M19 Tibet Protest at the Chinese Consulate 1450 Laguna St off Geary

Authorities in Tibet, which Chinese Communist troops entered in 1950, had earlier set a midnight deadline for rioters to turn themselves in after the violence that the Dalai Lama's officials believe killed 99. China puts the death toll in Lhasa at 13.

Foreign media are denied access to the area without government permission, making the competing claims difficult to verify.

But a human rights watchdog called on China to allow independent monitors to have access to detained Tibetans and said the government should publish names of those in custody.

"Given the long and well-documented history of torture of political activists by China's security forces, there is every reason to fear for the safety of those recently detained," said Brad Adams, Asia director of New York-based Human Rights Watch.

Please express your concerns directly to the Chinese embassy and raise the following two issues:

With a media black-out in Lhasa, verifiable information will become even harder to come by. Two Canadian journalists have been detained in Xiahe, and others turned away from areas outside the ‘Tibet Autonomous Region’, despite China having issued new regulations that were intended to allow free movement by foreign journalists in this Olympics year.

Demand that China allow foreign journalists back into all Tibetan areas (TAR and Tibetan areas of Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan).

Sign the petition - China's leaders are right now making a crucial choice between escalating brutality or dialogue that could determine the future of Tibet, and China. We can affect this historic choice -- China does care about its international reputation. But it will take an avalanche of global people power to get the government's attention. The Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has called for restraint and dialogue: he needs the world's people to support him. Fill out the form below and click to sign the petition--and spread the word! http://www.avaaz.org/en/

Fax Jacques Rogge, President of the International Olympic Committee

The International Tibet Support Network is speaking with a united voice, calling on the IOC to block China’s plans to carry the Olympic Torch through Tibet prior to the Games. Please add your voice to the thousands who already have by faxing or phoning Mr. Rogge at:

International Olympic Committee
Château de Vidy
1007 Lausanne
Switzerland

Tel: (41.21) 621 61 11
Fax: (41.21) 621 62 16

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3578941.ece

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Censored_Tibet_March_2008_protest_videos_-_AVI_format

Breaking all censorship – the Wikileaks goal
I’m with them, one-hundred and ten percent

Oaxaca, Mexico, Tuesday 18 March 2008
Friends,

Absolute freedom of communication among all the world’s peoples is The Rock-Bottom Necessity we must achieve if we are to have any realistic hope of changing the savage dominant global society in which most of us are living into a humane world for all peoples. In this struggle the Wikileaks group is exemplary. Today I got from them an e-mail on censorship by the Chinese government. Following their e-mail are some personal, slightly critical comments.
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Subject: Wikileaks releases 35 censored videos of the Tibet protests
From: Julian Assange. julian [at] wikileaks.org
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:53:53 -0400
To: George Salzman george.salzman [at] umb.edu

Wikileaks Press Release
Tue Mar 18 10:00:00 GMT 2008

Wikileaks has released 35 censored videos relating to the protests in Tibet and has called on bloggers around the world to help drive the footage through the so called 'Great Firewall of China'.

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Censored_Tibet_March_2008_protest_videos_-_AVI_format

The transparency group's move comes as a response to the the Chinese Public Security Bureau's carte-blanche censorship of youtube, the BBC, CNN, the Guardian and other sites carrying video footage of the Tibetan people's recent heroic stand against the inhumane Chinese occupation of Tibet.

Wikileaks has also placed the collection in two easy to use archives together with a HTML index page so they may be easily copied, placed on websites, emailed across the internet as attachments and uploaded to peer to peer networks.

Censorship, like communism, seems like a reasonable enough idea to begin with. While "from each according to his ability and to each according to his need" sounds unarguable, the world has learned that these words call forth a power elite to administer them with coercive force. Such elites are quick to define the needs of their own members as paramount. Similarly "from each mouth according to its ability and to each ear according to its need" seems harmless enough, but history shows that censorship also requires an anointed class to define this 'need' and to make violence against those who continue talking. Such power is quickly corrupted.

The first ingredient of civil society is the people's right to know, because without such understanding no human being can meaningfully choose to support anything, let alone a political party. Knowledge is the driver of every political process, every constitution, every law and every regulation. The communication of knowledge is without salient analogue. It is living, unique and demands its rightful place at the summit of society. Since knowledge is the creator and regulator of all law, its position beyond law commands due respect.

James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and other Enlightenment framers of the US Bill of Rights understood this well when they began the First Amendment's constitutional protections of speech and of the press with 'Congress shall make no law....'.

As knowledge flows across the world it is time to sum great freedoms of every nation and not subtract or divide them.
___________________________________________

The Wikileaks folks implied criticism of communism is flawed in its evident belief that the concept "from each according to his ability and to each according to his need" necessarily “call[s] forth a power elite to administer them with coercive force.” The Wikileaks statement is urging us to move in a very good and essential direction, freedom of communication unencumbered by any elite power structure. This is precisely what those who believe in anarchist-communism advocate and work towards. No nation-state has ever existed, so far as I know, that was communist, despite some states declaring themselves to be Communist (with a capital C!). We ought to recognize that anti-communism is an important component of the ideology of capitalism. That in and of itself doesn’t imply that it is bad, because there are parts of capitalist ideology that are good. But this is not one of them.

Sincerely,
George