If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
While brave men and women such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Tubman are lauded as American heroes today, they were once considered enemies of the state.
What is protected in the First Amendment is not the right of commercial enterprises to exploit the news for profit, but rather of citizens to become informed. That requires the courage of heroic sources, including Bradley Manning.
"It's true that the Hollywood community was (and is) sort of genially Democratic, but in the early '70s, their political activism had not yet been organized into effective fund raising."
The recent death of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, former publisher of the New York Times, provoked memories of the Times and its coverage of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s.
The Xerox technology in 1969 has been replaced by a global computer network that uses encryption to protect the identity of the whistleblowers. Even Wikileaks does not know their identities. But the media's response is simply surreal.
I believe that people such as Julian Assange, movements such as Occupy Wall Street and those behind the Arab Spring, actually want change for a better, not worse and more chaotic, world. But their image and their hard work is being hijacked and manipulated.
When I faced a crisis of conscience, to tell what I knew because it needed to be told, coming to realize I was risking at the least my job if not jail, I remembered the Pentagon Papers from 1971 you risked the same and more to release.
In an attempt to raise funds for the military budget, the Pentagon is encouraging schools to hold bake sales and donate the profits to the armed forces.
When it comes to the American military, the leading Republican presidential candidates evidently only learned to add and multiply, never subtract or divide.
We still don't know if he did it or not, but if the 24-year-old Army private from Oklahoma actually supplied WikiLeaks with its choicest material, then he deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom instead of a jail cell at Fort Leavenworth.
The cables present evidence that this administration has been tampering with other countries' legal systems to prevent prosecutions against government employees for committing human rights abuses.
"The word 'security' is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment...
Julian Assange is Upton Sinclair exposing the rotten meat. The message is, don't buy the rotten meat, or the rotten wars they're trying to sell to you. No wonder Bank of America is worried that they could be next.
In 1971, the government might have considered Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers the greatest threat to national security. Regardless of whether one considers Ellsberg a hero or villain, a patriot or traitor, his actions, today, seem quaint.
For Assange, the Times's allegedly compromised sense of accuracy clearly extends to a "terrible" article the paper ran on October 23rd that seeks to analyze -- though, he would say impugn -- his character and motives.
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is accused of leaking military secrets to the public. This week, his supporters are holding rallies in 21 cities, seeking M...
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