Tag: Wikileaks

Following yesterdays report from the UK Guardian that “The decision to have Julian Assange sent to a London jail and kept there was taken by the British authorities and not by prosecutors in Sweden, as previously thought.” and that Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service would go to the high court today to seek the reversal of the City of Westminster magistrates court decision to free the WikiLeaks founder on bail…

The Guardian reports this morning that:

Britain’s high court today decided to grant bail to Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who is wanted in Sweden for questioning over allegations of rape.

Justice Duncan Ouseley agreed with a decision by the City of Westminister earlier in the week to release Assange on strict conditions: £200,000 cash deposit, with a further £40,000 guaranteed in two sureties of £20,000 and strict conditions on his movement.

…

Bail conditions set by Riddle stipulate that Assange must stay at a country house in Suffolk owned by Vaughan Smith, the founder of the Frontline club in west London, report to police daily and wear an electronic tag.

There is no mention in the Guardian’s piece this morning as to whether Assange has actually been physically released yet.

Meanwhile, as Daniel Tencer notes this morning at RawStory, the US witch hunt continues as  “The Justice Department is looking at contact between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the alleged source of the leaked State Department cables, PFC Bradley Manning, in order to build a criminal conspiracy case against Assange, a news report says.”

The UK Guardian reports today that it has learned that “The decision to have Julian Assange sent to a London jail and kept there was taken by the British authorities and not by prosecutors in Sweden, as previously thought..”

The Crown Prosecution Service will go to the high court tomorrow to seek the reversal of a decision to free the WikiLeaks founder on bail, made yesterday by a judge at City of Westminster magistrates court.

It had been widely thought Sweden had made the decision to oppose bail, with the CPS acting merely as its representative. But today the Swedish prosecutor’s office told the Guardian it had “not got a view at all on bail” and that Britain had made the decision to oppose bail.

…

Karin Rosander, director of communications for Sweden’s prosecutor’s office, told the Guardian: “The decision was made by the British prosecutor. I got it confirmed by the CPS this morning that the decision to appeal the granting of bail was entirely a matter for the CPS. The Swedish prosecutors are not entitled to make decisions within Britain. It is entirely up to the British authorities to handle it.”

…

After the Swedish statement was put to the CPS, it confirmed that all decisions concerning the opposing of bail being granted to Assange had been taken by its lawyers.

The Guardian closes its article saying that it has seen the appeal, and says that it “will say that Assange must be kept in prison until a decision is made whether to extradite him, which could take months.”

Jeralyn at TalkLeft today also reminds that “At yesterday’s hearing, Sweden opposed bail“, and today the Swedish prosecutor has “not got a view at all on bail”??

John Pilger talks with Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow.org and with Julian Assange – and talks about mainstream media coverage of WikiLeaks…

I need to do something about these late breaking bombshells.  they’re not good for my health.  I should be going to bed, but instead I’m here at my keyboard.  This was just too, too precious to resist:

In a brain-melting move, the cyber-guardians of the 24th Air Force have blocked user access to nytimes.com, the Wall Street Journal reports, to prevent airmen from reading the WikiLeaks cable descriptions that the Times is publishing. It’s not just the Times, either: other news organizations with early access to the purloined WikiLeaks diplomatic trove are banned. That’ll teach you to read the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais or Der Spiegel at work.

It’s too late to say more, and all you really need is the original article, “Air Force Blocks WikiLeaks-Publishing Times Website”.  There’s a great photo of about 15 uniformed air force nerds sitting in their numbered computer cubicles working to protect the troops from the treasonous propaganda truth.  “ by Spencer Ackerman .

How dumb can they be?  Don’t they realize the kids can figure out how to get other access?

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, arrested in Britain on Swedish allegations of sex crimes, was conditionally granted bail by a British court today, an article by Reuters says this morning. The article notes that “Judge Howard Riddle, who had earlier granted Assange bail under stringent conditions, said Assange must remain in custody until the appeal is heard within 48 hours.”

Riddle, who last week said that Swedish authorities would need to show some convincing evidence if they wanted to oppose bail for the 39-year-old Australian when he appears in court to oppose extradition to Sweden, today granted Assange bail with conditions until another hearing on January 11.

Mr Assange had been refused bail Wednesday December 08, 2010 and sent to Wandsworth prison when he appeared before Judge Riddle to answer a Swedish extradition application.

The Brisbane Times reports that “Mr Assange, 39, won his temporary freedom after his lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, gave Judge Howard Riddle a temporary address where the WikiLeaks founder would stay and agreed to post a guarantee of £200,000 ($US315,280).”

…Mr Assange had not been given any of his mail, including legal letters, since he was jailed.

He was on 23½-hours-a-day ”lock-down” at Wandsworth. He was kept under surveillance on infrared video.

Ahead of his court appearance, Mr Assange blasted Visa, MasterCard and PayPal for blocking donations to his website.

In a defiant statement from behind bars, he claimed the firms were “instruments of US foreign policy” but vowed their actions would not stop the whistle-blowing website from continuing to publish thousands of confidential US diplomatic cables.

Last week, in the wake of Visa, MasterCard and PayPal shutting down donations processing for WikiLeaks, the organizations credit card processor DataCell ehf of Iceland announced its intention to sue Visa and Mastercard, with DataCell CEO Andreas Fink stating that the company “has decided to take up immediate legal actions to make donations possible again,”  and that “The suspension of payments towards Wikileaks is a violation of the agreements with their customers.”

Visa should “just simply do their business where they are good at – transferring money,” Fink wrote.

Today it’s about wikileaks and the longer term push for internet censorship.  I noticed years ago when I was still working the electronics industry’s technological push towards faster serial delivery protocols or in simple terms the shoving of sheeple crap into your mobile phone.  Anyway other places of New World Order note are hailing the Assange wikileaks even if that means the internet may become only an AOL like lamestream shopping mall.  What is NOT in the wikileaks is stuff like the timing detonation sequence needed for nuclear fission, the reason for censorship of seismic/geological survey data or the increase in bio-safety level four labs.  You know, the really good stuff.

From infowars we also have the EPA looking into taxing rainwater.

http://www.infowars.com/obamas…

Cracking down on the evils of farm dust.

http://www.news9.com/global/st…

And low and behold the Berkshare.  I live in Marxachusetts and for four full years have never heard of this local currency.

http://www.berkshares.org/

Plus Bernie Madoff Carbon Trading shit from the meeting in Cancun you never heard about.

http://www.infowars.com/final-…

Foundations of social engineering-Creating the very Matrix itself and thus the Iserbytan dumbed downedness of American lowest common zombinalic talking points.

http://www.oldthinkernews.com/…

I hope many of you are around to view this vid documentary on Sunday, 12/13, because supposedly it’s only up for one day.  I am going out of town for the day and won’t be around to do anything on this, so I hope someone else can/will. And if anyone has time to burn and save it, please do, and let me know.  Thanks.

This is a Swedish made film with much behind the scenes stuff on Wiki and Julian and more:

“What we have here is a new breed of rebels, IT guerrillas without a national base.”

Finally, in response to globalized eco-destruction, globalized wars, and globalized banking that robs national and personal wealth, we now have globalized resistance so profound, so effective, that global elites are waging a massive censorship campaign to silence the group, WikiLeaks, and smear its figurehead, Julian Assange.

Read it and view it at global research  

Enjoy, learn, and act…

And remember I/We are all Julian Assange.

Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports today that online supporters of Julian Assange working through the Spanish-language website Free WikiLeaks called for worldwide demonstrations Saturday to press for the release of the founder of WikiLeaks from a London jail where he awaits possible extradition to Sweden, and called for the restoration of the Wikileaks.org domain, which Amazon shut down after WikiLeaks began publishing secret US Embassy Diplomatic Cables two weeks ago.

Mirrors of the WikiLeaks site state that “On Sunday 28th November 2010, Wikileaks began publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into the US Government’s foreign activities.”

The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.

The embassy cables will be released in stages over the next few months. The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice.

The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in “client states”; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.

This document release reveals the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors – and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.

Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington – the country’s first President – could not tell a lie. If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today’s document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the US Government has been warning governments — even the most corrupt — around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures.

The full set consists of 251,287 documents, comprising 261,276,536 words (seven times the size of “The Iraq War Logs”, the world’s previously largest classified information release).

The Spanish language site urged rallies at 6 p.m. (1700 GMT) in eight Spanish cities, including Madrid and Barcelona, while similar demonstrations were planned in Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Bogota and Lima, says AFP.

Meanwhile BBC News Europe also reported today that “Protests have taken place across Spain calling for the release of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is facing extradition from the UK to Sweden for alleged sexual offences” and that “The crowd outside the British embassy in Madrid wore Julian Assange masks as they called for his release”, and that the Free WikiLeaks site demanded that Visa and MasterCard restore credit card services because “no one had proven Mr Assange’s guilt”.

Saturday’s protests were some of the first street demonstrations in support of Wikileaks, although there has been a worldwide outpouring of online support shown for Mr. Assange.

The Free Wikileaks site said protests were also planned for other Spanish cities, including Valencia and Seville.  

Steven Thomma at McClatchy Newspapers writes Friday December 10, 2010 of the depressing (and predictable?) results of a new public opinion poll conducted for McClatchy by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

The poll results indicate that “Americans overwhelmingly think that WikiLeaks is doing more harm than good by releasing classified U.S. diplomatic cables, and they want to see the people behind it prosecuted”

RawStory today…

Update: Assange attorney says he’s not been allowed to meet with his client

London lawyer, Mark Stephens, told Voice of Russia, the Russian government’s international radio broadcasting service, that British officials will not allow him to meet with Julian Assange until the day before a Dec. 14 court hearing.

“The one thing that is slightly frustrating is that we have another court hearing on December 14 and I’ve not been permitted a legal visit until December 13, which, of course, gives me less than 24 hours to prepare his case,” Stephens said.

Second update: Glenn Greenwald notes that if the Department of Justice is successful in prosecuting Assange, it will be the first time a non-government employee is convicted under the Espionage Act.

[snip]

This video is from ABC’s Good Morning America, broadcast Dec. 10, 2010.

More details in the RawStory report…