Michael Moore posts bail for Julian Assange
Good for Michael Moore – a man I rarely see eye-to-eye with – for posting Julian Assange’s bail and offering to host WikiLeaks on Moore’s servers:
Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.
Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.
We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.
Quite right. People say we need secrets for our security. I say we need security from the secret-keepers. Perhaps nothing will wipe war off the face of the planet, but certainly exposing the liars and warmongers for what they truly are, and scattering their secrets about like so much confetti will help expose the farce. Security is an illusion, but the security-state is most certainly not. It is…impending, accumulating. We need all the WikiLeaks we can get.
Moore again:
Openness, transparency — these are among the few weapons the citizenry has to protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt. What if within days of August 4th, 1964 — after the Pentagon had made up the lie that our ship was attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin — there had been a WikiLeaks to tell the American people that the whole thing was made up? I guess 58,000 of our soldiers (and 2 million Vietnamese) might be alive today.
Instead, secrets killed them.
Then again, with accommodations like these, perhaps Assange would do better to remain in “prison”….
After all, let’s remember that Michael Moore has never told a factual untruth. Because casting aspersions is not a factual untruth. Clever intercutting and editing are not factual untruth. Statements prefaced with “maybe” or “I think” or “it’s possible” are not factual untruths. “Just asking questions” is not factual untruth.Report
This is called “white propaganda”.
It’s telling the truth but deliberately withholding relevant factual information without which certain conclusions would be reached.
(Grey propaganda is deliberate falsehood while black propaganda is deliberate falsehood attributed to a third party.)
It’s all part of the battle, Comrade.
If you ain’t on our side, you’re on someone else’s.Report
It is a damned shame Moore doesn’t have the rock-ribbed honesty of a Karl Rove or a William Kristol.Report
I shared this comment I saw today with Erik earlier and thought everyone might benefit from its wisdom; it’s in regards to a conversation about anarchism prompted by a blog post criticizing Assange for staying in a large house despite being an anarchist, which presumably means he is opposed to big houses. Anarcho-capitalism was brought up. And then this:
“Anarcho capitalism. What a crock of bull. I think I’m of average intelligence, but this is really just another pie in the sky philosophy to me. If it was actually doable as a viable philosophy, why are there no governments which practice it.”Report
Assertion: Many commentators have stated that the disclosures thus far in wikileaks thus far largely conform with public pronouncements of the United States Government, albeit more detailed and pointed.
Postulate: The intelligence and diplomatic corps of the United States, like any large organization, has some diversity of opinion, but also a lot a group think and in some instances a degree of episystemic closure.
Theorem: In support of either stated orders, or in anticipation of what the bosses wanted or both. the various diplomats around the world circa late 2001 and 2002 would have been seeking out info tying Sadaam to WMDs and/or Al Qaida, and reporting any little tidbit they could come up with –> Lemma: and not reporting negative findings.
Hypothesis/Conclusion: If a set of diplomatic cables would have been been released circa 2002, like Moore would have liked, it would have *enhanced* George Bush’s case for war, not diminished it.
Evidence to support hypothesis: Look at how many people around the world are secretly itching for war with Iran.*
Evidence that would refute hypothesis: If any of the cables actually show diplomats in the middle east counselling against the Iraq invasion, either directly or by proxy. (I am not aware of any, but could have missed it)
*Without the context of the actual as-happened Iraq war, such cables would not have been seen as double dealling governments wanting for the US wanting to its dirty work for them. Not by the public anyway (otherwise the First Gulf War wouldn’t have been supported)Report
Yeah.
I figure that 20% of everything that shows up on Wikileaks henceforth will be grey propaganda.
At least 20%. If I were working for one of the letter companies, I’d try to get that number to 33%.Report
Gregg Housh just forwarded this to me:
http://my.firedoglake.com/rogershuler/2010/12/14/is-karl-rove-behind-the-effort-to-prosecute-julian-assange/
“That Assange’s legal troubles would originate in Sweden probably is not a coincidence, our source says. Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has been called “the Ronald Reagan of Europe,” and he has a friendship with Rove that dates back at least 10 years, to the George W. Bush campaign for president in 2000. Reinfeldt reportedly asked Rove to help with his 2010 re-election in Sweden.
On the hot seat for his apparent role in the political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, Rove sought comfort in Sweden. “When [Rove] was in trouble and did not want to testify on the three times he was invited [by the U.S. Congress], he wound up in Sweden,” our source says. “Further, it was [Reinfeldt] that first hired Karl when he got thrown out of the White House.”
There’s more evidence at the link, although no smoking gun.Report
Yes, everyone knows that no one in Obama’s Justice Department has a security clearance or more generally, access to any documents or files created before noon on Jan 20, 2009. It’s pretty much a given that Karl Rove knows the only method to disseminate information in the world is through wikileaks – and arresting one person completely shuts down the network. It is also common knowledge that American right-wing political operatives make alliances with radical Scandavian feminists — more precisely, that in Sweden, the fourth most corrupt country in the world it’s a pretty trivial thing for the prime minister to order a municipal prosecutor to stage a politically motivated arrest warrant.
Really, you’re a Garmin direction away from 123 Truther Lane, Birtherville USA with this type of stuff.Report
Sweetheart, I said that there was no smoking gun. I’m a columnist for Skeptical Inquirer so skip the nonsense.Report
So you’re just asking questions, then?Report
Sorry honey, I didn’t know you were being ironicReport
The bail is £200,000, Moore offered only $20K toward it. BFD.Report
Dang. They take condoms breaking really seriously over there.Report
Indeed, I had the numbers off. I blame a quick read.Report
I understand that Assange is still in jail because Sweden contested his bail. How does that work? I understand that Sweden has an extradition claim but how do they have any say on bail? That would seem to be a purely domestic concern and policy.
Anyway this may be off topic unless you want to sell an international conspiracy to keep him in jail.Report
“A case can be made . . . that secrecy is for losers. For people who don’t realize how important information really is. The Soviet Union realized this too late. Openness is now a singular, and singularly American, advantage. We put it in peril by poking along in a mode of an age now past. It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most pervasive of Cold War-era regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us.”
Secrecy, ch. 8 (1998)
Not sure I agree completely with Pat Moynihan here, but I just stumbled across this looking for something else, and I’m always willing to share whatever tidbits of wisdom come tripping over my transom. I like Moynihan, RIP.Report
That’s a good quotation, Tom. Thanks.Report