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.

In order to comprehend the ostensibly bizarre Wikileaks phenomena that is continually in the news these days, it is essential to first comprehend the concept of the 'Mighty Wurlitzer'.

It used to be the honorific of Frank Wisner, the first chief of political warfare for the Central Intelligence Agency, used to describe the C.I.A.'s plethora of front organizations and news media stooges that he was capable of playing (like a great organ with many keyboards) for synthesizing any propaganda tune that was needed for the day. More details may be gleaned in the disclosures of Operation Mockingbird.

The fact that such an omnipresent Message-Machine is not ancient history but very much current affairs, is underscored by this NYT headline Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand, Sunday, April 20, 2008.

Therefore, today, I use the term 'Mighty Wurlitzer' as a metaphor to pluralistically refer to the same message-machine, i.e., the intelligence apparatus for manufacturing consent and controlling dissent, and its concomitant conscious manipulation of peoples' thoughts, feelings, actions and in-actions, in order to serve the primacy interests of the ruling-elite. The latter are, invariably, also the de facto owners of the complete messaging-system now even more globally ubiquitous than when Frank Wisner played the world for a fool.

The energy services company Dick Cheney ran prior to becoming Vice President of the United States was atop the tongue of liberals each time it was awarded a contract in Iraq.

Now the company's name, Halliburton, is being spoken somewhere else: Nigeria.

According to a story filed late Wednesday, Cheney will be indicted in a Nigerian bribery case as part of an investigation into an alleged $180 million bribery scandal.

I obviously missed the momentous occasion when the mainstream media turned anti-war. But who can now deny that it is so when we see Wiki-leaks and the mainstream media joining forces to expose the ugly truth of the US invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and more recently, what the US state department thinks of world leaders? I mean, that is what is happening, right?

Wrong.

What is happening is that Wiki-leaks is being promoted by the media in order to sell the same old lies, except that now the lies are coming sugar-coated, with a 'whistle-blower' gloss to better enable digestion. The lies themselves don't frustrate me so much anymore, and I can understand why the general public are fooled, but I have to admit to being disappointed at how effortlessly the Wiki-leaks poison is being swallowed by so many supposedly alternative news sites. Sites like Counterpunch, Global Research, Citizens for a Legitimate Government and Information Clearing House, to name but a few, are all disseminating the Wiki-leaks story without so much as a hint of critical thought it seems.