http://english.aljazeera.net/...
Swedish prosecutors have cancelled an arrest warrant issued for Julian Assange, the founder of controversial whistleblower website Wikileaks.
The warrant was issued following a sexual assault complaint against him.
But on Saturday night, as international media outlets were beginning to pick up the story, Eva Finne, Sweden's chief prosecutor, announced that Assange was no longer wanted.
There's already been multiple diaries about the suspect accusations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Despite the Obama Administration declaring itself to be the most transparent in American history, Obama has gone after whistleblowers hard. Services like that provided by Assange's organization are invaluable. They keep the citizens of the world informed of the shit that is going down, the shit that people in power don't want us to see.
Assange's organization leaked documents have revealed the atrocities committed by American soldiers. These leaks have also shown, much like the Pentagon Papers 40 years earlier, that the war has been falsely portrayed by the Generals and Obama.
Daniel Ellsberg has been on Democracynow many times to share his analysis. He has said that Obama is deceiving the American public about the "progress" in and rationale for occupying Afghanistan.
Over a decade ago, Ellsberg spoke with Harry Kriesler about his experiences:
There is also an excellent documentary that has recently been released called The Most Dangerous Man In America.
Assange is doing a valuable service.
Wallace Shawn wrote in his collection Essays
Our enormous country is really a tiny principality, in which our leaders loom gigantically large in the quiet green landscape. Here in our country, our sky is actually not a sky, it's a specially designed impenetrable dome, and inside it we're calmed by soothing music and soothing voices. Every morning we're given our New York Times, which teaches us to see our leaders "as people." Our newspaper helps us to get to know our leaders, their quirks, their personalities, helps us really to identify with them. I understand their problems, what they're trying to do, how difficult it is. And I share a life with them—-at least I share the essential things: a climate sweetened by electricity, warm in winter, cool in summer; armchairs, bathrobes, well-made boots, pleasant restaurants. Just like our leaders, I like the old songs of Frank Sinatra, I like to watch Julia Roberts in the movies, I like driving quietly through the fall foliage in New England, I like lemon meringue pie and banana splits. Our leaders share my life, and they've made my life. I have my life because of them. Can that be denied? Is my life of pasta and pastries and books and concerts not based on the United States being the mighty nation they insist it should be?
...
In school we were taught various terms to characterize political systems—-"oligarchy," "autocracy," "democracy." What is our system? No term for it exists. To call it a democracy seems so wrong. How can you call it a democracy when, for example, still today the public is not aware that in 1991 the first President Bush circumvented quite plausible opportunities to avoid war with Iraq? Yes, we're allowed to vote for our leaders, but we're not allowed to know what they're like, because we're not allowed to know what they do. The enormous enterprises of the government are conducted sometimes for the benefit of certain citizens, maybe even sometimes for the benefit of all of them, but the citizens don't even know what the government is doing, much less who the beneficiaries are. The citizens can hardly be expected to have intelligent opinions on the government's decisions, because the citizens don't know what's actually going on, and they can't find out. At the appropriate moments, we're brought in to cheer, but we've never been told what actually happened.
...
In fact, the dispassionate tone of the "debate" about Iraq in the New York Times and on every television screen seems psychotically remote from the reality of what will happen if war actually occurs. We are talking about raining death down on human beings, about thousands and thousands of howling wounded human beings, dismembered corpses in pools of blood. Is this one of the "lessons of Vietnam" that people have learned—that the immorality of this unspeakable murdering must never be mentioned? That the discussion of murder must never mention murder, and that even the critics of murder must always criticize it because it is not in the end in our own best interest? Must the critics always say that the murders would come at too high a price for us, would be too expensive, would unbalance our budget, hurt our economy, cause us to spend less on domestic priorities; that it would lose us our friends, create enemies for us? Can we never say that this butchering of human beings is horrifying and wrong?