Icelandic MP Claims US Vendetta Against WikiLeaks 227
Stirling Newberry writes "Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir details more of the evidence for what she calls a 'judicial vendetta' against WikiLeaks and its volunteers, including attempts to gain access to her Twitter account. Her efforts to block the National Defense Authorization Act were discussed here previously. The story was taken up last year by Glenn Greenwald and Wired. As a result, the International Parliamentarian Union adopted a resolution on her case. What's new? She asserts that there is a grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks and related organizations, and is calling on Sweden to provide assurances that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange not be re-extradited to the U.S. She says, 'There is no doubt that the U.S. wants to get even with WikiLeaks.'"
Re:seriously, the USA is just making a martyr (Score:1, Informative)
And what exactly has he revealed? Only 6% of the leaked documents were classified as secret and usually for good reasons. Meanwhile Manning will be in jail probably for the rest of his life, and Assange will be made an example of sooner or later. Martyr?! That's a joke.
Re:Rome (Score:3, Informative)
That's an interesting alternative history of the fall of the Roman Empire. What science fiction book is it from?
Re:Rome (Score:4, Informative)
Weird, I didn't know "the rest of the world will get tired of being bullied [...] and stand up" was synonymous with "fragment under it's own mass and economically stagnate when a system hinged on continual expansion and conquest is halted, eventually being broken by displaced tribes to the north who were themselves being pushed out by a stronger expansionistic empire, although one major fragment survived for hundreds more years before finally being conquered by yet another expansionistic empire".
Re:seriously, the USA is just making a martyr (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit. (Score:0, Informative)
Libya was a CIA-led coup. Case closed.
Egypt, the jury is still out on that.
Syria? You bet your ass we've been arming the rebels, just like in Libya.
Iran, Panama, Guatemala, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. We have a long history of doing this and many times are successful.
And guess what, now we've taken the Iranian MFK off the terrorist watch list, because they want our support to take out the new Iranian government (which the MFK did with a great amount of lobbying and pressure of US lawmakers).
It's far easier to secretly arm an opposing faction and let a country's citizens kill each other than bring in our own troops. We simply don't give a shit, and anything that the side we oppose does, we make sure to get those atrocities televised ASAP.
Re:seriously, the USA is just making a martyr (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The UK lower court found, and the high court upheld, that all four counts would be illegal even under *British* law. And the accusations aren't at all like you present them [guardian.co.uk].
Re:seriously, the USA is just making a martyr (Score:2, Informative)
Horribly misleading graph. It makes it look like the US is super-popular when in fact the US simply has a higher positive/negative response rate than other countries. The net positives for each country are actually:
Germany: 23% with 62% responding
US: 22% with 79% responding
Japan: 18% with 62% responding
France: 17% with 61% responding
UK: 12% with 64% responding
China: 4% with 77% responding
Russia: -4% with 77% responding
If we scale that up to a standard 100% baseline we get, in order:
Germany: 37%
Japan: 29%
France: 28%
US: 28%
UK: 19%
China: 5%
Russia: -5%
Of "western nations", the US has gone up from "awful" to "below the middle of the pack". Of course people clearly prefer the US to Russia and China, which nobody should find as a shock.