Vagabond Journalist

Wikileaks scandal exposes anti-American agenda of the police state

By Charles Douglas
Humboldt Sentinel

This is Charles Douglas from HumboldtSentinel.com with a special commentary for Access Humboldt viewers on Freedom of Information Day.

This day, of course, was chosen to coincide with the birthday of James Madison, widely regarded as the father of the Constitution. While Madison deserves credit for establishing the separation of powers essential to our system of limited government, one quote from his voluminous writing does stand out: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.”

So when we talk about freedom of information, just like when we talk about freedom of the press, we must realize that this freedom is exercised primarily by those who own the means of production. In other words, your access to information is very dependent on your government watchdogs and your media institutions doing their job, not just to act independent but to be independent.

But have you heard of the Copley decision? Not if you rely on the local establishment media for your news. It was right here in California, and in it the court stated that the public does not have the ability to learn about misconduct committed by individual police officers. This effectively guts the ability of citizen police review boards to actually uncover the abuses they were established to combat.

How about Fusion Centers, have you ever heard of them? Again, not if you rely on the local establishment media for your news. Just so you know, we have one in this state, down in Sacramento, and in fact they’ve been established all across the country, thanks to one of the first pieces of legislation adopted by Congress after it was captured by representatives of the Democratic Party. These fusion centers turn every state police trooper and every local beat cop into intelligence gatherers for Homeland Security. Every contact, every arrest, every factoid gathered is fed into this federal matrix; what’s more, the FBI is signing agreements with the various states to exempt these intelligence gathering networks from the public records access laws.

The Internet revolution is breaking down the walls of censorship and bias built up by the establishment media, and toppling the domination of our information systems by what again our founding father James Madison called the “minority of the opulent.” So I’m sure many of you have heard of Wikileaks, which has disclosed countless secret government documents from many local, state and national governments. Well, the Army Counterintelligence Center has heard of it too.

In a recent report, ironically leaked on Wikileaks.org, they characterize Wikileaks as “a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security and information security threat to the US Army….such information could be of value to foreign insurgents and foreign terrorist groups for collecting information or for planning attacks against US forces.” The US Army report goes on to call for wiping out the rights of individual citizens (you and me) to provide information to Wikileaks, and to go further, to hunt us down and to prosecute us for revealing state secrets.

The Pentagon considers the Internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system. That’s not my opinion, that’s from another declassified document released to the National Security Archive at George Washington University under the Freedom of Information Act. And you know what, maybe they’re right. The Internet presents a grave and dire threat to the monopoly of the establishment media, and the rise of community media like Access Humboldt, of independent websites like HumboldtSentinel.com and of international new media phenomena like WikiLeaks presents the growing menace of exposure for the war profiteers, the bailed-out banksters and the rest of the culture of corruption suffocating the freedoms of the American people and of people worldwide.

On this Freedom of Information Day, I urge you to support your alternative media locally and globally and to support Access Humboldt in its mission of empowering this community with the means to create its own authentic and local culture of honesty and free expression.