SAN FRANCISCO – The University of California, Davis is facing a federal lawsuit filed by students who were pepper-sprayed during a campus crackdown on Occupy protests last fall.

Nineteen students and alumni represented by the American Civil Liberties Union filed the complaint in U.S. District Court in Sacramento on Wednesday.

The [...]]]> (CBS/AP) 

SAN FRANCISCO – The University of California, Davis is facing a federal lawsuit filed by students who were pepper-sprayed during a campus crackdown on Occupy protests last fall.

Nineteen students and alumni represented by the American Civil Liberties Union filed the complaint in U.S. District Court in Sacramento on Wednesday.

The lawsuit is the latest fallout from the Nov. 18 incident, when campus police doused pepper-spray on sitting protesters who had set up an Occupy camp.

No charges for pepper-sprayed UC Davis students
UC Davis pepper spray cop once lauded
UCD student: I was coughing up blood, vomiting

Widely viewed online videos of the pepper-spraying generated national outrage and calls for the chancellor’s resignation. The chancellor, P.B. Katehi, has apologized but refused to step down.

The lawsuit claims the university violated the demonstrators’ constitutional rights and seeks campus policies to prevent similar responses to non-violent protests, as well as unspecified damages.

UC Davis officials declined to comment Wednesday because they had not seen the lawsuit.

Video: Police pepper-spray passive students

UCD pepper-spray video inspires viral art

Prosecutors said last month that none of the students involved in the protest would be charged. Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig said there was insufficient information in police reports of the Nov. 18 protest to warrant charges against eight men and two women who were cited for unlawful assembly, failure to disperse or illegal camping.

The district attorney’s office has been investigating the spraying at the chancellor’s request.

Article source: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57382966/students-sue-over-pepper-spraying-at-uc-davis/

By Tom Burgis and Jane Croft in London

Article source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b30a7556-5d3b-11e1-889d-00144feabdc0.html

A group of protesters affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement plans to elect 876 “delegates” from around the country and hold a national “general assembly” in Philadelphia over the Fourth of July as part of ongoing protests over corporate excess and economic inequality.

The group, dubbed the [...]]]>

A group of protesters affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement plans to elect 876 “delegates” from around the country and hold a national “general assembly” in Philadelphia over the Fourth of July as part of ongoing protests over corporate excess and economic inequality.

The group, dubbed the 99% Declaration Working Group, said Wednesday delegates would be selected during a secure online election in early June from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories.

In a nod to their First Amendment rights, delegates will meet in Philadelphia to draft and ratify a “petition for a redress of grievances,” convening during the week of July 2 and holding a news conference in front of Independence Hall on the Fourth of July.

Any U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident who is 18 years of age or older may run as a nonpartisan candidate for delegate, according to Michael S. Pollok, an attorney who advised Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge last year and co-founded the working group.

“We feel it’s appropriate to go back to what our founding fathers did and have another petition congress,” Pollok said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We feel that following the footsteps of our founding fathers is the right way to go.”

In 1776, the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and cited King George III’s failure to redress the grievances listed in colonial petitions as a reason to declare independence.

One man and one woman will be elected from each of the 435 congressional voting districts, according to Pollok, and they will meet in Philadelphia to deliberate, draft and ratify a “redress of grievances.” One delegate will also be elected to represent each of the U.S. territories.

Organizers won’t take a position on what grievances should be included, Pollok said, but they will likely include issues like getting money out of politics, dealing with the foreclosure crisis and helping students handle loan debt.

Details of the conference are still being worked out, Pollok said, but organizers have paid for a venue in Philadelphia. Pollok would not identify the venue, but said it was “a major state-of-the art facility.” Pollok said the group planned to pay for the conference through donations.

Once the petition is completed, Pollok said, the protesters will deliver copies to the White House, members of Congress and the Supreme Court. They will demand that Congress takes action in the first 100 days of taking office next year. If sufficient action isn’t taken, Pollok said, the delegates will go back to their districts and try to recruit their own candidates for office.

Philadelphia Managing Director Richard Negrin said the city has been in communication with the conference organizers and said the biggest concerns are logistical. The conference is coming at a time when thousands of tourists flock to the City of Brotherly Love for Fourth of July festivities.

“It’s mostly a police and traffic control concern,” Negrin said. “We think that as the cradle of liberty we have to be careful and hold our constitutional rights especially reverent here. … We’re not going to be heavy handed.”

Hundreds of Occupy Philadelphia protesters set up an encampment in a plaza at City Hall in early October in unity with the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York. The city eventually ordered them to leave so it could break ground on a $50 million renovation project at the plaza and evicted the remaining protesters in late November.

Article source: http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/occupy-hold-national-conference-philly-15765625

The Nobel Peace Prize nominee is finally on trial after 19 months of being held in custody. Accused of providing Wikileaks with [...]]]> After being held in custody for an unprecedentedly long period of 19 months, Bradley Manning now faces trial. Accusations include aiding the enemy and giving out US military secrets to Wikileaks.

The Nobel Peace Prize nominee is finally on trial after 19 months of being held in custody. Accused of providing Wikileaks with US military secrets, he may be charged with 22 violations of military code, none of which however seem to have affected the country’s national security. From the theft of records to aiding the enemy, Bradley Manning could be sentenced to life imprisonment. What’s 19 months in custody in comparison to that, right?

After all, the 24-year-old junior soldier downloaded about 700,000 classified reports on US military affairs worldwide. At the time, however, no one was keeping count or found it suspicious. The access was free.

Under US law martial cases must be brought within 120 days of arrest. In Manning’s case it has taken nearly two years. The military rule book says delays may be prejudicial and result in the dismissal of the case.

The extra time, during most of which Manning was held in high-security solitary confinement, was taken to obtain security clearance according to the military authorities. The maximum-security-risk suspect was allowed one hour of exercise a day and one hour of television. He was checked every five minutes by security and was expected to respond. Manning was also put on a suicide watch. All that was before even being charged.

The alleged Wikileaks informer’s defense says 150 years’ punishment was not enough for the US government and so they additionally charged him with aiding the enemy. Mr Coombs, Manning’s lawyer also said charges against Manning using unauthorised software should be dropped, calling it a “lawless suit” since soldiers constantly violate them by playing video games and watching films online.

On the February 23 Manning’s attorneys will be able to object to the prosecution against him during the arraignment hearing. They can also raise the issues of the suspect’s torture in custody, unlawful command influence and the harm done by the alleged release of the documents.

Meanwhile, the state’s strategy is to pressure the soldier to implicate Julian Assange in espionage, saying Manning discussed the website in chatlogs they got hold of.

The credibility of the government’s key witnesses against Manning has also been questioned. One of them turned out to be a hacker and a recovering drug addict.

Manning is wideley supported by the Anonymous group for “risking his life to expose government corruption.”

While the US sees Manning as a villain and friend of enemy of the state Julian Assange, others want to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, saying he revealed much-needed truths about civilian war casualties in Iraq and Afghanistian. They hope the prize might save him from dying in jail.

The truth behind the Wikileaks informers might be revealed in Julian Assange’s new show on RT. The launch is scheduled for March 2012.

Article source: http://rt.com/news/assange-wikileaks-manning-trial-887/

A poster created by a WikiLeaks volunteer to promote its leak of Bank of America’s files. Note the Bank of America logo on the body of the spider. (Click to enlarge. )

Julian Assange’s promise in 2010 of a trove of scandalous leaks from a major U.S. bank generated equal [...]]]>

A poster created by a WikiLeaks volunteer to promote its leak of Bank of America’s files. Note the Bank of America logo on the body of the spider. (Click to enlarge. )

Julian Assange’s promise in 2010 of a trove of scandalous leaks from a major U.S. bank generated equal parts excitement and dread before it fizzledthis summer. But Bank of America’s security consultants and critics of the financial industry weren’t the only ones preparing for and anticipating that leak. So was WikiLeaks’ marketing department.

In the midst of my reporting for a book I’m working on about the history and future of digital anonymous leaking, an ex-WikiLeaks volunteer has provided me with two unreleased posters the group had created to promote the Bank of America leak it planned to publish in early 2011. One shows a sinister-looking spider with a Bank of America logo on its body sitting in a web of trapped flies, with a reference to Assange’s comment to me last November about exposing an “ecosystem of corruption” written below it. The other shows a house of cards with Bank of America logos and dollar bills on each card, a real-estate sign that reads “ethics for sale” and the phrase “expose unethical banking” below.

Another image created for WikiLeaks’ planned Bank of America leak. Click to enlarge.

In November of 2010, Assange told me that WikiLeaks planned to release a large cache of internal documents from a U.S. financial institution, with enough scandalous material in them to “take down a bank or two.” Rumors began circulating immediately that the bank in question was Bank of America, given that Assange had told Computer World in 2009 that the group had five gigabytes of data from the bank. Bank of America scrambled to prepare for the leak, hiring the security consultancy Booz Allen and the law firm Hunton Williams to help it scour its files for damaging documents, and even buying domain names that might be used to criticize its CEO.

But over the next year, that bank leak never appeared. Last summer, ex-WikiLeaks staffer Daniel Domscheit-Berg revealed that he had deleted a cache of leaked documents he had taken from WikiLeaks, a move he said was intended to protect the leaks’ sources. WikiLeaks has since claimed that the Bank of America files, taken from the hard drive of a senior board member, were among those destroyed documents. Domscheit-Berg denies that the bank files were in his destroyed cache, but WikiLeaks hasn’t backed down from its claim.

These posters show that some of WikiLeaks’ own staff at least knew the documents to be from Bank of America and were intent on publishing them. Not long after my initial interview with Assange, the artist who created the images, who says he’s part of a group he calls “Agents of Chaos,” received a request from a WikiLeaks contact to have images related to a Bank of America leak ready for early January. The date was later revised to late January. Then it was pushed off indefinitely.

The artist has since cut ties with the group after its widely criticized accidental leak and subsequent publication of the entire unredacted database of 250,000 State Department cables it had obtained.  ”The whole thing was just handled very poorly,” he writes to me. “I don’t see any progress…The internal organization is a nightmare and very frustrating to work with.”

The artist had been working with WikiLeaks since 2010, and created many other promotional posters for the group like the earlier image below. The group’s full collection of wallpapers and posters can be seen here.

An older image created by “Agents of Chaos” for WikiLeaks. Click to enlarge.

Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/02/22/unreleased-wikileaks-posters-promote-the-bank-of-america-leak-that-never-appeared/

WikiLeaks aims to release documents revealing that Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt is a US spy, as part of a ‘smear campaign’ to stop Sweden from extraditing founder Julian Assange to the United States, a Swedish daily reports.

The whistleblower website has threatened in an internal memo [...]]]> Updated: 04:04, Thursday February 23, 2012

WikiLeaks aims to release documents revealing that Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt is a US spy, as part of a ‘smear campaign’ to stop Sweden from extraditing founder Julian Assange to the United States, a Swedish daily reports.

The whistleblower website has threatened in an internal memo to publish a so far unknown diplomatic cable ‘where Foreign Minister Carl Bildt is shown to have been an informant for the United States since the 1970s,’ the Expressen tabloid reported on Wednesday, saying it had seen the WikiLeaks memo.

Bildt ‘will have to step down. This will be the end of his political career,’ an unnamed person with access to the unpublished diplomatic cable was quoted as saying.

Bildt himself reacted to the report on his official blog Wednesday, challenging WikiLeaks to publish ‘this in their opinion damning report.’

‘When that happens, this part of their planned ‘smear campaign’ will quickly fall to shreds,’ he wrote.

Assange, an Australian, is currently in Britain fighting extradition to Sweden where he is wanted for questioning on rape and sexual assault allegations, and WikiLeaks has long expressed concern that if he is sent to Sweden, Stockholm would quickly send him on to the US.

Washington is eager to lay hands on the WikiLeaks founder after the organisation’s publication of hundreds of thousands of classified US diplomatic files, and according to Expressen the group’s ‘smear campaign’ against Sweden would be aimed at blocking Assange’s further extradition.

‘Julian Assange will most probably be freed from the sex crime suspicions, because that is just a trap,’ the unnamed person with insight into WikiLeaks told Expressen.

‘What Assange is afraid of is that he either will be forced to testify in the trial against the arrested soldier and suspected WikiLeaks source (for the leaked diplomatic cables), or that he himself will be arrested and handed over to a US court to be tried for espionage against the United States,’ he added.

The cable on Bildt reportedly shows that he first became an informant for the United States in 1973 and his original contact was none other than Republican strategist and former president George W Bush’s political guru Karl Rove.

WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson would meanwhile only confirm that ‘we have a document that shows the close relationship between Carl Bildt and Washington insiders.’

‘I am sure that this information will soon be available to the public,’ he told Expressen.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE:

Article source: http://www.skynews.com.au/tech/article.aspx?id=721381&vId=

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Article source: http://www.localnews8.com/politics/30509946/detail.html

SAN QUENTIN, Calif., Feb. 21 (UPI) — Occupy demonstrators rallied outside California’s San Quentin State Prison to show support for hunger strikers protesting solitary confinement and other issues.

Many of the 700 demonstrators in the “day of solidarity” Monday with inmates were from Occupy Oakland, the Marin Independent Journal of Novato, Calif., reported.

More than 400 people crowded into a lecture theatre at the University of Technology Sydney on February 17 for a public forum, “Don’t shoot the messenger: WikiLeaks, Assange and Democracy”. The forum was organised by the Support Assange and WikiLeaks Coalition.

Speakers at the forum included socialist historian Humphrey McQueen, Greens [...]]]>

More than 400 people crowded into a lecture theatre at the University of Technology Sydney on February 17 for a public forum, “Don’t shoot the messenger: WikiLeaks, Assange and Democracy”. The forum was organised by the Support Assange and WikiLeaks Coalition.

Speakers at the forum included socialist historian Humphrey McQueen, Greens Senator Scott Ludlum, London-based human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson and Christine Assange, the mother of Julian Assange. Veteran journalist and broadcaster Mary Kostakidis chaired the forum.

The transcript of Christine Assange’s address to the meeting, in conversation with Mary Kostakidis, is below.

* * *

Mary Kostakidis: Christine, why don’t you begin with telling us just a little bit about your journey, what it’s been like.

Christine Assange: Initially, Julian and I were talking about the world, as we would, and what would change. What would it take to change the world? And Julian said to me I think there are only two things that will change the world, the way that it’s going, the way the power imbalance is and the suffering of people. Either a huge accident of some kind, a meteorite or another catastrophe, or technology.

And the technology was the dropbox for WikiLeaks. Initially, it was supposed to help the third world. That was why he was set up, to help the third world, to expose the dictatorships. But he had no idea he’d get a drop from America. That came as a complete surprise.

The time that everything really changed for me was August 21, 2010. I was sitting in bed watching a movie and the phone rang. At the end of the phone was a foreign voice. He said how do you feel about the fact that Julian has been charged with rape?

And my instinctive reaction was he wouldn’t do it. My second reaction was he’s been set up. That’s an instinctive reaction.

But for me to help Julian there had to be more than just a mothers’ instinct that he was set up. I knew I wouldn’t get the truth in the mainstream media. As others have pointed out its all Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton. [laughter]

[Inaudible section]

And then I did what any journalist should be doing: I dug around. And it was like slipping through a wormhole — I think you’ve all seen Dr Who or Star Trek, I’m not quite sure where that’s from — but going through from one reality that I believed was this, through into a shadow reality of the corruption of power. It is a very frightening journey and I can understand why people don’t want to look at it. It’s akin to the abyss.

But WikiLeaks took the mask off power. And power is very, very angry.

But I think what’s happened is the reaction of power has exposed them more than even the cables. WikiLeaks has shone the light on these sorts of cockroaches. [applause]

So I thought, well I didn’t know some of the facts. And at that stage I thought: maybe the politicians don’t. I know what I’ll do. I’ll write a letter and I’ll write a letter to Kevin Rudd because he was not as bad as Gillard. [laughter]

And this is me at the beginning of the journey. Kevin says it’s the American’s problem. John Howard says it’s a bit of frank commentary, I don’t expect a journalist to hold back on that.

So [I thought] that’s what I’ll do, I’ll be a citizen and write to my government and I’ll tell them what’s going on and they will do something. So I wrote my 8-page letter and sent it on the 9th of February and on the 10th DFAT [the department of foreign affairs and trade] quickly rang. I was going to be standing outside of Kevin Rudd’s office on the 11th and very quickly a letter went off to the minister for justice in the UK that the government of Australia expected all due process, before, of course, the press conference had been announced.

Nothing happened, apart from that. So I though, hmmm, well what I’ll do is fax the letter, which had a lot of facts that I had found about the Swedish case, and I’ll tell you a little bit about that because the reason I’m coming out is that the mainstream media will not print the facts. They just point-blank refuse. I’ve approached them and they will not report the facts.

And many of these facts subsequently came from my request to [Jennifer Robinson] to write to the Australian parliament.

But these are the facts. Both women involved in this “sex scandal” never alleged rape, but insisted that the sex was consensual and not violent. Woman SW has actually complained about being railroaded and was so upset that Julian was charged with rape that she refused to sign her statement.

Woman AA, who took a condom to the police saying that Julian had deliberately torn a condom during sex, went for an examination that proved there was not DNA from either her or Julian in it.

Interestingly, there is a domestic political agenda involved in Sweden. When the rape allegations were made on August the 20th, in one month’s time there was to be local and general elections in Sweden. And, “coincidentally”, woman AA, the police officer that interrogated woman SW, and both the lawyers in the law firm that picked up the case against Julian after it was dropped by the chief prosecutor, were all running for the same party, in the same elections, on the same platform of widening the definition of rape within consensual sex.

So there is the domestic agenda. Then of course we’ve got other things going on. The two laywers involved, Claus Borgstrom and Thomas Bodstrom, have previously been in the Swedish government.

Claus Borgstrom knew AA. And they all know Marianne Ny, who is the Swedish prosecutor, because they all worked together on widening the sex offenses for the last 10 years.

Thomas Bodstrom, the partner of the woman’s lawyer, had in 2001 signed off on CIA torture flights for two Egyptian refugees who were tortured in Egypt and subsequently found to be innocent and in 2003 Sweden had to pay up compensation.

So some of the facts that were not right were that Julian offered himself for interview numerous times in Sweden and was knocked back by prosecutor Ny with various excuses. The particular chosen officer, the only one in Sweden, was sick, or was away. He offered to fly back in — no that couldn’t be done either.

He was granted permission to leave on the 15th of September and he left. And this was all around the time of cablegate coming out. The US knew that this was happening because Julian had contacted them and asked them to help with the redaction and they refused. So they knew it was coming up.

Collateral Murder was out on the 4th of April. The Gillard coup was the 26th of June. The Afghan War Diaries was the 25th [of July] and the sex allegations were on the 20th of [August]. So it is all working quite nicely for them isn’t it?

So these are some of the things that I’ve found out. If you look at the timelines and you have to say no more, look at that timeline.

[Livestream recording briefly interrupted]

So when Mary asks me what’s this journey been [like], it’s been a journey of a mother, up and down emotionally. But it’s also been the journey of a citizen, an Australian citizen and a world citizen. And the eyes get bigger and bigger every day. But you know I’m not finding it in the mainstream media. I’m finding it down the rabbit holes in the internet.

When I sent that letter to Rudd with all the information, including the information that Julian was awarded the Sam Adams award in 2010. Does anyone know what that is? No, that’s because the mainstream media doesn’t want you to know what it is.

The Sam Adams award is an award given by retired US senior military and intelligence officers and Julian won it in 2010. Ann Wright from Stars and Stripes, the main military magazine in America, has come out and said we in the US military know what’s going on in the war … what should be investigated is what WikiLeaks is raising. So he actually has the backing of the US military that are retired.

So it’s the journey of a citizen that is becoming more and more alarmed for her country and democracy, and alarmed as a mother. And alarmed at the mainstream media that I contact, which refuse point blank to bring these facts to the Australian public. So this is why I’m here.

Mary Kostakidis: Christine, do you speak to Julian regularly and to your knowledge has he received any assistance from the Australian government?

Christine Assange: I do speak to him, but I can’t talk openly because our phones are monitored. So all the things a mother would normally talk to her son about, how are you feeling etc. I’m living under another name in a secret location as are some members of my family. I’ve had to give up the job that I’ve had.

Julian can’t express to me how he feels so I write poetry to him. I write him poems. [applause]

[The Australian] government have offered him absolutely nothing. He has been given a little bit of consular assistance — the equivalent of Tim Tams. [laughter] But they have passed the “WikiLeaks amendment” to make sure they can spy on me as well as him now, and all WikiLeaks people that are trying to help.

So going back to the letter, I thought ok, nothing’s happened. I know what I’ll do. It’s full of all this information. I’ll send it to every member of parliament and someone will do something.

So off it went to every member of parliament: all the Senators, all the MPs. And I actually did get a bite. The Greens, straight away, were right there with [me] and they have been standing up all along. [applause] And not just Scott [Ludlum], all of them.

And I thought there might be some hope because initially in December [2010] there was what was termed a “backbench revolt” going on against Gillard’s comments. And a number of quite senior Senator and ALP members had spoken up and said WikiLeaks should be defended as a democratic issue.

But I thought, once I [send] the fax then they’ll do something. This is the story of everybody, isn’t it? Once they go higher and higher up someone will do something.

So [inaudible] MP got back to me and said, look I’m really concerned, on the face of this something’s not right here, I’d like to convene a meeting in Canberra. And I thought great, someone’s going to do something.

So then Jen[nifer Robinson] prepared something for Canberra, a legal brief that would outline all the facts in a very simple way — its only 7 pages long and I’d really encourage you all to read it and I will give you the link in a minute, its in a nutshell, easy to read because its concise and short.

Then I asked some other lawyers, [such as] Peter Kemp. You’d all be aware of Peter Kemp? He wrote to the prime minister. And Greg Barnes, head of the lawyers alliance, and Tony Kevin, the ex-DFAT ambassador.

We all went and provided a legal and diplomatic brief to parliament, a crossbench meeting, quite a few turned up. And I thought okay, it’s in parliament. They’ve got the facts. They can see. They’re going to act — nothing.

Now they know what’s going on. So I thought okay, I’ll get all the briefings and I’ll email them back out again to all the MPs so all the MPs can read all the briefings and all the Senators can read all the briefings, and then they’ll do something — nothing.

Mary Kostakidis: Christine, if I could interrupt you, what would you like Gillard and Rudd to do? What do you think they should do?

Christine Assange: I would like them to act upon those briefings. And those briefings were that Julian was in clear and present danger, that, on the facts proven in the briefings, it was a political case, and that they should immediately — and this was back in March 2011 — state that the Australian government would not extradite Julian because it is a political case, and provide written humanitarian guarantees that Sweden and the UK say that they would not comply with a US extradition, that they would insist on an open court in the sex allegation case in Sweden, and that Julian be returned home as soon as possible.

Mary Kostakidis: And what would you like the Australian people to do?

Christine Assange: I think it was mentioned earlier, but we can’t rely on our mainstream media, that’s why I’m here. So we have to be the media. We have to inform Australia about what is going on. So I would ask you firstly to get informed about the facts.

People are very angry about what is happening to Julian but being angry and insulting other people is not the way that it is going to be won. We have to win it like a courtroom, we have to win it with facts. The facts speak for themselves. The facts are enough.

So first of all get the facts. If you want more you can go to http://wlcentral.org/. With those facts start the conversation in your community and among your friends and your family and your work colleagues.

Just mention one fact, put it into the conversation — you will turn them off if you go bashing them over the head. Just one fact that’s eye-opening from the ones that I’ve told you. You can do it at the pub or the water cooler. Ring talkback radio. Ring in about the smear about Julian. Counter it with facts. Watch what the media is doing. If they are pushing articles that smear, post a comment.

Write articles to the local media. Sometimes the regional papers are more likely to print than the big papers, that’s what I’ve found. You can buy WikiLeaks T-shirts. You can put your facts out wherever you can, or join a support group to help, and to lobby your MPs.

At this point, I can only count on self-interest. Apart from the Greens, I can only count on self-interest. Your MP really, really wants your vote. He wants your vote more than he wants his own party to get back in.

So this is what I’m asking you, I’m putting it forcibly, but I’m asking you to request a meeting — demand a meeting, you are a constituent and you’ve got every right to meet with your elected representative — armed with the facts that you have from Jennifer’s submission. Write a letter and make two copies. Take one letter to that meeting, and, depending on the strength of your feelings I would ask you to say that democracy and freedom are more important than a new plasma TV, and I want to leave my children a legacy of freedom.

So either you stand up for Julian Assange, which is the same as standing up for the free press, and you start representing Australian people, or you are not getting my vote next election. In fact, I’m going to vote Green, or I’m going to vote independent, or I’m going to actually stand for election. Thank you.

From GLW issue 911

Article source: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/50089