Wikileaks Assange ‘Rape’ Accuser Linked To Notorious CIA Operative

Swedish prosecutors told AOL News last week that Assange was not wanted for rape as has been reported in American media , but for something called "sex by surprise" or "unexpected sex."

Previously we had reported that Julian Assange founder of wikiLeaks accused of rape . And warrant was issued for the arrest of Julian Assange in connection with alleged rape , which we had suspected a hand twisting.

Our speculation came true when later on the warrant for the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were withdrawn.

Chief prosecutor Eva Finné in a statement explaining her decision said "I do not consider there to be any reason to suspect that he has committed rape."

The statement was issued in August, 2010 to confirm that Assange was no longer a suspect and is thus no longer required to contact the police.

"She (Eva Finné) has adjudged that he is not suspected of rape. There is thus no reason to retain a warrant for his arrest," Karin Rosander at the Prosecution Authority confirmed. read more

Wikileaks Assange ‘Rape’ Accuser Linked To Notorious CIA Operative

Now in latest development one of the women that is accusing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of sex crimes appears to have worked with a group that has connections to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

James D. Catlin, a lawyer who recently represented Assange, said the sex assault investigation into the WikiLeaks founder is based on claims he didn't use condoms during sex with two Swedish women.

Swedish prosecutors told AOL News last week that Assange was not wanted for rape as has been reported, but for something called "sex by surprise" or "unexpected sex."

One accuser, Anna Ardin, may have "ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups," according to Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett, writing for CounterPunch.

While in Cuba, Ardin worked with the Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White), a feminist anti-Castro group.

Professor Michael Seltzer pointed out that the group is led by Carlos Alberto Montaner who is reportedly connected to the CIA.

Shamir and Bennett also describe Ardin as a "leftist" who "published her anti-Castro diatribes (see here and here) in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba."

Shamir and Bennett noted that Las damas de blanco is partially funded by the US government and also counts Luis Posada Carriles as a supporter.

A declassified 1976 document (.pdf) revealed Posada to be a CIA agent. He has been convicted of terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of people. read more

Assange no longer suspected of rape.

The warrant for the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been withdrawn, the Swedish Prosecution Authority has confirmed.

Chief prosecutor Eva Finné in a statement explaining her decision said "I do not consider there to be any reason to suspect that he has committed rape."

The statement was issued at 4.30pm on Saturday to confirm that Assange was no longer a suspect and is thus no longer required to contact the police.

"She (Eva Finné) has adjudged that he is not suspected of rape. There is thus no reason to retain a warrant for his arrest," Karin Rosander at the Prosecution Authority confirmed.

A source close to the case told the newspaper that two women in their twenties went to the police in Stockholm on Friday to speak about their recent encounters with Assange.

The Prosecution Authority released a statement on Saturday morning in which it revealed that the warrant was based on “one report of rape and one report of molestation. A warrant has been issued for the person's arrest since there is a risk that he could hamper the investigation.”

Kristinn Hrafnsson, a colleague of Assange's who spoke to news agency AFP from Iceland earlier on Saturday, rejected the charges against Assange as a fabrication, but confirmed that Assange remained in Sweden and planned to turn himself in.

There has been widespread speculation in social media on Saturday that the allegations were completely unfounded and had an ulterior motive, an accusation that WikiLeaks, and comments attributed to them on Twitter, have also helped to forward.

The WikiLeaks founder has also personally denied the accusations in an email to Stockholm daily Dagens Nyheter.

“Why these accusations are coming at this point in time is an interesting question. I haven't been contacted by the police. The allegations are false,” Julian Assange said.

WikiLeaks chose to move its servers from the United States to Sweden in 2007 as Assange believed the site would benefit from Swedish laws protecting journalists' sources.

WikiLeaks' 'Kissinger Cables' underline the world's debt to Bradley Manning

President Richard Nixon conferring with Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser, in 1972. Photograph: AP

 

 

From 'Collateral Murder' to this latest release, his whistleblowing has laid bare US military misconduct and American realpolitik

WikiLeaks has released a new trove of documents, more than 1.7m US State Department cables dating from 1973 to 1976, which they have dubbed "The Kissinger Cables", after Henry Kissinger, who in those years served as secretary of state and assistant to the president for national security affairs. One cable includes a transcribed conversation where Kissinger displays remarkable candor:

"Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, 'The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.' [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I'm afraid to say things like that."

While the illegal and the unconstitutional may be a laughing matter for Kissinger, who turns 90 next month, it is deadly serious for Private Bradley Manning. After close to three years in prison, at least eight months of which in conditions described by UN special rapporteur on torture Juan Ernesto Méndez as "cruel, inhuman and degrading", Manning recently addressed the court at Fort Meade:

"I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information ... this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general, as well as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan."

These words of Manning's were released anonymously, in the form of an audio recording made clandestinely, that we broadcast on the "Democracy Now!" news hour. This was Bradley Manning, in his own voice, in his own words, explaining his actions.
He testified about the helicopter gunship video that he released to WikiLeaks, which was later made public under the title "Collateral Murder". In stark, grainy black-and-white, it shows the gunship kill 12 men in Baghdad on 12 July 2007, with audio of the helicopter crew mocking the victims, celebrating the senseless murder of the people below, two of whom were employees of the Reuters news agency. Manning said:

"The most alarming aspect of the video to me, however, was the seemingly delightful bloodlust the aerial weapons team. They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as 'dead bastards,' and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers."

Reuters had sought the video through a freedom of information request, but had been denied. So Manning delivered the video, along with hundreds of thousands of other classified electronic documents, through the anonymous, secure online submission procedure developed by WikiLeaks. Manning made the largest leak of classified documents in US history, and changed the world.
The WikiLeaks team gathered at a rented house in Reykjavik, Iceland, to prepare the video for public release. Among those working was Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament. She told me:

"When I saw the video in February 2010, I was profoundly moved. I was moved to tears, like many people that watch it. But at the same time, I understood its significance and how it might be able to change our world and make it better."

Jónsdóttir co-founded the Icelandic Pirate party, a genuine political party springing up in many, mostly European countries. A lifelong activist, she calls herself a "pixel pirate".
The "Collateral Murder" video created a firestorm of press attention when it was first released. One of the soldiers on the ground was Ethan McCord, who rushed to the scene of the slaughter and helped save two children who had been injured in the attack. He suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. He recently penned a letter of support for Bradley Manning, writing:

"The video released by WikiLeaks belongs in the public record. Covering up this incident is a matter deserving of criminal inquiry. Whoever revealed it is an American hero in my book."

In the three years since "Collateral Murder" was released in April 2010, WikiLeaks has come under tremendous pressure. Manning faces life in prison or possibly even the death penalty. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spent a year and a half under house arrest in Britain, until he sought refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has remained since June 2012, fighting extradition to Sweden. He fears Sweden could then extradite him to the United States, where a secret grand jury may have already issued a sealed indictment against him. Private details from Jónsdóttir's Twitter and four other online accounts have been handed over to US authorities.
WikiLeaks' latest release, which includes documents already declassified but very difficult to search and obtain, is a testament to the ongoing need for WikiLeaks and similar groups. The revealed documents have sparked controversies around the world, even though they relate to the 1970s. If we had a uniform standard of justice, Nobel laureate Henry Kissinger would be the one on trial, and Bradley Manning would win the Nobel Peace Prize.
• Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column
© 2013 Amy Goodman; distributed by King Features Syndicate

Bradley Manning V's Amerika

Supporters of U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning protest during his scheduled motion hearing, outside the gates of Fort Meade
Rallies are planned this weekend in dozens of cities across the globe in support of Private first class Bradley Manning as the former Army intelligence analyst prepares to stand trial for the largest intelligence leak in United States history.
The military court-martial against the 25-year-old soldier begins Monday in Ft. Meade, Maryland and is expected to continue throughout the summer. Manning faces a life in prison if convicted of the most serious of the counts against him — aiding the enemy — but presiding judge Col. Denise Lind previously said she’d credit the alleged leaker with 112 days due to the egregious conditions he endured while held for roughly nine months in a US Marine brig.
Manning is charged with uploading hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, including US State Department diplomatic cables, war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan and detainee assessment files for men held at the military’s controversial Guantanamo Bay prison. He admitted to leaking the documents during pretrial testimony presented in February. Army prosecutors say al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula [which is run by CIA...dan] benefited by WikiLeaks’ publishing of the documents, and a member of the Navy SEALs team that executed the lethal raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan compound is expected to take the stand during a closed-door court hearing in the coming weeks.
Last week marked three years to the day since Manning was captured by US authorities in Iraq while on duty and brought into custody. He spent nearly two months inside of a cage in Kuwait before being transferred to Quantico Marine Base in Northern Virginia, where for most of a year he was subjected to treatment considered by a United Nations special rapporteur to be tantamount to torture. He has spent the last two months imprisoned at an Army facility in Leavenworth, Kansas, though he’s been carted to-and-from Ft. Meade outside of Baltimore since December 2011 when his pretrial hearings began.
Supporters of the soldier and his defense counsel asked the court to drop charges against the soldier not just due to the conditions at Quantico but because of the more than 1,000 days he’s been held in pretrial confinement. Demonstrators will gather at Ft. Meade on the eve of the court-martial and at other sites around the globe this weekend to pay tribute to a man hailed as a whistleblower by some but condemned by the country he swore to protect.
Demonstrations have been held at Quantico, Ft. Meade and other sites since Manning was apprehended in May 2010, but organizers of this weekend’s event near the military court expect it to be the largest of its kind ever. Rallies elsewhere will occur on at least four continents.
Daniel Ellsberg, a former Department of Defense employee who infamously leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, is expected to speak at Ft. Meade on Saturday and in nearby Washington, DC on Sunday.
“Americans who care about the future of our country need to be involved in Bradley’s defense,” Ellsberg wrote in a statement this month. “The defining issues of the twenty-first century, including the transparency and accountability of our government, are at stake. I believe history is on the side of those who seek to reveal the truth, not on the side of those who seek to conceal it.”

Daniel Ellsberg, a former Department of Defense employee

Organizers expect as many as 1,000 supporters at Saturday’s rally at the Army base, and the military acknowledged this weekend that the number of press credential requests submitted for the trial is five times what Ft. Meade’s media center can accommodate. Offsite, however, rallies are expected to be held in more than two dozen major American and international cities.
On June 1, events in Australia, Canada, Germany, the UK, Italy and South Korea will coincide with the rally outside of Ft. Meade as well as others planned in cities across the US.
Busses will bring supporters from all over the US to Ft. Meade on Saturday for a march from the gates of the facility to an offsite location where Ellsberg will be joined by a number of other well-known advocates of the soldier, including former State Department official Col. Ann Wright and anti-Don’t Ask Don’t Tell activist Lt. Dan Choi.
In London, Manning supporters will gather outside the US Embassy to rally in support. The Consulate General of the United States will be the site of a similar event in Toronto, Ontario, as will the US embassies in Rome, Italy and Seoul, South Korea. At least 20 events will occur in just the US on Saturday, including protests in city parks and military bases, and demonstrators in Toledo, Ohio will march in support of Pfc. Manning during the historic King Wamba Parade in Toledo, Ohio. Other gatherings are planned internationally when the court-martial begins on Monday as part of an International Solidarity Week of Action organized by the Bradley Manning Support Network.
“Bradley believed that the American people have a right to know the truth about what our government does around the world in our name. We will send a message to the military prosecuting authority, and President Obama, that Bradley Manning is a patriot and heroic truth-teller,” the Support Network wrote of the events.
On Sunday, Ellsberg will join attorney Michael Ratner and others at a church in Washington to speak about the case. Ratner is the president emeritus at the Center for Constitutional Rights and serves as the American attorney for Julian Assange, founder and publisher of WikiLeaks. Assange has been inside of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for 11 months in order to avoid extradition to Sweden where he is wanted for questioning in regards to allegation of sex crimes.
Last week, Assange spoke to Democracy Now! about the US government’s allegation that Manning aided the enemy by going to WikiLeaks.
“If that precedent is allowed to be erected, it will do two things. Firstly, it means it’s a potential death penalty for any person in the military speaking to a journalist about a sensitive matter. Secondly, it also embroils the journalist and the publication in that chain of communicating, they would say, to the enemy, and therefore making them susceptible, as well, to the Espionage Act, which also has capital offenses. And that is part of the US — that latter part is part of the US attack on WikiLeaks, including myself,” Assange said.
Manning is charged with violating the Espionage Act, aiding the enemy and a number of other counts. He pleaded guilty to lesser offenses earlier this year carrying a possible 20 year prison sentence, but the Army said they’d continue to pursue all charges.
SEE ALSO:
- Julian Assange sues US military over secrecy of Bradley Manning trial
- Manning: US Army like ‘child torturing ants with a magnifying glass’ (FULL LEAKED TESTIMONY)
Source: http://rt.com/usa/meade-bradley-protests-manning-077/

Julian Assange sues US military over secrecy of Bradley Manning trial

Julian Assange (above) and a coalition of activists and journalists filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against the military judge overseeing Army Pfc. Bradley Manning’s trial in a bid to open access to the secretive proceedings.
During the trial both access to transcripts and prosecution and defense motions have been virtually inaccessible.
Bradley, who faces a life sentence over the leaking of more than 700,000 sensitive military documents published by Wikileaks, is currently being tried by a military tribunal. The trial is expected to begin on June 3, 2013.
The judge overseeing Manning’s court-martial announced this week that she will close portions of the trial to the public in order to protect classified material. Prosecutors are expected to call 150 witnesses to testify against Manning, while two dozen witnesses may be able to provide their testimony in closed sessions.
Shayana Kadidal, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights which is part of the legal challenge, described the effort as a last ditch attempt.
“If this lawsuit fails, Manning’s trial will take place under conditions where journalists and the public will be unable as a practical matter to follow what is going on in the courtroom,” says Kadidal.
“The federal civilian courts are now our last option,” she added.
Assange’s co-plaintiffs in the legal injunction include Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, and The Nation magazine. The coalition seeks to force the release of files currently being kept out of the public’s access.

Bradley Manning 

The same group previously filed a similar lawsuit in military courts that was shot down in a 3-2 decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces last month. Now, they are hoping that the same legal request will fare better in a civilian court.
The group’s preliminary injunction is expected to be presented in front of a Maryland US District Court shortly after Manning’s trial begins in June.
Though the pretrial process has been opaque, prosecutors did say this week that they had agreed not to pursue a charge that Manning had violated the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which could potentially reduce any prison sentence by eight years. According to the Washington Post, prosecutors did not provide a reason for the recent shift.
Regardless, convictions for the more serious charges faced by Manning could still carry a sentence of life in prison.
Manning’s defense team attempted to block testimony from witnesses linked to alleged damage caused by the release of the leaked documents. Army Col. Denise Lind, overseeing the trial, disagreed, and ruled that the prosecution will have the option to call witnesses to provide both evidence and context of any collateral damage caused by the document leaks.
Lind did say, however, that the testimony would be limited so as to not have the trial “devolve into many trials regarding international politics in many regions of the world.”
Both activists and journalists that have been following Manning’s pretrial proceedings have accused the US military of undermining the legal process by preventing access.
“The culture of extreme secrecy that has defined both the Bush and Obama presidencies does a disservice to our democratic society. By unnecessarily cloaking these proceedings from public view or scrutiny, the government is undermining the most basic principles of transparency and freedom of the press, both of which are vital components of the democratic and judicial process,” said journalist Jeremy Scahill, national security correspondent for The Nation.
SEE ALSO:
- Assange’s WikiLeaks Party opens for membership in Australia
- Bradley Manning: a window into the American soul
- Manning: US Army like ‘child torturing ants with a magnifying glass’ (FULL LEAKED TESTIMONY)
Source: http://rt.com/usa/assange-sues-military-manning-secrecy-661/

The Death of Truth; Julian Assange

http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/the_death_of_truth_20130505/

By Chris Hedges
This interview is a joint project of Truthdig and The Nation magazine.
LONDON—A tiny tip of the vast subterranean network of governmental and intelligence agencies from around the world dedicated to destroying WikiLeaks and arresting its founder, Julian Assange, appears outside the red-brick building on Hans Crescent Street that houses the Ecuadorean Embassy. Assange, the world’s best-known political refugee, has been in the embassy since he was offered sanctuary there last June. British police in black Kevlar vests are perched night and day on the steps leading up to the building, and others wait in the lobby directly in front of the embassy door. An officer stands on the corner of a side street facing the iconic department store Harrods, half a block away on Brompton Road. Another officer peers out the window of a neighboring building a few feet from Assange’s bedroom at the back of the embassy. Police sit round-the-clock in a communications van topped with an array of antennas that presumably captures all electronic forms of communication from Assange’s ground-floor suite.
The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), or Scotland Yard, said the estimated cost of surrounding the Ecuadorean Embassy from June 19, 2012, when Assange entered the building, until Jan. 31, 2013, is the equivalent of $4.5 million. 
Britain has rejected an Ecuadorean request that Assange be granted safe passage to an airport. He is in limbo. It is, he said, like living in a “space station.”
“The status quo, for them, is a loss,” Assange said of the U.S.-led campaign against him as we sat in his small workroom, cluttered with cables and computer equipment. He had a full head of gray hair and gray stubble on his face and was wearing a traditional white embroidered Ecuadorean shirt. “The Pentagon threatened WikiLeaks and me personally, threatened us before the whole world, demanded that we destroy everything we had published, demanded we cease ‘soliciting’ new information from U.S. government whistle-blowers, demanded, in other words, the total annihilation of a publisher. It stated that if we did not self-destruct in this way that we would be ‘compelled’ to do so.”
“But they have failed,” he went on. “They set the rules about what a win was. They lost in every battle they defined. Their loss is total. We’ve won the big stuff. The loss of face is hard to overstate. The Pentagon reissued its threats on Sept. 28 last year. This time we laughed. Threats inflate quickly. Now the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department intend to show the world what vindictive losers they are through the persecution of Bradley Manning, myself and the organization more generally.”
Assange, Manning and WikiLeaks, by making public in 2010 half a million internal documents from the Pentagon and the State Department, along with the 2007 video of U.S. helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down Iraqi civilians, including children, and two Reuters journalists, effectively exposed the empire’s hypocrisy, indiscriminate violence and its use of torture, lies, bribery and crude tactics of intimidation. WikiLeaks shone a spotlight into the inner workings of empire—the most important role of a press—and for this it has become empire’s prey. Those around the globe with the computer skills to search out the secrets of empire are now those whom empire fears most. If we lose this battle, if these rebels are defeated, it means the dark night of corporate totalitarianism. If we win, if the corporate state is unmasked, it can be destroyed. 
U.S. government officials quoted in Australian diplomatic cables obtained by The Saturday Age described the campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks as “unprecedented both in its scale and nature.” The scope of the operation has also been gleaned from statements made during Manning’s pretrial hearing. The U.S. Department of Justice will apparently pay the contractor ManTech of Fairfax, Va., more than $2 million this year alone for a computer system that, from the tender, appears designed to handle the prosecution documents. The government line item refers only to “WikiLeaks Software and Hardware Maintenance.”
The lead government prosecutor in the Manning case, Maj. Ashden Fein, has told the court that the FBI file that deals with the leak of government documents through WikiLeaks has “42,135 pages or 3,475 documents.” This does not include a huge volume of material accumulated by a grand jury investigation. Manning, Fein has said, represents only 8,741 pages or 636 different documents in that classified FBI file.
There are no divisions among government departments or the two major political parties over what should be Assange’s fate. “I think we should be clear here. WikiLeaks and people that disseminate information to people like this are criminals, first and foremost,” then-press secretary Robert Gibbs, speaking for the Obama administration, said during a 2010 press briefing.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and then-Sen. Christopher S. Bond, a Republican, said in a joint letter to the U.S. attorney general calling for Assange’s prosecution: “If Mr. Assange and his possible accomplices cannot be charged under the Espionage Act (or any other applicable statute), please know that we stand ready and willing to support your efforts to ‘close those gaps’ in the law, as you also mentioned. …”
Republican Candice S. Miller, a U.S. representative from Michigan, said in the House: “It is time that the Obama administration treats WikiLeaks for what it is—a terrorist organization, whose continued operation threatens our security. Shut it down. Shut it down. It is time to shut down this terrorist, this terrorist Web site, WikiLeaks. Shut it down, Attorney General [Eric] Holder.”
At least a dozen American governmental agencies, including the Pentagon, the FBI, the Army’s Criminal Investigative Department, the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Diplomatic Security Service, are assigned to the WikiLeaks case, while the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are assigned to track down WikiLeaks’ supposed breaches of security. The global assault—which saw Australia threaten to revoke Assange’s passport—is part of the terrifying metamorphosis of the “war on terror” into a wider war on civil liberties. It has become a hunt not for actual terrorists but a hunt for all those with the ability to expose the mounting crimes of the power elite. 
The dragnet has swept up any person or organization that fits the profile of those with the technical skills and inclination to burrow into the archives of power and disseminate it to the public. It no longer matters if they have committed a crime. The group Anonymous, which has mounted cyberattacks on government agencies at the local and federal levels, saw Barrett Brown—a journalist associated with Anonymous and who specializes in military and intelligence contractors—arrested along with Jeremy Hammond, a political activist alleged to have provided WikiLeaks with 5.5 million emails between the security firm Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) and its clients. Brown and Hammond were apparently seized because of allegations made by an informant named Hector Xavier Monsegur—known as Sabu—who appears to have attempted to entrap WikiLeaks while under FBI supervision.
To entrap and spy on activists, Washington has used an array of informants, including Adrian Lamo, who sold Bradley Manning out to the U.S. government. 
WikiLeaks collaborators or supporters are routinely stopped—often at international airports—and attempts are made to recruit them as informants. Jérémie Zimmerman, Smári McCarthy, Jacob Appelbaum, David House and one of Assange’s lawyers, Jennifer Robinson, all have been approached or interrogated. The tactics are often heavy-handed. McCarthy, an Icelander and WikiLeaks activist, was detained and extensively questioned when he entered the United States. Soon afterward, three men who identified themselves as being from the FBI approached McCarthy in Washington. The men attempted to recruit him as an informant and gave him instructions on how to spy on WikiLeaks.
On Aug. 24, 2011, six FBI agents and two prosecutors landed in Iceland on a private jet. The team told the Icelandic government that it had discovered a plan by Anonymous to hack into Icelandic government computers. But it was soon clear the team had come with a very different agenda. The Americans spent the next few days, in flagrant violation of Icelandic sovereignty, interrogating Sigurdur Thordarson, a young WikiLeaks activist, in various Reykjavik hotel rooms. Thordarson, after the U.S. team was discovered by the Icelandic Ministry of the Interior and expelled from the country, was taken to Washington, D.C., for four days of further interrogation. Thordarson appears to have decided to cooperate with the FBI. It was reported in the Icelandic press that he went to Denmark in 2012 and sold the FBI stolen WikiLeaks computer hard drives for about $5,000.
There have been secret search orders for information from Internet service providers, including Twitter, Google and Sonic, as well as seizure of information about Assange and WikiLeaks from the company Dynadot, a domain name registrar and Web host.
Assange’s suitcase and computer were stolen on a flight from Sweden to Germany on Sept. 27, 2010. His bankcards were blocked. WikiLeaks’ Moneybookers primary donation account was shut down after being placed on a blacklist in Australia and a “watch list” in the United States. Financial service companies including Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Bank of America, Western Union and American Express, following denunciations of WikiLeaks by the U.S. government, blacklisted the organization. Last month the Supreme Court of Iceland found the blacklisting to be unlawful and ordered it lifted in Iceland by May 8. There have been frequent massive denial-of-service attacks on WikiLeak’s infrastructure.
And there is a well-orchestrated campaign of character assassination against Assange, including mischaracterizations of the sexual misconduct case brought against him by Swedish police. Assange has not formally been charged with a crime. The two women involved have not accused him of rape.
Bradley Manning’s heroism extends to his steadfast refusal, despite what appears to be tremendous pressure, to implicate Assange in espionage. If Manning alleges that Assange had instructed him on how to ferret out classified documents, the U.S. might try to charge Assange with espionage.
Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy after exhausting his fight to avoid extradition from the United Kingdom to Sweden. He and his lawyers say that an extradition to Sweden would mean an extradition to the U.S. If Sweden refused to comply with U.S demands for Assange, kidnapping, or “extraordinary rendition,” would remain an option for Washington. 
Kidnapping was given legal cover by a 1989 memorandum issued by the Justice Department stating that “the FBI may use its statutory authority to investigate and arrest individuals for violating United States law, even if the FBI’s actions contravene customary international law” and that an “arrest that is inconsistent with international or foreign law does not violate the Fourth Amendment.” This is a stunning example of the security and surveillance state’s Orwellian doublespeak. The persecution of Assange and WikiLeaks and the practice of extraordinary rendition embody the shredding of the Fourth Amendment, which was designed to protect us from unreasonable searches and seizures and requires any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause.
Two Swedes and a Briton were seized by the United States last August somewhere in Africa—it is assumed to have been in Somalia—and held in one of our black sites. They suddenly reappeared—with the Briton stripped of his citizenship—in a Brooklyn courtroom in December facing terrorism charges. Sweden, rather than object to the extradition of its two citizens, dropped the Swedish charges against the prisoners to permit the rendition to occur. The prisoners, The Washington Post reported, were secretly indicted by a federal grand jury two months after being taken.
The persistence of WikiLeaks, despite the onslaught, has been remarkable. In 2012 it released some of the 5.5 million documents sent from or to the private security firm Stratfor. The documents, known as “the Global Intelligence Files,” included an email dated Jan. 26, 2011, from Fred Burton, a Stratfor vice president, who wrote: “Text Not for Pub. We [the U.S. government] have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect.”
WikiLeaks’ most recent foray into full disclosure includes the Kissinger files, or the WikiLeaks Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy. The files, which have built into them a remarkable search engine, provide access to 1.7 million diplomatic communications, once confidential but now in the public record, that were sent between 1973 and 1976. Henry Kissinger, secretary of state from September 1973 to January 1977, authored many of the 205,901 cables that deal with his activities.
In the files it appears that the late Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi may have been hired by the Swedish group Saab-Scania to help sell its Viggen fighter jet to India while his mother, Indira Gandhi, was prime minister.

In 1975 Kissinger during a conversation with the U.S. ambassador to Turkey and two Turkish and Cypriot diplomats assured his hosts that he could work around an official arms embargo then in effect. He is quoted in the documents as saying: “Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, ‘The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.’ [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things like that.”
The documents, along with detailing collaborations with the military dictatorships in Spain and Greece, show that Washington created a torture exemption to allow the military government in Brazil to receive U.S. aid.
The documents were obtained from the National Archives and Record Administration and took a year to be prepared in an accessible digital format. “It is essentially what Aaron Swartz was doing, making available documents that until now were hard to access or only obtainable through an intermediary,” Assange said in the interview.
Swartz was the Internet activist arrested in January 2011 for downloading more than 5 million academic articles from JSTOR, an online clearinghouse for scholarly journals. Swartz was charged by federal prosecutors with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The charges carried the threat of $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison. Swartz committed suicide last Jan. 11.
Assange, 41, works through most of the night and sleeps into the late afternoon. Even though he uses an ultraviolet light device, he was pale, not surprising for someone who has not been out in sunlight for nearly a year. He rarely gives interviews. A treadmill was tilted up against a wall of his quarters; he said he sets it up and tries to run three to five miles on it every day. He has visits from a personal trainer, with whom he practices calisthenics and boxing. He is lanky at 6 feet 2 inches tall and exudes a raw, nervous energy. He leaps, sometimes disconcertingly, from topic to topic, idea to idea, his words rushing to keep up with his cascading thoughts. He works with a small staff and has a steady stream of visitors, including celebrities such as Lady Gaga. When the Ecuadorean Ambassador Ana Alban Mora and Bianca Jagger showed up late one afternoon, Assange pulled down glasses and poured everyone whiskey from a stock of liquor he keeps in a cabinet. His visitors chatted at a small round table, seated in leatherette chairs. Jagger wanted to know how to protect her website from hackers.  Assange told her to “make a lot of backup copies.”
It is from this room that Assange and his supporters have mounted an election campaign for a seat in Australia’s upper house of Parliament. Public surveys from the state of Victoria, where Assange is a candidate, indicate he has a good chance of winning.
Assange communicates with his global network of associates and supporters up to 17 hours a day through numerous cellphones and a collection of laptop computers. He encrypts his communications and religiously shreds anything put down on paper. The frequent movements of the police cordon outside his window make sleep difficult. And he misses his son, whom he raised as a single father. He may also have a daughter, but he does not speak publicly about his children, refusing to disclose their ages or where they live. His family, he said, has received death threats. He has not seen his children since his legal troubles started. The emotional cost is as heavy as the physical one.
Assange said he sees WikiLeaks’ primary role as giving a voice to the victims of U.S. wars and proxy wars by using leaked documents to tell their stories. The release of the Afghan and Iraq War Logs, he said, disclosed the extent of civilian death and suffering, and the plethora of lies told by the Pentagon and the state to conceal the human toll. The logs, Assange said, also unmasked the bankruptcy of the traditional press and its obsequious service as war propagandists.
“There were 90,000 records in the Afghan War Logs,” Assange said. “We had to look at different angles in the material to add up the number of civilians who have been killed. We studied the records. We ranked events different ways. I wondered if we could find out the largest number of civilians killed in a single event. It turned out that this occurred during Operation Medusa, led by Canadian forces in September 2006. The U.S.-backed local government was quite corrupt. The Taliban was, in effect, the political opposition and had a lot of support. The locals rose up against the government. Most of the young men in the area, from a political perspective, were Taliban. There was a government crackdown that encountered strong resistance. ISAF [the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force] carried out a big sweep. It went house to house. Then an American soldier was killed. They called in an AC-130 gunship. This is a C-130 cargo plane refitted with cannons on the side. It circled overhead and rained down shells. The War Logs say 181 ‘enemy’ were killed. The logs also say there were no wounded or captured. It was a significant massacre. This event, the day when the largest number of people were killed in Afghanistan, has never been properly investigated by the old media.”
Operation Medusa, which occurred 20 miles west of Kandahar, took the lives of four Canadian soldiers and involved some 2,000 NATO and Afghan troops. It was one of the largest military operations by the ISAF in the Kandahar region.
Assange searched for accounts of reporters who were on the scene. What he discovered appalled him. He watched an embedded Canadian reporter, Graeme Smith of the Toronto Globe and Mail, use these words on a Canadian military website to describe his experiences during Operation Medusa:

In September 2006 I had one of the most intense experiences of my life. I was on the front lines of something called Operation Medusa. It was a big Canadian offensive against the Taliban who were massed outside of Kandahar City. The Taliban were digging trenches and intimidating locals, and the Canadians decided to sweep in there in big numbers and force them out. And I was travelling with a platoon that called themselves the “Nomads”. These were guys who had been sent all over, you know, sort of, a 50,000 square kilometer box out to the very edges of Kandahar City, and so they were moving around all the time; they were never sleeping in the same place twice and they’d even made up these little patches for their uniforms that said “Nomads” on them. The Nomads took me in and they sort of made me one of them. I spent what was originally supposed to be just a two or three day embed with them, stretched out into two weeks. I didn’t have a change of underwear. I didn’t have a change of shirt. I remember showering in my clothes, washing first the clothes on my body, then stripping the clothes off and washing my body, and that was just using a bucket as a shower. It was an intense experience. I slept in my flak jacket a lot of nights. We were under fire together, you know, we had RPGs whistling in. One time I was standing around behind a troop carrier and we were just sort of relaxing—we were in a down moment—and I think some guys had coffee out and were standing around and I heard a loud clap beside my right ear. It was like someone had sort of snuck up behind me and sort of played a prank by clapping beside my ear. I turned around to say hey that’s not really funny, that’s kind of loud, and all of the soldiers were lying on the ground because they know what to do when an incoming sniper round comes in, and I didn’t because [laughs] it was my first time under fire. So I threw myself to the ground as well. They had sort of made me one of them and so they gave me a little “Nomads” patch that I attached to my flak jacket and you know as a journalist you try to avoid drinking the Kool-Aid, but I did feel a sense of belonging with those guys.

“The physical demeanor of this man, the way he describes life in the great outdoors, led me to understand that here was someone who had never boxed, been mountain climbing, played rugby, been involved in any of these classically masculine activities,” Assange said. “Now, for the first time, he feels like a man. He has gone to battle. It was one of many examples of the failure by the embedded reporters to report the truth. They were part of the team.”
Assange is correct. The press of a nation at war, in every conflict I covered, is an enthusiastic part of the machine, cheerleaders for slaughter and tireless mythmakers for war and the military. The few renegades within the press who refuse to wave the flag and slavishly lionize the troops, who will not endow them with a host of virtues including heroism, patriotism and courage, find themselves pariahs in newsrooms and viciously attacked—like Assange and Manning—by the state.
As a reporter at The New York Times, I was among those expected to prod sources inside the organs of power to provide information, including top-secret information. The Pentagon Papers, released to the Times in 1971, and the Times’ Pulitzer-winning 2005 exposure of the warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens by the National Security Council used “top secret” documents—a classification more restricted than the lower-level “secret” designation of the documents released by WikiLeaks. But as the traditional press atrophies with dizzying speed—effectively emasculated by Barack Obama’s use of the Espionage Act half a dozen times since 2009 to target whistle-blowers like Thomas Drake—it is left to the renegades, people like Assange and Manning, to break down walls and inform the public.
The cables that WikiLeaks released, as disturbing as they were, invariably put a pro-unit or pro-U.S. spin on events. The reality in war is usually much worse. Those counted as dead enemy combatants are often civilians. Military units write their own after-action reports and therefore attempt to justify or hide their behavior. Despite the heated rhetoric of the state, no one has provided evidence that anything released by WikiLeaks cost lives. Then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in a 2010 letter to Sen. Carl Levin conceded this point. He wrote Levin: “The initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security. However, the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by the disclosure.”
The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde and Der Spiegel giddily printed redacted copies of some of the WikiLeaks files and then promptly threw Assange and Manning to the sharks. It was not only morally repugnant, but also stunningly shortsighted. Do these news organizations believe that if the state shuts down organizations such as WikiLeaks and imprisons Manning and Assange, traditional news outlets will be left alone? Can’t they connect the dots between the prosecutions of government whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act, warrantless wiretapping, monitoring of communications and the persecution of Manning and Assange? Don’t they worry that when the state finishes with Manning, Assange and WikiLeaks, these atrophied news outlets will be next? Haven’t they realized that this is a war by a global corporate elite not against an organization or an individual but against the freedom of the press and democracy?
And yet Assange is surprisingly hopeful—at least for the short and medium term. He believes that the system cannot protect itself completely from those who chip away at its digital walls.
“The national security state can try to reduce our activity,” he said. “It can close the neck a little tighter. But there are three forces working against it. The first is the massive surveillance required to protect its communication, including the nature of its cryptology. In the military everyone now has an ID card with a little chip on it so you know who is logged into what. A system this vast is prone to deterioration and breakdown. Secondly, there is widespread knowledge not only of how to leak, but how to leak and not be caught, how to even avoid suspicion that you are leaking. The military and intelligence systems collect a vast amount of information and move it around quickly. This means you can also get it out quickly. There will always be people within the system that have an agenda to defy authority. Yes, there are general deterrents, such as when the DOJ [Department of Justice] prosecutes and indicts someone. They can discourage people from engaging in this behavior. But the opposite is also true. When that behavior is successful it is an example. It encourages others. This is why they want to eliminate all who provide this encouragement.”
“The medium-term perspective is very good,” he said. “The education of young people takes place on the Internet. You cannot hire anyone who is skilled in any field without them having been educated on the Internet. The military, the CIA, the FBI, all have no choice but to hire from a pool of people that have been educated on the Internet. This means they are hiring our moles in vast numbers. And this means that these organizations will see their capacity to control information diminish as more and more people with our values are hired.”
The long term, however, may not be as sanguine. Assange recently completed a book with three co-authors—Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann—called “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.” It warns that we are “galloping into a new transnational dystopia.” The Internet has become not only a tool to educate, they write, but the mechanism to cement into place a “Postmodern Surveillance Dystopia” that is supranational and dominated by global corporate power. This new system of global control will “merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control.” It is only through encryption that we can protect ourselves, they argue, and only by breaking through the digital walls of secrecy erected by the power elite can we blunt state secrecy. “The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation,” Assange writes, “has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.”
The U.S., according to one of Assange’s lawyers, Michael Ratner, appears poised to seize Assange the moment he steps out of the embassy. Washington does not want to become a party in two competing extradition requests to Britain. But Washington, with a sealed grand jury indictment prepared against Assange, can take him once the Swedish imbroglio is resolved, or can take him should Britain make a decision not to extradite. Neil MacBride, who has been mentioned as a potential head of the FBI, is U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, which led the grand jury investigation, and he appears to have completed his work.
Assange said, “The grand jury was very active in late 2011, pulling in witnesses, forcing them to testify, pulling in documents. It’s been much less active during 2012 and 2013. The DOJ appears ready to proceed with the prosecution proper immediately following the Manning trial.”
Assange spoke repeatedly about Manning, with evident concern. He sees in the young Army private a reflection of his own situation, as well as the draconian consequences of refusing to cooperate with the security and surveillance state.
Manning’s 12-week military trial is scheduled to begin in June. The prosecution is calling 141 witnesses, including an anonymous Navy SEAL who was part of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Assange called the Navy SEAL the “star diva” of the state’s “12-week Broadway musical.” Manning is as bereft of establishment support as Assange.
“The old media attempted to remove his alleged heroic qualities,” Assange said of Manning. “An act of heroism requires that you make a conscious act. It is not an unreasoned expression of madness or sexual frustration. It requires making a choice—a choice that others can follow. If you do something solely because you are a mad homosexual there is no choice. No one can choose to be a mad homosexual. So they stripped him, or attempted to strip him, of all his refinements.”
“His alleged actions are a rare event,” Assange went on. “And why does a rare event happen? What do we know about him? What do we know about Bradley Manning? We know that he won three science fairs. We know the guy is bright. We know that he was interested in politics early on. We know he’s very articulate and outspoken. We know he didn’t like lies. ... We know he was skilled at his job of being an intelligence analyst. If the media was looking for an explanation they could point to this combination of his abilities and motivations. They could point to his talents and virtues. They should not point to him being gay, or from a broken home, except perhaps in passing. Ten percent of the U.S. military is gay. Well over 50 percent are from broken homes. Take those two factors together. That gets you down to, say, 5 percent—5 percent on the outside. There are 5 million people with active security clearances, so now you’re down to 250,000 people. You still have to get from 250,000 to one. You can only explain Bradley Manning by his virtues. Virtues others can learn from.”
I walked for a long time down Sloane Street after leaving the embassy. The red double-decker buses and the automobiles inched along the thoroughfare. I passed boutiques with window displays devoted to Prada, Giorgio Armani and Gucci. I was jostled by shoppers with bags stuffed full of high-end purchases. They, these consumers, seemed blissfully unaware of the tragedy unfolding a few blocks away. “In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences,” Albert Camus wrote in “The Plague.” “A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions.” 
I stopped in front of the four white columns that led into the brick-turreted Cadogan Hotel. The hotel is where Oscar Wilde was arrested in Room 118 on April 6, 1895, before being charged with “committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons.” John Betjeman imagined the shock of that arrest, which ruined Wilde’s life, in his poem “The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel.” Here’s a fragment:

A thump, and a murmur of voices— 
(“Oh why must they make such a din?”)
As the door of the bedroom swung open  
And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:
“Mr. Woilde, we ’ave come for tew take yew  
Where felons and criminals dwell:
We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly  
For this is the Cadogan Hotel.”

The world has been turned upside down. The pestilence of corporate totalitarianism is spreading rapidly over the earth. The criminals have seized power. It is not, in the end, simply Assange or Manning they want. It is all who dare to defy the official narrative, to expose the big lie of the global corporate state. The persecution of Assange and Manning is the harbinger of what is to come, the rise of a bitter world where criminals in Brooks Brothers suits and gangsters in beribboned military uniforms—propped up by a vast internal and external security apparatus, a compliant press and a morally bankrupt political elite—monitor and crush those who dissent. Writers, artists, actors, journalists, scientists, intellectuals and workers will be forced to obey or thrown into bondage. I fear for Julian Assange. I fear for Bradley Manning. I fear for us all.

interesting words from Julian Assange

source
 "Let me first frame this. I looked at something that I had seen going on with the world. Which is that I thought there were too many unjust acts.And I wanted there to be more just acts, and fewer unjust acts. And one can sort of say, well what are your philosophical axioms for this? And I say I do not need to consider them. This is simply my temperament. And it is an axiom because it is that way. And so that avoids, then, getting into further unhelpful discussions about why you want to do something. It is enough that I do.
So in considering how unjust acts are caused and what tends to promote them and what promotes just acts I saw that human beings are basically invariant. That is that their inclinations and biological temperament haven't changed much over thousands of years and so therefore the only playing field left is: what do they have? And what do they know? And "have" is something that is fairly hard to influence, so that is what resources do they have at their disposal? And how much energy they can harness, and what are the supplies and so on. But what they know can be affected in a nonlnear way because when one person conveys information to another they can convey on to another and another and so on in a way that nonlinear and so you can affect a lot of people with a small amount of information. And therefore you can change the behaviour of many people with a small amount of information. So the question then arises as to what kinds of information will produce behaviour which is just? And disincentivise behaviour which is unjust?
So all around the world there are people observing different parts of what is happening to them locally. And there are other people that are receiving information that they haven't observed first hand. And in the middle there are people who are involved in moving information from the observers to the people who will act on information. These are three separate problems that are all coupled together. I felt that there was a difficulty in taking observations and putting them in an efficient way into a distribution system which could then get this information to people who could act upon it. And so you can argue that companies like Google are involved, for example, in this "middle" business of taking... of moving information from people who have it to people who want it. The problem I saw was that this first step was crippled. And often the last step as well when it came to information that governments were inclined to censor.
We can look at this whole process as the Fourth Estate. Or just as produced by the Fourth Estate. And so you have some kind of... pipeline... and... So I have this description which is... which is partly derived from my experiences in quantum mechanics about looking at the flow of particular types of information which will effect some change in the end. The bottleneck to me appeared to me to be primarily in the acquisition of information that would go on to produce changes that were just. In a Fourth Estate context the people who acquire information are sources. People who work information and distribute it are journalists and publishers. And people who act on it... is everyone. So that's a high level construct, but of course it then comes down to practically how do you engineer a system that solves that problem? And not just a technical system, but a total system. So WikiLeaks was and is an attempt - although still very young - at a total system. .."