Around 8pmest every night
Wikileaks tweets ""Many new cables from around the world released http://wikileaks.ch/reldate/2011-02-18_0.html?x ."
Huge Bahranian cable dump
WL Central Bahrain protest "hub" just go to the link.
14 Journalists held at Bahrain airport from McClatchy, CBS, ABC, Reuters, Time, BBC, France24, Shimbun, Asahi TV, Fuji TV, ITN for 13 hours. Including McClatchy's Nancy Youssef. US embassy dispatching PAO to #bahrain airport to check on detained journalists. They received their visas after 16 hours, still being held.
Bahrain Helicopter shoots at Protesters and Journalists
Many cables on Libya
WL Central Libya hub
1:00 AM "benghazi is now like Cairo, where youth are organising traffic and guarding property" via @ShababLibya
1:00 AM "Mercenaries still walking the streets of Benghazi and scaring people, citizen committees being organized to protect people " via @ShababLibya
1:00 AM "TUNIS EGYPT and half of LIBYA are now free #Feb17 #Libya %100 confirmed" via @ShababLibya
1:00 AM "Aljazeera just confirmed over 100,000 demonstrators in #Benghazi, a city of 600,000" via @ShababLibya
1:00 AM "Mercenaries still walking the streets of Benghazi and scaring people, citizen committees being organized to protect people" via @libyanfsl
1:00 AM "again from fellow tweeter: mercenaries are entering homes of libyans while males are out #Libya #Feb17 (as expected city is now lawless)"
WL Central Kuwait hub
Youtube videos are posted of an estimated 1000 stateless Arabs protesting in Jahra, demanding citizenship. Police attacked with guns and water and reportedly arrested dozens.
WL Central Djibouti hub
WL Central w/ info on Syria
Update: All4Syria and Al Arabiya report that it was Syrian traffic police who beat up Imad Nasab, son of a shopowner in Hariqa, as stated on an opposition website on Friday. The 200 protesters blocked traffic for three hours until the interior minister came to the scene and arrested the policemen involved.
WL Central speculated three days ago, on the occasion of a Syrian court sentencing a teen blogger to five years in prison, that the patience Syrian president Bashar al-Assad so admired in his fellow citizens may soon wear thin. Assad escaped a scheduled day of rage on February 5, but today an extraordinary number of people objected to Syrian police beating Syrian citizen Emad Nasab.
WL Central Iraq hub
Sulaymaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan: They Killed the Protesters, They Killed the People
I almost got killed today as a bullet whizzed by my head, others were not that lucky, they got killed, they got wounded. What an age are we living in.
Today was the second day of the protest here in Sulaymaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan, thousands had gathered peacefully protesting in Bardarky Sara. There were thousands of Young Men, Old Men, Women and Children all gathered to raise their voice against corruption, lack of service and for change. It all started around 1 PM, there was a loudspeaker with people making speeches and slogans, thousands chanting. Made speech about solidarity with Egyptian and Tunisian Revolution. The mood was euphoric. They put on patriotic music and started to dance. Around 4 PM the speaker said that the people should all disappear and all peacefully go home, the Young Men started to chant “ناڕۆین، ناڕۆین” aka “We are not going, We are not going”. They started to march, from the square down the Mawlawy Street, bystanders started to join in, they went down the road, more join in, shouting “دەیگۆڕین، دەیگۆڕین” aka “We will Change it, We Will change it”. They went right into the front of section 4 of KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party) headquarter , they gathered around and chanted “چۆڵی كهن ئهو كورسییه میللهت ههموو برسییه” “Leave that chair, the Masses are hungry”. The guards inside the building and up on the roof were carrying guns (Pistol and Kalasehnkov, Machine Guns) looking down at the protesters, the roads on both way was blocked, cars stuck (passenger buses, taxi and private), soon all hell broke lose, the Young Men went to the opposite street in which a mega building is under construction, they kicked and punched the rails around it, took it apart and then picking up rocks and started to throw it at the building of PDK, one after another the windows started to break and fall as the crowds roared with chants and applaud.
Librarians react to Wikileaks
I always said that librarians were the most sneaky of revolutionaries after dolphins.
What you missed in Informationthread 62
Ex-W. Bush aide Matthew Dowd with a Dec. 2nd article on Wikileaks
Jake Tapper: A Wikileaks Primer on the Cozy US-Bahrain Relationship
The Forgotten Man: Bradley Manning (2011) 1/3
The Forgotten Man: Bradley Manning (2011) 2/3
The Forgotten Man: Bradley Manning (2011) 3/3
What you missed in Informationthread 61
Stars and Stripes : A threat to press and academic freedom
Stars and Stripes’ promised right to gather and present information “without news management or censorship” is being imperiled by the government anew, this time with a suffocating policy that intrudes not only on the newsroom but on classrooms nationwide.
In December, as part of a White House effort to tighten data security after the WikiLeaks disclosures, federal agencies and the military issued advisories on the handling of classified information. The Pentagon entity that incorporates Stars and Stripes, Defense Media Activity, did so on Dec. 10.
But after this column pointed out conflicts with the guarantees of editorial independence and press freedoms in Stars and Stripes’ charter, Department of Defense Directive 5122.11, the DMA withdrew it.
Now, the Pentagon has issued new restrictions more troubling in some respects than those they replaced.
The DoD should have tailored a policy to Stars and Stripes’ unique standing as a government-owned news organization that is nonetheless guaranteed the right to operate free of official influence or interference. Instead, the Pentagon took a one-size-fits-all approach and applied department-wide guidelines to the newspaper.
And those go beyond the concerns raised by WikiLeaks, effectively threatening punitive action against anyone who is in or aspires to federal service and lacks clearance to “access classified information” in the public domain in any form.
That would include even historical documents like the 40-year-old Pentagon Papers.
...
While the advisory was clearly sparked by WikiLeaks and elsewhere emphasizes concern over unsecured government or personal computers accessing and storing leaked information, its language and effect are far more sweeping.
John Prados, a senior research fellow at George Washington University’s National Security Archive and a recognized authority on Vietnam and national security issues, warns on his blog that if the government’s new WikiLeaks-inspired “standard holds true, government employees should not be allowed to read (or reference, or cite) the Pentagon Papers either.”
I asked Army Cadet Command, which oversees ROTC programs, what a cadet should do if assigned a reading from the Pentagon Papers. I was told that that scenario had not been discussed but that a student might ask the campus ROTC commander to intervene with the professor in search of an alternative.
At the Pentagon, a senior press spokesman, Col. Dave Lapan, said he was “not going to get into hypothetical scenarios,” but that “I would hope that service members and DoD employees wouldn't be given academic assignments requiring them to break the law.”
“Military students or those in the categories you describe are prohibited from accessing classified materials from unclassified government computers; this would include classified portions of the Pentagon Papers,” he wrote me. “There are ways to write about the Pentagon Papers without using government computers to access the classified portions.”
But the advisory does not confine itself to “government computers.” Lapan did not reply to a follow-up query seeking clarification.
John Prado: Can Government Employees Read the Pentagon Papers?
What you missed in Informationthread 60
Glenn Greenwald on Ratigan's radio show today with transcript
Brad Friedman on being targeted by the idiots
Alan Dershowitz on Parker Spitzer discussing Wikileaks/Julian Assange and his decision to become a legal advisor for them
WLCentral with review on what the cables have shown about Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere in the region