Re-reporting, editing end comment by
Carolyn Bennett
Birgitta Jónsdóttir
She is a Member of Iceland’s Parliament as well as a poet,
writer, artist, editor, publisher and activist. Birgitta Jónsdóttir organized “Art
against war” where a number of Icelandic artists and poets came out to protest
the war in Iraq.
She set up the first Icelandic online art gallery in 1996 for
the Apple Shop in Iceland and has participated in several international
projects related to writing and activism including “Poets against the War”, “Dialogue
among Nations through Poetry”, and “Poets for Human Rights”. She also edited
and published the international books The
World Healing Book and The Book of
Hope. She is founder of Beyond Borders Press and Radical Creations and part
of the International Network of Parliamentarians for Tibet (INPaT)
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irgitta Jónsdóttir was an active volunteer for WikiLeaks and
had an important role in the making and
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| Member of Icelandic Parliament Birgitta Jónsdóttir |
On January 7, 2011, she announced on her Twitter page that she had been notified by Twitter that it had been served with a subpoena by the U. S. Department of Justice demanding information about all her tweets and more since November 1, 2009. [Greenwald, Salon]
In the Icelandic Parliament Birgitta Jónsdóttir is Member of
the Parliamentary Review Committee on the SIC [Report of the Special
Investigation Commission (SIC): The Special Investigation Commission (SIC)
delivered to Althingi on April 12, 2010 had been established by Act No.
142/2008 by Althingi, the Icelandic Parliament, in December 2008, “to
investigate and analyze the processes leading to the collapse of the three main
banks in Iceland.”] report since 2009; Member of the Committee on the
Environment since 2009; Member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs since 2009; Member
of the Icelandic delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly since 2009.
She was elected to the Icelandic parliament in April 2009, her
district Reykjavík South Constituency, to serve on behalf of a movement aiming
for democratic reform beyond left and right party politics. Formerly representing
the Citizens’ Movement and The Movement, Birgitta Jónsdóttir now represents the
Pirate Party. She calls herself an “activist inside and outside the system” and
is quoted saying,
Being political is having opinions.
Every person has the opportunity to change the world.
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oday on Democracy
Now, she said, before the Iraq War started, she had participated in antiwar demonstrations
“with millions of people from around the world in an attempt to stop the war
from happening. I knew that this would happen.”
“To have it
actually in my living room in front of my eyes, the true horror of war and all
these war crimes that I had heard of but I’d never seen felt to me as important
enough to take a little bit of a risk,” Birgitta Jónsdóttir said; “so I did a lot of the background
investigation. I organized the Icelandic volunteer team. I pulled out the
photos that we put on the website. And I was the coordinator for the YouTube
account.”
Wikipedia note:
Baghdad airstrikes of July 12, 2007, were a series of air-to-ground attacks
conducted by a team of two United States Army AH-64 Apache helicopters in
Al-Amin al-Thaniyah (the district of New Baghdad in Baghdad) during the Iraqi
insurgency and U.S. military occupation of Iraq. The attacks received worldwide
coverage in 2010 following the release of 39 minutes [13 minutes were onboard
footage from one of the two AH-64 Apache helicopters involved in the incident] of
classified cockpit gunsight footage.
Reuters had unsuccessfully requested the
footage of the airstrikes under the Freedom of Information Act in 2007.
The
footage was acquired from an undisclosed source in 2009 by the Internet leak
website WikiLeaks, which released the footage on April 5, 2010, under the name “Collateral
Murder.” Recorded from the gunsight Target Acquisition and Designation System
of one of the attacking helicopters, the video shows three incidents and the
radio chatter between the aircrews and ground units involved. An anonymous U.S.
military official confirmed the authenticity of the footage.
Long train of abuses
U.S.
threat to freedom of expression
“I think it is time,”
she said, “to stop the witch hunt on people who are involved with journalism
and whistle blowing. It is of deep concern to me considering that this country,
the United States of America, had one of the most significant trials in the
world in relation to freedom of expression and speech when [American publisher,
poet, painter, liberal activist] Lawrence Ferlinghetti went on trial a long
time ago to defend just these values.”
Call government to account
In light of the constant abuse of rights and persecution of reporters and whistle blowers by U.S. government officials and related agents and as she and other global
and U.S. citizens have been (are being) threatened by this government and agents, Birgitta Jonsdottir asks, “…Why isn’t the U.S. government itself held accountable for probing
into the lives of people …?” It is “very serious,” she says, “that they probed
into my life. They … went into my home, through the Internet door, and I’m a Member
of Parliament.”
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uch actions amount
to international incidents. The International Parliamentary Union has put
forward a very harsh, unanimously adopted parliamentary proposal in which “parliamentarians
are encouraged all the time to work across nations. …” And a Member of Parliament
subjected to the U.S. tactic of persecution and probing surveillance means, she
says, that “Everybody who writes to me is now on the desk of the FBI.… What is the difference between what [hacker] Jeremy
Hammond did and what the U.S. government did?
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| Remember truth teller Journalist Anna Polikovskaya |
“… I am not the
subject of a criminal investigation,” she says, “so what gives them the right to
go into my personal stuff?”
“What gives [the global
intelligence company] Stratfor the
right to go into Julian Assange’s personal stuff or anybody that’s associated
with WikiLeaks?” she asks.
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nce rights are taken away or by an indifferent people relinquished to an oppressive regime, it is hard to impossible to get
them back. Rights taken today are lives taken today for exposing the truth of
events about which we have the right to know and on which to act as citizens in a
representative democracy. This isn't fashion or celebrity stuff. This is, as MP Birgitta Jonsdottir says, very serious indeed.
Sources and notes
“Icelandic Lawmaker Birgitta Jónsdóttir on Challenging Gov’t
Secrecy from Twitter to Bradley Manning,” April 8, 2013, http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/8/icelandic_lawmaker_birgitta_jonsdottir_on_challenging
The Official Website of Birgitta Jonsdottir, “Her political
views are not expressed on this website since she does not think of politics as
something beyond her everyday life,” http://this.is/birgitta/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birgitta_J%C3%B3nsd%C3%B3ttir
“Collateral Murder,” http://www.collateralmurder.com/
“Collateral Murder,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_murder#Leaked_video_footage
WikiLeaks obtained the video as well as supporting documents
from a number of military whistleblowers. “WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to
verify the authenticity of the information it receives. We have analyzed the
information about this incident from a variety of source material. We have
spoken to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident. WikiLeaks
wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention
it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were
journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in
order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from
2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work.”
Jeremy Hammond
and Judge Preska
Jeremy Hammond is
a political activist and convicted felon from Chicago charged in a criminal
complaint with crimes relating to the December 2011 hack of Strategic Forecasting,
Inc. (Stratfor).
Wikipedia: In
November 2012, after being held eight months without trial, Jeremy Hammond was
denied bail by Judge Loretta A. Preska (Chief Judge of the United States
District Court for the Southern District of New York) who warned that Hammond could
face life imprisonment for a Stratfor leak. Judge Preska’s husband worked for a
client of Stratfor and his emails were among the leaks as well as the password
to his email account.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Hammond
Stratfor
Wikipedia note: Stratfor: ‘The Shadow CIA’ ─ Barron’s once
referred to it as ‘The Shadow CIA.’ Strategic Forecasting, Inc or Stratfor is a
global intelligence company founded in 1996 in Austin, Texas, that has
published a daily intelligence briefing since 1996. Stratfor’s rise occurred
with the release of its “Kosovo Crisis Center” during the 1999 NATO airstrikes
over Kosovo. Time magazine, Texas Monthly, and other publications promoted it.
It enhanced its visibility with the tragedies of September 11, 2011. Its subscriber
list was confidential and the company’s publicity list includes Fortune 500
companies and international government agencies. Media outlets CNN, Bloomberg,
the Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times and the BBC used the company
as an authority on strategic and tactical intelligence issues. Barron’s once
referred to it as ‘The Shadow CIA.’
In early 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing over 5 million of the
company’s email messages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratfor
Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire
http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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