Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, arriving for an extradition hearing at the high court in London on 2 November 2011. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
The Dirty War on WikiLeaks
Media smears suggest Swedish complicity in a Washington-driven push to punish Julian Assange
By John Pilger
March 9, 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/09/julian-assange-wikileaks
War by media, says current military doctrine, is as important as the battlefield. This is because the real enemy is the public at home, whose manipulation and deception is essential for starting an unpopular colonial war.
Like the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, attacks on Iran and Syria require a steady drip-effect on readers’ and viewers’ consciousness. This is the essence of a propaganda that rarely speaks its name.
To the chagrin of many in authority and the media, WikiLeaks has torn down the facade behind which rapacious western power and journalism collude. This was an enduring taboo; the BBC could claim impartiality and expect people to believe it.
Today, war by media is increasingly understood by the public, as is the trial by media of WikiLeaks‘ founder and editor Julian Assange.
Assange will soon know if the supreme court in London is to allow his appeal against extradition to Sweden, where he faces allegations of sexual misconduct, most of which were dismissed by a senior prosecutor in Stockholm. On bail for 16 months, tagged and effectively under house arrest, he has been charged with nothing. His “crime” has been an epic form of investigative journalism: revealing to millions of people the lies and machinations of their politicians and officials and the barbarism of criminal war conducted in their name.
For this, as the American historian William Blum points out, “dozens of members of the American media and public officials have called for [his] execution or assassination”. If he is passed from Sweden to the US, an orange jumpsuit, shackles and a fabricated indictment await him. And there go all who dare challenge rogue America.
In Britain, Assange’s trial by media has been a campaign of character assassination, often cowardly and inhuman, reeking of jealousy of the courageous outsider, while books of perfidious hearsay have been published, movie deals struck and media careers launched or resuscitated on the assumption that he is too poor to sue. In Sweden this trial by media has become, according to one observer there, “a full-on mobbing campaign with the victim denied a voice”. For more than 18 months, the salacious Expressen, Sweden’s equivalent of the Sun, has been fed the ingredients of a smear by Stockholm police.
Expressen is the megaphone of the Swedish right, including the Conservative party, which dominates the governing coalition. Its latest “scoop” is an unsubstantiated story about “the great WikiLeaks war against Sweden”. On 6 March Expressen claimed, with no evidence, that WikiLeaks was running a conspiracy against Sweden and its foreign minister Carl Bildt. The political pique is understandable. In a 2009 US embassy cable obtained by WikiLeaks, the Swedish elite’s vaunted reputation for neutrality is exposed as sham. (Cable title: “Sweden puts neutrality in the Dustbin of History.”) Another US diplomatic cable reveals that “the extent of [Sweden's military and intelligence] co-operation [with Nato] is not widely known”, and unless kept secret “would open up the government to domestic criticism”.
Swedish foreign policy is largely controlled by Bildt, whose obeisance to the US goes back to his defence of the Vietnam war and includes his leading role in George W Bush’s Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He retains close ties to Republican party extreme rightwing figures such as the disgraced Bush spin doctor, Karl Rove. It is known that his government has “informally” discussed Assange’s future with Washington, which has made its position clear. A secret Pentagon document describes US intelligence plans to destroy WikiLeaks’ “centre of gravity” with “threats of exposure [and] criminal prosecution”.
In much of the Swedish media, proper journalistic scepticism about the allegations against Assange is overwhelmed by a defensive jingoism, as if the nation’s honour is defiled by revelations about dodgy coppers and politicians, a universal breed. On Swedish public TV “experts” debate not the country’s deepening militarist state and its service to Nato and Washington, but the state of Assange’s mind and his “paranoia”. A headline in Tuesday’s Aftonbladet declared: “Assange’s moral collapse“. The article suggests Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks’ alleged source, may not be sane, and attacks Assange for not protecting Manning from himself. What was not mentioned was that the source was anonymous, that no connection has been demonstrated between Assange and Manning, and that Aftonbladet, WikiLeaks’ Swedish partner, had published the same leaks undeterred.
Ironically, this circus has performed under cover of some of the world’s most enlightened laws protecting journalists, which attracted Assange to Sweden in 2010 to establish a base for WikiLeaks. Should his extradition be allowed, and with Damocles swords of malice and a vengeful Washington hanging over his head, who will protect him and provide the justice to which we all have a right?
Thanks for keeping Julian Assange's plight in the forefront. With everything else going on, it's easy to forget that Assange is still suffering for his work in exposing the truth and his attempts to make the dark cabalists accountable for their actions.
Did you hear about this report?
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/wikileaks-st...
WikiLeaks Stratfor Emails: A Secret Indictment Against Julian Assange?
POSTED: February 28, 1:35 PM ET | By Michael Hastings
On January 26, 2011, Fred Burton, the vice president of Stratfor, a leading private intelligence firm which bills itself as a kind of shadow CIA, sent an excited email to his colleagues. "Text Not for Pub," he wrote. "We" – meaning the U.S. government – "have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect."
The news, if true, was a bombshell. At the time, the Justice Department was ramping up its investigation of Julian Assange, the founder of the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, which over the past few years has released hundreds of thousands of sensitive government documents. An indictment under the 1917 Espionage Act would be the most serious action taken to date against Assange, possibly paving the way for his extradition to the U.S. (Assange is currently under house arrest in Britain fighting extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges.)
Burton, a former federal agent with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Services, had reason to trust his information. He often boasted of his stellar government sources ("CIA cronies," he called them in another email), and in his role as a government counter-terror agent he had worked on some of the most high-profile terrorism cases of recent years, including the arrest of the first World Trade Center bomber, Ramzi Yousef. As the VP of Texas-based Stratfor Global Intelligence, a private firm that contracts with corporations and several government agencies, like the Department of Homeland Security, to collect and analyze intelligence on political situations around the world, it was part of his job to keep those contacts alive and share inside information with analysts at the company. (The emails cited in this story – contained in a leak of 5 million internal Stratfor messages – were examined by Rolling Stone in an investigative partnership with Wikileaks.)
Burton's information had the ring of truth. As Salon's Glenn Greenwald reported last May, a secret grand jury had begun taking testimony from Wikileaks supporters in a courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia. In December, during the pre-trial hearings of Bradley Manning, the Army private who allegedly gave WikiLeaks a huge trove of classified information in 2009, prosecutors repeatedly tried to convince the judge that Assange had conspired with Manning to release the data. Assange’s own lawyers had warned of a possible indictment a month before Burton said one existed.
A Department of Justice spokesperson declined to comment on whether there was an indictment against Assange; a Strafor spokesperson also declined to comment, directing me to the statement and YouTube video the company released following the disclosure that WikiLeaks was planning to publish 5 million of the company’s internal emails it obtained. "This is a deplorable, unfortunate – and illegal – breach of privacy," the Stratfor’s CEO George Friedman said in a statement, warning that some of the emails may have been "forged." To be sure, we're in new territory here. The latest leak has set off a round of debate over the ethics of publishing information alleged to have been stolen. Members of the hacker collective Anonymous claim to have passed the emails to WikiLeaks; WikiLeaks maintains it does not know the identity of the leaker(s) and stands by its policy of not commenting on its sources.
Assange, who reacts to the indictment revelation in a statement here, has become an obsession for U.S. intelligence and government officials, and the Stratfor staff is no exception. The WikiLeaks founder’s name appears 2102 times in their emails over the past two years. The venom reserved for Assange (and Bradley Manning, too) in the internal email traffic is intense: "astonishing douchebaggery," says one analyst in relation to Assange. Writes another, referring to the sexual misconduct allegations against Assange, as well as his family background: "getting a rapist off the street is getting a rapist off the street. Also, his mom owns a puppet theater." The same analyst continues in another email: "I look forward to Manning and Assange facing a bajillion-thousand counts of espionage." A final note from yet another Sratfor analyst, sent after the arrest of 16 Anonymous hacktivists last July: "These assholes should get the death sentence, along with their hero Julian=Assange."
Predictably, it’s not just intel and government officials (both current and former) that have displayed their distaste for Assange. After WikiLeaks announced on Sunday that they would begin publishing the Stratfor emails, the derision rained down from the usual suspects in the Beltway media. A typical response: one editor at The Atlantic called WikiLeaks "a joke," dismissing the Strafor emails out of hand.
This perplexes me: To advertise a complete lack of interest in the inner workings of a major private intelligence firm, whose corporate clients (who pay up to $40,000 for Stratfor's services) include companies like Lockheed Martin, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America – seems, to say the least, rather un-journalistic. If Stratfor is a joke, what does that say about the government agencies like the C.I.A. and other intel shops that supply Stratfor with employees. And if WikiLeaks – an organization that 's pulled off a few of the biggest coups in the history of journalism – is a joke, whom, exactly, is the joke on?
Already, via these emails, we’ve seen a company, Stratfor, getting paid by large corporations to spy on activists around the world, scheme with Goldman Sachs, and pontificate about money laundering soccer teams. Whatever angle you look at it from, this is news. Though it’s unlikely the Stratfor emails will have the impact that Cablegate or the Iraq Diaries and the Afghan War Logs, it does provide for another fascinating exposé of the types of organizations that are becoming ever more profitable and powerful: intelligence firms that blur the lines between private and government work. Remember, when Burton said "we" have an indictment against Assange, he didn’t mean Stratfor – he meant the U.S. government, our government.
Michael Hastings is the author of The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan.
Related
• Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview
Ecuador grants Assange asylum; UK vows to ‘carry out’ extradition anyway
2012 08 16
By Dylan Stableford | The Lookout
http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=21238
"We have decided to grant political asylum to him," Ricardo Patino said at the end of a long televised statement from the Ecuadorean capital of Quito, where he criticized the U.S. and U.K. governments for failing to protect Assange from political persecution.
"The countries that have a right to protect Assange have failed him," Patino said. "[Assange] is victim of political persecution. ... If Assange is extradited to U.S., he will not receive a fair trial."
The foreign minister said that Ecuador asked Sweden to promise it would not extradite Assange to the United States, but Sweden refused.
"Asylum is a fundamental human right," Patino said, adding that "international law" overrides local laws, and that Assange has "the right not to be extradited or expelled to any country."
A crowd gathered outside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where Assange, a 41-year-old Australian native, has been holed up since June, to hear the announcement. At least one protester was arrested.
The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office called Ecuador’s decision to grant Assange asylum "regrettable."
"British authorities are under a binding obligation to extradite him to Sweden," a spokesman for the office said. "We shall carry out that obligation. The Ecuadorean government’s decision this afternoon does not change that."
According to The Associated Press, Sweden summoned Ecuador’s ambassador to Stockholm, calling the decision to grant asylum to Assange "unacceptable."
Moments before the announcement, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa tweeted: "No one is going to terrorize us!"
It’s unclear what will happen to Assange now. U.K. authorities say his asylum is a violation of his probation--and there is reason to believe he would be arrested if he tried to leave the embassy. "Assange is going to Sweden," Louise Mensch, a conservative member of the British Parliament, tweeted. "We are going to extradite him there. That’s it and that’s all. #rape"
Assange fears that if he were extradited to Sweden, he would immediately be extradited to the United States, which has condemned WikiLeaks’ publication of classified documents. Assange and his supporters say the U.S. would charge him with espionage; the U.S. has not said whether or not it would pursue charges against him.
On Wednesday, Patino said he received a "clear and written" threat from British authorities who claimed "they could storm our embassy in London if Ecuador refuses to hand in Julian Assange."
"We want to be very clear, we’re not a British colony," Patino said. "Colonial times are over."
British officials said they are obligated to turn Assange over to Stockholm.
"The U.K. has a legal obligation to extradite Mr. Assange to Sweden to face questioning over allegations of sexual offenses and we remain determined to fulfill this obligation," a spokesman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said in response. "Under British law we can give them a week’s notice before entering the premises and the embassy will no longer have diplomatic protection. But that decision has not yet been taken. We are not going to do this overnight. We want to stress that we want a diplomatically agreeable solution."
In a statement early Thursday, WikiLeaks condemned the U.K.’s threat to raid the embassy:
A threat of this nature is a hostile and extreme act, which is not proportionate to the circumstances, and an unprecedented assault on the rights of asylum seekers worldwide.
In 2010, Swedish prosecutors in Stockholm issued warrants to question Assange about alleged sex crimes involving a pair of former WikiLeaks volunteers. Assange claims the charges are part of an international smear campaign stemming from WikiLeaks’ publication of diplomatic cables.
After a brief international manhunt, Assange turned himself in to London police in December 2010. He was granted bail and placed under house arrest. After Assange’s appeals to fight his extradition to Sweden were denied, he fled to the Ecuadorean Embassy.
Inside the embassy, Assange "sleeps on an air mattress in a small office that has been converted to a bedroom," according to the New York Times. "He has access to a computer and continues to oversee WikiLeaks, his lieutenants have said."
[...]
Read the full article at: news.yahoo.com
My personal belief is that Wikileaks and Assange are controlled opposition although I admit I don't have the time at the moment to go back and research the articles that have left me with that impression.
It just seems that the stuff he has leaked has been relatively mild to the establishment - making the government look bad isn't necessarily the same as exposing the PTB behind these governments.
It is an interesting story to follow. I just hope he doesn't get killed once his usefullness to the PTB is over.
Wendy
Wendy,
Some of the stuff that Wikileaks leaked was NOT mild, and in fact was especially incendiary anb damaging to the US military from a public relations point of view. Maybe you never saw the helicopter attack on Iraqui civilians and their rescue attempt -- and the sequel -- on YouTube. It was brutal and callous, especially in denying hospital access to children who were hurt in the attack. Here it is with fair commentary by a Young Turks analyst: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20LkYvEZOZs&feature=related
I personally don't think Assange is part of the controlled opposition; just doesn't feel like it. But I'd like to see whatever led you to believe that he is.