9. (SBU) Olympic Protests: Pro-Tibetan Protesters Removed from China: Advocates for Tibetan independence continue to be detained and deported on the same day by Chinese officials in response to their ongoing campaign of well-organized protests in Beijing. These protesters, along with those detained in earlier Tibet-related demonstrations, all appear to be part of “Team Tibet,” in which “Students for a Free Tibet” (SFT) and other Tibetan advocacy groups have orchestrated a series of actions to unfurl banners and fly Tibetan flags in public areas in Beijing and elsewhere. In cases involving U.S. citizens, the U.S. Embassy has first learned of all three incidents from XXXXXXXXXXXX. To date, the following pro-Tibet incidents–reported by the same caller–have occurred in Beijing:
this is is about me…
08/09/2008–Five persons, including three Americans, detained at Tiananmen Square; American citizens deported to Los Angeles and Hong Kong.08/08/2008–Three Americans detained at the National Stadium (“Bird’s Nest”) before the Olympic opening ceremony; deported to Los Angeles.
08/06/2008–Four persons, including two Americans, detained near the National Stadium (“Bird,s Nest”); American citizens deported to Los Angeles. 10. (SBU) Hong Kong Protests: According to various media reports, at least six protesters were removed from the Sha Tin Olympic Equestrian venue in Hong Kong in reaction to separate incidents during the dressage competition on BEIJING 00003067 004 OF 005
08/09/2008. Among the six were reportedly two American citizens belonging to the “Students for a Free Tibet” organization. All protesters attempted to display either Tibetan flags or banners calling for an end to human rights abuses in China and were escorted from the arena by venue security. In one incident, the demonstrator refused to leave and was forcibly removed from the area.
Author: Noel Hidalgo
Assange wrote these things in 2006, and it’s hard to imagine that he didn’t have the Bush administration in mind. Certainly Bush was big on centralizing power, and wasn’t big on civil liberties, and sometimes he kept his infringements on our liberties secret. Assange is in this sense the anti-Bush, challenging secretive, centralized authority with a transparency that is highly decentralized. (His backers have created mirror Web sites to ensure access to the WikiLeaks documents, and Assange says that more than 100,000 people possess the whole archive in encrypted form.) Yet in one sense Assange is the anti-anti-Bush.
In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government”. The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.
“I don’t care about racial profiling. You know, sometimes it is good we are racially profiled, because the God’s honest truth is that 99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing these drivers are blacks and Hispanics,” said Mateo, who is Hispanic and has a black father
Members of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus may tout their commitment to cutting government spending now, but they used the 111th Congress to request hundreds of earmarks that, taken cumulatively, added more than $1 billion to the federal budget.
These leaks have been compared to the Pentagon papers. Which they are not. The Pentagon papers revealed that the U.S. engaged in a systematic campaign to deceive the world and the American people and that its private actions were often the opposite of its stated public policy. The WikiLeaks documents, by contrast, show Washington pursuing privately pretty much the policies it has articulated publicly. Whether on Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan or North Korea, the cables confirm what we know to be U.S. foreign policy. And often this foreign policy is concerned with broader regional security, not narrow American interests. Ambassadors are not caught pushing other countries in order to make deals secretly to strengthen the U.S., but rather to solve festering problems.
USA = king of banana republics
Nicholas Kristof argues that the U.S. is at the level of plutocratic banana republics:
CEOs of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.
Step back and (for the moment) avoid passing judgment on whether this state of affairs is good or bad. What’s fascinating is that against this backdrop, last week’s election went to the Republicans, who admit that their top priority is passing large tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans. I know much has been written about this, but I think it defies easy explanation how economic policies that benefit so very few enjoy the support of so many.
