sigh

Punjab, Pakistan: Women displaced by floods sit on a bench outside a hospital in Basira village [Muhammed Muheisen/AP]

Nader has a decent piece up at C-Punch on the whole flap doodle the US – well, Holder et alia – is carrying on about / against Wikileaks…

Thomas Blanton, the esteemed director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University described Washington’s hyper-reaction to Wikileaks’ transmission of information to some major media in various countries as “Wikimania.”

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last Thursday, Blanton urged the Justice Department to cool it. Wikileaks and newspapers like The New Yorks Times and London’s Guardian, he said, are publishers protected by the First Amendment. The disclosures are the first small installment of a predicted much larger forthcoming trove of non-public information from both governments and global corporations.  …

The people running our lives are simply berserk.  The hirelings are pathetic.  Who can have any shred of respect for any of this ??

Consider what Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith, who was head of the Office of Legal Counsel in George W. Bush’s Justice Department just wrote:

“In Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward, with the obvious assistance of many top Obama administration officials, disclosed many details about top secret programs, code names, documents, meetings, and the like. I have a hard time squaring the anger the government is directing towards Wikileaks with its top officials openly violating classification rules and opportunistically revealing without authorization top secret information.”

On the other hand, if Mr. Holder goes the narrow route to obtain an indictment of Mr. Assange, he will risk a public relations debacle by vindictively displaying prosecutorial abuse (i.e. fixing the law around the enforcement bias.) Double standards have no place in the Justice Department.  …

That last line is a bit of a dissemble.  I don’t think the DoJ has any trouble at all with double standards.  In fact, double standards seem to have a long standing seat at the table.  I would say that double standards sits on a lovely, soft, down filled love seat.

And last, I doubt any of us can feign surprise….

Over-reaction by the Obama administration could lead to censoring the Internet, undermining Secretary Clinton’s Internet Freedom initiative, which criticized China’s controls and lauded hacktivism in that country, and divert attention from the massive over classification of documents by the Executive Branch.

A full throttle attack on Wikileaks is what the government distracters want in order to take away the spotlight of the disclosures on their misdeeds, their waste and their construction of an authoritarian corporate state.

Professor and ex-Bushite Jack Goldsmith summed up his thoughts this way: “The best thing to do….would be to ignore Assange and fix the secrecy system so this does not happen again.”

That presumably is some of what Peter Zatko and his crew are now trying to do at the Pentagon’s famed DARPA unit. That secret initiative may ironically undermine the First Amendment should they succeed too much in hamstringing the Internet earlier advanced by that same Pentagon unit.

The Imperial State, with 30% of its people mired in generational poverty and hunger, sails on.

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