[Peace-discuss] Julian Assange: wanted by the Empire, dead or alive

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The Wikileaks documents - and even more the US government reaction to them - 
reveal the Obama administration for the toadies to wealth and power that they 
are. As Obama targets Assange, even those who thought in the last US 
presidential election that it was important to support Obama because the 
government had arranged such scary alternatives (Sarah Palin!) - now must see 
themselves as supporting Vichy against the Resistance...]

Julian Assange: wanted by the Empire, dead or alive
Alexander Cockburn: How the US press have colluded with government in their fury 
at the WikiLeaks founder

The American airwaves quiver with the screams of parlour assassins howling for 
Julian Assange's head. Jonah Goldberg, contributor to the National Review, asks 
in his syndicated column, "Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years 
ago?" Sarah Palin wants him hunted down and brought to justice, saying: "He is 
an anti-American operative with blood on his hands."

Assange can survive these theatrical blusters. A tougher question is how he will 
fare at the hands of the US government, which is hopping mad. The US attorney 
general, Eric Holder, announced on Monday that the Justice Department and 
Pentagon are conducting "an active, ongoing criminal investigation" into the 
latest Assange-facilitated leak under Washington's Espionage Act.

Asked how the US could prosecute Assange, a non-US citizen, Holder said, "Let me 
be clear. This is not sabre-rattling," and vowed "to swiftly close the gaps in 
current US legislation…"

In other words the espionage statute is being rewritten to target Assange, and 
in short order, if not already, President Obama – who as a candidate pledged 
"transparency" in government - will sign an order okaying the seizing of Assange 
and his transport into the US jurisdiction. Render first, fight the habeas 
corpus lawsuits later.

Interpol, the investigative arm of the International Criminal Court at The 
Hague, has issued a fugitive notice for Assange. He's wanted in Sweden for 
questioning in two alleged sexual assaults, one of which seems to boil down to a 
charge of unsafe sex and failure to phone his date the following day.

This prime accuser, Anna Ardin has, according to the journalist Israel Shamir, 
writing on the CounterPunch site, "ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and 
anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes in the 
Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by 
Misceláneas de Cuba…Note that Ardin was deported from Cuba for subversive 
activities."

It's certainly not conspiracism to suspect that the CIA has been at work in 
fomenting these Swedish accusations. As Shamir reports, "The moment Julian 
sought the protection of Swedish media law, the CIA immediately threatened to 
discontinue intelligence sharing with SEPO, the Swedish Secret Service."

The CIA has no doubt also pondered the possibility of pushing Assange off a 
bridge or through a high window (a mode of assassination favoured by the Agency 
from the earliest days*) and has sadly concluded that it's too late for this 
sort of executive solution.

The irony is that the thousands of diplomatic communications released by 
WikiLeaks contain no earth-shaking disclosures that patently undermine the 
security of the American empire. We are supposed to be stunned that the King of 
Saudi Arabia wishes Iran was wiped off the map, that the US uses diplomats as 
spies, that Afghanistan is corrupt?

This is not to downplay the great importance of this latest batch of WikiLeaks. 
Millions in America and around the world have been given a quick introductory 
course in international relations and the true arts of diplomacy – not least the 
third-rate, gossipy prose with which the diplomats rehearse the arch romans à 
clef they will write when they head into retirement.

Years ago Rebecca West wrote in her novel The Thinking Reed of a British 
diplomat who, "even when he was peering down a woman's dress at her breasts 
managed to look as though he was thinking about India." In the updated version, 
given Hillary Clinton's orders to the State Department, the US envoy, pretending 
to admire the figure of the charming French cultural attaché, would actually be 
thinking how to steal her credit card information, obtain a retinal scan, her 
email passwords and frequent flier number.

There are also genuine disclosures of great interest, some of them far from 
creditable to the establishment US press. Gareth Porter has identified a diplomatic
cable from last February released by WikiLeaks which provides a detailed account 
of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the 
US suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or that 
Iran intends to develop such a capability. Porter points out that:

"Readers of the two leading US newspapers never learned those key facts about 
the document. The New York Times and Washington Post reported only that the 
United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles - supposedly called the 
BM-25 - from North Korea. Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian 
refutation of the US view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence for the 
BM-25 from the US side.

"The Times, which had obtained the diplomatic cables not from WikiLeaks but from 
the Guardian, according to a Washington Post story Monday, did not publish the 
text of the cable. The Times story said the newspaper had made the decision not 
to publish 'at the request of the Obama administration'. That meant that its 
readers could not compare the highly distorted account of the document in the 
Times story against the original document without searching the Wikileaks website."

Distaste among the "official" US press for WikiLeaks has been abundantly 
apparent from the first of the two big releases of documents pertaining to the 
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The New York Times managed the ungainly feat of 
publishing some of the leaks while simultaneously affecting to hold its nose, 
and while publishing a mean-spirited hatchet job on Assange by its reporter John 
F Burns, a man with a well burnished record in touting the various agendas of 
the US government.

There have been cheers for Assange and WikiLeaks from such famed leakers as 
Daniel Ellsberg, but to turn on one's television is to eavesdrop on the sort of 
fury that Lord Haw-Haw used to provoke in Britain in World War II. As Glenn 
Greenwald writes in his column on the Salon site:

"On CNN, Wolf Blitzer was beside himself with rage over the fact that the US 
government had failed to keep all these things secret from him... Then - like 
the Good Journalist he is - Blitzer demanded assurances that the Government has 
taken the necessary steps to prevent him, the media generally and the citizenry 
from finding out any more secrets: 'Do we know yet if they've [done] that fix? 
In other words, somebody right now who has top secret or secret security 
clearance can no longer download information onto a CD or a thumb drive? Has 
that been fixed already?' The central concern of Blitzer - one of our nation's 
most honoured 'journalists' - is making sure that nobody learns what the US 
Government is up to."

These latest WikiLeaks files contains some 261,000,000 words - about 3,000 
books. They display the entrails of the American Empire. As Shamir writes, "The 
files show US political infiltration of nearly every country, even supposedly 
neutral states such as Sweden and Switzerland. US embassies keep a close watch 
on their hosts. They have penetrated the media, the arms business, oil, 
intelligence, and they lobby to put US companies at the head of the line."

Will this vivid record of empire in the early 21st century soon be forgotten? 
Not if some competent writer offers a readable and politically vivacious 
redaction. But a warning: in November 1979 Iranian students seized an entire 
archive of the State Department, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency 
(DIA) at the American embassy in Tehran. Many papers that were shredded were 
laboriously reassembled.

These secrets concerned far more than Iran. The Tehran embassy, which served as 
a regional base for the CIA, held records involving secret operations in many 
countries, notably Israel, the Soviet Union, Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, 
Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Beginning in 1982, the Iranians published some 60 volumes of these CIA reports 
and other US government documents from the Tehran archive, collectively entitled 
Documents From The US Espionage Den. As Edward Jay Epstein, a historian of US 
intelligence agencies, wrote years ago, "Without a doubt, these captured records 
represent the most extensive loss of secret data that any superpower has 
suffered since the end of the Second World War."

In fact the Tehran archive truly was a devastating blow to US national security. 
It contained vivid portraits of intelligence operations and techniques, the 
complicity of US journalists with US government agencies, the intricacies of oil 
diplomacy. The volumes are in university libraries here. Are they read? By a 
handful of specialists. The inconvenient truths were swiftly buried – and 
perhaps the WikiLeaks files will soon be forgotten too.

And Assange? Hopefully he will have a long reprieve from burial. Ecuador has 
offered him sanctuary and they say Quito, once you get used to the altitude, is 
a pleasant place.

* Footnote: in 1953 the CIA distributed to its agents and operatives a killer's 
training manual (made public in 1997) full of hands-on advice: "The most 
efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a 
hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will 
serve... The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, 
tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an 
outcry, playing the 'horrified witness', no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is 
necessary."


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