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Alexandria

Whistleblowing is bad.

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Here's a question to put to the warmongers in the White House: is whistleblowing risky if everything you're doing is above board and ethical?

Precisely. The only thing whistleblowers do is expose corrupt governments. Yours is one of the most corrupt. Your attempt to clamp down on whistleblowers is yet another oppressive policy intended to keep your dirty dealings - your earlier oppressive policies - secret.

What happened to 'government of the people, by the people, for the people'? You heard that one? Oh yes you have. You just don't give a shit anymore. Not when there's so much money at stake. Not when there's so much prestige at stake. And Oval Office egos dwarf that Deutsches Luftschiff Zeppelin D-LZ 127 by comparison.

Alexandria is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia. As of 2009 the city had a total population of 139,966. Located along the western bank of the Potomac River, Alexandria is approximately 6 miles (9.6 kilometers) south of downtown Washington DC.

According to the 2009 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the top employers in the city are the following.

Alexandria is also where a grand jury will convene on Thursday. The goal of this charade is to find a way to prosecute someone not even in the US.

80+%

Recent polls show a global approval rating for WikiLeaks of over 80%. Except in the US. There it's about half. Certainly the corrupt government of Barry 'Okey Dokey' Obama got a lot of flak because of leaks but what about the governments and the peoples of the northern African states on the Med? They were glad to find out how corrupt their governments were. They're amongst the most supportive.

But not in the US. Where people are lulled into a sleep-like state, where turnouts at elections hover around 50%, where most people can't even locate foreign countries on a map. It's all about football and basketball and baseball and Amerikan Idol and now X Factor and yes please let's try to take away Cheryl Cole's Geordie accent and wipe away that sweetness the Brits so love. Because sweet and kind and caring don't sell in the militaristic US. Over there you gotta wave the flag and collect guns and kill things. Tap into that mentality and you can (and will) make millions.

And hey - let's assassinate Julian Assange! OK so it's possibly illegal? No worries - we'll do it anyway in a sort of legal illegal way. Or better yet - kidnap his son. Then we're sure to get him. March onward good christians of the Dysfunctional States of Amerika.

Things wouldn't be so bad if the country hadn't had such visionary leaders and thinkers once upon a time. But that's hundreds of years ago now. It's so far back in history it probably happened in Europe.

The situation is not unlike Germany of the 1930s: concentration of power in the White House beyond constitutional control coupled with collusion of the thoroughly corrupt financial sector. We all know what happened in the 1940s - at least people not subjected to the US school system know - so what can we expect of this Barry Hussein 'Okey Dokey' Obama government? They're already the most oppressive junta ever over there. And this from a presidential candidate who promised unparalleled transparency and even made fun of governments that weren't transparent.

So far Okey Dokey's come down on Stephen Kim of the state department, CIA operative Jeffrey Sterling, NSA analyst Thomas Drake, and FBI translator Shamai Leibowitz who unbelievably enough pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison. This for exposing corruption in the government.

Some people don't think it's all that bad. 'Other than the media, who are willing recipients of this material, there's not a constituency out there who basically is outraged when you go after a leaker', says Abbe Lowell. But Lowell is wrong. He's wrong when people in the US see the leaks not as a way to expose governments who've betrayed them but as an attack on their global supremacy.

Harry Truman gave one single press release after the US murdered 200,000 people in Hiroshima. It's a military base, he said. And they were done with it. Obama's however been skiing slalom through all his bungling lies about Abbottabad and he can't seem to get his story straight. The people in the DSA don't need more hints than that: Barry trying to find the winning lie and failing miserably every time.

This same 'Okey Dokey' president flew to Oslo Norway to accept the tribute of the Nobel Peace Prize even as he escalated another in a long line of wars of aggression and shoved off an additional 30,000 grunts to killing fields.

Does that leave an impression on the people in the US? Hardly. They congregate outside 1600 and cheer the murder of someone in a place so far away they can't even find it on a map. The final scenes of 1984 come to mind. But Winston Smith and Julia had to be tortured to conform; the people in the US are much much easier to fool.

It's militaristic from the get-go. Everything is about the manifest destiny to rule the entire planet and damn the others. The kind of mentality that says 'might makes right' and that a government and its secret TLAs can commit any crime in the name of their increasingly obese citizenry. Keep 'em well fed. Give 'em lots of dead animal to eat. Grease and carcass. Keep 'em asleep.

And now a number of anonymous faceless mindless nobodies with no clue about anything on the face of the earth but with a strong sense of obedience towards the Man will take their places as automatons in the silliest proceeding ever. How exactly do you hold someone in another country accountable? The very thought is imperialistic in nature. The very thought says 'you shall do things our way, buy our products, live our way too - or else we kick the shit out of you'.

And it works. Have a read of the embassy cables - especially those from Stockholm - and you'll see. There's a tyrant breathing fire like a dragon and it's trying to slay the St George out to get it.

And now the election is won and the cool dude gets to wear the Air Force One jacket, the tune changes completely. Whistleblowing is no longer good. It was damned good during the campaign. It was damned good because everybody understands that whistleblowing is good.

Support for whistleblowing is a good campaign promise. Like that Okey Dokey about meeting enemies over a cup of tea without the traditional protocols, sabre rattling, and ruffling of feathers. It sure works better than telling them you're going to commit another act of aggression against a sovereign country to murder someone. Or that you're going to issue an Imperial Decree that you can murder anyone at any time - even your own people - without question or insight.

This is Germany in the 1930s. But actually it's worse. Because today we already have Germany of the 1930s in the rear view mirror and we should know better. And yes we outside that 'more perfect union' do so 'get it' and we see what's happening in the name of open government and democracy. And we can't figure out why those sleeping fat-arsed zombies over there don't.

I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes. Because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable.
- Barack Hussein Obama, former US president