More blood for Julian Assange

Terry Glavin December 28, 2010 – 10:03 am

1. Zimbabwe’s attorney general plans to set up a commission to investigate possible treason charges against locals over briefings with U.S. diplomats that are part of confidential State Department cables released by WikiLeaks.

2. The Cuban regime is selectively translating cables that detail meetings between independent Cuban bloggers with officials from the U.S. diplomatic mission in Cuba in an attempt to show that U.S. officials “organize youth networks to subvert the Cuban Revolution.”

3. In the Belarus police state, Wikileaks’ official “gatekeeper” – a holocaust-denying antisemite who goes by the name “Israel Shamir” – met with government apparatchiks after claiming to be in possession of never-before-seen documents proving ties between Belarussian opposition democrats and the U.S. government. Since last Sunday’s so-called election, Belarussian strongman Alexander Lukashenko has arrested 600 opposition supporters and journalists (the fate of several of the dictator’s high-profile opponents are unknown), and he is now vowing to publish the Wikileaks documents in a government propaganda sheet.

4. These revelations follows Assange’s flippant response to the urgent pleadings of Amnesty International, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, the Open Society Institute, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and the Kabul office of the International Crisis Group, who begged Assange to redact the names of Afghan workers and activists WikiLeaks was threatening to expose in its Afghanistan war cables. Assange’s warning to human rights activists if they continued their protests: “I shall issue a press release.”

National Post

Journalist, author and blogger Terry Glavin is an adjunct professor of creative writing at the University of British Columbia and editor of Transmontanus Books. He was awarded the 2009 B.C. Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.

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