Happy Birthday to Julian Assange, Editor in Chief of Wikileaks

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

HAPPY 40TH BIRTHDAY to JULIAN ASSANGE, Editor in Chief of WIKILEAKS!!

http://wikileaks.org/

How fitting that his birthday precedes US' official Independence day by one day.


“The aim of Wikileaks is to achieve just reform around the world and do it through the mechanism of transparency.”

Julian Paul Assange, born 3 July 1971- is an Australian publisher, journalist, computer programmer and Internet activist. He is the editor in chief of WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website and conduit for worldwide news leaks, with the stated purpose of creating open governments. Assange was a hacker in his youth, before becoming a computer programmer. He has lived in several countries and has made public appearances in many parts of the world to speak about freedom of the press, censorship and investigative journalism.

Assange serves on the WikiLeaks advisory board. WikiLeaks has published material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya, toxic waste dumping in Côte d'Ivoire, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, and banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer. In 2010, WikiLeaks published Iraq War documents and Afghan War documents about American involvement in the wars, some of which was classified material. On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five international print media partners (Der Spiegel, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian and El País) began publishing U.S. diplomatic cables.
Assange received a number of awards and nominations, including the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award for publishing material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya and Readers' Choice for TIME magazine's 2010 Person of the Year

“What does censorship reveal? It reveals fear.”


“It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abuses.”

“Capable generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.”





“…we in the West have deluded ourselves into believing that we actually have a truly free press. We don’t. And we can see that in the difference between what Wikileaks does and what the rest of the press does.”



Collateral Murder

5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-sight, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded

“We know for sure that one big media company in the US had the ‘Collateral Murder’ video for years and did not release it.”



“It is impossible to correct abuses unless we know that they’re going on.”

“…that hasn’t been picked up, why not? It’s current policy. It says in this manual that the Geneva Convention says one thing but…US military policy is to do something else.”



"they were to forge the paperwork, allow the Red Cross through, that they had certain sections that were ‘show prisons’."




"...if we are to produce a more civilized society, a more just society, it has to be based upon the truth. Because judgements which are not based upon the truth can only lead to outcomes which are themselves false.”

Some of the stories we have broken

War, killings, torture and detention
Government, trade and corporate transparency
Suppression of free speech and a free press
Diplomacy, spying and (counter-)intelligence
Ecology, climate, nature and sciences
Corruption, finance, taxes, trading
Censorship technology and internet filtering
Cults and other religious organizations
Abuse, violence, violation

Changes in Guantanamo Bay SOP manual (2003-2004) - Guantanamo Bay’s main operations manuals
Of Orwell, Wikipedia and Guantanamo Bay - In where we track down and expose Guantanamo Bay’s propaganda team
Fallujah jail challenges US - Classified U.S. report into appalling prison conditions in Fallujah
U.S lost Fallujah’s info war - Classified U.S. intelligence report on the battle of Fallujah, Iraq
US Military Equipment in Iraq (2007) - Entire unit by unit equipment list of the U.S army in Iraq
Dili investigator called to Canberra as evidence of execution mounts - the Feb 2008 killing of East Timor rebel leader Reinado
Como entrenar a escuadrones de la muerte y aplastar revoluciones de El Salvador a Iraq - The U.S. Special Forces manual on how to prop up unpopular government with paramilitaries

Should the press really be free?
In its landmark ruling on the Pentagon Papers, the US Supreme Court ruled that "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government." We agree.

Visit this link for more Julian Assange quotes and attribution.


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