WikiLeaks: Major Revelations Is What Journalists Do – See @carwinb

There’s some crow to eat this morning, for anti-Assange, anti-Wikileaks people.

Last year we got confirmation in the form of a WikiLeaks-Strafor leak of all things, that Assange had been secretly indicted in the US, for his journalism.

On January 26, 2011, Fred Burton, the vice president of Stratfor, a leading private intelligence firm which bills itself as a kind of shadow CIA, sent an excited email to his colleagues. “Text Not for Pub,” he wrote. “We” – meaning the U.S. government – “have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect.”

The news, if true, was a bombshell.

Well, it’s true. It’s not unexpected if you follow people who actually care about journalism and the truth. And it’s led to Assange being trapped in various prisons in and near London, while the UK, Swedish, American, and Australian legal and political systems toy with his freedom.

The American admission that they are still seeking to charge Assange with crimes, despite his activity falling under First Amendment protection for journalists, demonstrates the reason he’s opted to stay out of a Swedish jail.

The Swedish prosecutor who refused to travel to London to interview Assange in order to proceed with the case they want to build against him, has LEFT the case.

AA’s lawyer has been fired, and a new one has been chosen and approved by the court. AA is one of Assange’s accusers in Sweden.

And more shocking, a Swedish judge is set to speak publicly about what he’d do if he was directly handling Assange’s case! Just this week, Toronto’s Mayor Ford ended up in hot water for making radio comments about an active case in the Canadian justice system.

Speaking to Fairfax Media, Mr Assange condemned Judge Lindskog’s planned discussion of his case.

“If an Australian High Court judge came out and spoke on a case the court expected or was likely to judge, it would be regarded as absolutely outrageous,” he said.

“This development is part of a pattern in which senior Swedish figures, including the Swedish Foreign Minister, the Prime Minister and Minister for Justice, have all publicly attacked me or WikiLeaks.”

Justice Lindskog is chairman of the Supreme Court of Sweden, the country’s highest court of appeal. In announcing his forthcoming lecture, Adelaide University observed that “as one of Sweden’s most eminent jurists, he is uniquely able to provide an authoritative view of the Assange affair”.

… which is precisely why it’s not supposed to happen in public, until at least the accused has been acquitted if charged. Assange has still not even been charged with a crime in Sweden, so he can’t even formally defend his innocence in the matter. If he submits to the politically motivated extradition to Sweden, he’s justified in knowing that Sweden will eventually send him on to face political charges in the United States.

Wab Kinew at UofR Minifie Lecture

On Tuesday I tried to live blog Wab’s lecture from my smart phone, but the WiFi or something else wasn’t working right. The lecture will be online soon, and is on Access Communications coming up very son on Friday and again on Sunday I think I heard. Check it out, it’s awesome.
One story involved how he protested against a memo from CBC brass.
“Survivors” of residential schools were to be called “former students” according to CBC. More than 3000 children died in those schools. The brass did not heed his caution.

Wab threatened to resign from the CBC. The CBC reporters were unanimously behind Wab.

Whenever he hears Mansbridge say “survivor” in the context of Residential school students, he does a little fist pump. I feel like doing one when I hear the media use that word too.

@saskboy feather is a sacred item, I use it to keep me grounded in a spiritual sense—
Wab Kinew (@WabKinew) March 20, 2013

WikiLeaks: Hollywood Hatchet, Swedish Swindle

The problem with how Sweden, the UK, and the United States have been treating Julian Assange of Wikileaks, has dragged on for years. It’s left the foremost journalist in the world stuck in a London apartment building that houses the Ecuadorian Embassy where Assange is trapped as a political prisoner. He sought asylum from the Swedish extradition order, and Ecuador granted him that request. Assange’s home country of Australia has sided with the United States in wanting him imprisoned and taken offline, because they’ve failed to negotiate his safe return to Australia or Ecuador where he could be free.

In February there was a great response to a New Statesman article by a former Assange supporter who has now betrayed him by working for Hollywood/CIA who is set to smear him in a widely distributed film.

Khan complains that Assange refused to appear in the film about WikiLeaks by the American director Alex Gibney, which she “executive produced”. Assange knew the film would be neither “nuanced” nor “fair” and “represent the truth”, as Khan wrote, and that its very title, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, was a gift to the fabricators of a bogus criminal indictment that could doom him to one of America’s hellholes. Having interviewed axe-grinders and turncoats, Gibney abuses Assange as paranoid. DreamWorks is also making a film about the “paranoid” Assange. Oscars all round.

It’s also worth reading this summary by WikiLea’s J. Farrell, of Assange’s present legal and political problems:

Over a lunch you [, Khan,] questioned this fear of extradition to the US, and when I asked you what you would do in his position you refused to answer the question. I asked you more than six times what you would do in his shoes. Having offered to cooperate with the Swedish investigation non-stop for the past two years and been refused with no proper explanation, and believing that you would end up in an American prison for decades, in solitary confinement and under SAMs, what would you do? You never gave me a concrete answer. Instead, you skirted the question with another question and discounted the numerous legal opinions out there, favouring instead an article by David Allen Green. I reiterated that Julian had never said that it would be likely in practice that he would face the death penalty, although the Espionage Act permits this. But more to the point, and one that everyone always ignores, there was (and still is) the fear of being extradited to face life imprisonment and almost certainly torture or other inhumane and degrading treatment for his publishing activities.

I told you that the Swedish authorities could, if they wanted to, charge Julian in absentia. Even if they were to do that, they should, according to their own procedures, conduct an interview with him before requesting his extradition. I repeated that he remains available even in the embassy for questioning by the Swedish authorities should they wish to employ the standard procedures they use regularly in other cases.

I think it was David Allen Green who I was arguing with once on Twitter about WikiLeaks. He’s clearly not very objective, and is out to present the situation in a way that will result in Assange ending up imprisoned.

In response to the sexual assault allegations, here are people who recognize what is going on:

Khan is rightly concerned about a “resolution” of the allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden. Putting aside the tissue of falsehoods demonstrated in the evidence in this case, both women had consensual sex with Assange and neither claimed otherwise; and the Stockholm prosecutor Eva Finne all but dismissed the case.

As Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote in the Guardian in August 2012, “. . . the allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction . . .

“The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will . . . [Assange] has made it clear he is available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in Britain or via Skype. Why are they refusing this essential step to their investigation? What are they afraid of?”

They are afraid of Skype, or a plane flight to London. Here’s a fricken map for them to find Julian Assange for that interview they claim to want on behalf of Assanges’ accusers.

View Larger Map

Wall’s Leaky Logic

Brad Wall went to Washington in order to pitch the Keystone XL pipeline project. In doing so, he made some really absurd claims, that CTV failed to juxtapose against the scientifically accurate situation that Wall mischaracterized. Joe Oliver of the Conservatives has also been making totally absurd claims about Canada’s environmental track record under his government’s [lack of] leadership.

“Saskatchewan’s environmental record is not good.” – Global TV news clip from 2009.

It’s totally irresponsible journalism by the Canadian Press to allow the Premier to make the opposite claim without also clarifying his remarks, or offering the comments from someone with a factual response to his fiction.

Here’s the economic case, here’s the energy security and oh, by the way, we care about the environment and here’s what we’re doing with respect to the environmental piece of this.”
“We need to indicate that we’re serious about the environment, because we are,”{… delusional or two faced, I must add.}

This was a horrendously unbalanced CP article. Experts can refute the “Conservative” premier’s claims that Sask. can care about climate change while pushing the carbon-budget-obliterating KXL pipeline project.

Wall’s claim is analogous to a captain saying that he’s serious about keeping a ship afloat by plugging a hole in starboard side, while boring a bigger hole in the port side. It doesn’t matter if water intake is reduced in one side, if the ship’s still getting flooded.

The premier added he’s confident Keystone will soon be approved, particularly following the U.S. State Department’s draft environmental assessment of the pipeline that was dismissive of many of the environmental movement’s concerns about it.

That State Dept. report was actually written by a KXL friendly contractor, we soon later learned. Hard to believe Wall didn’t know the integrity of the report is in doubt. What is not in doubt among scientists is the potential carbon from the tar sands, when burned, will far surpass the carbon budget our climate could possibly withstand for a less than 2 degree change in our climate’s temperature.

Russian Dash-cameras

The meteor strike last week made more people realize the prevalence of dash-cams in Russia. I’d seen shocking vehicle footage on YouTube before, one of a brick flying from a truck and killing a passenger in a car going the other way. The Guardian put together an assortment of unusual vehicle incident videos. The one of the car being hung up on the street car wire is particularly unusual, as are the two with jets. Unfortunately one with a jet, is a crash, where four on the plane died. I’d be more than a little terrified if a hail of debris suddenly washed over the highway in front of me (with a wheel hitting the car in front too).

Russian Chelyabinsk Meteorite Injures People – UPDATED

Shocking, exciting news from Russia early this morning as coincidentally [because they were on different orbits reports CBC Radio] on the same day a major 50m asteroid (2012 DA14) is set to fly by Earth, a meteorite has struck Russia. Reports are that there are injuries, which have been very rare for meteorite impacts until now.

The camera person nearly lost their poop. Sonic boom of doom, anyone?

[UPDATE: dead link youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c-0iwBEswE&w=560&h=315%5D

One of my dreams in life is to shoot a video at least this awesome, of a fireball.

UPDATES: So many incredible videos!
Here’s a dash cam from this site.

A lot of unlikely, and wrong details in this RT early report.

There is confirmation from scientists that the report of the Russians “shooting” this down are erroneous boasting.

@colbycosh absolute nonsense that they shot it down. Moving 8km/s according to @BadAstronomer regardless, very cool—
Ryan Hastman (@RyanHastman) February 15, 2013

ADDED:

NBC has some more video, and the following video that streamed for me was about 2012 DA14 which flies by later today and has no chance of an impact with our surface or atmosphere. We’ll be talking about the Chelyabinsk meteorite for a long time after today.

Watch this one to the end, it has more sonic booming. It gives a sense of how far that sound wave had to travel to hit at the camera.

MUCH MORE:

Meteorite shook Chelyabinsk this morning. Shook my whole building and woke me up! #челябинск youtube.com/watch?v=4ZxXYs…—
Michael Garnett (@MichaelGarnett) February 15, 2013

RT has photos of smashed windows, and a hole in a brick building.

ADDED: Globe and Pail has details of how many injured, it’s over 500.

“Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said the meteorite was travelling at a speed of 30 kilometres per second and that such events were hard to predict. The Interior Ministry said the meteorite explosion had cased a sonic boom.

Russia’s Emergencies Ministry said 514 people had sought medical help, mainly for light injuries caused by flying glass, and that 112 of those were kept in hospital. Search groups were set up to look for the remains of the meteorite.”

FRIDAY Morning CST: Fragments may have fallen into a frozen lake. Fragments of a meteorite were found on a Saskatchewan pond’s icy surface several years ago after video helped lead searchers to the area.

UPDATE: At 10AM CST, the Russians are reporting 985 injuries took place. I feel bad about all of the people who rushed to windows to see the flash of light, and wound up with a face full of exploding glass as the shockwave hit. It would be me too, if I’d been there, and hadn’t had a quick way out onto a balcony. Duck and Cover isn’t drilled into me.

ADDED: Compilation video including some with windows breaking off screen.

ADDED: This is one of the more amazing ones I’ve found:

ConCalls: Investigate the Investigation? #RoboCon

If you need your blood pressure raised, Daniel Dickin has just the treatment for you. The persistent hack, perpetual election fraud defender, suggests that because there are no resulting charges for the misdirecting robocalls that Conservative supporters ran across the country on May 2, 2011, the investigators’ expenses should be put under a microscope. Yes, a “journalist” suggests that crime is expensive to investigate, so if there are not results, the investigation of a fraud, is a fraud itself. Well, he may well be onto something, because 651 days to investigate a major national crime, with no charges is kinda fishy. Somehow, I don’t think he wants the same judicial outcome that I’m looking for though.

He goes on to call the election crime the Conservatives pleaded guilty to, “In and Out”, a “debate”.
(huffingtonpost.ca/daniel-dickin/conservatives-robocalls-investigation_b_2634333.html)

Throw National Post a Lifeline

I haven’t encountered a Kelly McParland article that I can say I agree with. His latest, about Elizabeth May’s attempt to subvert the stalemate in Parliament amongst the opposition parties, is missing the point. May isn’t just out to help the Green Party, which of course is a given, despite McParland’s ridiculous claim that he’s revealed a dastardly, secret trap that the NDP or Liberals could fall into. May’s insistence that she’s putting the country before partisanship isn’t hot air, she’s attempting to win the next election using co-operation. Co-operation was not tried on a grand enough scale the last 3 elections, and the Liberals, NDP, and Greens have come out the losers in them as a result. (Widespread election fraud by Conservative supporters, didn’t help either, of course.)

“Should the other parties agree to pool resources with her in some ridings, as Ms. May suggests, her troops are likely to gain far more than they can contribute.”
This notion that McParland puts forward is built upon the opinion that it’s unfair for Canadians to be represented proportionally in the House of Commons, based upon popular vote election results. May isn’t only out to help the Greens take seats from Conservative MPs, she’s offered to help Liberals and NDP MPs win in place of Conservatives also. The result from another First Past the Post (FPTP) election could very well be totally unbalanced, where the NDP, Liberals, and Greens win all but a dozen seats, and the Conservatives end up under-represented in the House. The next step isn’t to hold onto power unfairly, but to change the electoral system so Canadians can decide and feel more satisfied with the resulting Parliament.

The dull, partisan point McParland is trying to have people agree with, is that it’s better for Canadians to be subjected to FPTP perpetually, than it is to support Greens who oppose it. May is seeking a functional, practical solution to overcoming the system, but McParland wants to protect that system, along with Mulcair, and other power hungry political leaders who think they are better off with all or nothing. The Greens hold a sort of ‘nuclear option’ as does any other national party that can get a million votes or more. If co-operation isn’t reached in time, the Conservatives can basically win by default (or so it seems). This means the NDP and Liberals have more to lose by failing to talk with the Greens, than they have to gain by ignoring co-operation. If it’s more important to Mulcair that May’s Greens not pick up any more seats, than it is for him to win his party a fair amount of power, then McParland and the Conservatives get what they argue for.

So how does a national newspaper writer get national politics so very wrong? Probably intentionally, right? It’s hard to see how his analysis supports the progression of a fair democratic country, unless we assume that’s not his mark.

ConCalls: Another Poutine Style Recording in #RoboCon

Elections Canada may be allowing the Conservative Party to set the glacial pace of the criminal investigation across Canada into illegal election robocalls that misdirected and harassed electors. May be? Who are we kidding. It’s well past 600 days since the crime that calls into question the right of the Conservatives to represent our country, and Elections Canada investigators are moving so slowly that newspapers are announcing their next move before they bring suspects in for questioning.

The full audio of a clip previously available in a CBC story, is posted in the latest from the Citizen.

The message captured by O’Reilly’s voice mail purports to be a get-out-the-vote call from Liberal candidate Doug Ferguson and directs her to a voting location far from her home. The message is recorded in a female voice with what sounds like a slight American accent.

According to Dickson’s statement, Ferguson said his campaign did not make the call.

Some useful analysis of the call can be found on this blog.

Hawthorne Rd. was where Donna was misdirected to. She lives, according to 411, on Wayne Crt, London ON N6K 3Z6

The message, from a woman claiming to be with the Ferguson campaign, arrived mid-afternoon on election day, May 2, advising O’Reilly she could vote at a polling station at “the Emily Carr public school” on Hawthorne Rd. O’Reilly had already voted at her assigned station – not that school, which is about 10 km from her home – when she got the message. She forgot about it, she says, until this weekend.

“Honestly, I thought, wow, what if this call was one of the calls (they’re) looking for?” said O’Reilly, who added she never erased the message, as it’s her family’s habit to “hold onto things forever.”

A News Hope

I missed this Rap News from last May. You won’t want to miss it. If it’s confusing though, you’ve got fifty minutes of documentary catch-up, plus some news footnotes to follow up on. Plus, it helps if you’ve seen Star Wars. If this is all greek/geek to you, it’s a good thing you’re reading my blog, you’ll be up to speed in ‘know time’.

I love that Hrafnsson’s daughter commented on the video. [Strange she missed an 's' in the name though ;-)]

Wikileaks: “A little group of activists…” – Julian Assange