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With the latest ruling class hysteria that some of the material from Wikileaks is directly benefiting Al Qaeda, one wonders wether Assange is now marked to dissapear into a secret prison somewhere. The larger issues that this case brings up was put very well on another discussion site: The class dictatorship character of the bourgeois democratic state stands revealed before the world in a way that is new and huge. The resort to naked censorship, intimidation and calls for the extra-judicial execution of Assange are stark. So too is the contradiction between the promise of the internet as an electronic commons and the reality of corporate power (as reflected in the actions of Amazon and PayPal). For whatever the "common knowledge" about the sordid nature of US diplomacy, the revelation of this "fault line "within the digital world itself is important and will have an effect way beyond the boundaries of online socialists. As to effectively using some of this material for agitation, I just received this today from the Campaign against the Israeli Occupation: WikiLeaks Exposes U.S. Militarization of Middle East The cables released so far by WikiLeaks shed light on behind-the-scenes struggles between Israel's quest for complete military dominance in the Middle East versus the U.S. desire to saturate the entire region with a flood of high-tech weapons. Read more about these revelations here: WikiLeaks: Israel's Security Concerns Often Clash With U.S. Interests, by Josh Ruebner, our National Advocacy Director WikiLeaks: War, Diplomacy & Ban ki-Moon's Toothbrush, by Phyllis Bennis, a member of our steering committee Top 10 Wikileaks Palestine Nuggets, by Yousef Munayyer of the Jerusalem Fund, one of our member organizations WikiLeaks has done a great service, exposing in detail how U.S. diplomacy is geared toward flooding the Middle East with weapons, fueling a never-ending arms race, abetting Israel's crimes against innocent Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, maintaining U.S. wars that have cost hundreds of billions of dollars. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com