Month: December 2010

The Hollywood / Pentagon Axis

December 30, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

In a discussion with Oliver Stone, Micheal Moore and Christopher Hedges, Al-Jazeera’s Marwan Bishara “examines the symbiotic relationship between the movie industry and the military-industrial complex”:

And here is another relevant quote from an older article by Normon Solomon on the same topic, “The Military-Industrial-Media Complex“:

In 1991, when my colleague Martin A. Lee and I looked into the stake that one major media-invested company had in the latest war, what we found was sobering: NBC’s owner General Electric designed, manufactured or supplied parts or maintenance for nearly every major weapon system used by the U.S. during the Gulf War—including the Patriot and Tomahawk Cruise missiles, the Stealth bomber, the B-52 bomber, the AWACS plane, and the NAVSTAR spy satellite system. “In other words,” we wrote in Unreliable Sources, “when correspondents and paid consultants on NBC television praised the performance of U.S. weapons, they were extolling equipment made by GE, the corporation that pays their salaries.”

Enough about Assange: What WikiLeaks has Revealed

December 29, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

By focusing on the personalities or philosophy behind Wikileaks, in addition to the Imperial and Corporate reactions to its successes thus far, it is easy to lose focus on the actual substance of the leaks themselves. So here is an incomplete list of significant revelations emerging from Wikileaks in 2010, summarized from a list of headlines compiled by G. Greewald:

UPDATE: Here is another round-up of what Wikileaks revelations, compiled by CBS news.

Journalism as “Terrorism”

December 23, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Cenk Uyger asks Julian Assange if he considers himself a “journalist”,  and what he thinks about being called (by V.P. Biden and Senate Republican Leader McConnell) a “terrorist”:

And Greenwald asks: In terms of revealing state secrets, what distinguishes Wikileaks from the New York Times?

Rap News 6: Cablegate

December 19, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Some source material links from The Juice Media:

Instruments of U.S. Foreign Policy

December 16, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

In the wake of the release of a small fraction of the diplomatic cables it has attained, Wikileaks has faced a barrage of challenges. In addition to threats and denunciations, as well as incoherent accusations of treason and even calls for the extrajudicial execution of Assange,  Amazon booted Wikileaks from it’s servers,  PayPal “permanently restricted” its account,  EveryDNS terminated its DNS services, and MasterCard and Visa stopped processing donations — all in the absence of official charges, let alone a trial or conviction for any wrongdoing.

In British custody for questioning about a (very convenient) Swedish sexual assault investigation, Julian Assange delivered the following message via his mother:

“We now know that Visa, MasterCard and PayPal are instruments of US foreign policy. It’s not something we knew before.”

At CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn points out that this episode is a “wake-up call on the enormous vulnerability of our prime means of communication to swift government-instigated, summary shutdown”:

So here we have a public “commons”—the Internet—subject to arbitrary onslaught by the state and powerful commercial interests, and not even the shadow of constitutional protections.

Effectively defy the Imperial Will, and the global corporate institutions which sustain your activities — your communications and financial transactions — will evaporate.

Here is a discussion on Al-Jazeera questioning the right of companies like MasterCard and PayPal to deny service to Wikileaks.

Swedish Documentary about Wikileaks

December 15, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Here is an informative Swedish documentary on Wikileaks:

View from Outside II

December 10, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

This vid from Taiwan summarizes recent wikileaks-related events quite nicely: