MasterCard “is taking action to ensure that WikiLeaks can no longer accept MasterCard-branded products.”
Yet as Glenn Greenwald writes:
WikiLeaks has never been charged with a crime, let alone indicted for one or convicted of one. A consensus of legal experts agree that prosecuting the organization or Julian Assange for any of its leaks would be difficult in the extreme…
Just look at what the U.S. Government and its friends are willing to do and capable of doing to someone who challenges or defies them — all without any charges being filed or a shred of legal authority.
Moreover, the cNet report continues:
[T]he incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee wants WikiLeaks listed as a ‘terrorist” organization, which would prohibit U.S. banks from processing payments and make it a felony for anyone else to provide “material support or resources” to the group.
Back in March, Greenwald wrote:
A newly leaked CIA report prepared earlier this month analyzes how the U.S. Government can best manipulate public opinion in Germany and France — in order to ensure that those countries continue to fight in Afghanistan. The Report celebrates the fact that the governments of those two nations continue to fight the war in defiance of overwhelming public opinion which opposes it — so much for all the recent veneration of “consent of the governed” — and it notes that this is possible due to lack of interest among their citizenry: “Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters,” proclaims the title of one section.
And how did Greenwald get his hands on the CIA report? It was published on Wikileaks after being leaked by someone in the U.S. government.
But the MSM have abandoned “whistleblower” as a descriptor of the organization. Michael Calderone notes that “Associated Press, for one, used ‘whistle-blower’ as recently as Thursday in describing WikiLeaks but has since opted against it.”
Visions of George Orwell and Joseph McCarthy are dancing through my head.
We should be screaming bloody murder. Instead, most are silent or uninformed.
Addendum — this tidbit is worth appending to every story about WikiLeaks:
WikiLeaks has won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award. In June 2009, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange won Amnesty International’s UK Media Award (in the category “New Media”) for the 2008 publication of “Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances”, a report by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights about police killings in Kenya.In May 2010, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first in a ranking of “websites that could totally change the news”.
Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com