Today, Amy Goodman of Democracynow! spends the hour with Julian Assange.

The White House continues their dismissal strategy, saying there’s nothing new.   But my own thoughts, which were echoed by Julian this morning, is how this is about more than a few specific incidents of horror. It’s about the vast amount of abuses evident over the six years of data.   It’s concrete evidence that this war is inflicting terrorism on the every day lives of the Afghanistan people.   And if the WH is willing to admit there’s nothing new in here, than what the hell are we, the people, waiting for? Let’s end this war!

What I find really interesting, is how on the one hand, the WH goes on about how it’s old news, nothing new.  But on the other hand, they’re saying how irresponsible this was and how it could endanger the lives of the soldiers on the ground.  Which one is it then?

One interesting thing Julian specifies in his interview, is how they’re not anti-war activists, they’re “Transparency Activists”.  The idea being, transparent governments leads to just governments.  And I can agree with that,  but that depends on the people using this transparency and holding the government accountable.  And that’s where the rub is, because then we’re back to figuring out how to make people care.

On a last unrelated note, I was just reading about the Congo the other day… Over 5 million “excess deaths” in the last 10 years. “Excess”  meaning an amount outside the acceptable amount during a conflict.  The weapons used are horrific, most prominently being massive sexual violence…

Another world is possible… it echoes in my head.

Another world is necessary… burned into my heart.

I’m going to write a more detailed post on the situation in the Congo, but I’m not done researching it.

I spent the morning with Michael Moore talking with Juan and Amy of Democracynow! It was a really good conversation.

I just—I think that there’s so much good that we could do. You know, if you travel the world, you know that people like us as people, as individuals. There’s something charming about our naïveté and our, you know, right? I mean, you know, “Hey! Hey! How ya doin’! Hey, yeah! I’m from Detroit! Yeah!” They could spot us coming. But I think we’re capable of a lot of good. And when you have a billion people on this planet that tonight cannot drink a cup of clean water, two billion who don’t have clean sanitation, what if we used our money to do that? I read this crazy statistic—and I have not fact-checked this, I’ll just throw this out there—but it was something like, for $15 billion or something like that, we could dig so many—x number of wells in the third world that would greatly reduce that number of how many people don’t have clean water. And I’m thinking, $15 billion is what we’ve been spending almost most every month on Iraq and Afghanistan. So, one month of the killing machine could give clean water to virtually all the people that don’t have it? Wouldn’t you rather be known as, you know, a citizen of a country that a child 10,000 miles away, while growing up, drinking clean water, saw that plaque on that well that said, “Brought to you from your friends in the United States of America”? That’s how I’d like to be known.

In light of the recent witch hunt against Helen Thomas, I’ve been thinking a lot about hypocrisy lately. I’ve been thinking about what people can and can not say.

How can we accept Rand Paul, an elected official talking about how he would have fought against the civil rights act that granted all people equal rights? And how can we have a journalist talking about how businesses have the right to discriminate and be racist and it barely breaks the media sound barrier?

How can we accept Fox News at all? And the racist, sexist and homophobic likes of Glen Beck/Sarah Palin/Bill O’Reily and so on?

How can we have an ex-president of the United States opening talk about the use of torture in an un-apologetic way, stating he would use it again and I only saw it on a few news site? He calls it a “dunk in the water”.  I’d love to see someone water board Bush and then we’ll see if he can talk about it in such a glib manner.

How can we live in a world where a Prince of England can make racist and homophobic comments and at worst, get sent to a “diversity camp”?

On May 4th, Democracynow! had an exlusive interview with Jeremy Scahill, who obtained a rare audio recording of a recent, private speech delivered by Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater, to a friendly audience in January.

The audio also reveals Prince at his best, offering himself up as a cultural imperialist. When asked if he ever worried about not having protection under the Geneva convention, Prince replied: “Absolutely not, because these people, they crawled out of the sewer and they have a 1200 AD mentality. They’re barbarians. They don’t even know where Geneva is, let alone that there was a convention there.”

And nothing has come of these recordings. In fact, this story received the least amount of press of any of the incidents I’ve linked above.

All of these are just a few small examples of the kind of disgusting hypocrisy that exists. These hateful men and women can cry “free speech” and incite hatred and violence at will, but an 89 year old women with a career spanning decades in which she was the very example of journalistic integrity can’t share her thoughts? For her comments she deserves to be smeared and her life long work dismissed?

I’m not condoning what she said, but neither am I judging her. I’ve spent less than a year fully immersed in the news informing myself about the situation in the middle east and I get so worked up I can barely stomach the Israeli Propaganda machine so apparent in the main stream media. After 60 years of watching this happen, and alone standing against the darkness searching for truth, can you really blame her? The whole of Israel didn’t even exist when she was born. It was a country called Palestine. And over the last 60 years it has been taken over and the original inhabitants violently uprooted. And that is fact. That’s not me being anti-semitic. That’s the truth.

I’m surprised at how many people are not aware of how Israel came to be. I meet a lot of people and in discussion, their knowledge of the situation somehow begins with Arabs attacking the Jewish State. I show this map to people, and i can see them looking at it in confusion. How did the little the colors completely flip?

I look at this map… and I can’t understand how they world thought it was ok to give a whole country away to a group of different people. And not only that, but to leave the occupiers in charge of the remaining inhabitants to use them, and abuse them and take everything they have.

If any other group of religious people, Wiccan’s for example, wanted to move to a piece of land dear to them, (let’s say Scotland for example), kick out all the original inhabitants, create their own state and then violently occupy the rest, the world would freak out. Just reading that sentence is laughable. No one would even seriously consider the example. But that is exactly what happened here.

What is with the iron clad grip that Israel holds on the world? And isn’t it about time we start questioning it?