Wikileaks Bits.

I am away from a PC for a few days so here are some useful links and discussions on Wikileaks.

How Has WikiLeaks Managed to Keep Its Web Site Up and Running?

Huff Post’s rolling commentary, which isn’t too bad.

Yaacov Lozowick has his own thoughts on things.

Pfizer in Nigeria.

The Guardian’s WikiLeaks US embassy cables site is well worth a read.

WikiLeaks Central too.

Wikileaks on Facebook.

If readers come across any other useful sites or links please leave a comment below.

The Shape Of Things To Come.

Marko has a post on the Police’s treatment of demonstrators in London last night and he knows who is to blame:

“At one level, I was grateful it was the UK rather than, say, Italy or Russia, as individual officers showed a lot of discipline and restraint; things would have been a lot worse if individual officers had lashed out indiscriminately on their own initiative, as police in such circumstances have been known to do. But that is a tribute to the ordinary policeman – not the strategy of the police command, which put its own officers in harm’s way.

The police strategy did not serve to protect people or property from violence; on the contrary. Although there was a minority among the demonstrators that was actively seeking violence, the police strategy of keeping people ketted for hours in the cold, and preventing them from going home, appeared guaranteed to ensure that a riot would take place, and that even some demonstrators who hadn’t been out for trouble would be drawn into it. The strategy of not only keeping people kettled, but then inserting a phalanx of armed police into the kettle was sheer lunacy – what did they think would happen ? The moderate, peaceful majority was lumped together with the minority and treated as dangerous deviants, instead of what they were – citizens exercising their democratic right to protest. Those of us who wanted to move to the second demonstration were prevented from doing so – a violation of the right of freedom of assembly.”

I suspect the Police or their political masters, Cameron and Co, don’t really care about freedom of assembly or other freedoms.

The politicians who call the shots are preoccupied with pushing their policies through and anything else is a distraction. They will, naturally, do lipservice but they probably view anyone who is not a Tory or doesn’t vote Tory as a subversive.

My bet is that Cameron’s government will go down in history as one of the most ideologically bent ones, even exceeding what Thatcher did. They will use the full force of the State against anyone that actively opposes them and we would be naive to assume otherwise.

This is the shape of things to come in Britain.

Update 1: A young student was violently attacked by a policeman wielding a truncheon, AP reports:

“A student was left unconscious with bleeding on the brain after a police officer hit him on the head with a truncheon during the tuition fee protests in central London, his mother said.

Alfie Meadows, 20, a philosophy student at Middlesex University, was struck as he tried to leave the area outside Westminster Abbey during Thursday night’s demonstrations, his mother said.

After falling unconscious on the way to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, the second-year undergraduate underwent a three-hour operation for bleeding on the brain.

Susan Meadows, 55, an English literature lecturer at Roehampton University, said: “He was hit on the head by a police truncheon. He said it was the hugest blow he ever felt in his life.

“The surface wound wasn’t very big but three hours after the blow, he suffered bleeding to the brain. He survived the operation and he’s in the recovery room.”

Mr Meadows and his friends tried to leave the area where protesters were being held in a police “kettling” operation when he suffered a blow to the head.”

Wikileaks, Cyber-attacks And Wandsworth Prison.

It is interesting to see how the news agenda has moved away from the contents of the Wikileaks material to discussing cyber-attacks.

Instead of pondering what Wikileaks’ releases tells us about misrule, political complacency and the stupidity of the political classes we are debating what happened with Julian Assange.

Whilst his arrest is important it is also a convenient distraction from the meat of the issue, Cablegate.

Along with the cyber-attacks it is a diversion from what we should be concentrating on, what the Cablegate material tells us, what political issues does it illuminate.

That’s what we should be directing our gaze towards.

But if you are interested in the cyber attacks and counter-attacks then Panda Labs has good coverage:

Conspiracies, The CIA And The Racist, Israel Shamir.

There are conflicting events, overlapping narratives and some downright strange articles being posted concerning Wikileaks and the charges against Julian Assange.

The Raw Story has an accusation, which I find pretty disgusting and slightly improbable, that one of the defendants in the case against Julian Assange is a CIA agent.

It is only when you look into the story that alarm bells start ringing, and if the name Israel Shamir doesn’t mean anything to you, then you are lucky.

Shamir is a Far Rightist and a mean antisemite, as Michael C. Moynihan demonstrates:

“So who is Israel Shamir, Counterpunch’s resident intelligence correspondent? Alternately known as Jöran Jermas and Adam Ermash, Shamir is a fringe writer who has devoted his professional life to exposing the supposed criminality of “Jewish power,” a paranoid anti-Semite who curates a website full of links to Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi sites, defenses of blood libel myths, and references to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Ali Abunimah, Hussein Ibish, and Nigel Parry have warned their fellow Palestinian activists to avoid contact with Shamir, citing his frequent forays into the sewers of Jew-hatred. The British anti-fascist magazine Searchlight (along with its Swedish sister magazine Expo) showed that Shamir is a “Swedish anti-Semite” who has repeatedly lied about his past, not a truth-telling Israeli dissident.

Spend a few minutes on Shamir’s website and here’s some of what you’ll learn: Imprisoned neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel is a “German political prisoner of Zion”; Maria Poumier, a French Holocaust denier whose work Shamir publishes, claims that the “Nazi-jewish H[olocaust] was just a civil war between European brothers”; Shamir himself believes that the Holocaust “narrative is Jewish, it belongs to Jews, and it has no meaning but as manifestation of Jewish supremacy.” Shamir also asserts that the pro-Nazi historian David Irving “was sentenced [to prison] for denial of Jewish superiority,” warning his readers of “Jewish mind-control on a world scale.” On the Auschwitz death camp, Shamir says that “The camp was an internment facility, attended by the Red Cross (as opposed to the US internment centre in Guantanamo).””

I think we know what he’s up to, best disregard this nonsense until there is solid evidence.