Assange Handed Sydney Peace Medal 199
hihihihi writes "WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been awarded the Sydney Peace Foundation's Gold Medal for 'exceptional courage in the pursuit of human rights.' It is only the fourth time in the organization's 14-year history that the prize for extraordinary achievement in promoting peace with justice has been given out. Previous winners are Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Japanese Buddhist leader Daisaku Ikeda. Foundation director Professor Stuart Rees accused the Australian government of demonizing Mr Assange and aiding US efforts to behave like a totalitarian state."
Re:Awarding the idea (Score:3, Informative)
Showing how great of pains the US government goes through to prevent us from learning that their military doesn't live up to their propaganda.
Articles about revelations (Score:5, Informative)
what has been released that has been worth all the hub-bub?
Here's an article listing some of the revelations from 2010 [cbsnews.com].
Re:must be a (Score:0, Informative)
Lol, you pathetic antisemite. Just remember next time you look in the mirror, it is the Jews that achieve over 30% of Nobel Prizes, Field Medals, Chess Masters, and Best Writers. Every piece of technology, from quantum mechanics needed in advanced computing (Richard Feynman), to the actual computing architecture (Jon Von Neumann), to the relativity (Einstein) without which there is no space travel, there is no GPS, there would not even be a safe way to do standard air travel, all of this is created by the Jewish race, and never yours, even though the Jews only compose less than 0.3% of the earth's population. Neither you, nor your pathetic offspring, will ever have the genetics to accomplish even a 1/1000th of the great things the Jews have accomplished in this world. You are disgusting, you are not even a man.
Re:Awarding the idea (Score:5, Informative)
That said, I really liked reading about US diplomats opinions of French racial issues. Or Yemen's attempts to take credit for US actions. Stuff like that is really fun to read.
Re:Hateful and Evil Organization (Score:3, Informative)
So you're saying Israel is a repressive regime? Do you know anything about the Middle East or the world for that matter? I bet you view Israel as a far greater problem area than Syria, but Syria is the one that has a repressive regime. Israel has a Democracy with citizens of all religions. Homosexuals can walk the streets holding their lover's hand without getting stoned to death. Christians don't run in terror from angry mobs, expect in the West Bank and Gaza. What an unusual repressive regime.
Re:Awarding the idea (Score:3, Informative)
And if you think every other government doesn't do exactly the same thing, then you're a fucking retard.
True, but consider that Bush quite freely admits that God told him to invade Iraq and that it was a holy crusade. Shame God couldn't also tell him there were no WMD there. The fact that a Country with frequently elects religious fundamentalist presidents who genuinely believe invisible men are telling them to invade other nations, also has enough nuclear weapons to extinguish all life on the planet. Yes this deserves some serious scrutiny and a man willing to risk his freedom and his life exposing the dirty things their military and global corporations get up to does actually deserve some kind of recommendation.
Now read through this staggeringly long list of military engagements and consider how many of them were necessary :-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations#2000.E2.80.932009 [wikipedia.org]
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bush-god-told-me-to-invade-iraq-509925.html [independent.co.uk]
Re:yes (Score:5, Informative)
That's because whilst America screams about free speech, justice, liberty and so forth the only thing America really actually stands for is hypocrisy.
- Condemning countries who torture whilst torturing
- Screaming about justice and liberty whilst performing detention without trial, extraordinary rendition, and having a long history of assassinations
- Fining foreign firms for dodgy dealings whilst turning a blind eye to it's own
- Touting the importants of the WTO and how everyone should join it and adhere to it's rulings whilst ignoring rulings by the WTO against it
- Putting free speech at the centre of everything America claims to be about, whilst trying to silence the likes of Wikileaks
- Talking about peace, whilst being the largest warmonger of the last 50 years
- Complaining about terrorism whilst having a long history of having funded terrorists
- Patriotic talk of how their military is the greatest, and making fun of countries like France for their military history, whilst having lost or at least definitely failed to win pretty almost every major war or military incursion they've been involved in since World War II (e.g. Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq x2, Afghanistan)
- Talk about how China should stop polluting despite the fact China has far more investment, a far bigger programme, and a far better ratio of renewable energy use than the US and a third of oil use despite having over 4 times the population
Really, the list goes on, the case with Assange and American attempts to supress Wikileaks is just one of many examples of American hypocrisy lost in a sea of such problems. Americans fear the rise of China, India and so forth and talk of how dangerous the rise of these countries are, when really, the only thing that's causing the decline of the US is it's own complete and utter hypocrisy and the knock on effects of that.
Re:Manning? (Score:4, Informative)
Assange won't even go to Sweden to face the charges for sex-crimes (not even after being assured he will not be sent to any other country without britains concent (sic) ).
There are no charges.
Re:Awarding the idea (Score:5, Informative)
The Iraq war documents exposed that the number of civilians killed had been downplayed by the US military. If we are going to safeguard human rights, we first need to know the truth.
The "Cablegate" documents showed that my own country's toughened copyright legislation was due to pressures from the USA.
One of Wikileaks' most recent leaks exposed child slavery and prostitution in Saudi Arabia, which the Saudian government denies exists.
Re:Swedish Court System - A medieval political cir (Score:5, Informative)
I'm Swedish and this is 100% accurate, +100 Insightful. The Swedish justice system is a huge embarrassment and completely broken. Hopefully this case will shed some light on it so it can be fixed.
You also forgot to mention two other interesting facts of Claes Borgström, both of which you can find in his Wikipedia article [wikimedia.org]. First of all he was the attorney of Thomas Quick, a case that is one of the biggest scandals in Swedish justice history. Basically Quick was mental and admitted to a whole bunch of murders he never committed and was sentenced guilty without a shred of evidence. Secondly Claes Borgström is an extreme left wing feminist nutjob that thinks men has a "collective guilt" against women and should pay a special tax for being men.