Free Republic

Although Sudanese president Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir meets more than all of the requirements that qualified Libya's Muammar Gaddafi for regime change -- the U.S. has shown an alarming amount of empathy for the oppressor and his cabal in Khartoum. In fact, Gaddafi's sins pale in comparison to those of Bashir, whose transgressions were concisely enumerated by Doyle McManus in the L.A. Times on Tuesday. Because of his role as the architect of the Darfur genocide -- a campaign which claimed over 300,000 lives -- Bashir became the first sitting head of state indicted for war crimes by the International...

Israel could have engineered the release of hundreds of thousands of confidential documents on WikiLeaks as a plot to corner Turkey on both domestic and foreign policy, according to a senior ruling party official. “One has to look at which countries are pleased with these. Israel is very pleased. Israel has been making statements for days, even before the release of these documents,” Hüseyin Çelik, deputy leader of the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and the party’s spokesperson, told reporters at a press conference Wednesday. Following initial reaction to the leaked U.S. Embassy cables, which have revealed diplomatic secrets...

America's biggest strategic problem in the Balkans is the role of Turkey, through its pawn, Haris Silajdzic is trying to compete with neootomannic position in the Balkans and the Middle East - said in a dispatch of the U.S. ambassador in Ankara since January this year, which was sent to the State Department called " Ankara87 ", published on page Wikiliks. Comparing the Turkish efforts as "ambition" Rolls-Royce ', but with the resources of' Rover ', "the ambassador wrote that, being aware that they have their own resources for this policy, they must find" your own errand boy in the...

WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange has said in an interview he had signed deals for his autobiography worth more than one million pounds(($A1.57 million). Assange told Britain's Sunday Times newspaper that the money would help him defend himself against allegations of sexual assault made by two women in Sweden. "I don't want to write this book, but I have to," he said on Sunday. "I have already spent 200,000 pounds for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat." The Australian said he would receive the equivalent of $A800,000 from Alfred A. Knopf, his American publisher,...

Wikileaks continues to rock the political world by shedding light on conspiracies, corruption and cover-ups. The latest batch of diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks reveals what can only be characterized as a U.S.-led conspiracy to force GMOs onto European countries by making those countries pay a steep price if they resist. The cable reveals the words of Craig Stapleton, the US ambassador to France, who was pushing the commercial interests of the biotech industry by attempting to force GMOs into France. In his own words (below), he expresses his frustration with the idea that France might pass environmental laws that...

Cables Portray Expanded Reach of Drug Agency By GINGER THOMPSON and SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables. In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be...

We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our efforts there. Not me, though: I am relieved. Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90 percent of the public do not want us out right now. Between January 1 and September 30, 2005, nearly 1,400 stories appeared on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed...

      WASHINGTON — It's a tough time to be a member of the U.S. armed forces. Those serving in our all-volunteer military — and their families — are stretched and stressed by more than nine years of war. Unfortunately, our commander in chief — supposedly the champion of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardsmen and Marines — isn't doing anything to make serving in uniform any easier. President Barack Obama — fresh from his 3 1/2-hour "visit" to Afghanistan — continues to insist that the U.S. Senate act immediately to allow active homosexuals to serve in the military....

Rajendra Pachauri denies helping Washington block scientist from senior post on intergovernmental climate bodyThe US used backstage diplomatic manoeuvres to help block the appointment of a scientist from Iran to a key position on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a leaked diplomatic cable reveals.The US privately lobbied IPCC chair Dr Rajendra Pachauri, as well as the UK, EU, Argentina and Mali representatives, and had put its embassies to work from Brazil to Uzbekistan. It wanted to prevent the election of Dr Mostafa Jafari as one of two co-chairmen of a key working group.The other co-chair was to be...

To the United States, Julian Assange may now be Public Enemy Number One. Some American politicians have even called for his execution. But less than a year ago, the founder of WikiLeaks was officially entertained at a US Embassy cocktail party by one of the very diplomats whose secrets he would soon spill to the world. Mr Assange's site had already published dozens of leaks embarrassing to the US, including secret Guantanamo Bay detainee handling manuals and the full emails of Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate. The US State Department condemned the manuals' publication as "a criminal act."

The WikiLeaks dump of State Depart ment cables confirmed what practi cally every foreign-policy analyst not named Stephen Walt already knew: that Israel is hardly the only Middle Eastern country worried about Iran's nuclear ambitions. From Cairo to Riyadh to Abu Dhabi, Sunni Arab leaders have repeatedly singled out Iran as the greatest threat to regional stability -- in private. But they refuse to speak out publicly, telling US diplomats that they'd face a tremendous domestic blowback if they were seen as siding with the West against a Muslim country. Yet this is a dilemma of their own making. Even...

IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win." His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public. I grew up...

Here’s an interesting tidbit we can thank jailed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for: according to cables included in the recent WikiLeaks document drop, informants have told diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia that American television–particularly Fox News Channel and David Letterman’s Late Show–are proving to be powerful weapons against “violent jihad.” As the U.K.’s Guardian reports, uncensored satellite broadcasts of popular American shows–with Arabic subtitles–carried via Saudi channel MBC, have turned young Saudis into huge fans of Desperate Housewives, Friends, and Fox News: “It’s still all about the war of ideas here, and the American programming on MBC...

Assange is seeking supporters to put up surety and bail for him. He said he expected to have to post bail of between £100,000 and £200,000 and would require up to six people offering surety, or risked being held on remand. In recent days Assange, 39, has told friends that he is increasingly convinced the US is behind Swedish prosecutors' attempts to extradite him for questioning on the assault allegations. He has said the original allegations against him were motivated by "personal issues" but that Sweden had subsequently behaved as "a cipher" for the US. He has also said he...

It’s all a grand charade — the matinee show put on by the Theater of Science was merely being used for the Grand Extravaganza called the Theater of Politics.Wikileaks, not surprisingly, turned up some not-so-diplomatic and not-so-scientific goings-on in the political race to steer power and dollars.From The Guardian The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic...

JERUSALEM – The Jordanian government maintains a "powerful undercurrent of doubt" that the Obama administration knows how to deal with Iran, according to classified documents released by WikiLeaks and reviewed by WND. An April 2009 cable from the U.S. embassy in Jordan summarized the Jordanian leadership's attitudes toward President Obama's offer of diplomacy to Iran. "Jordan's leaders are careful not to be seen as dictating toward the U.S.," read the cable, "but their comments betray a powerful undercurrent of doubt that the United States knows how to deal effectively with Iran." The cable continued: "(Jordanian) Foreign Minister Nasser Joudeh has...

Wikileaks Cables Expose John Kerry as an Enemy of Peace in the Mideast 2010 November 30 by Seth Mandel When Barack Obama became president, he finally put one issue to rest: No, the Democratic Party is not pro-Israel. But the WikiLeaks revelations have now put in doubt another claim: that the Democrats want peace for Israel and her neighbors.The question is raised with regard to John Kerry, the Democrats’ previous standard-bearer. One of the leaked diplomatic cables divulges that in a meeting with the emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa, Kerry “added that Netanyahu also needs to compromise and work...

Israelis can't be blamed for mistrusting Arabs, according to remarks by the ruler of the Arab state of Qatar released by the WikiLeaks group in the latest of a string of surprising revelations. Qatar's Emir, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, made the comments in a meeting with U.S. Senator John Kerry on February 23. A report of their discussions, obtained by the WikiLeaks group, was filed by America's Ambassador to Qatar Joseph LeBaron.

United Nations official says US order to diplomats to glean intelligence on UN leadership may breach international law The senior American diplomat at the UN tonight defended her team after WikiLeaks disclosed a US spying operation targeting the UN's secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, and members of the security council. Susan Rice, the US ambassador appointed to the UN by Barack Obama last year, appeared uncomfortable and, at times, exasperated as she took questions from the media at the UN today. She denied US diplomats were engaged in spying. "Let me be very clear: our diplomats are just that," she said. "They...

It strikes me a bit odd that some of the original Wikileaks memos/cables at the WikiLeaks site have some names replaced with "XXXXXXXXXXXX", while the same memo when printed in the msm have the real names in them. How could this be? Why would Assange try to hide certain names on the originals, while providing them to the media? Or, did the media make up the missing names somehow? For example, this is in the news: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/204917 The Wikileaks version is here: http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/cable/2009/04/09BEIJING1176.html The Wikileaks version has as the subject: XXXXXXXXXXXXDISCUSSES G-20, DPRK, IRAN, AF/PAK, UNSC REFORM, TAIWAN, TIBET WITH...

Something else which has come out of the WikiLeaks dump is that when President Obama met with King Abdullah last year, he scored himself a tirade for having spent all his time bloviating about the importance of the Arab/Israeli conflict when what Abdullah really cared about was Iran and their nukes. That, again, isn’t exactly news. It does, however, indicate that the people in charge of our foreign policy are informed by left-wing pontification rather than reality. You mean the Saudis are backstabbing liars, play a double game and want others to do their dirty work for them? Quel surprise!...

Once again, Wikileaks had done a HUGH bombshell of a number a large trove of diplomatic information online. The names of individuals and nations was not only very shocking, but very embarrassing as well, and in the end, very damaging in respects to international relations.

Duke railed against France, British anti-corruption investigations into BAE and American ignorance, leaked dispatches reveal Prince Andrew launched a scathing attack on British anti-corruption investigators, journalists and the French during an "astonishingly candid" performance at an official engagement that shocked a US diplomat. Tatiana Gfoeller, Washington's ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, recorded in a secret cable that Andrew spoke "cockily" at the brunch with British and Canadian business people, leading a discussion that "verged on the rude".

An American politician has called for WikiLeaks to be designated a terrorist organisation following the release of the latest batch of leaked documents. New York Republican Peter King said the organisation was a "clear and present danger" to the US. "WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States," he said. "I strongly urge you (Foreign Secretary Hillary Clinton) to work within the Administration to use every offensive capability of the US government to prevent further damaging releases by WikiLeaks." The Foreign Office said the actions of WikiLeaks risked British lives and security. "We...

A cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at backroom bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats. ome of the cables, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, were written as recently as late February, revealing the Obama administration’s exchanges over crises and conflicts. The material was originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing secret documents. WikiLeaks intends to make the archive public on its Web site...

Classified U.S. diplomatic cables reporting corruption allegations against foreign governments and leaders are expected in official documents that WikiLeaks plans to release soon, sources said Wednesday. The whistle-blowing website said on its Twitter feed this week its next release would be seven times larger than the collection of roughly 400,000 Pentagon reports related to the Iraq war which it made public in October. Three sources familiar with the State Department cables held by WikiLeaks say the corruption allegations in them are major enough to cause serious embarrassment for foreign governments and politicians named in them. They said the release was...

Iran has been able to smuggle advanced technological equipment to its uranium enrichment plant in Natanz via a complex smuggling route based in Dubai, the Sunday Telegraph reported on Sunday. According to the report, an Iranian company has purchased control systems from one of Germany's leading electronic manufacturers. The deal was negotiated with a Dubai trading company, which in turn sold Iran a range of electronic equipment for use at its enrichment facility, the British website reported. The report comes amid growing concerns that though Iran claims its nuclear program has only peaceful aims, Tehran is in fact working toward...

(04-09) 16:37 PDT SAN JOSE -- Vandals cut fiber-optic cable lines belonging to AT&T at two locations early today, knocking out phones and access to 911 emergency services to thousands of residential customers and businesses in southern Santa Clara County, in Santa Cruz and San Benito counties and along the Peninsula, authorities said. Four AT&T fiber-optic cables in an underground vault were severed shortly before 1:30 a.m. along Monterey Highway north of Blossom Hill Road in south San Jose, police Sgt. Ronnie Lopez said. Four more underground cables, at least two of which belong to AT&T, were cut about two...

Tech Central: er, something's happening Millions of people across the Middle East and Asia have lost access to the internet after two undersea cables in the Mediterranean suffered severe damage. Huge numbers in Egypt and India were left struggling to get online as a result of the outage, when the major internet pipeline between Egypt and Italy was cut. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) throughout the region, including those in United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, also reported problems. International telephone calls, which have also been affected, are being rerouted to work around the problem. Industry experts told The Times...

DOHA (AFP) - Damage to several undersea telecom cables that caused outages across the Middle East and Asia could have been an act of sabotage, the International Telecommunication Union said on Monday. "We do not want to preempt the results of ongoing investigations, but we do not rule out that a deliberate act of sabotage caused the damage to the undersea cables over two weeks ago," the UN agency's head of development, Sami al-Murshed, told AFP.

MUMBAI, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Services on two of three broken undersea cables providing Internet services to parts of the Middle East and Asia have been restored after both cables were repaired, an Indian-owned cable operator said on Sunday. FLAG Telecom, a subsidiary of India's No. 2 mobile operator Reliance Communications (RLCM.BO: Quote, Profile, Research), said in a statement the breaks in its FLAG Europe-Asia (FEA) and FALCON cables had been repaired and services routed back through these cables. Web access in south Asia and parts of the Middle East was disrupted after breaks occurred in segments of two cables...

Of cables and conspiracies Feb 7th 2008 The Economist An online frenzy that seems way out of line WHEN two undersea cables were damaged, apparently by ships' anchors, five miles north of Alexandria on January 30th, it seemed like a reminder of the fragility of the internet. The cables—one owned by FLAG Telecom, a subsidiary of India's Reliance Group, the other (SEA-ME-WE 4) by a consortium of 16 telecoms firms—carry almost 90% of the data traffic that goes through the Suez canal. When the connections failed, they took with them almost all internet links between Europe and the Gulf and...

From our "eyes open" and be ready for the ME to go hot, not only are sources in Israel reporting that unofficially folks are being told to ready their safe rooms, but we now see that telecommunications cable breaks servicing that part of the world are now up to 5! "A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each. These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also...

Is the U.S. Failing in Afghanistan? It was malice in wonderland at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday as Bush Administration envoys insisted things are getting better in Afghanistan, while angry lawmakers from both parties cited facts and figures showing just the opposite. Even the senior Republican on the panel, Senator Richard Lugar, found the Administration's claims wanting. "I'm not sure that we have a plan for Afghanistan," he said. Long seen as the "forgotten war" eclipsed by Iraq in U.S. priorities, Afghanistan is in the Washington spotlight this week with the release of three independent reports concluding...

Ships are not responsible for damaging undersea internet cables in the Mediterranean, Egypt's Government says. Two cables were damaged earlier this week in the Mediterranean sea and another off the coast of Dubai, causing widespread disruption to internet and international telephone services in Egypt, Gulf Arab states and South Asia. A fourth cable linking Qatar to the United Arab Emirates was damaged on Sunday causing yet more disruptions, telecommunication provider Qtel said. Egypt's transport ministry said footage recorded by onshore video cameras of the location of the cables showed no maritime traffic in the area when the cables were damaged....

Internet outages disrupted business and personal usage across a wide swathe of the Middle East on Wednesday after two undersea cables in the Mediterranean were damaged, government officials and Internet service providers said. In Cairo, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said the cut of the international communications cables Flag and Seamewe 4 had led to a partial disruption of Internet services and other telecommunications across much of Egypt. Emergency teams were quickly trying to find alternative routes, including satellite connections, to end the disruptions, Minister Tariq Kamel said. A telecommunications expert at the Egyptian communications ministry, Rafaat Hindy,...

Our rant about those $7,250 Pear Anjou speaker cables found its way to the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), and Randi offered $1 million to anyone who can prove those cables are any better than ordinary (and also overpriced) Monster Cables. Pointing out the absurd review by audiophile Dave Clark, who called the cables "danceable," Randi called it "hilarious and preposterous." He added that if the cables could do what their makers claimed, "they would be paranormal." We see that the Pear Cable company is advertising a pair of 12-foot "Anjou" audio cables for $7,250; that's $302 a foot! And,...

How the designers of the HDMI standard screwed up, and what's to be done about it. HDMI is a format which was designed primarily to serve the interests of the content-provider industries, not to serve the interests of the consumer. The result is a mess, and in particular, the signal is quite hard to route and switch, cable assemblies are unnecessarily complicated, and distance runs are chancy. Why is this, and what did the designers of the standard do wrong? And what can we do about it? The story begins with another badly-developed standard, DVI. A few years ago, there...

Everyone is talking about HDMI with the release of the PS3, and it's worth talking about; many people don't know that much about the cables or the connections. Heck, I've talked to people who don't realize that their PS3 will look better if they upgrade their composite cables that come with the system. I'm not going to try to break down the entire issue of cabling because it's a broad one, but if you're looking to buy an HDMI cable, just pay attention to the fact that there are stores that will rob you and others that won't. When I...

We did it... We protested churchill. There was a collection of pro-Churchill moonbats that showed up, and we protested them as well.

TROUBLE SPEAK Ward Churchill copied 'original' art piece Takes a swing at TV reporter who confronted him -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: February 26, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com Professor Ward Churchill Adding to a growing list of allegations, controversial University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill appears to have violated copyright law by claiming a reknowned artist's work as his own. Churchill, whose integrity has been challenged since news broke earlier last month of his paper blaming victims of 9-11 for the attacks, made an Indian-theme serigraph in 1981 called "Winter Attack" and printed 150 copies. But one of the buyers,...

Ward Hill as a member of the schismatic Boulder/Denver branch of AIM [American Indian Movement] as spent his whole life trashing the FBI and police. Here is what he said in his "Roosting Chickens" article. He is an anarchist who publishes his books through anarchist publishers. He wants to trash our law enforcement and intelligence organizations so that we will be destroyed. He doesn't want to make them better. He want the USA off the planet. He has often depicted the FBI and CIA as terrorist organizations.

Ward Churchill is the professor from Colorado University who called the dead in the World Trade Center "Nazis" and also said that the US deserved 9/11, and that we should have not fought back. Prof Churchill may get fired from the University of Colorado-Bolder He may appear on March 1st, time pending, if the administration approves of it.

In his FrontPage Magazine article Andrew Alexander’s Lies About the Cold War, Jamie Glazov speaks of the Soviet regime’s aggressive and expansionist designs against the West in the post-WWII period, and how de-classified Soviet sources prove that they had extensively infiltrated their agents into Western society. "...the Venona transcripts are thousands of Soviet intelligence messages that were intercepted and decoded over four decades by the FBI and the NSA (National Security Agency). Released over the past few years, these files prove that there was a large-scale Communist penetration of the U.S. government, and that Communist spies passed on valuable information...

Wondering if any freeper can help. I've tried Fry's, HP, and Radio Shack: no joy. I gave a friend's daughter an HP laptop last year as a college-entrance present. It lasted 6 months and someone gave it a big cup of coke. We managed to save the HD. Now I am trying to put the drive in a standard desktop PC. I bought a kit which provides spacers and a special header to bring power in thru the HD pinouts. Then the big surprise. THE PINS ON THE LAPTOP PC DRIVE (and the adapter) DO NOT MATCH a STANDARD IDE...