In a January 2008 meeting, US and Spain trade officials strategized how to increase acceptance of genetically modified foods in Europe, including inflating food prices on the commodities market, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

During the meeting, Secretary of State for International Trade, Pedro Mejia, and Secretary General Alfredo Bonet "noted that commodity price hikes might spur greater liberalization on biotech imports."

It seems Wall Street traders got the word. By June 2008, food prices had spiked so severely that "The Economist announced that the real price of food had reached its highest level since 1845, the year the magazine first calculated the number," reports Fred Kaufman in The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it.

The unprecedented high in food prices in 2008 caused an additional 250 million people to go hungry, pushing the global number to over a billion. 2008 is also the first year "since such statistics have been kept, that the proportion of the world's population without enough to eat ratcheted upward," said Kaufman.

Attack strikes mosque in southeastern city of Chabahar as Shi'ites began mourning Ashoura, marking the death of prophet Mohammad's grandson.

Two suicide bombers blew themselves up near a mosque in southeastern Iran on Wednesday, killing dozens of people at a Shiite mourning ceremony, state media reported.

The attack took place outside the Imam Hussein Mosque in the port city of Chahbahar, near the border with Pakistan, the official IRNA news agency reported, quoting lawmaker Mohammad Yaghoub Jedgal.

The bombing appeared to target a group or worshippers preparing to mark Ashoura, which commemorates the seventh century death of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson Hussein, one of Shiite Islam's most beloved saints.

The area of Iran is home to an armed Sunni militant group, Jundallah, or Soldiers of God, which has waged sporadic attacks to fight alleged discrimination against the area's Sunni minority in overwhelmingly Shiite Iran.

"World bankers, by pulling a few simple levers that control the flow of money, can make or break entire economies. By controlling press releases of economic strategies that shape national trends, the power elite are able to not only tighten their stranglehold on this nation's economic structure, but can extend that control world wide. Those possessing such power would logically want to remain in the background, invisible to the average citizen."
(Aldus Huxley)

Wikleaks is upheld as a breakthrough in the battle against media disinformation and the lies of the US government.

Unquestionably, the released documents constitute an important and valuable data bank. The documents have been used by critical researchers since the outset of the Wikileaks project. Wikileaks earlier revelations have focussed on US war crimes in Afghanistan (July 2010) as well as issues pertaining to civil liberties and the "militarization of the Homeland" (see Tom Burghardt, Militarizing the "Homeland" in Response to the Economic and Political Crisis, Global Research, October 11, 2008)

In October 2010, WikiLeaks was reported to have released some 400,000 classified Iraq war documents, covering events from 2004 to 2009 (Tom Burghardt, The WikiLeaks Release: U.S. Complicity and Cover-Up of Iraq Torture Exposed, Global Research, October 24, 2010). These revelations contained in the Wikileaks Iraq War Logs provide "further evidence of the Pentagon's role in the systematic torture of Iraqi citizens by the U.S.-installed post-Saddam regime." (Ibid)

Progressive organizations have praised the Wikileaks endeavor. Our own website Global Research has provided extensive coverage of the Wikileaks project.

The leaks are heralded as an immeasurable victory against corporate media censorship.

But there is more than meets the eye.

Even prior to the launching of the project, the mainstream media had contacted Wikileaks.

There are also reports from published email exchanges that Wikileaks had entered into negotiations with several corporate foundations for funding. (Wikileaks Leak email exchanges, January 2007).

This week, Senators Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein engaged in acts of serious aggression against their own constituents, and the American people in general. They both invoked the 1917 Espionage Act and urged its use in going after Julian Assange. For good measure, Lieberman extended his invocation of the Espionage Act to include a call to use it to investigate the New York Times, which published WikiLeaks' diplomatic cables. Reports yesterday suggest that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder may seek to invoke the Espionage Act against Assange.

These two Senators, and the rest of the Congressional and White House leadership who are coming forward in support of this appalling development, are cynically counting on Americans' ignorance of their own history -- an ignorance that is stoked and manipulated by those who wish to strip rights and freedoms from the American people. They are manipulatively counting on Americans to have no knowledge or memory of the dark history of the Espionage Act -- a history that should alert us all at once to the fact that this Act has only ever been used -- was designed deliberately to be used -- specifically and viciously to silence people like you and me.

Iran's interior minister has accused the intelligence agencies of Israel, the United States, and Britain of involvement in the recent terrorist attacks on two Iranian nuclear scientists.

The arrested agents confessed that they received equipment and training from the Mossad, the CIA, and MI6, Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar said in Tehran on Saturday.

He also promised that the country's security forces would track down the ringleaders of the attacks.

Najjar also said that the Interior Ministry has been ordered to take special measures to provide protection for the elite and scientists, adding that the investigations would continue until the main perpetrators of the terrorist attacks are caught.

Call me Saul on the road to Damascus. I have seen the light. As a former intelligence officer, I was initially appalled at the leak of a quarter of a million classified documents by someone who had responsibility for protecting them. I was highly skeptical of the entire WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning saga but following the leaks has convinced me that there is a lot of material that deserves a public airing to demonstrate to the American people how Washington is pursuing a senseless policy almost everywhere in the world. I have been particularly mortified in reading the accounts of meetings of US Ambassadors and Undersecretaries of State with their foreign counterparts, encounters revealing an unbelievable arrogance derived from the Bush Administration dictum "you are either with us or against us." Persian King of Kings Darius addressing his satraps could not do it any better.

The WikiLeaks plus Manning story has truly revealed that the US government will do anything necessary to silence its critics, legally or illegally. The way in which it is orchestrating a highly questionable international effort against both WikiLeaks and Julian Assange is despicable. There exists a sharp divide between those who believe government secrets should always be protected at all costs and those who believe that secrecy in government exists only to conceal official misbehavior. Obviously there is a middle ground hidden somewhere between the two, but those who favor the narrative that accepts that there is a nefarious government in Washington ruthlessly manipulating a world empire have pretty much gotten it right. The documents and the Obama Administration behavior together tell the tale.

Tell a truth that discomforts power, that challenges its domination over our lives, our discourse, our very thoughts, and you will be destroyed. No institution, public or private, will stand with you; the most powerful entities, public and private, will be arrayed against you, backed up by overwhelming violent force. This is where we are now. This is what we are now.


Well, they got him at last. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the target of several of the world's most powerful governments, turned himself into British authorities today and is now at the mercy of state authorities who have already shown their wolfish - and lawless - desire to destroy him and his organization.

It has been, by any standard, an extraordinary campaign of vilification and persecution, wholly comparable to the kind of treatment doled out to dissidents in China or Burma. Lest we forget, WikiLeaks is a journalistic outlet - just like The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, all of whom are even now publishing the very same material - leaked classified documents -- available on WikiLeaks. The website is also a journalistic outlet just like CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox and other mainstream media venues, where we have seen an endless parade of officials - and journalists! - calling for Assange to be prosecuted or killed outright. Every argument being made for shutting down WikiLeaks can - and doubtless will - be used against any journalistic enterprise that publishes material that powerful people do not like.

Paris - For many Europeans, Washington's fierce reaction to the flood of secret diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks displays imperial arrogance and hypocrisy, indicating a post-9/11 obsession with secrecy that contradicts American principles.

While the Obama administration has done nothing in the courts to block the publication of any of the leaked documents, or even, as of yet, tried to indict the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, for any crime, American officials and politicians have been widely condemned in the European news media for calling the leaks everything from "terrorism" (Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York) to "an attack against the international community" (Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton). Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates called the arrest of Mr. Assange on separate rape charges "good news." Sarah Palin called for him to be hunted as an "anti-American operative with blood on his hands," and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate, said that whoever leaked the cables should be executed.

Anyone who doubts the unmitigated evil of the US government and its international enablers has only to look at the disgraceful persecution of Julian Assange to see Washington's brazen malevolence in full flower. As the WikiLeaks web site continues to release daily examples of US incompetence, bullying, venality, and corruption, the response from the Imperial City has been a coordinated campaign of lies, smears, and what can only be described as utter filth.

This outpouring of satanic bile has been disgorged onto the front pages of the world's newspapers in retaliation for the "crime" of revealing the everyday machinations and cynical maneuverings of the US government as it rampages, loots, and murders its way across the face of the earth. In doing so, Assange and WikiLeaks have violated the first principle of the new world order, which is that they (the governments of the world) have every right to know what we're saying in the privacy of our own homes: in our emails, our phone conversations, and anywhere else we (falsely) believe we're free from prying eyes and ears. However, we have no right to know what they are doing, in our name - with our tax dollars - and to believe otherwise is "treason."

Fresh doubts have been raised over how Dr David Kelly died after police admitted no fingerprints were found on the packs of pills he supposedly overdosed on.

The public inquiry into Dr Kelly's death found the weapons expert killed himself by slashing his wrist with a pruning knife and taking 'an excess amount of co-proxamol tablets'.

Three blister packs of the painkiller, each able to hold ten pills, were retrieved from Dr Kelly's coat pocket when his body was found in woods near his home.

Only one tablet remained, leading his post mortem examination report to state he may have taken up to 29 pills.

Co-proxamol ingestion is listed as a cause of death on his death certificate.

But Thames Valley Police has now revealed that when it tested two of the blister packs for fingerprints there were 'none recovered'.

The development is doubly significant because police have already said the knife which Dr Kelly is said to have used to cut his wrist did not have fingerprints on - nor did an open bottle of water found beside his body.