WIKILEAKS, ASSANGE NEWSLETTER #12, 4-14-19

OMNI

WIKILEAKS/ASSANGE NEWSLETTER #12, April 14, 2019

https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2019/04/wikileaksassange-newsletter-11-may-25.html

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace

(#9 July 21, 2011; #10, Jan. 30, 2012, #11, May 25, 2018).

Special connection to the University of Arkansas is its motto “Veritate Duce Progredi.”  To advance with truth as our leader.

See separate OMNI Manning Newsletters, OMNI Investigative Journalism Newsletters, OMNI Whistleblower Newsletters, and more.

http://omnicenter.org/donate/

 

OMNI’S REPORTING OF US EFFORTS TO SILENCE ASSANGE

WIKILEAKS, ASSANGE NEWSLETTER #6, 2-4-11

http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2011/02/wikileaks-6.html 

(#7 I couldn’t find the http today)

WIKILEAKS, ASSANGE, MANNING NEWSLETTER, #8, April 4, 2011  http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2011/04/wikileaks-8.html

OMNI WIKILEAKS, ASSANGE, MANNING NEWSLETTER #9, JULY 21, 2011, Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace

http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2011/07/wikileaks-newsletter-9.html

WIKILEAKS, ASSANGE, MANNING NEWSLETTER #10, January 30, 2012.  https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2019/04/wikileaksassange-newsletter-10-1-30-12.html     (go to Manning Newsletters)

WIKILEAKS/ASSANGE NEWSLETTER #11, May 25, 2018

https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2019/04/wikileaksassange-newsletter-11-may-25.html

 

Sample Bradley Manning newsletter 2011 http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2011/03/bradley-manning-in-danger-irish-call-to.html

 

WIKILEAKS/ASSANGE NEWSLETTER #12, 4-14-19

CONTENTS

3 NADG Arrest Reports

Andy Greenberg.  US Hacking Case v. Assange

Tariq Ali.  US Motives to Punish Assange

US vs. Investigative Journalism. 

     Greenwald and Lee. 

     Pilger.

Tulsi.  Political Action to Defend Assange

Newsletter #11

TEXTS

ASSANGE ARRESTED, US REQUESTS EXTRADITION

Page one coverage in the Northwest Arkansas Democrat -Gazette.

Staff.  “Assange Extracted from Embassy.”  4-12-19.

He is charged by the US with  hacking (“conspiracy-to-commit-computer-intrusion”) “to help former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning break a password to the Defense Department.”  But no evidence is presented showing their success.  Specifically he was jailed by the British for “breaching his bail conditions.”   Page one importance is enhanced by his attorney’s claim that “’Journalists around the world should be deeply troubled by these unprecedented criminal charges.”

Staff.  “Assange Extradition Raises Concern in U.K.”  4-13-19.

Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn opposed extradition to the US seeks to punish him for exposing  “‘evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan.’”  Officially he is charged with “conspiring to break into a classified government computer at the Pentagon.”  The article gives considerable history, background, and related matters (Trump’s earlier praise of Wikileaks, his crackdown on leakers, Hillary Clinton, the Vault 7 leak whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg’s denunciation of criminalizing investigative journalism).

Gregory Katz. (AP).  “Britons Call for Sending Assange to Sweden, if Rape Case Reopens.”  4-14-19.  Elaborates on the preceding report especially on the possible Swedish extradition.  New are the inquiries rising over Equador’s president Moreno ‘s possible corruption and “abandonment of Assange,” and the role of Ola Bini, encryption expert.

(End NADG reports)

Robert Mackey.    “Julian Assange Arrested in London After Ecuador Withdraws Asylum; U.S. Requests Extradition. “ The Intercept (4-13-19).

READ THE STORY →

ANDY GREENBERG. “Breaking Down the Hacking Case Against Julian Assange.”  wired, April 11, 2019.

FOR THE FIRST time since 2012, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange no longer has the legal protections of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. He now faces the criminal charges he's always suspected and feared—although it's now clear that he's accused of criminal behavior not as a journalist, or even a spy, but a hacker.

On Thursday, London's metropolitan police physically dragged Assange out of his residence at the embassy and into a police van. Hours later, a grand jury unsealed an indictment against the WikiLeaks founder for one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. The UK government has already made clear that it carried out Assange's arrest on behalf of the US government, implying that it intends to comply with his extradition to the US to face those hacking charges.

The indictment—which you can read in full below—centers on an incident nine years ago ago, when Assange allegedly told his source, then Army private Chelsea Manning, that he would help crack a password that would have given her deeper access to the military computers from which she was leaking classified material to WikiLeaks.

"On or about March 8, 2010, Assange agreed to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on United States Department of Defense Computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network, a United States government network used for classified documents and communica­tions," the indictment reads, referring to the Pentagon's SIPRNet network of computers that store classified information.

That brief alleged offer of active assistance from Assange may be all the US government needs to charge him not as a journalist recipient of Manning's leaks, but as a coconspirator with Manning in the theft of Pentagon data.

"It can be as simple as that," says Bradley Moss, an attorney for the Washington, DC, law firm Mark Zaid P.C. who focuses on issues in national security and intelligence community personnel.   MORE

https://www.wired.com/story/julian-assange-arrest-indictment-hacking-cfaa/

WHY DO THE US AND ITS IMPERIAL SATRAPIES WANT TO PUNISH ASSANGE and call it rule of law?  Assange revealed their lawlessness!

“Julian Assange outside the Gate of Hell.”

Posted Apr 13, 2019 by Tariq Ali

Topics: Incarceration

Places: Ecuador

Originally published: Verso (April 11, 2019)   | 

I’ve been to see Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy several times, mainly when Rafael Correa was President and the Embassy felt like a liberated space. A few weeks ago I met him again. By now Correa’s successor, Lenín Moreno, had capitulated on every level to the American Empire. The Embassy became a prison and Assange’s health deteriorated. He was in no doubt that Moreno had been asked and had agreed to expel him from the Embassy. The U.S. demand for extradition was no longer a secret. The Embassy handed him over to the British police earlier today.

If we lived in a world where laws were respected, then Assange would be charged with jumping bail (a minor offense), fined or kept in prison for a few weeks and then released to return to his native Australia. But both the UK and Australia are, effectively, imperial satrapies and likely to bow to U.S. demands. The secret and not-so-secret state in both countries work closely with (or under) its U.S. masters. Why do they want him so badly? To set an example. To incarcerate and isolate him as a warning to others not to follow the Wikileaks path. Chelsea Manning has been re-arrested because she refused to testify to a Grand Jury against him. Since the Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies are pretty much aware of what the U.S. is up to in most parts of the world, the threat posed by Wikileaks was that it made its information available to any citizen, anywhere in the world, who possessed a computer. US/EU foreign policy and its post 9/11 wars have been based on lies, promoted by global TV and media networks and often accepted by a majority of North American and European citizens. Information contradicting these lies challenges the stated motives for war — human rights, democracy, freedom, etc.

Wikileaks has been exposing all this by publishing classified documents that shine a light on the real reasons. It is an astonishing record. Till now WikiLeaks has published almost 3 million diplomatic cables and other U.S. State Department records, comprising some two billion plus words. This stupendous and seemingly insurmountable body of internal state literature, which if printed would amount to some 30,000 volumes, represents something new in the world. This is where the Internet becomes a subversive force, challenging the propaganda networks of the existing order. Assange and his colleagues made no secret that their principal target was the American Empire and its global operations. The response of U.S. institutions has been hysterical and comical. The Library of Congress, blocked Internet access to WikiLeaks. The U.S. National Archives even blocked searches of its own database for the phrase “WikiLeaks.” So absurd did the taboo become that, like a dog snapping mindlessly at everything, eventually it found its mark — its own tail. As Julian Assange pointed out: “By March 2012, the Pentagon had gone so far as to create an automatic filter to block any emails, including inbound emails to the Pentagon, containing the word ‘WikiLeaks.'” As a result, Pentagon prosecutors preparing the case against U.S. intelligence analyst PFC Manning, the alleged source of the Cablegate cables, found that they were not receiving important emails from either the judge or the defense.

The British government is insisting that they will follow the law. We shall see. The U.S. Department of Justice has stated that Assange could face five years in a U.S. prison. Diane Abbot, a leading member of Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet, said in parliament today:

On this side of the house, we want to make the point that the reason we are debating Julian Assange this afternoon–even though the only charge he may face in this country is in relation to his bail hearings–is entirely to do with the whistleblowing activities of Julian Assange and Wikileaks. It is this whistleblowing activity into illegal wars, mass murder, murder of civilians and corruption on a grand scale that has put Julian Assange in the crosshairs of the U.S. administration. It is for this reason that they have once more issued an extradition warrant against Julian Assange … Julian Assange is not being pursued to protect U.S. national security, he is being pursued because he has exposed wrongdoing by U.S. administrations and their military forces.

We will learn more in the days and weeks ahead. In the meantime, Wikileaks and its founder expect and deserve the solidarity of all those of us who believe that citizens should not be treated like children and that most politicians in the US/EU orbit are untrustworthy and hate their lies and corruptions being exposed.

·        

ARREST OF ASSANGE VS. INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM

Glenn Greenwald, Micah Lee “The U.S. Government’s Indictment of Julian Assange Poses Grave Threats to Press Freedom.”   The Intercept (4-13-19). The Trump DOJ is exploiting animosity toward Assange to launch a thinly disguised effort to criminalize core functions of investigative journalism. READ MORE →

"Julian Assange arrest" - by John Pilger

Justice Initiative via uark.onmicrosoft.com	4-14-19,7:05 AM (2 hours ago)
to James

JUSTICE INITIATIVE    John Pilger.    “The Assange arrest is a warning from history.”  Justice Initiative.  April 14, 2019. johnpilger The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in  almost seven years. That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for "democratic" societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention. But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi fascists in Trump's Washington, in league with Ecuador's Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice. Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair's "paramount crime" is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange's crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth. The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, "sow the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilisation". The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast. . . .[I excised a section mainly condemning The Guardian.] Even if journalists who published WikiLeaks' leaks are not summoned by an American grand jury, the intimidation of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning will be enough. Real journalism is being criminalised by thugs in plain sight. Dissent has become an indulgence. In Australia, the current America-besotted government is prosecuting two whistle-blowers who revealed that Canberra's spooks bugged the cabinet meetings of the new government of East Timor for the express purpose of cheating the tiny, impoverished nation out of its proper share of the oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea. Their trial will be held in secret. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, is infamous for his part in setting up concentration camps for refugees on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus, where children self harm and suicide. In 2014, Morrison proposed mass detention camps for 30,000 people. Real journalism is the enemy of these disgraces. A decade ago, the Ministry of Defence in London produced a secret document which described the "principal threats" to public order as threefold: terrorists, Russian spies and investigative journalists. The latter was designated the major threat. The document was duly leaked to WikiLeaks, which published it. "We had no choice," Assange told me. "It's very simple. People have a right to know and a right to question and challenge power. That's true democracy." What if Assange and Manning and others in their wake - if there are others - are silenced and "the right to know and question and challenge" is taken away? In the 1970s, I met Leni Reifenstahl, close friend of Adolf Hitler, whose films helped cast the Nazi spell over Germany. She told me that the message in her films, the propaganda, was dependent not on "orders from above" but on what she called the "submissive void" of the public. "Did this submissive void include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?" I asked her. "Of course," she said, "especially the intelligentsia.... When people no longer ask serious questions, they are submissive and malleable. Anything can happen." And did. The rest, she might have added, is history. John Richard Pilger is an Australian journalist and BAFTA award-winning documentary film maker. He has been mainly based in the United Kingdom since 1962.

POLITICAL ACTION IN DEFENSE OF ASSANGE

FROM TULSI

Dick—  4-14-19 On Twitter, CNN, and MSNBC, Tulsi called out the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange as a clear warning shot to journalists and Americans: This is such a dangerous and slippery slope, not only for journalists but also for every American. That our government has the power to lay down the hammer to say, “Be careful, be quiet, fall in line — otherwise we have the means to come after you.” Tulsi is standing up for our freedoms to the Washington establishment who are celebrating Assange’s arrest — and she’s taking fire for it. Will you show Tulsi that you stand with her? Click here to say you agree that the job of the US government is to protect our rights— not infringe on our civil liberties, restrict the freedom and flow of information, and wage costly interventionist wars around the world. There is a reason that Assange’s arrest is happening now—because President Trump has turned the swamp into a cesspool of corruption. Assange’s activities are a threat to US intelligence overreach and any powerful politician who seeks to subvert the will of the American people by subterfuge. As a result, the establishment has long sought to take him down. President Obama’s administration looked into the charges against Assange and chose not to extradite him because they were concerned about setting a precedent that threatens the freedom of the press. But as Trump surrounds himself with chickenhawk neocons like Pompeo and Bolton, he’s lost any ability to thwart the establishment agenda. As Tulsi said on CNN, “This is what happens when we have people in government who can identify an individual as a foreign asset because they disagree with you.” This isn’t about the charges brought against Assange, which should be litigated fairly in a court of law. This is about shining light on a corrupt professional political class that shuns transparency and seeks to create a culture of fear in order to keep the American people in line. We can’t let that happen. Our democracy depends on transparency, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. Click here to stand with Tulsi in this fight to hold our government accountable for actions taken at home and abroad. Thank you for standing with us. TULSI2020   STAND WITH TULSI »

PAID FOR BY TULSI NOW PO Box 75255 Kapolei HI 96707

Contents  Wikileaks/Assange Newsletter #11, May 25, 2018  (Newsletters 1-10, 714pp.)

2 essays from #7,2011,  on Wikileaks, Assange, and Democracy (copied 4-13-19)

Books by Assange:

The Wikileaks Files: the World According to U.S. Empire.

    Freedom and the Future of the Internet.

Film About Assange:

Ales Gibney, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks.

Catching Up with Assange 2017-2018

Roots Action 5-18, Petitioning Equador Not to Cave to US Pressure

Catching Up with Assange 2016   Amy Goodman:  UN Panel Says Assange Being Arbitrarily Detained.  What Will
      Happen Now?  Jan. 2016

Wikileaks/Assange Google Search Feb. 4, 2016

Strong ACLU Protest against 6 Years of Arbitrary Detention  Feb. 6, 2016

Veterans for Peace:  Give Assange his Freedom, Feb. 12

New Paperback Edition of The Wikileaks Files: The World According to US Empire.  Verso, 2016. 

 

 

Assange 2012-2015

Assange, Google is Privatized NSA

Assange, Cypherpunks

Gibney, Film about Assange

Greenberg, Wikileaks vs. Secrecy

Hayase, Assange and the Tilted Scale of Justice

Moon, et al., Saving the Internet

 

OMNI Newsletters

Wikileaks/Assange Newsletters Nos. 9 and 10

 

END WIKILEAKS/ASSANGE NEWSLETTER #12, 4-14-19

 

WIKILEAKS/ASSANGE NEWSLETTER #10, 1-30-12

OMNI

WIKILEAKS/ASSANGE NEWSLETTER #10,

January 30, 2012.

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace  (#9 July 21, 2011).

Here is the link to all OMNI newsletters:  http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/   For a knowledge-based peace, justice, and ecology movement and an informed citizenry as the foundation for change.     Here is the link to the Index:  http://www.omnicenter.org/omni-newsletter-general-index/

See Manning Newsletters and Snowden.

 

Contents of #9  Wikileaks/Assange

Timothy Vaslett:   Defense of WikiLeaks, Assange, Manning

Vaslett, Anonymous:  Monkeywrenching to Defend WikiLeaks

Amnesty International Praises WikiLeaks

Assange Wins Gellhorn Prize

WikiLeaks Blog by Greg Mitchell

 

 

Contents of #10

Help Wikileaks Expose

Petition for Assange

Rolling Stone Interview of Assange

US Persecution from Manning to Assange

Manning Opponent of War Crimes

Assange and Manning for Nobel Peace Prize

Tens of Thousands More

Justice Foreclosed

Films About Assange

Here is the link to all the newsletters on all subjects archived in the OMNI web site:  http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/

 

 

    Help #WikiLeaks Liberate the Trans-Paci​fic Partnershi​p Negotiatin​g Text!

Just Foreign Policy info@justforeignpolicy.org via uark.edu

August 17, 2012 to jbennet

Dear Dick,

Help free the TPP! Make a pledge to donate to WikiLeaks should it publish the TPP text--and check out the campaign!

Take ActionOn September 6, negotiators will go to Leesburg, Virginia, for the latest round of secretive talks on the "Trans-Pacific Partnership" agreement. This proposed agreement threatens access to essential medicines in developing countries, threatens environmental regulations, and threatens internet freedom. Even Members of Congress and their staffs have been blocked from seeing the draft text, while corporate representatives have been allowed to see it.

Americans - and citizens of the other countries that would be covered by the agreement - have a right to see what our governments are proposing to do. Parts of the draft negotiating text have been leaked. We want to see the whole text!

So we're issuing a reward for the liberation of the TPP negotiating text. But our reward has some special features: we want as many people as possible to contribute what they can to raise the reward. That means you.

Check out the campaign and make a pledge here:  http://www.freetpp.org

 

So why are we trying to raise a reward for WikiLeaks to publish the TPP?

First of all, we want WikiLeaks to publish the text. We want this because it will show that WikiLeaks is still relevant to citizen demands for government transparency, that releasing U.S. diplomatic cables wasn't the end of WikiLeaks' contribution to public knowledge of government misdeeds. And we want this because it will show that the WikiLeaks campaign for government transparency isn't just about national security issues.

 

This week, Ecuador granted political asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the threat of political persecution by the United States - as thousands of Americans had urged them to do through Just Foreign Policy's petition. But the UK authorities have refused to grant Assange safe passage to Ecuador, and he remains trapped in Ecuador's embassy. Meanwhile, the corporate financial blockade of WikiLeaks has starved WikiLeaks of resources, while the legal fight to protect Assange from the threat of extradition to the United States has drained resources.

 

The reward isn't to whoever leaks the document, but to WikiLeaks if it publishes the document. In addition to helping WikiLeaks, this path will shield the leaker against any claim that they leaked the document for personal gain. It will be clear that they leaked the document to promote the public interest.

Second, we're "crowdsourcing" our reward. Instead of asking one rich person to put up the money for a reward, we're asking you to make a pledge to make a financial contribution to WikiLeaks, if WikiLeaks publishes the draft TPP negotiating text. If many people make small pledges, that will add up to a big reward. And the reward will grow over time, dramatizing public concern about the secretive TPP negotiations, about the lack of transparency [1], about the threat to access to essential medicines in developing countries [2], about the threat to environmental regulation [3], and about the threat to internet freedom. [4]

 

Can you help us launch this campaign by making a pledge to donate to WikiLeaks if it publishes the draft TPP negotiating text? You can make your pledge here:

 

http://www.freetpp.org

 

Thank you for all you do to help bring about a more just foreign policy,

Robert Naiman, Chelsea Mozen, Sarah Burns and Megan Iorio

Just Foreign Policy

Please support our work. Donate for a Just Foreign Policy.

http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/donate

 

References:

 

1. "Trans-Pacific Partnership Talks: Senators Demand Access To Controversial Documents After Leak," Zach Carter, Huffington Post, 06/25/2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/25/trans-pacific-partnership-documents-sherrod-brown-jeff-merkley-ron-wyden-robert-menendez_n_1624956.html

2. "Trading Away Health: How the U.S.’s Intellectual Property Demands for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Threaten Access to Medicines," Issue Brief, MSF Access Campaign, August 2012, http://aids2012.msf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/TPP-Issue-Brief-IAC-July2012.pdf

3. " The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (aka NAFTA on Steroids): What it could mean for the Environment ," Sierra Club, http://www.sierraclub.org/trade/downloads/TPP-Factsheet.pdf

4. "Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement," Electronic Frontier Foundaton, https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp

 

 

 

 

    UK: Don't Allow US Extraditio​n of Assange

Since June 19, Wikileaks' Julian Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London while his application for political asylum is reviewed. Meanwhile, Ecuadorean officials have been trying to reach a diplomatic resolution by seeking assurances from the US, UK, and Swedish governments that Assange will not be extradited to the United States if he travels to Sweden for questioning. But all three governments have remained silent on the issue. It is also being reported that the Swedish government has refused an offer to interview Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy.

 

But there is still hope. A senior legal advisor to the Ecuadoreans told the Guardian that the UK must waive what is called “specialty” for Assange to be extradited to the US after proceedings in Sweden are complete. If the UK were to give assurances that they would not waive specialty, Assange would be safe to venture to Sweden for questioning.

 

To date, there hasn't been much public pressure on the UK government to declare its intentions with regard to Assange. Let's change that. Sign our petition pressing the UK to publicly declare that it will not waive specialty in the case of Julian Assange.

http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/uk-dont-allow-us-extradition-assange

Thanks!

 

US the Real Betrayer

“Michael Hastings Interview With Julian Assange”

 Rolling Stone, January 18, 2012, RSN

Excerpt: "'The question is, where has the United States betrayed Madison and Jefferson, betrayed these basic values on how you keep a democracy? I think that the US military-industrial complex and the majority of politicians in Congress have betrayed those values.'"

READ MORE http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/367-wikileaks/9503-focus-michael-hastings-interview-with-julian-assange  

 

Subject: Manning & Assange:  Manning Prosecution Lays Basis for Terror Charge Against Assange By Naomi Spencer   The United States government is seeking to use its prosecution of Manning, to lay the basis for extraditing Assange to the US and either prosecuting him as a terrorist or locking him away indefinitely in a military prison without any recourse to the courts or due process. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30075.htm

 

 

Bradley Manning: Traitor or Hero?  By Marjorie CohnIf

Manning had committed war crimes instead of exposing them, he would be a free man today. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30071.html    From Sue S 12-26-11

 

Bradley Manning, Julian Assange Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

DJ Pangburn, Death And Taxes Magazine, Sept. 29, 2011

Pangburn writes: "And while a Nobel Peace Prize nomination might not help Manning avoid prison time or get Assange released from house arrest and his legal charade, it certainly is a form of vindication for both men; many people across the world admire their principled stand."

READ MORE   http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/287-124/7637-bradley-manning-julian-assange-nominated-for-nobel-peace-prize

 

 

WikiLeaks Publishes Tens of Thousands More Cables

Mark Hosenball, Reuters, August 26, 2011

WikiLeaks is in the process of releasing tens of thousands of previously unpublished U.S. diplomatic cables, some of which are still classified.

READ MORE   http://www.readersupportednews.org/news-section2/367-wikileaks/7188-wikileaks-publishes-tens-of-thousands-more-cables 

 

 

For Julian Assange, Justice Foreclosed

JoAnn Wypijewski

August 29, 2012   |    This article appeared in the September 17, 2012 edition of The Nation.

·          

Every once in a while, a situation arises that so completely captures the spirit of the time—in this case, the horror moving like an amoeba under the surface of our pleasant days, our absurd distractions, our seemingly serious politics—that ordinary assumptions, ordinary arguments and their limited conclusions serve only to obliterate honesty, and so any hope of grappling with the real. Such is the case of Julian Assange now.

About the Author

JoAnn Wypijewski

JoAnn Wypijewski is a writer in New York. Contact her at jwyp at earthlink.net.

Also by the Author

Remembering Alex (Lived History, Journalists and Journalism, Nation History)

For what the ancients called avarice and iniquity, Alex’s hate was pure. No writer had a deadlier sting against the corruptions of empire.

JoAnn Wypijewski

Playing Doctor (Sex and Sexuality, Film, History)

When it comes to the distant past, there’s a lot we don’t know about what occurred sexually.

JoAnn Wypijewski

He is the wanted man. Wanted for the purpose of conducting criminal proceedings, ostensibly on sexual misconduct allegations in Sweden, but maybe not; maybe on charges of espionage or conspiracy in the United States instead; maybe to face indefinite detention, maybe torture or life in prison. It’s so hard to know… But one thing is not mysterious: the law is no more capable of delivering justice in his case today than it was for a black man alleged to have raped a white woman in the Jim Crow South.

I am not comparing the founder of WikiLeaks, a white man benefiting from not only white-skin privilege and straight-man privilege but also class and celebrity privilege, with black men on the other side of a lynch mob. This is not about the particulars of oppression; it is about the political context of law, the limits of liberal expectations and the monstrosity of the state.

Liberals have no trouble generally acknowledging that in those rape cases against black men, the reasoned application of law was impossible. It was impossible because justice was impossible, foreclosed not by the vagaries of this white jury or that bit of evidence but by the totalizing immorality of white supremacy that placed the Black Man in a separate category of human being, without common rights and expectations. A lawyer might take a case if it hadn’t been settled by the mob, but the warped conscience of white America could do nothing but warp the law and make of its rituals a sham. The Scottsboro Boys might have been innocent or they might have been guilty; it didn’t matter, because either way the result would be the same.

With Assange, the political context is the totalizing immorality of the national security state on a global scale. The sex-crime allegations against Assange emerged in Sweden on August 20, 2010, approximately four and a half months after WikiLeaks blazed into the public sphere by releasing a classified video that showed a US Apache helicopter crew slaughtering more than a dozen civilians, including two journalists, in a Baghdad suburb. By that August, Pfc. Bradley Manning, the reputed source of the video and about 750,000 other leaked government documents, was being held without charge in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, subjected to what his attorney, David Coombs, describes in harrowing detail in a recent motion as “unlawful pretrial punishment.” In plain terms, Manning was tortured. He faces court-martial for aiding the enemy and has been denounced as a traitor by members of Congress.

For disseminating classified materials that exposed war crimes, Assange has been called a terrorist. A coloring book for children, The True Faces of Evil—Terror, from Big Coloring Books Inc. out of St. Louis, includes his face on a sheet of detachable trading cards, along with Timothy McVeigh, Jared Lee Loughner, Ted Kaczynski, Maj. Nidal Hasan and Bill Ayers. A commentator on Fox News urged President Obama to order his assassination. Vice President Joe Biden called him a “high-tech terrorist” and suggested that the Justice Department might be angling for a prosecution; that was two years ago. Indications of a secret grand jury investigation and imminent indictment have helped ratchet up the rhetoric and tension in and around the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Assange has received political asylum.

It has been common for the media to compartmentalize: on the one hand, there are complaints of sexual misconduct against Assange by two women in Sweden, which must be seen as a straightforward matter for law enforcement; on the other hand, there is his political activity, also his “attention-seeking,” “narcissism” and “arrogance,” which, come to think of it, sound a lot like traits in a rapist’s profile. Only rarely has anyone—notably Naomi Wolf and the team from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Four Corners program—begun with the intrinsic political challenge posed by WikiLeaks and proceeded from there to scrutinize the Swedish prosecutorial machinery.

That machinery is tricky. Police were so quick to initiate the arrest process that one of the women who came to them—to see if Assange could be forced to take an STD test after she’d had unprotected sex with him—became distraught and refused to give further testimony. The Swedish prosecutor’s office issued an arrest warrant for rape and molestation on one day and withdrew it the next, saying there was no reason to suspect rape, and that the other claim wasn’t serious enough for a warrant. About a week later, the Swedish director of prosecution reopened the investigation, and a court later approved her request to detain Assange for rape, molestation and unlawful coercion. By then he was in London, having been told he was free to leave Sweden. Assange was working with the New York Times and the Guardian in advance of launching the Iraq War Logs when the Swedes issued an international arrest warrant. He was readying the release of a cache of diplomatic cables when Interpol got involved, issuing a “red notice” for his arrest. In London, his legal efforts to block extradition were rejected by the High Court—whose strained decision was praised by the New Statesman’s David Allen Green as the ultimate in reasoned justice—and by the UK Supreme Court.

If the Swedish claims against Assange had involved anything but sex, it’s unlikely that liberals, and even some self-described radicals, would be tiptoeing around this part of the story, either by asking “So I guess he’s a bad guy?” or by arguing “Of course he needs to answer for his crimes.” If it were anything but sex, we would insist on the presumption of innocence. We have instead gotten comfortable with presuming guilt and trusting in the dignified processes of law to guarantee fairness.

“Believe the victim” entered the lexicon decades ago for historically understandable reasons. Women had been denied their own due process, in a sense—their right to make a complaint and expect justice, not vilification or worse. They are still being denied and derided, as the idiot spewings of Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin illustrate. The mutation of basic rights into an imperative for belief, and of full citizens into victims, has not made women any safer, but its cultural manipulation—particularly in high-profile cases—has struck at the foundations of civil liberty in a way that may not have been anticipated.

So here is the spectacle of Assange, as yet unindicted, bearing the dual brand of Sex Offender and Terrorist, the subhuman beings of the twenty-first century. The fusing of abuse and terror in his case thus implies two victims who must be believed, the women and the state. But the women’s claims are murky, and the state is not credible.

It should be possible to imagine a resolution outside the criminal justice system for problems that arise in the course of consensual sexual coupling: dissatisfaction over the use (or ill use) of condoms, constraints that keep people from expressing their wishes or intuiting those of another, selfishness, insensitivity, confusions as “yes” slides into “no” and back to “yes,” perhaps wordlessly—all issues that seem to apply in the Assange case but exist beyond it. That will require a braver sexual politics (and at least another column), and it does not demean experience to recognize that the language of punishment is a poor substitute for the lost language of love.

About the state, though, there must be no illusions. A nation that goes to war on fraud, that insists “We don’t torture” when evidence to the contrary abounds, that kidnaps foreign nationals and puts them on planes to be delivered to dungeons, that spies on its people, asserts its right to lock them up indefinitely and lets documented CIA torturers off the hook of accountability because they were only following orders: that nation will plot, and it will double-cross, and it will kill. Sweden participated in the US program of extraordinary rendition. The United Kingdom has threatened to storm Ecuador’s embassy. The United States now says it does not recognize the historic right of persons to seek diplomatic asylum. Assange’s lawyers have said that he will go to Sweden if he gets an absolutely firm guarantee from the Obama administration that it will not arrest him. Such a guarantee is impossible in an empire of lies.

FILMS ABOUT ASSANGE

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 5:55 PM, Susan wrote:

http://t.co/Hc6psnUR

thanks for sending this, I will share it

I watched the 19min animation description of the charges being filed against Assange 

and will watch the remaining 46min video about the case later

the topic is also a movie entitled "we steal secrets" shown at sundance this yr. interesting prof producer who seems convinced that assange should be extradited to sweden, came across with a lot of double talk in his interview on Democracy Now, I smell a rat

interesting indeed, assange SHOULD not be having unprotected sex with people he hardly knew but there are MANY men who would be behind bars for practising the same stupid behavior if that was going to make them a criminal   (from David Druding)

 

END WIKILEAKS NEWSLETTER #10