2011 BEGINS

It's finally here, 2011.
I'm never quite prepared.
This year it was spent at Wie's place with 9guests for a splendid dinner of  

• fish, 
• German roast pork and 
• classic German potato salad (with added ginger) 
• Salad, 
• various cheeses, 
• chocolate and finally 
• a rich fruit salad and 
• "berliners".

I arrived in Kreuzberg at about 5pm after a leisurely breakfast with Wie as we caught up on each others lives in what has become our yearly ritual (interrupted last year by Margot's co-hosted party in Berlin-Mitte with Tanis in attendance).
I have not yert watched DemNow's yearly review:



2010 can be defined as the year of WikiLeaks. The whisteblowing website first made headlines around the world in April when it released a video of a U.S. helicopter gunship indiscriminately firing on Iraqi civilians killing 12 people, including two Reuters news staff. In July, WikiLeaks created a bigger firestorm when it published more than 90,000 classified U.S. military war logs of the war in Afghanistan. Then in October, WikiLeaks published some 390,000 classified U.S. documents on the war in Iraq—the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history and the greatest internal account of any war on public record. And in November WikiLeaks began releasing a giant trove of confidential State Department cables that sent shockwaves through the global diplomatic establishment. Throughout it all, WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange were targeted by the U.S. and other governments around the world. We play our interviews with Assange and with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.


After WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested in London an international group of former intelligence officers and ex-government officials released a statement in support of his work. We speak to one of the signatories, Daniel Ellsberg, the famous whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War in 1971. "If I released the Pentagon Papers today, the same rhetoric and the same calls would be made about me," Ellsberg says. "I would be called not only a traitor—which I was then, which was false and slanderous—but I would be called a terrorist... Assange and Bradley Manning are no more terrorists than I am."