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Maybe anger toward Wikileaks will soften as more of its disturbing revelations come to light.

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Towlie Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Dec-10-10 04:15 PM
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Maybe anger toward Wikileaks will soften as more of its disturbing revelations come to light.
I predict a slow sea change in public sentiment toward Julian Assange.

http://humantrafficking.change.org/blog/view/wikileaks_reveals_us_tax_dollars_fund_child_sex_slavery_in_afghanistan">Wikileaks Reveals U.S. Tax Dollars Fund Child Sex Slavery in Afghanistan

The now infamous Wikileaks recently released a cable from Afghanistan revealing U.S. government contractor DynCorp threw a party for Afghan security recruits featuring trafficked boys as the entertainment. Bacha bazi is the Afghan tradition of "boy play" where young boys are dressed up in women's clothing, forced to dance for leering men, and then sold for sex to the highest bidder. Apparently this is the sort of "entertainment" funded by your tax dollars when DynCorp is in charge of security in Afghanistan.

DynCorp is a government contractor which has been providing training for Afghan security and police forces for several years. Though the company is about as transparent as a lead-coated rock, most reports claim over 95% of their budget comes from U.S. taxpayers. That's the same budget that DynCorp used to pay for a party in Kunduz Province for some Afghan police trainees. The entertainment for the evening was bacha bazi boys, whose pimps were paid so the boys would sing and dance for the recruits and then be raped by them afterward. That's your tax dollars at work -- fighting terrorism and extremism in Afghnistan by trafficking little boys for sex with cops-in-training.

In fact, the evidence linking DynCorp to bacha bazi was so damning, Afghan Minister of the Interior Hanif Atmar tried to quash the story. Upon hearing a journalist was investigating DynCorp and the U.S. government's funding of the sex trafficking of young boys in Afghanistan, Atmar warned any publication of the story would "endanger lives," and requested the U.S. suppress the story. Atmar admitted he had arrested eleven Afghans nationals as "facilitators" of the bacha bazi party. But he was only charging them with "purchasing a service from a child," which is illegal under Sharia law and the civil code. And in this case "services" is not used as a euphemism for sex; so far, no one is being held accountable for the young boys whose rapes were paid for by the U.S. taxpayers.

http://humantrafficking.change.org/blog/view/wikileaks_reveals_us_tax_dollars_fund_child_sex_slavery_in_afghanistan">more
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davidwparker Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Dec-10-10 04:20 PM
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1. ... like when they expose the fraud in the mortgage
scandal and can see why they lost their houses.
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drm604 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Dec-10-10 04:24 PM
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2. Not as long as the media focuses on "the saga of Julian Assange"
rather than the contents of those cables.
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saras Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Feb-05-11 09:32 PM
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3. Yeah, right
And the Tea Party's anger will go away as soon as they figure out that multinational corporations are using them.

You are assuming, I think incorrectly, that the majority of anger towards Wikileaks, and the projection of that anger on its public proxy, Julian Assange, is driven by rational considerations.
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