for Jews.
Ben-Gurion airport manager, Shmuel Kandel, explained in his rejection of the peace group’s request that Chabad provides a service to “religious consumers and travelers who want to avail themselves of this service.” Kandel concluded his response by saying that Chabad “is aware of its obligation not to approach passengers, and airport inspectors make sure this is the case.”
“Artists Without Walls” is a permanent forum for dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians engaged in all fields of arts and culture, who strive to develop a better and more ‘human’ understanding between the two people through nonviolent and creative actions.
Through the joint peace group, several Israeli artists have been able to visit Ramallah for the first time, initiating a process of dialogue with Palestinian artists whom they did not know. Likewise, Palestinian artists have had the opportunity to visit their Israeli counterparts in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
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Aaron Siri’s Book: Vaccines, Amen
By Maryanne DemasiMaryanne Demasi | Brownstone Institute | June 15, 2026
For decades, vaccines have been treated as the sacred cow of modern medicine. I was taught that they were the holy grail. To question them was heresy. To raise concerns about safety was to risk professional exile.
Aaron Siri makes it clear in Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines that the story we’ve been told about vaccine science rests far more on belief than proof.
“No child should be sacrificed on the altar of the religion of vaccines,” Siri writes, as he turns his focus to America’s overcrowded childhood immunisation schedule.
I assumed little in this book would surprise me. I’ve spent years reporting on drug safety, regulatory capture, and the corruption of science. But Siri showed me how wrong I was.
Siri is not a doctor or a scientist. He is an attorney, and this, he says, is his advantage. In court, rhetoric won’t save you. Evidence does. As he puts it, he doesn’t get to say “trust me” the way many doctors do. “I need to prove claims with real data.”
And he does. … continue
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