Disclosure and Deceit: Secrecy as the Manipulation of History, not its Concealment

By Dr. T. P. Wilkinson
Global Research

The declassification of official secrets is often seen as either a challenge or a prerequisite for obtaining accurate data on the history of political and economic events. Yet, at the same time, high government intelligence officials have said that their policy is one of ‘plausible deniability’. Official US government policy for example is never to acknowledge or deny the presence of nuclear weapons anywhere its forces are deployed, especially its naval forces. The British have their ‘Official Secrets’ Act. When the Wikileaks site was launched in 2007 and attained notoriety for publication of infamous actions by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, this platform was heralded and condemned for its disclosures and exposures.

Julian Assange is quoted as saying that when he receives documents classified under the UK Official Secrets Act he responds in accordance with the letter of the law – since it is forbidden to withhold or destroy, his only option is to publish. The question remains for historians, investigators, and educated citizens: what is the real value of disclosures or declassification? Given the practice of plausible deniablity, does disclosure or declassification constitute proof, and if so by what criteria? Both facts and non-facts can be concealed or disclosed.

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The 10 Tools of Online Oppressors

By Danny O’Brien
Committee to Protect Journalists

The world’s worst online oppressors are using an array of tactics, some reflecting astonishing levels of sophistication, others reminiscent of old-school techniques. From China’s high-level malware attacks to Syria’s brute-force imprisonments, this may be only the dawn of online oppression.

In reporting news from the world’s most troubled nations, journalists have made a seismic shift this year in their reliance on the Internet and other digital tools. Blogging, video sharing, text messaging, and live-streaming from cellphones brought images of popular unrest from the central square of Cairo and the main boulevard of Tunis to the rest of the world.

New Assange Interview on Banksters, Cablegate, India

By Times of India

This 20-minute interview of Julian Assange reveals how Swiss banks help criminals hide assets, how public support of Wikileaks protects them from the US, and how Bradley Manning’s plight is kept in the public mind. Of note, Assange describes a recent Obama fundraiser where 12 people each paid $5,000 to attend, and then all stood up together to protest the treatment of Bradley Manning.

Apostle of Our Inner Genius

By Robert C. Koehler

“Go home and write anything that comes to your mind. Don’t stop. Write for ten minutes or till you’ve filled a whole page.”

Ken Macrorie said this just in time, as far as I’m concerned.

The date was May 5, 1964. I was still in high school, a month shy of graduation. That fall I’d be going off to Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, 120 miles from suburban Detroit where I grew up. I had never heard of Ken Macrorie, had no idea he was a member of the English Department who taught classes called freshman comp and advanced writing.

Gary Webb: RIP

Gary Webb

While we are all busily contemplating what happened to our civil rights, our liberties and our healthcare insurance, I thought it might be important to recognize and memorialize the kind of humanity and human spirit conspicuously and vacuously absent from American media today.   That humanity and spirit was and is embodied in the memory of The Journalist, Gary Webb. 

In his place we have the media issued to us by the same people who murdered the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr and that brought us the production that was the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001.

The danger of a single story

By Chimamanda Adichie

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

The Tossed Shoe Award

By Robert C. Koehler

“Businesses exist to serve the general welfare. Profit is the means, not the end. It is the reward a business receives for serving the general welfare. When a business fails to serve the general welfare, it forfeits its right to exist.”

Do Adam Smith’s famously forgotten words of caution for capitalists apply to journalism? Is this why, when I go to the newsstand these days, I see my city’s two great newspapers sitting there like twin anorexics, panhandling (I mean pandering) for quarters?

Gmail may hand over IP addresses of journalists

By Julian Assange

Subpoenas for records are rubber-stamped by US courts, meaning that anyone in a position to start law suits in California can obtain private information about Gmail users who are not in a position to respond in kind, including cash-strapped corruption busting journalists from the Caribbean.

Philippines Special Report: Under Oath, Under Threat

Witness Bob Flores says he has sacrificed nearly everything to testify against the defendants in the Dennis Cuesta murder. (CPJ/Shawn W. Crispin)

By Shawn W. Crispin
Audio Report: Shawn Crispin

In the Philippines, witnesses to journalist murders face extreme pressures and grave risk. The government’s protection program, while valuable, falls short of ensuring justice. 

Cheap Frames

Image at Al Jazeera

By Robert C. Koehler

Before I know it I’m sucked into the New York Times story and I haven’t had my Prozac or anything.

Through the miracle of language, here we are, walking with U.S. troops on patrol through the streets of Mosul, and by the time the story’s point has been thoroughly explicated, two kindergarten-age Iraqi boys, bait on the hook of evil, are blown to Kingdom Come by an IED that had been planted in the car in which they sat helplessly.