The award is judged by a group of retired senior US military and intelligence personnel, and past winners. This year the award to Julian Assange was unanimous.
Previous winners and ceremony locations:
Coleen Rowley of the FBI; in Washington, D.C.
Katharine Gun of British intelligence; in Copenhagen, Denmark
Sibel Edmonds of the FBI; in Washington, D.C.
Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan; in New York City
Sam Provance, former sergeant, U.S. Army, truth-teller about Abu Ghraib; in Washington, D.C.
Frank Grevil, major, Danish army intelligence, imprisoned for giving the Danish press documents showing that Denmark’s prime minister disregarded warnings that there was no authentic evidence of WMDs in Iraq; in Copenhagen, Denmark
Larry Wilkerson, colonel, U.S. Army (retired), former chief of staff to Secretary Colin Powell at the State Department, who has exposed what he called the “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal”; in Washington, D.C.
http://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2010/08/15/can-wikileaks-help-save-lives/
Not sure yet where this year’s award ceremony will be held, but I’ll be there.
Fascinating writer:
http://www.peterdalescott.net/
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-kelly-murdered-yes-and-i-bet-you-believe-in-the-tooth-fairy-too-2017805.html
Interesting that Tom Mangold gets hauled out – again. Actually, while one is skeptical about the input of Pederson, she most certainly did not wait for seven years to come out with her allegations but has been saying similar things – in a consistent way – for seven years. No-one is suggesting that DK was abducted from his home. Mangold raises up a number of strawman arguments.
Quite simply, Mangold has been forcefully and publically arguing the suicide theory since the very day DK’s body was found – before anyone knew anything much at all.
he does not examine any of the criticisms of the suicide theory, not does he grapple with the statements made by eminent doctors and others casting doubt on the suicide hypothesis.
It’s quite clear that, in both tone and substance, this article is a piece of propaganda. This applies, I would suggest, whether or not one agrees with the suicide theory. Mangold’s article is inadequate and looks – reads – as though it’s been churned-out quickly, to order, on a Saturday afternoon, local tabloid-style. Hence the rather pathetic, ‘sting-in-the-tail’ tooth-fairy allusion.
Will I risk being sued now, for saying his article is propaganda and appears as though it was written ‘to order’?
Frank Gardner, Con Coughlan and Thomas Mangold – three-of-a-kind!
Roll up! Roll up! It’s the Francie, Connie and Tommy Show!
For those who like an occasional but very interesting read, try Mark Morford of the SF Chronicle… which I used to buy locally while living there 🙁
Just a couple of examples:
Damn you Muslims, get off my lawn:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/09/15/notes091510.DTL
Thank God global warming is a hoax:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/08/18/notes081810.DTL
The archives are not hard to find.
“Fascinating writer:
http://www.peterdalescott.net/”
A sharp and deep man.
You know, Suhayl, I wonder at The Independent sometimes. They’ve got that awful Howard Jacobson, bigot, sexist, racist, Zionist, pro-war, Israel-can-do-no-wrong boor, the slimy John Rentoul who _still_ can’t stop glorifying Blair and is baffled that anyone wouldn’t Blair’s life-sized portrait above the mantlepiece. Not content with them, they’ve now got that dreadful Julie Burchill on board. (Actually, I’m glad they put her unbecoming features on the cover as a warning, whenever they’re hosting her column, so one can buy The Guardian instead.)
Can anyone suggest a decent Sunday newspaper? The Observer is a shadow of its former self – Nick Cohen alone was a good enough reason to stop buying it. The IoS has long since gone to the dogs, or Janice Street-Porter anyway. I repeat myself. Both papers have gone from mostly good to excellent, to some good but mostly mediocre if not downright terrible.
But for a daily, I think The Guardian has the edge once more over The Independent.
I think the papers are stuffed with people from the intelligence services or people who for a fee put out propaganda when the need arises just as I believe Parliament is now stuffed with undeclared agents.
On the other hand, Vronsky (to resume the narrative of the CEO’s secretary), one may posit, in one’s naughtier moments, that silicon entanglement with Stuxnet is, for some, the passionate equivalent of a soiree with a mezzo-soprano.
I agree with Ruth, what little papers still inform opinion, are stuffed with misinformers and spin merchants.
Whatever we can glimpse of reality lies in the twilight of comments by people who know on blogs and on the comments pages of newspapers, as well as places like facebook and twitter.
But newspapers, not only due to economic reasons, do not like to be put on the spot, have the public telling them whats wrong on their fora, they do not like their prefered politicians/councils dragged into the limelight and exposed.
Here in Norwich the EDP has stopped their forum debates, only the Evening News now operates a forum that is currently made harder to access.
Stories like ‘shoddy work to reinstate Lutyens war memorial in Norwich City centre’, do not get scrutinised. Work is carried out by Carter, fined 3 milliona for fraud, and it took them a whole year to do the job, now they are racing to make rememberance day deadline by….
MIXING RED BRICKS WITH YELLOW LIMESTONE AAARRRGHHHH.
Basically they are not reinstating like for like on a grade 2 listed memorial, planners don’t give a flying …. and Archant news is just looking on to report the veterans first meeting there, nobody cares how it will look after all it nearly costs 4 million to do the work.
Another story past by the public is that South Norfolk DC has lost 700k this year in planning rows, i.e. their legal advisor is crab and nobody wants to tell us.
Another little snippet not many people know is that section 106 monies, of which some 90 billion is outstanding to councils nationwide, (a big chunck of the deficit innit?) are not enforcable because they do not appear in any legal register. Unless these works carried out under 106 are registered with the land register, they have no legal basis for mortgage protection, hence nobody can force developers to pay up, a massive hole.
Many 106 moneis have disappeared into black holes, free floating money that can be used at the behest of those we elect, something known for years, but continued.
Ingo,
I recently went to buy fish and chips. On the counter was our local paper, lamenting the cancellation of the new runway at Stanstead airport; “So-many thousand jobs… (etc)”. This made me mad. Opposition to the new runway is almost unanimous here. I held the headline up for the other customers, and asked “Who agrees with this? Does anyone here want another runway? Whose interests does this paper represent; ordinary people’s, or Big Money’s?”
Suhayl Saadi,
a virus, like any piece of computer code, is a human artifact. Far from interacting with “silicon”, I’m engaging with the work of other people, just as, if I read a novel, I’m engaging with the ideas of its author, rather than paper and ink.
Modern warfare has taken an interesting turn. Here on my hard disk I have a copy of an actual modern cyber-weapon, developed in the secret labs of the people that we oppose. Information wants to be free!
Good point, Clark – that’s an excellent way of putting it!
Ingo, systemic corruption on a massive scale, good post,
A slightly surreal typo here: “i.e. their legal advisor is crab…”
Really? I thought our co-blogger, crab was on the side of the angels (!)
There seems to be a similarity between security against terrorism and computer security. In each case, a large and profitable industry has been developed to counteract the threat, rather than facing or even admitting to the sources of the problems. In the case of terrorism, the primary motivators are Western foreign policies.
In computer security, the problem is the insecurity of the Windows operating system, which is itself a symptom of the failure of governments to effectively regulate the market, permitting Microsoft to achieve a monopoly and thus to have no incentive to make their system secure.
In each case, the focus of governments and the media is upon what can be done to counteract the symptoms, with barely a mention of the root causes.
I think the same argument applies in the cases of climate change, and health and medicine.
Clark,
What is the download link for the Stuxnet sample? Is it source code?
Thinking back to Glenn’s link to the Adbusters video:
https://www.adbusters.org/abtv/gross_domestic_product_gdp.html
“Every time Windows gets a virus, the GDP goes up. Every time the terrorist threat increases, the GDP goes up”.
Mark Golding,
no, it’s a RAR compressed file, password protected, containing the three files that an infected USB stick would contain. It’s just one version; there are more.
Mark Golding,
I’m not sure I should put a link to a virus up here. If anyone wants it, they can e-mail me.
I agree, Glen, Ruth and ingo you might as well read the Daily Star and get clued up on Suhayl’s ‘naughty moments’ with ‘bad girls who shock us!’ – Perhaps we need a ‘Press Newspaper’ because I get a more pragmatic and ‘unbrainwashed’ truth from Press TV News.
presstv.ir
You’re right there Mark. Apologies for my typo’s, in no way did I want to malign anybody on here or crack cheap jokes.
Interesting interview with Barenboim. He conducted a concert to commemorate the wall coming down in Berlin. At the interval he sat at the piano and played the slow movement from Mozart K330. Not a dry eye in the house.
http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2010/09/daniel-barenboim-music/
http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2010/09/daniel-barenboim-music/
That’s good reading. Thanks, Vronsky.
http://www.reddit.com/r
/worldnews/comments/dlvqa
/the_flotilla_attack_may_bring_major_consequences/
The redditor’s are discussing the illegality of the Israeli flotilla raid.
http://www.france24.com/en/20100928-icc-can-examine-aid-flotilla-case-un-expert
Reddit is the webs most prolific web news/link/curio review forum. It is not quite an ‘enlightened’ community, but i find the mobs chatter is encouragingly above the baseline anglo-american web opinion blurb.
Vronsky,
thanks for the link to that excellent interview.
Yes very cool site, “Index on Censorship : Too Much Information”
Richard Robinson,
output of ‘strings’, acting upon the three files you’d find on a Stuxnet infected USB stick. You won’t find that path string in here; it’s in one of the files Stuxnet creates when it infects Windows, and I haven’t got around to trying that yet.
http://www.killick1.plus.com/strings.zip
Richard Robinson,
that ZIP will give Windows a headache, as I’ve used filenames that differ only by upper and lower case characters. Please let me know when you’ve got it, so I can delete it from the server.
“Please let me know when you’ve got it”
… Sorry, I only just saw this – yes, thank you, I have it.
Looks fine on my Debian box 🙂
Not a lot you could build a good conspiracy-theory on, right enough … the binary-looking gunk in the big last one displays rather-better-than-random as autodetect/Russian in FireFox. It’s too late for coherent geeking. Good night.
Richard Robinson,
thanks for that. There is already a possible Russian connection. See the second paragraph of the section “Ralph’s theory — completely speculative from here” on Langner’s page:
http://langner.com/en/
I really have learned a lot from you.Thanks for sharing.
So many people have come to your blog.
This is interesting from PressTV:
‘Iraq’s Buratha news agency had earlier revealed documents indicating Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, who heads the Saudi National Security Council, appointed a new leader for the al-Qaeda cell operating in Iraq.
The prince, who some quarters allege has supported a number of regional terrorist groups, has reportedly chosen a militant leader identified as ‘Abu Suleiman’ as the new commander of al-Qaeda militants in Iraq.’
And yet Bander is best buddy with Bush and helped negotiate the Al Yamamah deal.
And again from infowars Ireland
‘Prince Bandar “Bush” Running, Equipping And Financing Terror Organizations In Iraq, Lebanon and Pakistan’