Wikileaks Arrest: Julian Quixote: Will Assange suffer the fate of Pollard or Ellsberg?
13 December 2010
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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