As this noteworthy New York Times editorial was buried by its publication on Christmas Day, it's worth highlighting here today in hopes that a few more folks may actually read it.

To date, the lack of alarm (by both media and, subsequently, the public) caused by the idea of major U.S. financial services companies serving as little more than instruments of unofficial U.S. governmental policy is troubling enough as is. That WikiLeaks, the organization being outrageously penalized by these enormous corporations, has been been charged with absolutely no violation of law, makes the actions of these banks even more extraordinary and chilling.

And finally, the entire affair is made most disturbing of all, perhaps, due to the fact that in 2010 none of this seems to come as much of a surprise to anybody, as reflected by the lack of concern expressed in the bulk of the mainstream media and, therefore, by the populace at large (most of whom, thanks again, MSM, likely have no knowledge of any of it, or why it's extraordinary in the first place)...

Full report...

A "turducken" is defined by Wikipedia as "a dish consisting of a de-boned chicken stuffed into a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed into a de-boned turkey." Sounds pretty close to what we've just witnessed in the closing hours of the 111th Congress.

Conventional wisdom, at least that flogged by the MSM over the last 24 hours or so, has it that somehow Democrats shocked the nation by finally stepping up their game and doing the extraordinary in the lame duck session by passing an unprecedented number of their hard-fought initiatives, many thought to have been otherwise dead (or waiting for reconsideration in the next, more heavily Republican-weighted Congress).

Not to be a contrarian here, or even a Christmas curmudgeon, but while the Democrats deserve credit for hanging in there on a number of important initiatives, rather than tossing up their hands and walking away in the face of unprecedented, historic obstructionism by the GOP, it's a fact that the major legislation finally passed can hardly be seen as any sort of "progressive," or even "liberal," victory. It all may well represent a Democratic victory, if a short-lived one, but that only demonstrates how successful Republicans have been in pushing Dems far to the right, and how willing Democrats are these days to celebrate the passage of center and center-right (and even hard-right) legislation, almost all of which was depressingly low-hanging holiday fruit to begin with...

[Now UPDATED with audio archives below! Enjoy!]

Secrets and lies. Secrets and lies. Virtually every problem our nation (and world) now faces, seem to stem from secrets and lies. We'll be discussing that throughout the evening, as WikiLeaks changes our world, and as I guest-host the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show once again tonight.

We're BradCasting LIVE once again from L.A.'s KTLK am1150 9pm-Midnight ET (6p-9p PT). Join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! The LIVE chat room will be up and rolling right here at The BRAD BLOG during the show as ever, so come on by while you're listening! (The Chat Room will open at the bottom of this item a few minutes before airtime, see down below, just above "Comments" section.)

Don't miss tonight's show!

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates across the country and also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at affiliate GREEN 960 in San Francisco or via MikeMalloy.com.

Scheduled (so far) for tonight:

• COLEEN ROWLEY, FBI's 9/11 whistleblower and TIME's 2002 Person of the Year, on her arrest at the White House yesterday while protesting war crimes and rallying in favor of the exposure of war crimes via WikiLeaks, and in support of alleged leaker PFC Bradley Manning; Her recent LA Times op-ed asserting that WikiLeaks might have helped to avert 9/11; And on her concerns about federal whistleblower legislation just passed by the U.S. Senate.
• MUCH MORE ON SECRETS & LIES: Including CNN's recent (and shameful) segment/interview with FBI vet Ray McGovern in which the cable net compared WikiLeaks Assange to a "TERRORIST", and (so far, unreported) details on my conversations with both Lemon and CNN that followed; The deplorably inhumane condititions alleged leaker Manning is being held in, and support for him by other legendary whistelblowers such as "Pentagon Papers" whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg (who I also recently interviewed on this topic); My thoughts on the tremendous, maddening and heart-breaking new film Fair Game, telling the story of secrets, lies and purposely harmful leaks by the Bush Administration in the Valerie Plame case, and much much more...
• PLUS: As if that's all not enough, whatever else comes up along the way and your calls at 877-520-1150 and tweets to @TheBradBlog!...

Click here to jump into our LIVE Chat Room during the show. Or just see below!...

POST-SHOW UPDATE: The show flew by tonight! At least for me! Audio archives are all below and I think you'll enjoy 'em. Have a listen (and the chat room archives are below those, if you like)...

Snow-covered peace activists and military veterans --- as well as legendary whistleblowers and former intelligence officers --- were arrested today in front of the White House while protesting the War in Afghanistan and rallying in support of WikiLeaks and for the exposure of war crimes.

The BRAD BLOG spoke with one of those arrested, the FBI's 9/11 whistleblower and TIME's 2002 Person of the Year Coleen Rowley, within the past two hours, shortly after she was released from custody by the Capitol Hill police. Rowley had traveled some 22 hours with a group of about 17 fellow Minnesotans to participate in today's protest and paid a $100 fine for the charge of "refusal to obey a lawful order."

"Over a hundred of us got arrested standing at the White House fence, singing and showing our signs," the former FBI analyst told us. "We sang all 15 versus of 'We shall Overcome', versus that you probably never heard, and sang new words to 'Down by the Riverside' as 'Down at the White House Fence.'"

Also arrested at the protest today were Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg (whom we recently interviewed about WikiLeaks), 27-year veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern (about whom we recently wrote after last weekend's appearance on CNN) telling host Don Lemon that CNN should "following [WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange's] example" by "seek[ing] out secrets," and Pulitzer prize-winning former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges.

Rowley will be our guest tomorrow night (Friday) on the nationally-syndicated Mike Malloy Show, which we are again scheduled to co-host.

"We were protesting against war crimes and for exposing war crimes," Rowley explained earlier tonight. She said she made her own sign back home Minnesota before traveling to D.C.. She says her sign had "The War is a Lie" on one side and "Expose War Crimes, Free Bradley Manning" on the back, with photos from WikiLeaks' "Collateral Murder" video revealing a U.S. Army Apache helicopter firing and killing approximately a dozen individuals, including two Reuters employees, and wounding two children. The video is alleged to have been leaked to WikiLeaks by Army PFC Bradley Manning who, Salon's Glenn Greenwald reported yesterday, has been detained and held "in intensive solitary confinement" for the past seven months "under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture," even as he has reportedly behaved as "a model detainee"...

Guest editorial by Ernest A. Canning

In "Plumbing the Depths of Lawless Executive Depravity", I argued that targeted assassinations threaten the very foundation of our republic. This occurs not only due to the potential for collateral damage but due to the distinct possibility that many whom we target as "suspected" terrorists may be entirely innocent.

A more recent article of mine here, "WikiLeaks' Pakistan, Yemen Cables Expose Unchecked Executive Power, 'Hatred for Democracy'" addressed a specific form of targeted assassinations --- the predator drone strike. In it, I noted that the secret expansion of such strikes into Pakistan and Yemen, as confirmed by diplomatic cables recently published by WikiLeaks and their media partners, reflected a dangerous usurpation of power by the Executive branch.

These two articles, and former CIA field operative Robert Baer, in a must-see RethinkAfganistan.com video (embedded at end of this article), assume the targets of the drone strike are suspected insurgents and terrorists. Both of them deal with the counterproductive effect of unintended civilian deaths ("collateral damage") which serves to destabilize "friendly" governments, provide a recruiting tool for those bent on revenge, and increase the likelihood of "blowback," a CIA term that describes "the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people."

Have Baer and I erred in assuming these strikes are not aimed at civilians?...

I'll be joined by GLENN GREEWALD, Salon's great blogger, constitutional attorney and author (of How Would a Patriot Act?, A Tragic Legacy, and Great American Hypocrites LIVE today during the 3p PT/6p ET hour on KPFK, the Pacific Radio outlet in Los Angeles (90.7FM), San Diego (93.7FM), Santa Barbara (98.7FM) and China Lake (99.5FM) where I'm sitting in one more day for Harrison. The show will again be streamed live via KPFK.org.

We'll be picking up where things left off a bit, following my interview last week with "Pentagon Papers" whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and the extraordinary events that have happened since, as the all-out assault on WikiLeaks --- by the U.S. Government, both major political parties and, most disturbingly, the media --- continues to grow.

See Greenwald's piece last week at Salon on Sen. Joe Lieberman "emulating Chinese dictators" by what seems to be an abuse of his post as Chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee in helping to intimidate WikiLeaks' Internet server Amazon.com into shutting them down, and some in the MSM's support of the notion that WikiLeaks is the bad actor here, despite having broken no laws and being charged with no crime.

That was last week, and things have gone quickly downhilll from there, with U.S. colleges warning students not to read or link to WikiLeaks, Government agencies (including the Library of Congress) restricting access to them, PayPal cutting off their account, and now even Switzerland freezing their defense fund account.

This seems to be all out "Information/Cyber War", at the very least, and like nothing we've ever seen in this country. Greenwald has more on all of this today, and it's chilling --- particularly his UPDATE on that link.

We'll talk LIVE about all of that and much more on today's show beginning at 3pm PT! Please tune in live here...

POST-SHOW UPDATE: The complete interview with Greenwald follows. Lots of interesting stuff to dig into. Enjoy...

Download MP3 or listen online [appx. 48 mins]

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

"One of the major reasons for government secrecy is to protect the government from its own population...[The WikiLeaks cables reveal a] profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership." -Noam Chomsky, Democracy Now, 11/30/2010

There is no issue of greater import to the aspirations of a democratic people than matters of war and peace. There can be no greater display of contempt for democracy on the part of an American President than that reflected by a covert decision to engage in a secret war without the knowledge or consent of Congress or the American people.

As late as 2002, George W. Bush felt compelled to seek some semblance of compliance with the War Powers Resolution of 1973, albeit via deceit in which false claims of Iraqi WMD and links to al Qaeda were presented in order to secure Congressional approval of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution.

According to Jeremy Scahill (video below), "in '03/'04 the Bush administration issued an Executive order that authorized U.S. forces to go anywhere in the world where al Qaeda was to fight them; essentially declared the whole world a battlefield..."

The WikiLeaks Pakistan/Yemen cables confirm that President Barack Obama, possibly relying upon the Bush/Cheney cabal's extremist position that the Sept. 14, 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists ("AUMF") is tantamount to a blanket license to initiate wars anywhere and everywhere there is a "suspected" presence of al Qaeda, has both perpetuated and expanded these dangerous claims of lawless Executive power...

Just thought we should flag this one while Dick Cheney is still around (and while Obama is still in office).

According to Business Week, the former CEO of Halliburton will soon be wanted for arrest on bribery charges by Nigeria, with whom the U.S. has a long-standing extradition treaty. As well, they may also be asking Interpol, whom the U.S. is supposed to be cooperating with, to help in seeking Cheney's arrest. All of this at a time when Rightwingers (and some non-Rightwingers) are calling on Interpol to arrest WikiLeaks' Julian Assange for...something or other.

All of which may put the U.S. in "a very awkward position", according to Georgetown University's Constitutional Law professor Jonathan Turley, who discussed that --- and the Obama Administration's collusion with Republicans to protect the Bush Administration from torture charges in Spain, as we've now learned from recently released WikiLeaks cables --- on MSNBC last night...

Daniel Ellsberg, the legendary "Pentagon Papers" whistleblower, is an ardent supporter of the WikiLeaks project and of its co-founder Julian Assange, who finds himself under attack from many corners. The man whom Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once called "the most dangerous man in America" recently traveled to London to appear at a press conference with the besieged Australian in support of his release of some 400,000 classified Iraq War logs. But, as Ellsberg revealed during my interview with him on Wednesday, he disagrees with Assange on at least one point in regard to the latest round of documents released by the controversial organization. Unlike Assange, Ellsberg does not believe Hillary Clinton needs to resign.

In an interview with TIME magazine earlier this week, in the wake of WikiLeaks' recent release of thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables, Assange responded to a question from managing editor Richard Stengel, saying that he felt the U.S. Secretary of State should step down.

"She should resign if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations, in violation of the international covenants to which the U.S. has signed up," Assange told TIME. "Yes, she should resign over that."

But Ellsberg disagrees. During my on-air interview with him Wednesday, when I asked about that point and whether he agrees with Assange's assessment, he was direct in his response: "In a word, no," he told me.

Despite information from the released cables --- in this case, revealing that the State Department, under the approval of Clinton, ordered U.S. diplomats to spy on their foreign counterparts by secretly collecting personal information such as credit card numbers, frequent flier membership records, email addresses, even fingerprints and DNA --- Ellsberg does not believe the disclosure, which he concedes reveals illegalities, merits her resignation.

"I've come to respect Assange's judgment in a lot of these matters a lot more than I do the Pentagon spokespersons," Ellsberg said. "In this case, I don't agree with him."

Richard Nixon's former enemy, and the subject of the 2009 Oscar-nominated documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America, explained during our live interview on Pacific Radio's KPFK in Los Angeles on Wednesday that, in this case, at least, Assange may be "far too idealistic and romantic"...

I'll be interviewing the 1970s legendary "Pentagon Papers" whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg live today during the 3p PT/6p ET hour on KPFK, the Pacific Radio outlet in Los Angeles (90.7FM), San Diego (93.7FM), Santa Barbara (98.7FM) and China Lake (99.5FM). It will also be streamed live via KPFK.org

I'll be talking with Ellsberg, "The Most Dangerous Man in America," about WikiLeaks, it's founder Julian Assange (now "The Most Dangerous Man in the World"???), and all things related.

In early 2008, as I noted over the weekend, Ellsberg wrote an op/ed for The BRAD BLOG in which he noted:

Those comments, and ones from JFK in 1961 which I also posted in the same weekend article, in which he calls "the very word 'secrecy'...repugnant in a free and open society", seem to offer a bit of perspective on these recently released documents. I'll ask Ellsberg about those comments, and much more today --- including his support for Assange and his recent assertions, prior to the WikiLeaks release of hundreds of thousands of Iraq War Logs last that month, that he's been waiting for such a release of documents for 40 years.

Hope you'll tune in!

POST-SHOW UPDATE: The audio from the complete hour today follows. It includes a bit of my own commentary on Ellsberg and the WikiLeak situation in the first half hour --- along with a check-in from Cary Harrison (the show's regular host who I was filling in for today) on World Aids Day. My interview with Ellsberg begins at approximately the :34 mark.

I spoke with Ellsberg, a bit, after the show to follow up on a few points, particularly concerning Hillary Clinton, and hope to have an article a bit later on both the on-air interview, as well as some of the points we discussed aftewards.

For now though, here's the complete hour, including the full on-air interview (Text transcript of the Ellsberg interview is now posted here.)

Download MP3, or listen online (complete show is appx 58 mins. Ellsberg interview is about 23 mins)...

Some 250,000 classified cables and embassy dispatches from the State Department are being released today via WikiLeaks latest, and reportedly largest, document dump ever. Within the last hour, news reports based on those documents have begun to be published by various world media outlets that are said to have been given advanced access.

[Update: Browse all of the documents now via WikiLeaks' "CableGate" database.]

Among the very first revelations to emerge, as quickly highlighted on Twitter via search hashtags #WikiLeaks and #CableGate this morning, are details on the U.S. having pleaded with Germany in 2007 to not prosecute CIA operatives who kidnapped and tortured a terror suspect, Yemeni officials covering up U.S. drone strikes in their country, Saudi officials encouraging U.S. to take attack Iran, the U.S. spying on UN diplomats, as well as various, potentially embarrassing State Department assessments of allied world leaders. There will be much more to come.

You can review more of the coverage yourself at the UK Guardian, the New York Times, German's Der Spiegel, and Israel's Haaretz among many others to emerge over the next several hours and, indeed, days. The Nation's Greg Mitchell is live blogging the release, and rounding up many of the key links.

As this information becomes public, and as the U.S. Government continues to scramble to mitigate what the White House is calling today a "reckless and dangerous" leak, condemning it "in the strongest terms" as an alleged threat to national security, it's worth keeping in mind, for valuable perspective, what the 1970s legendary "Pentagon Papers" whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg wrote in an op/ed for The BRAD BLOG in early 2008...

As well, John F. Kennedy's April 1961 speech on what he described as this nation's abhorrence of secrecy, and the necessity of a free press --- as delivered to the American Newspaper Publishers Association at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York a year or so before his death --- is rather astonishing, and more than a bit ironic, in light of today's leaks and, as directly, the actions of the Executive Branch and its enablers in this country --- in Congress, in the mainstream media and in the public --- over the past dark decade. JFK's remarks include these thoughts among others that must be heard or read...

Here is a five minute or so excerpt from that speech (the full 19-minute version, and complete text transcript are both posted here)...

Please read on for both a transcript of the above video excerpt, and one or two more quick, but noteworthy, thoughts on it thereafter...

Another big show tonight as I guest-host the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show this week. (Note: We're off tomorrow, but back on Friday!)

We'll be BradCasting again LIVE tonight from L.A.'s KTLK am1150 9pm-Midnight ET (6p-9p PT). Please join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! The LIVE chat room will be up and rolling right here at The BRAD BLOG during the show as ever, so come on by while you're listening! (The Chat Room will open at the bottom of this item a few minutes before airtime, see down below, just above "Comments" section.)

So far scheduled for tonight's show...

• ANDY WORTHINGTON, British journalist, historian and author of The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 759 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison on Obama's two different Americas in regard to national security
  issues and the trials of alleged terrorists held (forever?) at Gitmo.
• DEREK BRETT & SUSAN PYNCHON The attorney (Brett) and election integrity adovcate (Pynchon) from Florida Fair Election Coalition on a remarkable election contest [PDF] --- including serious evidence of both election fraud and Diebold op-scan mistabulation --- just filed in Osceola County, FL.
• PLUS: Tom DeLay found GUILTY today and much more to be thankful for from today's news, plus your calls at 877-520-1150 and tweets to @TheBradBlog!...

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates around the country and also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at affiliate GREEN 960 in San Francisco or via MikeMalloy.com.

Click here to jump into our LIVE Chat Room during the show. Or just see below!...

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Commercial free audio archives are below (and the chat room archive is below them.) Lots of interest stuff tonight, some great calls, and plenty to be thankful for...somehow...including my thanks to Mike and Kathy for allowing me to fill in. My favorite call tonight: Curtis in the third hour. Mike is back tomorrow with a Thanksgiving "Best Of" and then I'll be back again Friday night! See ya then! Happy holidays and enjoy the archives until then...