(I originally posted this item in December, 2009, at The Dream Antilles.  This is a short story by Luis Ramirez, who was executed in Texas on October 20, 2005. My thanks to Abe Bonowitz for passing this story along to me. The story doesn’t require any commentary, and I’m not going to give any. It’s a gift to all of you for the Holidays, Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, New Year’s, Solstice, whatever holiday, if any, you may celebrate.)

Julian Assange is the big media story, but the unsung hero is probably Brad Manning.  Unfortunately, while Manning suffers in solitary confinement, as he has for the past 7 months, and we scour the leaked material for which he might be responsible, the subject of Manning’s torturous, stringent, long term confinement are noted with horror and contempt, but is anything being done to challenge them?  Put another way, where is the Great Writ, the writ of habeas corpus, for Brad Manning?

Today I was captivated for 8.5 hours as Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders spoke about the tax bill.  But it wasn’t just the tax bill that he was talking about.  The speech was actually a progressive manifesto about the way that ordinary middle class and poor Americans are being plundered by the richest 1%.

And it was the most important political speech– by far– of the past two years.  Seldom, if ever, has anyone seized the spotlight to discuss and examine so thoroughly the the plundering of the nation by its wealthiest citizens.  And to demand so clearly that the government provide genuine relief for the millions of Americans who are now suffering the consequences of the plunder.

The top 1% need further tax relief like a fish needs a bicycle.  And if it took most of today to get that point across, it was worth it.

It’s not a secret: the Internet was always going to radically change the world of information.  That’s nothing new.  What is new, is that the struggle over who controls and possesses information isn’t going to be fought solely in the courts or in the legislatures or the media.  It’s going to be fought out as well on the Internet itself and the weapons are going to be computers.

The present battle, fought between Wikileaks and its allies, on one side, and its well organized adversaries, including financial organizations and governments, on the other, may eventually bring information democracy, in the form of unprecedented and simple access to all kinds of information, even classified or secret information, to anyone with a modem.  Or at the other pole, it may eventually bring unprecedented censorship through even tighter control of information to the Internet and harsh penalties for publication of various kinds of information.

The New York Times reports from today’s digital battlefront:

LONDON – A broad campaign of cyberattacks appeared to be under way on Wednesday in support of the beleaguered antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks, which has drawn governmental criticism from around the globe for its release of classified American documents and whose founder, Julian Assange, is being held in Britain on accusations of rape.

Attacks were reported on Mastercard.com, which stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; on the lawyer representing the two Swedish women who have accused Mr. Assange of sexual improprieties; and on PostFinance, the Swiss postal system’s financial arm, which closed Mr. Assange’s account after saying he provided false information by saying that he resided in Switzerland.

At least some of the attacks involved distributed denials of service, in which a site is bombarded by requests from a network of computers until it reaches capacity and, effectively, shuts down.

It was unclear whether the various attacks were independently mounted, but suspicion was immediately focused on Anonymous, a leaderless group of activist hackers that had vowed to wreak revenge on any organization that lined up against WikiLeaks and that claimed responsibility for the Mastercard attack.

Anonymous, according to the Times, has expressed its philosophy in two manifestos released this past week, and is battling for nothing less than free information on a free Internet:

The group, which gained notoriety for their cyberattacks…  released two manifestos over the weekend vowing revenge against enemies of WikiLeaks.

“We fight for the same reasons,” said one. “We want transparency and we counter censorship.”

The manifestos singled out companies like PayPal and Amazon, who had cut off service to WikiLeaks after the organization’s recent release of classified diplomatic documents from a cache of 250,000 it had obtained.

In recent days, Gregg Housh, an activist who has worked on previous Anonymous campaigns, said that a core of 100 or so devout members of the group, supplemented by one or two extremely expert hackers, were likely to do most of the damage. Mr. Housh, who disavows any illegal activity himself, said the reason Anonymous had declared its campaign was amazingly simple. Anonymous believes that “information should be free, and the Internet should be free,” he said,

Information, as the law now stands, is anything but free. But the Internet for more than a decade and a half has eroded much of the traditional deference to ownership of information. Napster and its progeny have brought a generation of people who think music and film should all be free.  Readers of Blogs are never disturbed by what amounts to wholesale infringement of copyrighted photos and videos and text. Wikileaks has carried this a step further by publishing enormous amounts of material officially designated “secret”.  The trend on the Internet is toward free and unfettered access to all information.  But those who own the information have no intention whatsoever to allow it to flow without charge and without a fight.

Today’s attacks, I think, mark the Cyber Battle of Lexington and Concord.

——-

simulposted at The Dream Antilles

Haiti is in need of millions of dollars to combat the cholera epidemic, but the US is still holding back $1.15 billion in Aid that has already been appropriated.  It’s time to tell your congress members to stop sitting on the wallet and get that money to Haiti, where it’s urgently needed.

AFP today reports on the need for $164 million in aid to combat the cholera epidemic in Haiti:

nough.  I’ve been writing for the past week, daily, because I’m concerned that the cholera outbreak in Haiti endangers the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and especially threatens the more than a million Haitians who are living in tents or under tarps in Port au Prince and elsewhere in the country.

This morning’s Miami Herald Editorial captures exactly what needs to be said in the US about this impending public health disaster:

he news from Haiti continues to be simply awful.  The cholera epidemic that started elsewhere has now reached the Haitian capital, Port Au Prince, where it threatens the 1.5 million people who were displaced by the recent earthquake.  “Displaced” is a sanitary way of describing the squalor of terrible living conditions which only foster the spread of the disease.

The epidemic threatens the lives of people who suffered so much in the earthquake and who then survived the rain and flooding caused by Hurricane Tomas.  Even before these natural disasters, Haiti was wracked by hunger, poor infrastructure, high infant mortality, short life span, poverty and disease.  Now weakened people face the onslaught of a cholera epidemic.

Please make the jump.

As feared, Cholera appears to have arrived in Port Au Prince, Haiti.  A first confirmed case has now been reported: the 3 year-old child with the disease had not left Port Au Prince.  This outbreak is a major threat to millions of people.  The report:

Tonight Eastern Standard Time will begin.  Again.  And that, around here, is the dreaded beginning of horrible Winter.  This, after all, is Upstate New York.  I’m nestled against the Massachusetts border.  And the beginning of Eastern Standard Time fills me with utter dread.

What stands between me and actual, below zero winter?  First, deer hunting season.  A very few hunters, fewer by far than a decade ago, will stagger drunkenly into the woods before dawn and send the grotesquely overpopulated deer into an unparalleled panic and frenzy.  They’re already crazy because they’re in rut.  The deer will then run into the roads and into cars.  Why don’t they avoid the cars?  Two reasons: first, they think the roads are made of ice, so they’re afraid of running on them.  And second, there really is a  reason for the phrase “a deer in the headlights.”  This doesn’t begin explain why deer run into the sides of passing cars.  And it doesn’t explain why the shoulders of all of the roads are filled with deer eyes reflecting headlights and waiting for an unfortunate moment to run into the road.

Hasn’t Haiti suffered enough?  Centuries of grotesque exploitation and purposeful neglect.  And most recently, the devastating earthquake.  Then an inadequate relief effort that has left thousands and thousands homeless or stuck in makeshift, flimsy camps, without adequate housing, food, medicine or sanitation.  An outbreak of Cholera.  And now, on top of all of that, the unimaginable: a possible Hurricane this week.  And a very big one at that.

The model predicts the storm will make a right turn.  In fact, almost all of the models say it will make a right turn.  And when it does, it will come ashore in Haiti.  This will cause loss of life, flooding, further outbreaks of disease, loss of even temporary shelter, unavailability of food.  A nightmare for those living in Haiti.

I’ve asked before that we contribute to Doctors Without Borders, specifically for Haiti Aid.  Now I’m asking again.  What else can be done?  What else can I or you do?

Money for specialized aid is extremely important.  As important, and perhaps more important in the long run, I think is for US citizens to being to know Haiti’s history and the story of its relationship to the US, in other words, the story of how it got to be the way it is now.  I’m sure we all realize that Haiti didn’t get to its present horrendous situation all by its self, without a lot of US and European “help.”  To ferret how all of this has happened, a great starting point is this dailyKos essay by allie123. It’s part of a series.  Each piece is important on its own.  Please take the time to read them.

For now, though, please consider an immediate, small donation to Doctors Without Borders.  It might save some lives in Haiti.  It might alleviate some of the suffering.

————

cross posted from The Dream Antilles