Activists behind a website dedicated to revealing secret documents have complained of harassment by police and intelligence services as they prepare to release a video showing an American attack in which 97 civilians were killed in Afghanistan.
Julian Assange, one of the founders of Wikileaks, has claimed that a restaurant where the group met in Reykjavic, the capital of Iceland, came under surveillance in March and one of the group's volunteers was detained for 21 hours by police.
Assange, an Australian, says he was followed on a flight from Reykjavik to Copenhagen by two American agents. The group has riled governments by publishing documents leaked by whistleblowers.
Last week it released the cockpit recording from an American Apache helicopter as it killed Iraqi civilians, including a Reuters photographer, in Baghdad in 2007.
Assange claims surveillance has intensified as he and his colleagues prepare to put out their Afghan film. It is said to concern the so-called “Granai massacre”, when American aircraft dropped 500lb and 1,000lb bombs on a suspected militant compound in Farah province on May 4 last year. Several children were among those killed.
In messages on Twitter, the internet social networking site, Assange complained of “covert following and hidden photography” by police and foreign intelligence services. There have been thinly veiled threats, he says, from “an apparent British intelligence agent” in a car park in Luxembourg.
“Computers were also seized,” another member of Wikileaks said on Twitter, raising alarm among supporters with a subsequent post: “If anything happens to us, you know why ... and you know who is responsible.”
Their apprehension is perhaps understandable. America's defence establishment has made clear that it would like to silence the site. In 2008, the Pentagon produced a report on how to undermine and neutralise Wikileaks. This, too, emerged on the website.
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Monday, April 12, 2010
Whistleblowers on US ‘massacre’ fear CIA stalkers
Top Polish leaders opposing euro and swine flu vaccines wiped out in mysterious plane crash
According to media, authorities are handling the deaths of top Polish political, military and economic leaders in a plane crash in the western Russian city of Smolensk on Saturday as an accident.
But a day after the crash, many unanswered questions surround the event.
Polskaweb has said that an assassination cannot be ruled out.
There are many reasons to dismiss the official story of how Poland's president, all of Poland's top army chiefs, the central bank governor and secret service chief died as a cover-up of massive proportions.
According to the mainstream media, the Polish delegation was flying from Warsaw to Smolensk to mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre of thousands of Poles by Soviet secret service during the second world war.
But the official ceremony marking the Katyn anniversary was held earlier in the week on Wednesday and attended by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Russian head of state Vladimir Putin.
The Polish President Lech Kaczynski was not invited.
How come Presidnt Kaczynski and half of Poland's government flew to Katyn three days after the official anniversary?
Why did100 figures who are vital for the day-to-day functioning of the Polish government go to a relatively insignificant ceremony, and not to the main one?
What reason could there be for the Polish central bank governor to fly to Katyn to attend the ceremony?
Why did the 100 top Polish leaders all fly on the same plane?
How could security protocols that require that even a president and his deputy fly separately be so relaxed that so many key people needed to run the Polish government from day to day are allowed to fly on the same plane?
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Saturday, April 10, 2010
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity, fulfillment and flow
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow."
http://www.ted.com
image from http://www.spitting-image.net
