A friend sent this to me yesterday, and I thought it was so good that I asked him to let me forward it. Merry Christmas! Hajja Romi
From: Justice Freedom <[email protected]> Subject: My letter to Amazon re WikiLeaks To: Date: Thursday, December 23, 2010, 8:07 PM Daniel H. Stone 1374 17th Avenue San Francisco, CA 94122-1945 (Please close my Amazon account) December 23, 2010 OPEN LETTER Jeffrey P. Bezos President, CEO & Chairman of the Board Amazon.com Corporate Headquarters 1200 12th Avenue, Suite 1200 Seattle, WA 98144 Dear Mr. Bezos, I am deeply disappointed that you missed a golden opportunity to stand up to the U.S. government — you should have continued to allow WikiLeaks to operate on the Amazon Web Services ("AWS"), your cloud hosting services. You can still take them back. Please do. I was going to close my Amazon.com account anyway, as soon as I learned that Amazon / AWS had removed WikiLeaks from its services. Then American hero Daniel Ellsberg started an Amazon Boycott, so consider me a part of that. Therefore, I respectfully request that you close my account with Amazon. If it has not been closed by January 1, 2011, I will close it myself. Amazon Web Services has stated that the technical reason why AWS evicted WikiLeaks was that it violated your terms of service, but a technicality must not be placed above the greater good of standing up for free speech, free information, and your customers’ right to free expression --- and standing against a repressive government. You had, and still have, a choice. YouTube opposed the U.S. government successfully --- if success, rather than principle and values, is the criterion for you. And they are still operating. Why don’t you follow their righteous example and oppose the government also, instead of the wrongeous example of Mastercard, Visa and PayPal ?! Why don’t you ignore the manufactured hysteria against WikiLeaks? If you are so concerned about your clients not harming anyone, as so stipulated in your rules of service, why is Eli Lilly one of your clients? Or investment banks? Or hedge funds? The January 15, 2009 "Eli Lilly Promotion of Zyprexa" criminal fine of $515 million is the largest criminal fine for an individual corporation ever imposed in a United States criminal prosecution of any kind. (And this was on top of Lilly’s $800 million civil settlement and other past violations.) Lilly was not only charged, but convicted. WikiLeaks has not even been charged. So much for your abiding by your own rules and legal technicalities. And investment banks and hedge funds are behind the economic collapse, causing great harm to a great number of Americans. Yet you have not asked them to leave, much less unceremoniously kicked them off your servers as you did WikiLeaks. So how did the aforementioned entities, and perhaps other clients of harmful nature, slip through your rigorous screening process, but somehow WikiLeaks got snagged, coincidentally on exactly the same day Sen. J. Lieberman called you to ask, "What is your relationship with WikiLeaks?" Just as high-profile people and groups lined up to support the illegal and immoral u.s. invasions and occupations of two small countries, so too have you and too many other groups sided with the government and against free speech and freedom of the press. How do you sleep at night? In exercising your own right of free speech in this particular case, you have betrayed the larger principle of opposing the state when it wishes to crush dissent and halt the dissemination of information. The purpose of the media is to provide facts and information to the public so that the public is well-informed. The American imperial media disseminates little or no information on the most important issues. WikiLeaks has filled that gaping void. You can undo most of the damage you have done by publicly accepting WikiLeaks back onto your servers. You can change your rules by which you accept clients, if you must, so that WikiLeaks can be re-admitted to AWS. Sincerely yours, s/ Daniel Stone ________________________________________ -- It is not illegal to expose an illegal war. Support Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks !! -- An asylum for the sane would be empty in America. - George Bernard Shaw -- It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class — except congress. - Mark Twain -- 30 million christianist fundamentalists (probably the largest voting bloc in the world) voted for bush, war and occupation in 2004, about as far away from a Christian approach to other people as it is possible to get. As Chris Hedges says, “The gospels are the one book the [christianist] fundamentalists know nothing about.” — The Palestinian intifada is a war of national liberation. We Israelis enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities ... we established an apartheid regime. - Michael Ben-Yair, Israeli attorney general in the1990s, quoted in The Guardian (U.K.), April 11, 2002 ___________________________________ Daniel Stone [email protected] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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