{“Help WikiLeaks run the United States over the next four years”}

WikiLeaks enters U.S. election campaign.

Last Friday, on 28 September, the Pentagon again threatened WikiLeaks. Pentagon spokesman George Little demanded WikiLeaks destroy its publications, including the Iraq War logs which revealed the killings of more than 100,000 civilians. Little said: “continued possession by WikiLeaks of classified information belonging to the United States government represents a continuing violation of law”. The Pentagon also again “warned Mr Assange and WikiLeaks” against “soliciting” material from U.S. military whistleblowers.

In response, WikiLeaks has decided to intervene in the U.S. election campaign.

The United States government claims Mr Assange and the WikiLeaks organization are within its jurisdiction. In reply, we place the Obama administration within our jurisdiction. All American school children are taught that being subject to laws without representation is an injustice. This is the backbone of the American Revolution. We claim our representation and now initiate a campaign to transform Democratic and Republican votes into economic and political support for WikiLeaks and its First Amendment values. This election day, do not vote for the Republican or Democratic parties. Instead, cast the only vote that matters. Vote with your wallet – vote for WikiLeaks.

The Democratic Party promised to open government. But instead it is building a state within a state, placing nearly five million Americans under the national security clearance system. It has classified more documents than any previous administration, classifying even the process used to decide who will live and who will be killed. The U.S. administration hurtles towards dystopia: secret laws, secret processes, secret budgets, secret bailouts, secret killings, secret mass spying, secret drones and secret detention without charge. The collapse of the Soviet Union could have led to the withdrawal of the U.S. security state, but without moral competition from another system it has grown unchecked to influence almost every American policy. Four more years in the same direction cannot be tolerated.

The Obama administration continues to conduct a “whole of government” investigation of “unprecedented scale and nature” into WikiLeaks and its people. It has fuelled the extrajudicial banking blockade against the organization and has held an alleged WikiLeaks source, Bradley Manning, in conditions that the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, found had amounted to torture. Mr Assange has been formally found to be a political refugee, but U.S. ambassadors warned countries such as Switzerland not to offer him asylum. President Obama has called Bradley Manning guilty before trial and Vice-President Biden has labelled Julian Assange a "hi-tech terrorist". The Obama-Biden campaign brags of having prosecuted twice as many national security whistleblowers as “all previous administrations combined”. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/05/obama-campaign-brags-about-whistleblower-persecutions. This is not acceptable.

Politicians always say your decision, come election-time, will determine the future. But, as has been seen with the Obama administration, deciding on who gets into formal office is not a meaningful choice, because when you vote your party into government you also vote the government, including all its agencies and friends, into your party. Thus, parties taking office are eliminated as the restraining voice of opposition.

But there is another option.

Government agencies and corporations know that knowledge is power. That is why they spend literally billions to keep their plans and actions secret from all of us.

They know that together we can force them to act differently.

It was WikiLeaks’ revelations – not the actions of President Obama – that forced the U.S. administration out of the Iraq War. By exposing the killing of Iraqi children, WikiLeaks directly motivated the Iraqi government to strip the U.S. military of legal immunity, which in turn forced the U.S. withdrawal. http://salon.com/2011/10/23/wikileaks_cables_and_the_iraq_war/

It was WikiLeaks’ revelations and pan-Arab activists, not the Obama administration, that helped to trigger the Arab Spring. While WikiLeaks was exposing dictators from Yemen to Cairo, Vice-President Joseph Biden was calling Hosni Mubarak a democrat, Hillary Clinton was calling his government “stable” and the U.S. administration was colluding with Yemeni dictator Saleh to bomb his own people. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/13/amnesty-international-wikileaks-arab-spring http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/wikihistory-did-leaks-inspire-arab-spring

And it was WikiLeaks’ revelations, not the White House, that led to the reform of the largest children's hospital network in the United States. http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Report_on_Shriners_raises_question_of_wrongdoing

Last year, the Pentagon got $662 billion for its 2012 war chest. For WikiLeaks to continue its work to bring transparency to powerful institutions through the mass publication of leaks with the greatest potential to lead to more just forms of governance, we need to build a bigger 'war chest' too.

In early December 2010, WikiLeaks was receiving $120,000 per day in donations from the general public. In response to pressure from Washington, and entirely outside the law, financial institutions including Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Bank of America and Western Union, erected a banking blockade against WikiLeaks, stripping the organization of 95% of its funding. Although WikiLeaks has won every court case to date against the blockade, these Washington-linked institutions continue to appeal.

So, for the next 34 days, beginning on 3 October 2012, we are launching a new fundraising campaign running up to Election Day, 6 November.

You can still donate to WikiLeaks using a variety of easy methods, including workarounds for Visa, MasterCard and PayPal. These donations go to fund WikiLeaks' publishing and infrastructure costs and our legal costs to fight the financial blockade. We are expecting an answer shortly on Visa's appeal against the Icelandic court's ruling that declared their blockade illegal, and decision-makers are expected to meet soon on our European anti-trust banking case.

If you wish to contribute to Julian Assange's legal defence costs, you can still use your credit card but you will need to make a separate donation to the Julian Assange and WikiLeaks Staff Defence Fund, administered and audited by Derek Rothera & Co. Full details are on our donate page. You can also donate to the Bradley Manning Defense Fund from our site.

{"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting",} Milan Kundera.

Julian Assange

The URL for this campaign is: http://wikileaks.org/donate2012