Analysis

A set of cables about Bulgarian energy business, published by the Wikileaks media partner Bivol.bg, discloses a realm of "energy mafia", murky intermediaries, connected with organized crime, and Russian financial interests.

The cables reveal how Russia was blackmailing Bulgarians to advance the construction of new pipelines for Russian gas and oil, and of a new nuclear power plant in Belene (the only Russian project of this type in EU).

Describing his September 1, 2009, meeting with Putin in Gdansk, Borissov said Putin implied (in an off-the-record remark) that Bulgarians "risk being cold" during the upcoming winter if Borissov did not move forward with the projects.

Bulgaria is 100% dependent from Russian gas and nuclear fuel and was the most affected country during the gas supply cuts in 2009.

Translation of the full analysis by Bivol.bg will follow shortly.

*With research assistance from Heather Marsh

Pakistani national Naqib Ullah (also Naqibullah) was 14 years old and out doing an errand for his father when he was kidnapped from his village in Khan, Afghanistan by 11 men that called themselves, “Samoud’s people.” The men, according to Ullah, “forcibly raped him at gunpoint”. He was taken back to the men’s village encampment and “forced to do manual work.”

Ullah was in the camp for three days when, in December 2002, US forces raided the camp. The group had been forewarned. They ordered Ullah and others to stay behind and fight US forces. He was captured and had a weapon but it had not been fired. He was transported to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in January 2003 because the military believed he might have knowledge of “Taliban resistance efforts and local leaders.”

This teenager is just one of twenty-two juveniles who wound up in Guantanamo. And, with the release of the Gitmo Files by WikiLeaks, more details on the capture, transfer, detention and release of juvenile detainees are becoming known.

Article 1 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as “every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier.”

President Obama Makes a Fair Trial of Bradley Manning Impossible By Declaring Him Guilty

Authored by Kevin Zeese

The credibility of the military justice system is being undermined by the prosecution of Bradley Manning. His abusive punishment without trial violates his due process rights; his harsh treatment in solitary confinement-torture conditions violates the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment; and now the commander-in-chief has announced his guilt before trial making a fair trial impossible. A Bradley Manning exception to the Bill of Rights is developing as the Obama administration seeks Manning’s punishment no matter what constitutional protections they violate.

On Thursday April 21, 2011 in San Francisco a group of Bradley Manning supporters protested the prosecution of Manning at a Barack Obama fundraising event. One of Manning’s supporters was able to question the president directly afterwards and during the conversation, Obama said on videotape that Manning was guilty.

Can you imagine if the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamene’i, pronounced an Iranian military whistle blower “guilty” before any trial was held? Khamene’i is the commander-in-chief of all armed forces in Iran, just as President Obama is the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed services. Would anyone in the United States think that a trial before Iranian military officers that followed such a pronouncement could be fair? The U.S. government would use the situation to make propaganda points about the phony justice system in Iran.

A statement from the Pentagon was published just after 9 pm ET on April 24th, no more than an hour or two after the New York Times had posted their package covering the Gitmo Files they had not obtained from WikiLeaks. The statement was posted on NPR and the Times website. Yet, again, it seems this is an instance of complete collusion between the press and government.

Michael Calderone reports "representatives from NPR and the Times visited the White House and spoke with Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell and members of Joint Task Force Guantanamo." And, "The news organizations agreed to some redactions requested by government officials but not all of them."

Recall, in February, it was found out that the Times had met with the State Department prior to their release of the US State Embassy Cables. Marcy Wheeler over at Firedoglake highlighted NYT’s close cooperation with the State Department:

Because of the range of the material and the very nature of diplomacy, the embassy cables were bound to be more explosive than the War Logs. Dean Baquet, our Washington bureau chief, gave the White House an early warning on Nov. 19. The following Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving, Baquet and two colleagues were invited to a windowless room at the State Department, where they encountered an unsmiling crowd. Representatives from the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon gathered around a conference table. Others, who never identified themselves, lined the walls. A solitary note-taker tapped away on a computer.

The release of the files should draw attention to the reality that, despite US President Barack Obama’s promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, the prison is still open. In fact, El Pais has posted analysis to complement coverage of the Guantanamo Files, which details how “legal and political setbacks” prevented Obama from closing the military prison:

Barack Obama criticized George W. Bush for orchestrating, executive order, a labyrinthine detention center that sent hundreds of terror suspects after the attacks of [September 11th] , condemning them to oblivion and without the right to a fair trial in civil court. Obama has perpetuated the shame of Guantánamo to the president's decision, also through an executive order to reinstate the military commissions created by Bush and formalize the system of indefinite detention, which offers the only solution to many of the 172 inmates who reside in the prison to rot within its walls.

There is no other solution. And there is none because the invention was conceived Guantanamo from violating the most basic principle of humanity and legality rules for governing the United States and the developed democracies for centuries. To send to whom the administration of George W. Bush considered suspected of violating U.S. and be soldiers of Al Qaeda, the legal architects of the "war on terror" was invented the concept of unlawful enemy combatants, thus bypassing the safeguards offered by the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war . Detainees in secret CIA prisons anywhere in the world began to land in Guantanamo in January 2002, hooded and shackled hand and foot.

It should draw attention to each of the individual reports and place them in the context of information that journalists have already reported. It should help us further understand what has been going on in the dark and murky military prison that has become so notorious and perhaps further color the world's understanding of documents the ACLU and other organizations have managed to obtain in the past years.

But, the New York Times has published coverage of the documents and did not obtain them from WikiLeaks. Also, according to Greg Mitchell, who has been covering WikiLeaks for TheNation.com with a daily blog since Cablegate began, “"WikiLeaks abruptly lifted the embargo Sunday night, after the organization became aware that the documents had been leaked to other news organizations, which were about to publish stories about them."

McClatchy Newspapers writes “the US military set up a human intelligence laboratory at Guantanamo,” the Washington Post details new classified military documents obtained by the “anti-secrecy organization” present “new details” of detainees whereabouts on Sept 11, 2001 and afterward and the Daily Telegraph reports that it has exposed “America’s own analysis of almost ten years of controversial interrogations on the world’s most dangerous terrorists.”

Months after news organizations reported the Guantanamo Files might be WikiLeaks’ next release, the files are now posted on the WikiLeaks website. Nearly 800 documents, memoranda from Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO), the combined force in charge of the Guantanamo Bay prison to US Southern Command in Miami, Florida.

The memoranda do not detail torture or how detainees were interrogated. The reports from between 2002 and 2008 show how JTF-GTMO justified when to keep detainees and also when it chose to release detainees. In cases of detainees “released,” that detainee’s “transfer” is detailed to “the custody of his own government or that of some othergovernment.”

The reports represent not just JTF-GTMO but, according to WikiLeaks, they also represent the Criminal Investigation Task Force created by the Department of Defense to conduct interrogations and the Behavioral Science Teams (BSCTs) consisting of psychologists who had “a major say in “exploitation” of [detainees] in interrogations.”

The tenth episode of "This Week in WikiLeaks" features Iraq war veteran Ethan McCord and Bradley Manning Support Network Steering Committee member Kevin Zeese. McCord and Zeese have both appeared on "This Week in WikiLeaks." They are part of this week's episode because I recorded them talking at an event in New York City organized by World Can't Wait to promote a new short documentary, "Incident in New Baghdad."

Run time is about 1 hour for the episode.

To listen, click on the play button on the widget below:

A new short documentary called, “Incident in New Baghdad,” premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City on Sunday. The film tells the story of Iraq war veteran Ethan McCord, a soldier who appears in the “Collateral Murder” video rescuing two wounded children.

The director, James Spione, attended an event at Revolution Books in NYC on April 21, 2011. He talks about his initial reaction to the video WikiLeaks released and how he was horrified. But, then he began to pay attention to the media response and found it was pretty much the same on every channel.

It didn’t matter if it was Fox, ABC, CNN, CBS or MSNBC. It really didn’t matter. For the most part, each media channel’s response was “let’s find two people with opinions we know in advance and we’ll have them argue about this and they’ll say things we already know they are going to say and we’ll say that we were journalists and we did our job. And, it’s bullshit.”

Spione was doing research on the Internet and he found an interview with McCord. He thought it was interesting that he had actually been on the scene and wondered why the media was not talking to him about the incident. So, he decided to fly out and spend some days in Wichita, Kansas meeting McCord, shooting and doing an extensive interview for the film.

Obama on Manning: “He Broke the Law”

At a fundraiser for President Barack Obama at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco, a group of progressive supporters of Bradley Manning paid tens of thousands of dollars to attend and disrupt the event. Oakland activist Naomi Pitcairn personally paid for tickets so people from her group could attend. The group sang a song with lyrics they wrote expressing their disgust with the way the Obama Administration has responded to Manning’s inhumane treatment.

Someone with the group also managed to confront President Obama on Manning. Obama’s handlers may have been preoccupied because in this clip that runs about a minute Obama opens up about what he thinks about what Manning did.

“People can have philosophical ideas about certain things,” President Obama explains. “But, look, I can’t conduct diplomacy on open source.” He then goes on to add that he has to abide by certain classified information rules or law and if he had released material like Manning did he’d be breaking the law.

Now, here is the remark that deserves the most attention: “We’re a nation of laws. We don’t individually make our decisions about how the laws operate.” He adds, “He broke the law.” Finally, before removing himself from the conversation, he says Manning “dumped” information and “it wasn’t the same thing” as what Daniel Ellsberg did because what Ellsberg leaked “wasn’t classified in the same way.”

The Pentagon’s decision to transfer the alleged whistleblower to WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, caught Manning’s defense by surprise. Manning’s move was not reported to his defense counsel until “twenty minutes before the Pentagon’s press briefing.” The way his defense learned of the move was the same way most citizens of the world did: by reading the information that was leaked to the Associated Press just before the briefing. Supporters of Manning are now watching closely, planning to call attention to any new violation of his rights that might occur.

David E. Coombs, Manning's lawyer, says the Pentagon had been thinking about moving Manning for a long time. So, the timing of the move did not surprise Manning’s lawyer David E. Coombs. He blogged:

The defense recently received reliable reports of a private meeting held on 13 January 2011, involving high-level Quantico officials where it was ordered that PFC Manning would remain in maximum custody and under prevention of injury watch indefinitely. The order to keep PFC Manning under these unduly harsh conditions was issued by a senior Quantico official who stated he would not risk anything happening “on his watch.” When challenged by a Brig psychiatrist present at the meeting that there was no mental health justification for the decision, the senior Quantico official issuing the order responded, “We will do whatever we want to do.” Based upon these statements and others, the defense was in the process of filing a writ of habeas corpus seeking a court ruling that the Quantico Brig violated PFC Manning’s constitutional right to due process. See United States ex. rel. Accardi v. Shaughnessy, 74 S.Ct. 499 (1954) (violation of due process where result of board proceeding was predetermined); United States v. Anderson, 49 M.J. 575 (N.M. Ct. Crim. App. 1998) (illegal punishment where Marine Corps had an unwritten policy automatically placing certain detainees in MAX custody). The facts surrounding PFC Manning’s pretrial confinement at Quantico make it clear that his detention was not “in compliance with legal and regulatory standards in all respects” as maintained at the Pentagon press briefing.

The Bradley Manning Support Network, which formed to “provide prisoner support” during his imprisonment, put out a press release indicating concern over the move. Kevin Zeese, an organizer with the Support Network, says his “transfer from Virginia to Kansas limits his access to his civilian attorney David Coombs of Rhode Island. It also severely limits visitation opportunities by his East Coast family and friends.” Jeff Paterson of Courage to Resist and the Support Network says, “It wasn’t a secret that we were preparing to rally one to two thousand for an upcoming DC-area pre-trial hearing.”

Is it possible he is being moved because the Bradley Manning Support Group has been successfully mobilizing people to protest his detention at Quantico? On March 20, a day that was declared Bradley Manning International Support Day, hundreds turned out for a protest at Quantico, just one day after the eighth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. Reports from Firedoglake indicated “the ratio of police to protesters was disproportionate.” About one hundred regular police officers were present, six on horseback. Dozens of riot police with police dogs and then about a half-dozen military officers with gas masks carrying automatic weapons and tear gas were there. And, prior to the protest, the base the director of operations raised “the specter of infrastructure damage, vandalism or harassment to USMC personnel” through a “Threat Advisory” issued just prior to the planned protest.

Image credit: SkyNews

"We are extremely concerned that lives are endangered as a result of this article based on WikiLeaks," a senior Obama administration official told Fox News Monday morning. "The concern regards what (the) Syrians might do to those that work for (Barada), given that (Assad and his security forces) are prone to crack down and could well use this as an excuse -- blaming it on foreigners."

It is unfortunate that it took a Washington Post article on US involvement in Syria for the US government to feel concern, and that it chose to do so based on the disclosure of their actions rather than the actions. US State cables published by the Washington Post have illustrated reason for concern over US involvement for a very long time, and have also shown that US actions have been known to the Syrian government for a very long time.

Cable 09DAMASCUS306 dated April 28, 2009 states: "The SARG would undoubtedly view any U.S. funds going to illegal political groups as tantamount to supporting regime change. This would inevitably include the various expatriate reform organizations operating in Europe and the U.S., most of which have little to no effect on civil society or human rights in Syria."

As related in cable 09DAMASCUS477 dated July 8, 2009, it did not take the publication of the US State cables for the Syrian government to become aware of US activity. "... report begs the question of how much and for how long SARG has known about Democracy Council operations in Syria and, by extension, the MJD's participation. Reporting in other channels suggest the Syrian Muhubarat may already have penetrated the MJD and is using MJD contacts to track U.S. democracy programming. If the SARG does know, but has chosen not to intervene openly, it raises the possibility that the SARG may be mounting a campaign to entrap democracy activists receiving illegal (under Syrian law) foreign assistance."

The National Security Archive has, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to force the release of the CIA's "Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation." The lawsuit charges the CIA has "wrongfully withheld" a multi-volume study the Archive requested in 2005 that is "the most important and substantive CIA-produced study of this episode."

Director of the Archive's Cuba Documentation Project Peter Kornbluh has called on the CIA to release the report under President Barack Obama's Executive Order 13526 , which states that "no information may remain classified indefinitely." (Of course, denying FOIA requests doesn't mean documents will be classified indefinitely. It just means they aren't getting released now.)

One might wonder, how long does this have to go on before someone goes ahead and declassifies the material? What is the government hiding? Is there any chance someone will just leak the report to WikiLeaks and end this travesty?

The Bay of Pigs invasion is an episode in US foreign policy that is considered to be a sham. Beyond that, it's unclear what has been learned from the incident.

Vancouver native Marc Emery, was today denied a transfer to Canada to serve the final four years of his five year sentence. Emery's lawyer Kirk Tousaw said US authorities told his client that the US government refused his transfer on April 6 despite a recommendation from his sentencing judge that he be transferred and despite his meeting all the requirements, due to the “seriousness of the offence” and “law enforcement concerns.”

Marc's serious offense is selling marijuana seeds by mail to the US, a serious offense on the US side of the border, where the law equates one marijuana seed to one plant to 100 kilos of marijuana, but almost never prosecuted in Canada where seed shops are common, and the last conviction was against Emery in 1998 when he was fined $2,000. In fact on Wednesday, an Ontario court struck down Canada's laws that prohibit the possession and growing of marijuana as unconstitutional. The judge suspended his ruling for three months, to give the federal government time to appeal or respond; if they are unsuccessful, marijuana will be legal to possess and cultivate in Ontario in three months, which will set precedent for all of the other provinces. That would explain why the US has "law enforcement concerns," as Emery in Canada would have no chance of being in jail, much less serving repeated solitary confinement. According to the US - Canada Extradition Treaty, extradition applies only in cases where the “offenses are punishable by the laws of both Contracting Parties by a term of imprisonment exceeding one year.”

The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), which some believe could establish and require Internet users to have ID on the Internet, was unveiled today at the US Chamber of Commerce. NSTIC aims to establish "identity ecosystems," what the National Institute for Standards in Technology describes as a "a user-centric online environment, a set of technologies, policies, and agreed upon standards that securely supports transactions ranging from anonymous to fully authenticated and from low to high value."

Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke delivered the following remarks:

"I'm optimistic that NSTIC will jump-start a range of private-sector initiatives to enhance the security of online transactions. This strategy will leverage the power and imagination of entrepreneurs in the private sector to find uniquely American solutions. Other countries have chosen to rely on government-led initiatives to essentially create national ID cards. We don't think that's a good model, despite what you might have read on blogs frequented by the conspiracy theory set. To the contrary, we expect the private sector to lead the way in fulfilling the goals of NSTIC. Having a single issuer of identities creates unacceptable privacy and civil liberties issues. We also want to spur innovation, not limit it. And we want to set a floor for privacy protection that is higher than what we see today, without placing a ceiling on the potential of American innovators to make additional improvements over time. "

What might this mean for the Internet as citizens of the world know it today? As the US government, in cooperation with the private sector, works to preserve cyber infrastructure or networks that it considers to be “strategic national assets,” how might this protection of assets fundamentally alter key characteristics of the Internet, which many have grown to appreciate? In the age of WikiLeaks and Anonymous, in an era where the US government has been unable to prevent the Chinese government and military from stealing usernames and passwords for State Department computers, it seems that this strategic plan could transform the Internet into a realm that requires you to prove your identity with an approved and issued identification card every time you move in to a new website.

Violence has escalated significantly in the past month between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The Itamar attack, which involved the stabbing of five members of a Jewish family by two individuals whom were believed to be Palestinians, and arms found, which Israel believed were being smuggled from Iran, inflamed tensions further. As some suggest Operation Cast Lead II has begun, Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth and Al Akhbar have begun to release US State Embassy cables on Israel from WikiLeaks.

Haaretz reports on Hamas and the Gaza Strip. According to a November 2009 cable, Israel has no clear or consistent policy and Israel has refused US requests to “allow more goods into Gaza to assist the population.” Also, months after Operation Cast Lead, Embassy Tel Aviv reported, “Israelis are enjoying the best security situation since the outbreak of the second intifada [in 2000], the result of Israeli intelligence successes in destroying the suicide bombing network in the West Bank as well as good security cooperation with the Palestinian Authority’s security forces.”

This cable [09TELAVIV2473] features Major General Yoav Galant, the Israel Defense Forces general responsible for Gaza and southern Israel, commenting:

They are starting to celebrate in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi as the news of the decisions taken at the meeting of the Libya International Contact Group earlier today in Doha, Qatar began to filter in. They see most of the decisions taken are supportive of their struggle to overthrow the 42 year old regime of Mummar Gaddafi and they expect that soon many more nations will join France and Qatar in recognizing the Transitional National Council as the sole legitimate government of Libya.

At the end of the one day summit, the group issued a statement calling for Gaddafi to step down. "Gaddafi and his regime has lost all legitimacy and he must leave power allowing the Libyan people to determine their own future," it said. The meeting which was hosted by Qatar and chaired by British Foreign Secretary William Hague and the Qatari prime minister, Hamed bin Jassem included representatives of NATO countries, Middle East and African countries and a number of international organizations. Ban ki Moon represented the United Nations. At this meeting were representatives of the Transitional National Council that has emerged as the leadership of the Libyan rebels. For many in the contact group it was their first opportunity to meet with the rebel leadership. Also in Qatar, ahead of the talks was Moussa Koussa, Libya's former foreign minister who became the most prominent member of Gaddafi's regime to deflect when he fled to London last month. Just how he got to Doha and what he was doing there remains something of a mystery. He had no formal role in the summit and the opposition Transitional Nation Council said they had no connection to him but he was reported to be having some meetings outside the summit.

Turkey is a land of many lands. A checkpoint, a bridge between the East and the West used by many cultures and civilizations across the history of humankind. In many ways, however, the country is not only divided by the classical dichotomy between Europe and Asia, as it is a nation made up of many different groups, clans and tribes. It is difficult to accept that those living in Bodrum along the Mediterranean beaches are from the same country as those living in the deserted Diyarbakir; and it would be hard to argue that those living in the orthodox Kayseri are the same culture as those in modern Istanbul. Colloquially one could say that Turkey suffers from an identity problem. This has been seen as an obstacle for the government, obsessed with standardizing religion so as to moderate extremist clans that have an unfavourable view in Europe. To unite people under the giant Turkish state, the government has spread the same flag over the whole country, trying to make it present in every village, town or major city. But far from making one single body of Anatolian citizens, the red fabric painted with a star and a moon all abroad the country only denounces the paradox of Turkish society in religious affairs.

We will be publishing a series of reports related to freedom on Turkish lands and minds. For more information or if you want to help us continue our work contact us at wlworld@hush.com or on Twitter @wikileaks_world.

PART 1, RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND EQUALITY

“Turkey's reputation as a moderate, tolerant, and secular country is due in large measure to the oppressive and authoritarian manner in which the State monitors and controls religion” (05ANKARA6106).

Acting Deputy Department Spokesman Mark C. Toner was confronted during a briefing with a few members of the press, who chose to confront the State Department on its handling of human rights especially the current detention and treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning on April 11.

In a video of the briefing, Matt Lee, a reporter for the Associated Press, asks about “the annual ritualistic dance” of the State Department’s release of the Human Rights Report, which China immediately condemned. He wonders if the annual report, which he considers to be an “annual exchange of vitriol,” will have any constructive effects on the State Department's April 11 & 12 meetings with China.

Toner responds saying he doesn’t consider the annual exchange to be vitriolic at all. And adds, “We are candid in our exchanges with China about human rights concerns both from the podium and in our private meetings with them. And certainly, we don’t regard it as an interference in our internal affairs when any foreign government or individual organization monitors our human rights practices. And we are proud to say that our system of government allows for that kind of comment without fear or without fear of recrimination. And it speaks to the value of our system, we feel.”

Lee seizes on Toner’s answer to ask a canny follow-up question, “Can you explain why, if the United States is proud of its human rights record, that the UN special rapporteur has complained that you’re not allowing him independent access to Bradley Manning?”

The Washington Post published a cable days ago on Hamid al-Ahmar, Islah Party leader, well-known businessman and de facto leader of Hashid, Yemen’s largest tribal confederation. The cable suggests that al-Ahmar aimed to remove President Ali Abdullah Saleh from power unless he “guaranteed” there would be “fairness” in the 2011 parliamentary elections, a unity government formed with movement leaders from South Yemen, and removed his relatives from power by December 2009.

The cable from August 31, 2009, indicates Ahmar had plans for demonstrations that would rock Saleh’s regime:

Absent this fundamental shift in Saleh’s governance of the country, Ahmar will begin organizing anti-regime demonstrations in "every single governorate," modeled after the 1998 protests that helped topple Indonesian President Suharto. "We cannot copy the Indonesians exactly, but the idea is controlled chaos." Ahmar said he had conveyed his ultimatum to Saleh through Ahmar’s brothers (NFI) in early August, but had not yet received a response from the president or his inner circle.

Ahmar believes the country would be thrown into “complete chaos” without the support of the Saudi leadership and elements of Yemeni military particularly MG Ali Muhsin. Muhsin has joined the opposition and recently indicated support for a Gulf Cooperation Council initiative that would transfer power to the vice president. And, Saudi Arabia is playing a role as a key mediator in the conflict that continues to intensify in Yemen.

A National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR) put on by Free Press took place over the weekend. Thousands of attendees gathered to discuss the state of media and democracy in the US and how best to fight for better media. While the discussions tended to be general conversations on policy and politics, social justice and movement building, journalism and public media, the role of culture and art in media making, or technology and innovation, one subject was continuously mentioned in panel sessions: WikiLeaks.

It would be a stretch to suggest this if it weren’t for the fact that at the “Media and Corporate Power: Beating Back the K Street Juggernaut” panel The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel mentioned an individual in Russia, who has drawn inspiration from WikiLeaks, and now plans to publish corporate documents from Russia to his own “leak portal” website. Vanden Heuvel wondered why media reformers don’t get their own “leak portal” website established for the sole purpose of giving whistleblowers a place to turn and having a central location for Americans to see the truth about corporate power in the US. Following her remark, Bob Edgar of Common Cause thought it important to add the US should stop torturing or abusing the soldier alleged to have leaked information to WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning.

The panel had nothing to do with WikiLeaks except for the fact that the issue of corporate power and transparency is critical to the story of WikiLeaks. The organization’s commitment to exposing secrets makes the organization an enemy of corporations, especially any corporation that has a well-established relationship with the political class in Washington and has records to prove just how they mutually work together to subvert democracy.

An organization like Free Press may prefer to not elevate WikiLeaks or any stateless news organization like it too much by making it a component of their agenda. That is understandable given the fact that the Knight Foundation, prior to the release of the Iraq War Logs and the beginning of Cablegate, awarded twelve groups with a “News Challenge” grant but did not award WikiLeaks a grant despite the organization’s request to spend about a half a million dollars “over two years to bring its anonymous method of leaking documents to local newspapers.” But, no organization in the world has exposed the fault lines in media and democracy like WikiLeaks has in the past year.