The case for Julian Assange in a nutshell is that it should not be a crime to expose abuse of power by government.
The I Am WikiLeaks web site, established by the Courage Foundation, gives a more detailed account of Julian Assange’s life and work, and the various charges against him. Courage has prepared infographics that give the essence of Assange’s case.
Click to enlage
.
Click to enlarge
The rule of law is a fundamental principle, at least as basic or maybe more basic than voting rights and freedom of the press.
This is part of our British heritage, going back to Magna Carta—the idea that nobody, not even the King, is above the law, and nobody, not even the humblest cottager, is below the protection of the law.
For us Americans, the rule of law was part of our Constitution even before we had a specific Bill of Rights.
The Constitution from the beginning has guaranteed the right of habeas corpus, which means the right of arrested persons to be told what law they are accused of breaking, and forbid ex post facto laws, which declared things illegal after they were done, and bills of attainder, which declared certain persons outside the protection of the law.
I was shocked and disillusioned by how easily, after the 9/11 attacks, these fundamental principles were forgotten.
The Bush administration, the Obama administration and now the Trump administration claim the right to order the killing of anyone they deem a threat to the state, based on secret criteria and without accountability to anyone.
George W. Bush had a kill list. Barack Obama called has a “disposition matrix”. I don’t know what Trump calls it. Most of us middle-class white Americans of have come to regard it as normal, possibly because we think only people with dark skins and Arab names will ever be on it.
I read a chilling article by Matt Taibbi about a journalist who figured out he is on the kill list, and is trying to get off it. He doesn’t know what he is accused of nor how to appeal.
Julian Assange is in a situation in some ways similar to this journalist. A grand jury has been meeting in Alexandria, Va., since 2010 to consider his case. James Comey, when he was FBI director, and Attorney-General Jeff Sessions have said they intend to apprehend Assange.
Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking Democratic member of the House intelligence committee, has said he’s not interested in testimony from Assange until Assange is in custody. Yet no charges against Assange have ever been announced. If the grand jury has indicted him, those indictments are sealed.
Neither the US nor the UK government has been willing to say whether an extradition request is on file.
Suppose a government claimed the right to commit crimes, make those crimes state secrets and prosecute anyone who revealed them to the public.
Could you call such a government democratic? Could you say its people enjoyed freedom of the press?
Yet that is what the U.S. government wants to do to Julian Assange.
Assange is the founder of Wikileaks, which makes it possible for whistle-blowers to reveal secret documents without their identity being traced. Wikileaks publications revealed, among other things, the secret bibles of Scientology, censored videos of protests in Tibet, secret neo-Nazi passwords, offshore tax scams by Barclay’s bank, the inside story of the crashing of Iceland’s economy and texts of the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations.
What got him into trouble was publication of information of crimes committed by the U.S. government, notably the killing of civilians in Iraq, and secret surveillance of the public by U.S. intelligence agencies. That is why the U.S. government is determined to capture and imprison him.
The espionage laws are intended to punish those who give military secrets to a hostile foreign power. In the case of Julian Assange, it is we, the people, who were given the secrets. We are the supposed enemy.
A U.S. grand jury investigation of Assange has been ongoing since 2010. It is widely believed that it has made sealed indictments against Assange.
He sought political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 to avoid extradition to the United States. Since March, the Ecuadorian government has cut him off from communicating with the outside world, except for his lawyers and Australian consular officials.
Reportedly the government is planning to expel him from the embassy, leaving him subject to arrest by British police and extradition to the USA. There his likely fate will be imprisonment, probably for life, or execution.
What can be done to Assange can be done to anyone who reveals information the U.S. government wants kept secret. Anyone who cares about freedom of the press, or their own freedom, should stand with Julian Assange.
LINKS
Ecuador Will Immediately Withdraw Asylum for Julian Assange and Hand Him Over to the UK. What Comes Next? by Glenn Greenwald for The Intercept.
Be Prepared to Shake the Earth If Julian Assange Is Arrested by Caitlin Johnstone.
Inside WikiLeaks: Working With the Publisher That Changed the World by Stefania Maurizi for Consortium News. [Added 7/23/2018]
The War on Assange Is a War on Press Freedom by Chris Hedges for TruthDig. [Added 7/23/2018]
The Guardian reported that Ecuador has spent more than $5 million on closed-circuit TV cameras, 24-hour monitoring and other surveillance of Julian Assange, who took refuge in their London embassy in 2012.
Every communication by Assange with the outside world was monitored and recorded. Guardian reporters were given access to this information. I imagine British and U.S. intelligence services also have access to it.
The thrust of the articles is what a nuisance Assange has become to the Ecuadorian government and how understandable it is that they want to get rid of their unwelcome guest. I am sure this is true. If I were president of a small, vulnerable country such as Ecuador, I would not wish to antagonize the United States and other great powers.
What the articles also show is Assange’s uncompromising loyalty to his self-appointed mission. The government of Ecuador expected him to refrain from “interfering” with other countries’ politics. Assange’s publication of confidential e-mails embarrassing to Hillary Clinton was regarded as a violation of that, as was his protest against the arrest of a Catalan independen
Then Assange went on to destroy any hope of a pardon from the Trump administration by publishing more confidential CIA information. He published new information about Russian intelligence surveillance. Like him or not, you can’t reasonably say Wikileaks is a tool of any government or political faction.
All of this shows that the campaign against Assange is political. It is not about criminal justice. No routine bail bond case would ever result in the huge and expensive effort mounted by the British and Ecuadorian governments to bring Assange under control. Only the naive would think that his only risk is punishment for bail bond violations.
He is a lone individual, standing up to the world’s most powerful governments and calling them to account. He is hated and feared for telling inconvenient truths. How can anyone who cares about political freedom not defend him? It is Assange’s enemies, not him, who have to justify themselves.
LINKS
How Julian Assange became an unwelcome guest in Ecuador’s embassy by Luke Harding, Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Dan Collyns for The Guardian.
Ecuador spent millions on spy operation for Julian Assange by Dan Collyns, Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Luke Harding for The Guardian.
Why does Ecuador want Assange out of its London embassy? by Dan Collyns for The Guardian.
The Guardian Rejoices in the Silencing of Assange by Craig Murray. [Added 5/17/2018]
Ecuador Under Lenin Moreno: an Interview With Andrez Arauz by Joe Emersberger for Counterpunch.
Ecuador’s Ex-President Rafael Correa Denounces Treatment of Julian Assange as “Torture” by Glenn Greenwald for The Intercept. [Added 5/17/2018]
JULIAN ASSANGE’S DEFENSE STATEMENT. Statement to the Swedish prosecutor after questioning at the Ecuadorian embassy in November 14-15, 2017.
Understanding Julian Assange and US Media by Mike Swanson. Good background on Wikileaks and older Wikileaks controversies up to early 2016.
These may be the last days of Julian Assange. He is under virtual solitary confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, cut off from contact with the outside world, while the Ecuadorian government is reportedly discussing handing him over to the British government.
He faces arrest jumping bail in a case in which no criminal charges were ever brought, but his real offense has been to publish information embarrassing to U.S. military and intelligence services.
You would think that liberals, progressives and war protestors would rally to the support of Assange, but, for the most part, they don’t.
I know people who in their youth protested the Vietnam War and supported the release of the Pentagon Papers, but can’t forgive Assange for publishing inconvenient truths about Hillary Clinton—as if Clinton were an advocate of peace!
It is not as if the Trump administration considers Assange a friend. Attorney-General Jeff Sessions said arresting Assange is “a priority.” Mike Pompeo, former CIA director and now Secretary of State, called Wikileaks a “hostile intelligence service”, as if it were equivalent to a foreign government.
Assange is not a perfect person. Who is? He is a lone wolf who is not aligned with any of the established political parties or movements. He sometimes expresses himself in offensive ways. He hangs out with doubtful people. A relentless propaganda campaign has uncovered everything he has even done that might seem to be wrong.
Grant for the sake of argument that everything said against him is true (which I don’t believe). Weigh that against the hundreds of thousands of innocent lives taken in the wars of the Bush and Obama administrations, and in the wars we can expect to be waged in the Trump administration.
In Wikileaks, he has created a technology by which whistle-blowers can expose crimes and abuses without being hunted down and jailed. This technology will live on when Assange the individual has vanished from the scene.
Assange’s possible fate is to be turned over to U.S. authorities, followed by execution or life imprisonment. But that hasn’t happened yet. If you care about peace, or if you care about freedom of the press, demand freedom for Julian Assange.
LINKS
Being Julian Assange by Suzie Dawson. This is a review and rebuttal of most or all the accusations that have been made against Assange.
On the Silencing of Julian Assange, interviews with John Pilger and Christine Assange (Julian’s mother) for Consortium News.
Ecuador hints it may hand over Julian Assange to Britain and the US by James Cogan for the World Socialist Web Site.
People Lie to Themselves About Julian Assange to Justify His Persecution by Caitlin Johnstone on her web page.
Hillary Clinton and Julian Assange (Reuters)
The Australian journalist John Pilger wrote a good article about Hillary Clinton’s book tour of Australia and her vicious attacks on Julian Assange.
Clinton has made herself rich and powerful by serving the interests of militarists and plutocrats. Assange has effectively lost his freedom, and may well end his life in prison, for revealing the secrets of militarists and plutocrats.
Yet Clinton has been able to persuade journalists that she is a victim and that Assange is her persecutor.
I find it amazing that Assange has never yet been shown to have published any material that turned out to be bogus. That is more than the New York Times and Washington Post can claim.
LINK
Clinton, Assange and the War on Truth by John Pilger for teleSUR. Hat tip to Bill Harvey.
Power corrupts, the saying goes, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If a government has the power to commit crimes in secret, and to punish people for revealing its crimes, what limit is there on its absolute power.
That is why Julian Assange, the founder and leader of Wikileaks, is a hero. He has sacrificed his freedom and risked his life to make known crimes and abuses by the U.S. and other governments.
Here’s what he said about his aims back in 2006—
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.
Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are non-linearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.
Only revealed injustice can be answered; for man to do anything intelligent he has to know what’s actually going on.
Source: IQ.ORG
Of course this is inherently dangerous. Making powerful immoral people paranoid about having their crimes revealed will reduce the effectiveness of those powerful immoral people, either by damaging their reputations or making them afraid to communicate with each other or both. But it’s a given that if you keep it up, these powerful people will use their power against you.
∞∞∞
CIA Director Mike Pompeo said in a recent speech that Assange’s Wikileaks should be suppressed because it is a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” In other words, Wikileaks gathers information that governments don’t want it to know, and publishes it—just like any other muckraking news organization.
The difference is that Wikileaks, like other publishers, gathers intelligence on behalf of the public and not a foreign government. If you say the distinction doesn’t matter, then freedom of the press does not include the right to tell the truth; it means nothing except the right to express mere opinion.
Julian Assange, in addition to his great service in bringing secret facts to light, is an interesting thinker. The video shows fellow Australian John Pilger, a noted investigative journalist, interviewing Assange on the coming U.S. election and his current status.
Here are some highlights of the interview:
Julian Assange: If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America’s political police. The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the former head of the CIA [General David Petraeus] over classified information given to his mistress. Almost no-one is untouchable.
The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no-one can resist it. But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI’s investigation, so there’s anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak.
We’ve published about 33,000 of Clinton’s emails when she was Secretary of State. [snip]
Then there are the Podesta emails we’ve been publishing. [John] Podesta is Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign manager, so there’s a thread that runs through all these emails; there are quite a lot of pay-for-play, as they call it, giving access in exchange for money to states, individuals and corporations.
∞∞∞
Julian Assange: There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves.
But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar that have been funding ISIS.
Russian intelligence services are accused of waging cyber-warfare by releasing embarrassing Hillary Clinton e-mails through Wikileaks.
There is no direct evidence of where Wikileaks got the Clinton e-mails, but the Russians have the capability and the motive to hack her system.
Would this be an act of war? I for one would welcome war by means of weaponized truth.
If revealing accurate information about your geopolitical enemy is a form of warfare, I think escalation of this kind of warfare would be a good thing and not a bad thing.
I think the NSA and the CIA should retaliate by arranging the release of damaging secret information about Vladimir Putin—maybe through Wikileaks as a form of poetic justice.
In fact, there are those who think they already have done so, through the Panama Papers leak
I haven’t seen anything in the news accounts of the Democratic National Committee e-mails that is either new or shocking.
We the public knew before the DNC hacks that the committee members and staff were supporters of Hillary Clinton. That’s what smart and successful politicians do—put their supporters in positions of influence.
The e-mails reveal how much the DNC people disliked Sanders and favored Clinton, but I haven’t seen anything that shows the e-mails showed they actually did—as distinguished from talking about—anything unethical.
What wrongdoing I do know about comes from publicly available information, not e-mail hacks. The Hillary Victory Fund, for example, raised money ostensibly for state Democratic Party organizations, but then funneled the money back to Clinton. That’s dishonest and probably illegal, but those facts had already been revealed.
As to the source of the information, intelligence agencies of various governments have a long history of revealing information that is embarrassing to their adversaries.
What’s new about the publishing of confidential Democratic National Committee e-mails is that it was done through Wikileaks, which provides a platform by which whistle-blowers and hackers of any affiliation can reveal secret documents without being traced. is not affiliated with any government and for that very reason provides a perfect cover. This is ideal cover for secret intelligence agencies.
Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, says his only responsibility is to verify the authenticity of the information, not to judge the motives of those providing it. The problem is that the CIA, FSB and their counterparts in other countries are probably much more expert in faking the source of information than Assange and his friends are in detecting forgeries.
There’s a moral here. The moral is that secret information is not necessarily more significant than public information that has been overlooked.
LINKS
On the Need for Official Attribution of Russia’s DNC Hack by Matt Tait for the Brookinsgs Institution’s Lawfare blog.
Yet More Thoughts on the DNC Hack: Attribution and Precedent by Jack Goldsmith for Lawfare.
Here are some links to article I found interesting, and perhaps you will, too.
How Close Was Donald Trump to the Mob? by David Marcus for The Federalist.
Maybe there are innocent explanations tof Donald Trump’s business connections with known Mafia bosses in New York City and Atlantic City. If such exist, we the voting public deserve to hear them.
Katrina Washed Away New Orleans Black Middle Class by Ben Casselman for FiveThirtyEight.
Black homeowners and business owners lost the most in Hurricane Katrina. Black professionals such as physicians and lawyers have moved on. And black school teachers are losing their jobs to supposed school “reform.”
∞∞∞
Hat tip for the following to Bill Harvey—
The Myth of the Middle Class: Have Most Americans Always Been Poor? by Alan Nasser for Counterpunch.
The United States was the first country in which a majority of the people were taught to think of themselves as middle class. In Victorian English novels, the middle class are the doctors, lawyers and other professionals who aren’t working class, but not truly upper class.
Life-size heroic bronze statues of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning were unveiled in May in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz Square.
“They have lost their freedom for the truth, said Italian sculptor Davide Domino, creator of the artwork. “They mind us how important it is to know the truth.’
Domino depicted the three whistle-blowers standing on chairs and he added an empty fourth chair for anybody who wants to take a stand and speak (as shown above).
We Americans like to see the world as a battle between the good guys and the bad guys. It is hard to accept that so much of the world sees us as the bad guys.
LINK
New Statue in Germany Illustrates Just How Much the Rest of the World Opposes the U.S. Police State by Jay Syrmopoulos for The Free Thought Project. Hat tip to Avedon’s Sideshow.
Julian Assange is a great hero of our time.
Subject to a 24-hour police siege, confined to a single windowless room, he continues to fight, and fight effectively, for truth and justice.
WikiLeaks continues to provide a means by which whistle-blowers can reveal how governments, corporations and other organizations conspire against the public. Most of what the American public knows about the toxic Trans Pacific Partnership, for example, has been made known by WikiLeaks.
John Pilger wrote an excellent article, updated on Counterpunch, about the how the U.S. government, abetted by the governments of the United Kingdom and Sweden, are bending international law and their own laws to deprive Assange of his freedom.
He is wanted for extradition to Sweden for questioning in a sexual misconduct case. He has not been charged with any crime, and the alleged victims in the case do not accuse him of any crime. He has offered to testify in London, or to go to Sweden to testify if he can be assured that he won’t be extradited to the United States.
A grand jury has been meeting in secret in Alexandria, Va., for five years trying to figure out ways to define Assange’s truth-telling as a crime. The details of the ongoing investigation of Assange have been defined themselves as a state secret. One of the crimes the grand jury is pondering is violation of the U.S. Espionage Act, which carries a maximum penalty of death or life imprisonment.
Assange might be in a U.S. prison today, or worse, if not for the courage of the Ecuadorian government, which despite all pressure and threats offered him refuge in its London embassy.
The U.S. government treats Assange as it might treat a terrorist. And in fact, to a government whose policies are based on secrecy and lies, truth-tellers and whistle-blowers are more terrifying than killers or suicide bombers.
I think a good litmus test for whether an individual believes in freedom and democracy is the person’s attitude toward Julian Assange. President Obama most certainly fails that test. I think Assange will be remembered when Obama is forgotten.
LINK
Julian Assange: the Untold Story of an Epic Struggle for Justice by John Pilger for Counterpunch.
Why US fracking companies are licking their lips over Ukraine by Naomi Klein for The Guardian (hat tip to Bill Harvey)
American oil and gas companies are using the Ukraine crisis to press for an increase on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas and construction of LNG (liquified natural gas) terminals at U.S. seaports.
Supposedly this will enable the United States to export gas to Europe as a substitute for Russian gas cut off by sanctions. The problem with this, as Naomi Klein pointed out, is that the Ukraine crisis probably will be long over by the time the LNG terminals are constructed.
This is an example of what Klein calls the “shock doctrine”—use of crises by special interests to manipulate people into agreeing to do things they don’t want to do.
The siege of Julian Assange is a farce by Australian journalist John Pilger.
Julian Assange has been living in a room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for two years to avoid extradition to Sweden to answer questioning in a sexual misconduct case because he fears re-extradition to the United States for prosecution on his Wikileaks disclosures.
Pilger showed the case against Assange is bogus and his fears are well-founded. Assange’s alleged victims haven’t accused him of any crime nor did the original investigators. There is ample precedent for Swedish investigators to come to London to question Assange if they wish. And the U.S. and Swedish governments have discussed his re-extradition.
Afghan Opium Production Hits All-Time High by Mike Whitney for Counterpunch.
The CIA would rather see Afghanistan dominated by drug lords than by the Taliban.
Putinization is a word I first came across when I read an interview of Julian Assange in 2011. It means a society that is in the process of having a market economy and a democratic government taken over by patronage networks—people in positions of power doing favors for the less powerful, the less powerful being loyal to the powerful patrons.
I think Vladimir Putin is a statesman Machiavelli or Bismarck would have respected—a realist, not a moralist. I think what he said about international law in his Valdai speech is true and important, and, as an American, I find it humiliating that a former KGB official is in a position to lecture my country’s leders on international norms of conduct.
But I don’t think Putin is a good person, I don’t think Putin’s Russia is a good place. My great fear for my country is Putinization, as characterized by Julian Assange below.
When I was in Russia in the 1990s, I used to watch NTV in Moscow. NTV was the freest TV I have ever seen. … At that time, Russia had something like 10 independent points of power. It had the army. It had the remnants of the KGB and the external KGB, which ended up becoming the SVR. It had Yeltsin and his daughter, and the mob. It had some broader mish-mash of bureaucracy left over from the Soviet Union. It had seven oligarchs.
In terms of media control, that meant the state plus the oligarchs with their own independent media. The result was, you could actually put out almost anything you wanted under the patronage or protection of one of these groups.…
[Then] Putin came in. He tamed the oligarchs. Some were arrested, some had their assets seized, and some were exiled. The result was, they fell in under Putin’s centralized patronage pyramid. The ownership of the TV stations also reined [in] popular democracy under Putin’s pyramid. Now, in order to get anything of scale done in Russia, you have to have a sponsor in the pyramid somewhere.
Over the weekend my friend Daniel Brandt e-mailed me a link to an article by Julian Assange wrote for The Stringer, an on-line Australian newspaper, about how Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, works hand in glove with Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, performed covert missions for State Department.
Google and the NSA: Who’s holding the ‘shit-bag’ now? by Julian Assange for The Stringer.
Assange wrote that once, when Wikileaks tried to communicate with Hillary Clinton at the U.S. State Department, the caller was transferred to people at successively higher levels of the State Deparment until someone promised a call-back.
The call was returned, however, not by a State Department employee, but by Lisa Shields, who was Eric Schmidt’s girl friend. The fact that she was Hillary Clinton’s chosen back channel of communication shows how tight are the top people in Google and the government.
Jared Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton, was recently in Azerbaijan performing secret missions for the State Department. According to a leaked e-mail from Stratfor, an important U.S. intelligence contractor, Cohen was doing things that the CIA could not do and that he was likely to get caught. The e-mail said exposing the operation might not be a bad thing because the U.S. government could disavow it and Google would be left “holding the shit-bag.” There’s more in the article, but these are the high points.
Assange is amazing. Here he is, a fugitive from the U.S. legal system, unable to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and he still is leading Wikileaks (with the help of others), revealing new information, helping Edward Snowden in Moscow and running for the Australian Senate as the candidate of a Wikileaks Party.
Julian Assange interviewed on what the Wikileaks Party will mean to the Aboriginal peoples by Gerry Georgatos for The Stringer.
Assange seems well-informed about Aborigines and their current plight, considering how long he’s been away from his native Australia and considering how many other things he has to think about.
StratforLeaks: Google Ideas Director Involved in ‘Regime Change’ by Yazan al-Saadi for Al Akhbar English, in 2012. [Added 8/28/13]
NSA Domestic Spying: Mathematicians Should Speak Out by Charles Siefe for Slate. Hat tip to Jack Clontz.
Charles Siefe, a mathematician who worked for the National Security Agency briefly in the 1990s, wrote that in those days the nation’s top mathematicians flocked to the NSA out of patriotism and the desire to do challenging and important work. In those days, he wrote, the NSA in those days respected the legal limits of its mission and also was untroubled by leaks.
It’s possible that both the excesses and the leaks in those days were more than Siefe was aware. Still, I do think there is a connection between a government agency respecting the law and its employees being loyal to the agency.
Is the NSA Actually Aware of All Internet Traditions? Some Thoughts on Incompetency by Mike the Mad Biologist. The U.S. tradeoff of freedom for security hasn’t produced much security.
Julian Assange said in an interview Monday that the Bradley Manning court-martial is a show trial. Just like the show trials in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the verdict has been pre-determined, and the purpose of the trial is to convince the public of the defendant’s guilt.
The judge has ruled out the Manning’s lawyers main line of defense, which is that the information he released was wrongly over-classified, and allowed only one of 33 witnesses the defense wanted to call. The prosecution will call 141 witnesses, some of whom will present their testimony in secret. Access by the press is controlled, and less than a quarter of those who applied were granted press credentials.
Assange pointed out that many American newspapers published articles using the information Manning revealed, but not one of them contributed to Manning’s defense fund. Some reporters may have done so individually, however.
Here are links to articles that I found interesting, and I think you might find interesting, too.
The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’ by Julian Assange.
The founder of Wikileaks reviewed The New Digital Age by Eric Schmidt, executive chair of Google, and Jared Cohen, former aide to Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton and now head of Google Ideas. He said Google epitomizes the death of personal privacy and the shift toward authoritarianism.
The section on “repressive autocracies” describes, disapprovingly, various repressive surveillance measures: legislation to insert back doors into software to enable spying on citizens, monitoring of social networks and the collection of intelligence on entire populations. All of these are already in widespread use in the United States. In fact, some of those measures — like the push to require every social-network profile to be linked to a real name — were spearheaded by Google itself.
Student Loans as Medieval Indentures
![types of debt[1]](https://philebersole.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/blog_student_loan_debt.jpg)
Click to enlarge.
Dave Dayen writing for Salon points out that U.S. student loan debt now exceeds $1 trillion. It has exceeded credit card debt for some time. Unlike ordinary debt, student loans can’t be discharged in bankruptcy, and are virtually impossible to refinance. Dayen said people now collecting Social Security are still paying on their student loans. It is a terrible drag on the economy. Indebtedness keeps young people from buying homes, buying automobiles, starting businesses or getting jobs based on what they love to do. But the problem is not just the student loan system. It is the lack of affordable education and the lack of decent jobs for people with high school educations.
Scam Alert! Press Sleeps Through Great Post Office Fire Sale.
The Postmaster General is selling off Postal Service property, much of it prime downtown real estate, at bargain prices. It is a great deal for the buyers and a bad deal for the public. Maybe this is why Congress has imposed unusual financial burdens on the Postal Service, such as funding retirement 75 years in advance, and refuses to allow the Postal Service to take normal business steps to stem its losses.
Why Does Eastman Chemical Fear for Its Reputation?
The Washington Spectator reports on how Eastman Chemical, a Kodak spinoff, paid scientists to write journal articles saying its baby-bottle plastic is safe. There was a time, 30 or so years ago, when I would have presumed Kodak executives were above such conduct. Maybe they were, then.
Gretchen Reynolds of the New York Times says academic research says that moderate amounts of coffee—four or five ordinary cups a day, or one Starbucks drink—are good for you. I’m glad to think that, because I’ve never weaned myself from my coffee addiction. I hope and presume that none of these studies was paid for by the coffee industry.
The United States and British governments treat Julian Assange like the ultimate terrorist threat.
Members of the London Metropolitan Police, wearing Kevlar vests, surround the Ecuadorian embassy, where Assange has taken refuge, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They occupy the front steps and entrances, they occupy street corners nearby, one police officer occupies a room in a building adjoining Assange’s room. Chris Hedges, a journalist and former war correspondent, said the Metropolitan Police spent the equivalent of $4.5 million in surveillance of Julian Assange just through January 31.
Behind the United Kingdom government is the power of the U.S. government. A dozen government agencies are working on the Julian Assange case. They have waged economic warfare and cyberwarfare to try to shut down Assange’s WikiLeaks operation. They interrogate and try to recruit WikiLeaks supporters every time they pass through a U.S.-controlled airport. Assange’s lawyers believe that Bradley Manning, who leaked confidential government information to WikiLeaks, could plea bargain for a reduced sentence by testifying that Assange solicited the information.
A secret grand jury in Arlington, Va., reportedly has handed down a sealed indictment of Assange. Hedges reported that the Department of Justice is mounting a major effort on this. It spent $2 million this year alone for a computer system to handle Assange prosecution documents. The U.S. Congress in 1989 authorized the federal government to seize anyone, anywhere in the world, who is accused of a crime under U.S. law, even if this is done in violation of international law or the law of the country concerned.
I read a lot about the partisan divisions in the U.S. government, but Democrats and Republicans, the so-called liberals and the so-called conservatives, are united in their desire for the U.S. government to capture Julian Assange. If this happens, Julian Assange can look forward to spending the rest of his life in the equivalent of the Soviet Gulag.
What is Julian Assange’s crime? What makes him such a threat? What he has done is to break the wall of secrecy which makes possible the “disposition matrix,” “signature strikes,” “extraordinary renditions,” “enhanced interrogation” and all the other secret Orwellian activities of government. If he is guilty of revealing secret information to the enemy under the Espionage Act, it is only if the U.S. government regards the American people as its enemy.
The remarkable thing is that, with all this power arrayed against him, Julian Assange is not afraid. The powers-that-be are afraid of him. He is not afraid of them. Trapped in a corner, he continues his work, to make known what the world’s governments want to hide. To the extent that freedom and democracy survive the next few decades, he will be regarded as one of our era’s greatest heroes.
Click on The Death of Truth: Chris Hedges Interviews Julian Assange for Hedges’ full report and links to the interview.
The Obama administration has refused to give a clear answer on whether the President claims authority to order the killing of an American citizen on American soil, based on the President’s sole determination that the person is a threat.
I have a different question. Does President Obama believe he has the authority to order the killing of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks? Assange has never participated in an act of violence against Americans, and never has advocated violence against Americans. Yet Assange is accused of being a threat to American national security because he has provided a means of publishing secret information that is damaging to the U.S. government’s reputation.
I do think Julian Assange is safer in the Ecuadorian embassy in London than he would be anywhere else. It isn’t paranoid to think that, if he were free to move about, he might be found dead some morning in a hotel room or along a lonely country road. My guess is that he will be in the Ecuadorian embassy for a longl— just like Cardinal Mindszenty, who was sentenced to life imprisonment on trumped-up charges by the Communist government of Hungary during the Cold War era, and found asylum for 15 years in the U.S. embassy in Budapest.
But my question is not about President Obama’s intentions. My question is what limits, if any, exist in his eyes to his power to issue death warrants.
Julian Assange gave an an interview yesterday to Democracy Now! about Wikileaks, Bradley Manning and his new book Cypherpunks. Here’s part of what he said.
There’s not a barrier anymore between corporate surveillance, on the one hand, and government surveillance, on the other. You know, Facebook is based—has its servers based in the United States. Gmail, as General Petraeus found out, has its servers based in the United States. And the interplay between U.S. intelligence agencies and other Western intelligence agencies and any intelligence agencies that can hack this is fluid.
So, we’re in a—if we look back to what’s a earlier example of the worst penetration by an intelligence apparatus of a society, which is perhaps East Germany, where up to 10 percent of people over their lifetime had been an informer at one stage or another, in Iceland we have 88 percent penetration of Iceland by Facebook. Eighty-eight percent of people are there on Facebook informing on their friends andtheir movements and the nature of their relationships—and for free. They’re not even being paid money. They’re not even being directly coerced to do it. They’re doing it for social credits to avoid the feeling of exclusion.
But people should understand what is really going on. I don’t believe people are doing this or would do it if they truly understood what was going on, that they are doing hundreds of billions of hours of free work for the Central Intelligence Agency, for the FBI, and for all allied agencies and all countries that can ask for favors to get hold of that information.
William Binney, the former chief of research, the National Security Agency’s signals intelligence division, describes this situation that we are in now as “turnkey totalitarianism,” that the whole system of totalitarianism has been built—the car, the engine has been built—and it’s just a matter of turning the key. And actually, when we look to see some of the crackdowns on WikiLeaks and the grand jury process and targeted assassinations and so on, actually it’s arguable that key has already been partly turned. The assassinations that occur extra-judicially, the renditions that occur, they don’t occur in isolation. They occur as a result of the information that has been sucked in through this giant signals interception machinery.
That’s a strong statement, but I don’t think it is an exaggeration. Watch the interview and decide for yourself. The key parts are between the 10th and 20th minute and after the 32nd minute. Or click on Julian Assange on Wikileaks, Bradley Manning and the Emerging Surveillance State and read the transcript.
George Orwell in his novel 1984 coined the word un-person. When the regime of Big Brother turns you into an un-person, you not only cease to exist, but all record and memory of your existence cease to exist. This was inspired by the old Soviet Union, where, when the regime turned against a prominent person, they not only disappeared, but all reference to them in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia was eliminated. Winston Smith, the central character of 1984, has a job of “rectifying” the records.
Now Wikileaks has uncovered records that indicates the authorities at the Guantanamo Bay detention center had a policy of turning inmates into un-people. Julian Assange said in an interview last week with CNN that a 2005 Guantanamo Bay manual, recently revealed by Wikileaks, show that military authorities had a policy of not identifying the inmates as individuals, not even by a number. That meant a person could be made to disappear, and there would be no record that the person was even present at Guantanamo.
Now perhaps there is a logical explanation for this policy other than the one Assange gives. Perhaps the present policy is different from what it was in 2005. But U.S. government spokesmen refuse to explain, confirm or deny. They say it is a matter of security. The only way that I can see it would be a matter of security is that the truth really is Orwellian.
Click on Embassy life like a ‘space station,’ Assange says for the interview and a summary on the CNN home page.
Click on The Detainee Policies for Wikileaks’ press release on the Guantanamo documents.
Double click to enlarge.
Click on Wikileaks novo for the original Portuguese version of the infographic. Hat tip to This Day in Wikileaks.
