Today Guantanamo Detention Centre is 13 years old, and I just finished making a clip for The Justice Campaign called ‘Guantanamo Blues’. Produced by Dr Aloysia Brooks, wife of the ex-detainee David Hicks, it features the art of Molly Crabapple and the music of Les Thomas.

During a visit to Guantanamo, Molly did a number of portraits of men who had not been charged with any crime. Most of the 127 prisoners have been cleared for release – some, years ago – but they are still malingering there in conditions that amount to torture. According to a recent talk by David Hicks, most would be incapable of functioning independently again as human beings.

The song was written to raise awareness about the ongoing situation of those detained in the facility. ‘Guantanamo Blues’ songwriter, Les Thomas said:

“It is important that President Obama is aware that people from all over the world are counting on him to adhere to his promise to close Guantanamo and ensure fair trials.”

An unknown number of men are participating in a hunger-strike to protest their ongoing detention without charge or trial, and their conditions and treatment. Upon the release of the summary of the US Senate Committee Report on the CIA torture program, there is a renewed call for the Obama administration to hold those who orchestrated the torture program to account. One of the most disturbing revelations is that it was largely futile, and almost never produced any actionable intelligence. Hina Shamsi, Director of ACLU’s National Security Articulate Projectspace, commented:

“[JTF-GTMO assessments] are one-sided assessments that are full of uncorroborated information, information obtained through torture, speculation, errors, and allegations that have demonstrably been proven false.”

NB Quite by accident, we included a drawing by Steve Mumford – ‘Sgt Trisha Pinczes Reading by Camp X-Ray Disused since 2002, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba’ – believing it to be one of Molly’s. We are currently trying to contact him for permission to leave it in. Steve, if you’re reading this, please drop me a line at EDITIONS@THING2THING.COM.

I visited Daniel Ellsberg as a citizen journalist in 2012, to talk about Wikileaks. He talked for a long time, with dismay, about why people haven’t leaked in the past – neither in government, the corporate sector, nor the church – about even the most heinous of crimes.

Thus, the importance of leaking; for justice, peace, democracy, well-being and the health of our planet. But if wrongful secrecy abounds, and at such a cost, surely we need more than one in a million addressing the issue…

“We must challenge the systems that make this secrecy possible”.

Daniel Ellsberg is a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He is best known as the whistleblower who gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. Ellsberg is also the author of three books: Papers on the War (1971), Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002), and Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (2001). In December 2006, he won the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” in Stockholm, Sweden, “for putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example.”

That may sound unreliable… but it sells! Welcome to Big Brother meets Big Data!

Palantir Technologies, is a premium Silicon Valley start-up, whose business it’s been to write clever software to track digital footprints, then ‘join the dots’ to predict who you are and what you might do next. Its directors are Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal and first outside investor in Facebook, and Alex Karp, an “eccentric philosopher” (with a PhD in neoclassical social theory) who turned their Palo Alto* headquarters into a replica of The Shire from ‘Lord of the Rings’. If it sounds like a fairy story, it is not. Palantir’s software has been labelled the Killer App. It was allegedly used to hunt down and kill Osama Bin Laden.

[Editor's update: In 2020 Palantir moved its headquarters to Denver.]

Palantir is ‘well in’. Its advisors are Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet (ex CIA). It was funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm and the CIA became a client of Palantir back in 2004. Other government clients are the NSA, the FBI, the NYPD, and a number of counter terrorism and military agencies.

This baby was valued at five to eight billion dollars in 2013 and predicted to earn another billion in private sector deals in 2014. Forbes Magazine reported:

“Palantir is emerging from the shadow world of spies and special ops to take corporate America by storm. Private-sector deals now account for close to 60% of the company’s revenue.”

[Editor's update: Palantir went public in 2020 as PLTR. As of late April 2026, it has a market capitalization estimated in the range of $300 to $375 billion, largely due to its AI-enabled software platform. Its share value has seen a downturn in 2026, after peaking in 2025.]

The identities of corporate clients are usually kept secret, but in 2014 they have included J.P. Morgan, various hedge funds, News Corp and Bank of America – as some will recall from Palantir’s dealings with H.B Gary Federal in a thwarted plan to destroy Wikileaks and its media partner Glenn Greenwald, who instead went on to report on the disclosures of Edward Snowden. The plan may have succeeded, had not Aaron Barr, an employee of H.B. Gary, bragged about and published a list of alleged members of Anonymous, which in reality was a list of artists, writers and musicians who had taken an interest in the movement. The injustice of this blunder unsurprisingly triggered a revenge attack on H.B. Gary’s servers from real hackers, who uncovered a Powerpoint file outlining the steps the partners would take to discredit Wikileaks and its associates.

When Anonymous gained access to thousands of emails on H.B Gary’s servers, they found that Palantir had worked with HB Gary Federal to develop proposals for attacking WikiLeaks’ infrastructure, blackmailing its supporters and identifying donors. One idea was to submit false information to the organisation’s drop box, which would later be exposed as such. When the plot was exposed, Palantir put an engineer on leave, apologised for his role in the plan, and cut ties with HB Gary. After that they installed a “Batphone” in Karp’s office, allegedly to receive reports about “unethical clients”, and reinstated their engineer.

One might ask at this stage if these people are elves or the Black Riders.

Palantir Technologies is a perhaps a pioneer in an upcoming consumer industry of selling private information for profit, and they are cheap as chips compared to Booz Allen, IBM and Lockheed Martin. But Forbes Magazine suggested Palantir restrict their services to the top end because some people wouldn’t be happy if they went totally public. Quote: “It helps its customers see too much”.

Really? Alex Karp claims his “turn-key” service (as he calls it) helps the Government go after bad guys. Who those bad guys are he often doesn’t know or succeed in finding out.

“It’s tough”, he says, because his targets don’t leave behind any tangible evidence such as fingerprints or DNA.

Whether they actually are bad guys he takes on faith from his Government or whichever client he is working for, and of course the Batphone. According to former employees, Palantir has sought work in Saudi Arabia despite the staff’s misgivings about human rights abuses in the kingdom, but Karp doesn’t seemed to have picked up on any calls about that issue.

In an interview on the Palantir website, Karp assures us that Palantir are the good guys and he showcases a high profile project where they chased the infiltrators of the Dalai Lama’s computer. He stumbles however when asked who it was and has to admit that it wasn’t really clear in the end whether it was a foreign government or teenagers. That’s a pretty wide margin of error.

Palantir’s so-called predictions hinge on assumptions and probabilities – no light, just shadow – and as it turns out, the “bad guys” are not always bad guys. Sometimes they’re activists; sometimes journalists. Karp loves to drop in the word “turn-key” when he’s selling his crystal ball kit. The irony he doesn’t see is that it is the perfect tool for turn-key totalitarianism. You put all of this surveillance into place and then someone, a new President or Prime Minister, flips the switch to tyranny.

Click! Suddenly the technology is not being used as intended. Click! Anti-war activists are raided by the FBI. Click! Refugee activists are threatened by the Department of Immigration and Border ‘Protection’.

[Editor's update: In 2026 a Palantir AI-powered platform called ImmigrationOS is used for identifying, tracking and removing deportation targets - so that an officer can green light a raid, generate a warrant and trigger deportation within a few clicks.]

Alex Karp claims to be an advocate for civil liberties. He assured a talk-show host that innocent people would not be “swept into the dragnet”; that the “patterns” his software detects only relate to the activities of terrorists. He says that the data Palantir supplies is “tagged” for one use only, giving the impression that his company has control over who sees what, or how the information will be used.

The US Justice Department’s Inspector General, in a series of reports on FBI practices found systematic disregard for the required procedures for demanding records. False statements in affidavits to telecommunications companies and the FISA Court; improper acquisition of journalists’ phone records; use of national security authorities in cases unrelated to national security; and attempts by superiors to retroactively conceal these improprieties. Speaking of patterns, a pattern of failure to report potential violations to the proper oversight board was also “noted”.

William Binney, a former NSA official, who led a team to develop ThinThread, the agency’s selective and effective pre-911 surveillance tool, resigned because he saw the whole thing spin out of control and his country turn into a police state. Binney baulked when he saw that NSA data was being used to prosecute petty crime, and not many terrorists. Not many at all. Palantir’s director admits that real terrorists are apt to change their patterns and cut their ties as soon as anyone in their circle is arrested. Going after ordinary citizens, on the other hand, is a much more fruitful, easy and lucrative process.

FBI Director Robert Mueller argued that the entire body of phone records is “relevant to an investigation” because it plausibly contains records that will be relevant to some investigation at some point in time. Since these investigations were not only being used to pursue petty criminals but dissidents too, Binney realised that his Government’s actual use of data gathered through spying had become “a Totalitarian Process”. The American Civil Liberties Union describes Palantir as “a true totalitarian nightmare”.

Julian Sanchez from the CATO Institute articulated a problem that possibly none of the hobbits from The Shire had foreseen:

“Such an architecture of surveillance, once established, would be difficult to dismantle and prove too potent a tool of control if it ever fell into the hands of people who — whether through panic, malice, or a misguided confidence in their own ability to secretly judge the public good — would seek to use it against us.”

Unscathed by the plot to destroy his career, Glenn Greenwald worked with Edward Snowden to reveal that this architecture is in place. Mass surveillance of all citizens, an unprecedented level of eavesdropping, with all the dirt ready if your name comes up, to prosecute you for any kind of crime or misdemeanour. And if you happen to be living in ‘The Lucky Country’ of Australia, you might already be getting into strife for criticising your Government, even if you use a pseudonym because you happen to work for it.

The more innocent citizens are spied upon and intimidated, if they get lippy, the more secretive Governments must become to get away with it. Besides an erosion of civil liberties that inevitably becomes unconstitutional, there’s another ‘technical’ issue that makes the whole process dubious:

Evidence stops being ‘forensic’ when it’s only a digital footprint.

Alex Karp admits that and one can only conclude that his company sells nothing but hunches, and that around these hunches his clients have cultivated a devout belief in the stoned philosopher’s Palantiri – and word has it he often is stoned. A cloud of secrecy then prevents sceptics, lawyers and moralists from reality-checking the ‘vision’, and inducing them to assume that a well-paid, well-hidden job is being well done. Copies of NSA documents are not even allowed to be passed on for analysis by another Palantir client, the NYPD. And thus, the circle of trust is hermetically sealed, around an irrational, self-serving seat of power that is frightened of mere shadows.

Peter Jackson should make a film about that!

Sydney PRISM-BREAK protest - Photo Jarek Gasiorek

Whatever your choice of political party for government in the House of Representatives, you can still vote for the Wikileaks Party in the Senate.

Go The Leeks! - Click to enlarge

The WikiLeaks Party stands for unswerving commitment to the core principles of civic courage nourished by understanding and truthfulness and the free flow of information. It is a party that will practise in politics what WikiLeaks has done in the field of information by standing up to the powerful and shining a light on injustice and corruption.

The Constitution of the WikiLeaks Party lists its objectives which include the protection of human rights and freedoms; transparency of governmental and corporate action, policy and information; recognition of the need for equality between generations; and support of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander self-determination.

Julian Assange: Wikileaks Party Candidate for Victoria

The Wikileaks Party’s most prominent candidate, running in the State of Victoria, is Julian Assange, the founder and editor in chief of WikiLeaks. He states:

“The values of transparency and accountability and resistance under pressure that I have developed through hard experience with WikiLeaks, that is what we intend to take to Canberra.”

Running in New South Wales is lawyer and Human Rights activist Kellie Tranter, who has delivered addresses, chaired workshops and participated in public debates on issues like climate change, human rights and gender equality at local, national and international conferences, including speeches opposing unjustified wars and economic exploitation.

Kellie Tranter: Wikileaks Party Candidate for NSW

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For Western Australia the lead candidate is Gerry Georgatos, a life-long human rights and social justice campaigner, investigative journalist and PhD researcher in Australian Custodial Systems and Deaths in Custody. He founded Students Without Borders, with one of its initiatives recycling and refurbishing computers, becoming the largest computer recycling program in Australia. Gerry has travelled widely among remote Aboriginal communities and extensively researched Aboriginal homelessness, poverty, imprisonment and suicide rates. He has been a long-time staunch refugee rights advocate, visiting immigration detention centres, an anti-drugs campaigner working alongside the vulnerable and a life-long freedom of speech campaigner. His advocacy in fighting racism has been longstanding and he has completed two Masters topically covering racism and the ways forward.

Gerry Georgatos: Wikileaks Party Candidate for WA

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For a complete overview of the other Candidates, the Wikileaks Party National Council, its Constitution and Policies, and information on how to become a Member and DONATE! please visit the Party’s website at wikileaksparty.org.au.

Most importantly, if you would like “The Leeks” to receive a STRONG primary vote:

…… VOTE 1 WIKILEAKS PARTY, ABOVE THE LINE

If you don’t live in Australia, there is unfortunately no Wikileaks Party in your country, yet…

Wikileaks Party Artwork by Mark Rastrick- click to enlarge

What is this hell we call Gitmo? Whose idea was it to detain people there indefinitely without charges? Why can’t even the President of the United States find a way to resolve the plight of at least the 86 men who have been cleared for “immediate” release but are still stuck in the detention camp? What, or who is causing the inertia?

Why is Obama suggesting it’s Congress, when there is a clause in the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) that permits him, as the Commander in Chief, to fulfil the promise he made repeatedly during his 2008 campaign, to shut down this appalling violation of human rights? What has Obama really done to close, or not close Guantanamo?

For those who haven’t been aware of what Gitmo is like, consult The Justice Campaign, the Freedom of The Press Foundation and of course Wikileaks.

In a recent press conference about Guantanamo detainees, 106 of whom have been on a hunger strike for over 100 days now, Barrack Obama did nothing more than deplore the fact that the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp was located on foreign soil; announce that he had asked Congress to transfer the prisoners to the US; and say that he was lifting the moratorium on the repatriation of Yemeni prisoners.

The President specified however that these men would not be released immediately, but subjected to a case by case investigation – presumably again, since they were already cleared. The President was understandably heckled by Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin, and in no uncertain terms, told to “get real”.

If the Gitmo transfer ever happens, one would hope for the rule of law to apply, eventually… But after 11 years of unjust detainment, deprivation and torture, most of Obama’s captives have had it, and have have opted for death by starvation. It is after all, the most likely way now to exit Guantanamo.

To prevent this mass exodus in body bags however, the prisoners are being force-fed on a round the clock regime. It would seem that the US will not even let these men die in dignity…

A small group of us attended the US Consulate in Sydney in solidarity with those on hunger strike and the international day of action to close Guantanamo Bay.

Force-feeding is the ultimate tyranny, for those who only want to give up and die

“The Wikileaks Tapes” is a labour of love and it was a very unexpected adventure which began the day I met Christine Assange. She had been consulting my blog at thing2thing.com and I guess she trusted that I was willing and able to do something strong for Julian. So she asked people to give me the time of day… and I gave it my 110%.

Special thanks to #colmirgo for the interview…

THE WIKILEAKS TAPES - 24 films about the organisation that changed the world

“The WikiLeaks phenomenon has shown us that a new form of journalism is possible. It has also shown just how full of Western corporate propaganda the mainstream media have become. The lengths that Vogan has gone to, as a completely unfunded solo operator, to make such an important contribution to the historical continuum is a case in point that independent citizen journalism is an indispensable tool for speaking the truth.” Colin Mirgis, Green Left Weekly ………………………..READ MORE

I visited Daniel Ellsberg to learn the importance of leaking.

Special thanks to #colmirgo for the interview…