Wikileaks arrest: Julian Quixote
By Eric Walberg
An epic drama is
unfolding after the Wikileaks founder gave
himself up to Scotland Yard, but will
Assange suffer the fate of Ellsberg or
Pollard, asks Eric Walberg
It was United States
president Woodrow Wilson who called for
"open diplomacy" — number one of his
fourteen points in 1918 — so that "diplomacy
shall proceed always frankly and in the
public view." He would surely approve of
Wikileaks' efforts at open diplomacy, though
current US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton has called them "an attack on
America's foreign-policy interests" and
indeed on "the international community",
though she failed to specify which
particular community members were the
victims, or what they were the victims of.
On 7 December, the bane
of US empire voluntarily gave himself up to
Scotland Yard and will face trial and
extradition to Sweden possibly by the end of
the year, accused of "rape, unlawful
coercion and two counts of sexual
molestation", alleged to have been committed
in August 2010. The trumped-up cases involve
consensual relations, one an obvious "honey
trap" by a CIA plant and the other a spurned
Lewinsky-like groupie.
Assange is nothing short
of a legend after a year of leaks,
especially an April video taken from a US
helicopter in Iraq in 2007 showing GIs
shooting at least 12 innocent Iraqis like
rabbits. Starting in July, he issued 500,000
US military documents on the US wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan. The straw for the imperial
camel was a batch of 250,000 US diplomatic
notes (1966-2009) in November, revealing a
US diplomatic world increasingly acting as a
branch of the CIA, and the cynicism of both
Western and Arab regimes anxious to destroy
Iran.
The leaks have been
hailed as a blow to US criminal activity by
people around the world, including staunchly
American US Congressman
Ron Paul, and condemned by lovers of US
empire such as former US vice-presidential
candidate Sarah Palin, who called for
Assange to be "pursued with the same urgency
we pursue Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders".
Former UK Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm
Rifkind said WikiLeaks' actions were "active
assistance to terrorist organisations",
neglecting to reflect on the UK's own long
history of worldwide terrorist activities.
The 39-year-old Assange
is an Australian citizen, though his Prime
Minister Julia Gillard has threatened to
cancel his passport. He is described by
colleagues as charismatic, driven and highly
intelligent, with an exceptional ability to
crack computer codes. To his critics, he is
just a publicity-seeker and womaniser.
In 1995 he was accused
with a friend of dozens of hacking
activities and fined, promising to be a good
boy. He quietly co-authored Underground
with Suelette Dreyfus, dealing with the
subversive side of the Internet. Dreyfus
described Assange as "quite interested in
the concept of ethics, concepts of justice,
what governments should and shouldn't do".
He began Wikileaks in
2006 as a "dead-letterbox" for would-be
leakers — the real heroes of this saga, the
unknown soldiers disgusted with their role
as hired killers. His collective developed a
Robin Hood guerrilla lifestyle, moving
communications and people from country to
country to make use of laws protecting
freedom of speech. Co-founder Daniel Schmitt
describes Assange as "one of the few people
who really care about positive reform in
this world to a level where you're willing
to do something radical".
Wikileaks was forced this
year to switch to a Swiss host server after
several US Internet service providers shut
him down, claiming he was endangering lives,
though he made clear he was careful to vet
the military cables from Afghanistan and
Iraq precisely to avoid this. His site also
came under cyber attack and PayPal cut off
his ability to raise funds.
There is no doubt that
Gillard, the Swedish prosecutor, PayPal, etc
are all being pressured by the US government
to help snuff out this ray of light exposing
its many crimes. Only French Internet
service provider OVH said it had no plans to
end the service it provides to Wikileaks,
and a judge threw out Industry Minister Eric
Besson's case to force it to.
Hackivist admirers of Mr
Quixote have set up mirror sites faster than
traditional servers can shut Wikileaks down
and are launching denial-of-service attacks
targetting its Internet enemies. Coldblood,
a member of the computer group Anonymous,
told BBC, "Websites that are bowing down to
government pressure have become targets. We
feel that Wikileaks has become more than
just about leaking of documents, it has
become a war ground, the people vs the
government."
The Man of La Mancha
fought off more than "100 legal attacks"
before his arrest, including one by Swiss
banks whose illicit offshore activities were
exposed. That case too was dismissed and
left the bankers to scramble to protect
their ill-gotten gains.
The show goes on.
Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said
Assange's arrest was an attack on media
freedom but assured, "Wikileaks is
operational. We are continuing on the same
track as laid out before." Assange — or his
colleagues still at large — hopes to set up
a number of "independent chapters around the
world" as well as to act as a middle-man
between sources and newspapers.
Strangely, he has been
attacked on the left as a stooge of the CIA
or Israel, though the former makes no sense
at all. True, the latter comes off
relatively clean amidst the diplomatic
cesspool. But what the few tight-lipped US
diplo leaks relating to Israel really show
is the fear that US diplomats have of saying
anything negative about Israel. Perhaps they
fear they will be passed over for their
"anti-Semitism" or perhaps they fear that
all their missives are read by Mossad as a
matter of course.
A terse cable from the US
embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan compares
Israeli-Azeri relations ominously to an
"iceberg with nine-tenths unseen". Another
polite one from Tel Aviv reveals that
several "OT" (organised crime) figures
applied for visas to attend a "security
conference" in Los Vegas but thankfully
didn't come back when asked for their prison
records in Russia.
An interesting comparison
is between Assange and another exposer of US
military secrets, Jonathan Pollard, the
(only) US-Israel spy serving a life sentence
he received in 1987 for revealing US
military secrets. The big difference, of
course, is Pollard did not apply the "open
diplomacy" principle. If he had blacked out
the sensitive names, and exposed the secrets
to broad daylight, like Assange, he could
have had a beneficial influence on world
politics. Instead he sold the secrets to
Israel, and uncounted CIA agents lost their
lives in the Soviet Union as a result.
Another worthy comparison
is with the legendary Daniel Ellsberg,
leaker of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, who
like Assange, gave himself up and faced the
music, which turned out to be sweet. The
judge dismissed all charges against him in
1973 and the New York Times pompously
applauded him in 1996, saying that the
papers demonstrated "that the Johnson
Administration had systematically lied"
about "a subject of transcendent national
interest and significance."
Ellsberg and Assange,
following the advice of Woodrow Wilson, are
heroes. Pollard, truly a villain, is
worshipped today in Israel, where his 9000th
day in prison last year was commemorated
with a light show on the walls of the old
city of Jerusalem. Last month 39 Congressmen
petitioned US President Barack Obama to
pardon him. Last summer, Netanyahu had the
gall to offer to hold off a few more months
on settlements if Obama freed him.
Will Assange suffer the
fate of Pollard or Ellsberg? The US military
machine was in disarray in 1971 and Ellsberg
gave it a brave shove and helped bring the
troops home. But this is 2010. The open
calls to free Pollard are treated as a
matter of course. While the Hillaries and
Sarahs are calling to assassinate Assange
for doing something noble, their like are
calling to free a traitor who was
responsible for betraying his country and
causing untold deaths of US officials.
The sides are lining up,
much like Bush predicted in 2001 with his
"You are with us or against us." A brave
Aussie, a principled French judge, an
American libertarian congressman, a youthful
computer nerd — the enemies of empire come
in all shapes and sizes.
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