Julian Assange, the Australian editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, turned himself in last Tuesday and is currently in jail, after the British judge in charge of the case denied him bail.
The British authorities having received a European arrest warrant issued by Sweden the day before, Mr. Assange was instructed to report to a London police station Tuesday morning at 930AM.
When he did, he was
arrested.
He is now detained in the segregation unit of Wandsworth prison where he will have access to a computer in order that he may prepare his defense.
The Swedish authorities however, even though they did issue an arrest warrant, have not charged Mr. Assange with any wrongdoing.
Instead, they merely want to question him concerning accusations leveled against him by two Swedish women he encountered last August.
Gemma Lindfield, for the Swedish authorities, gave details of the allegations against Mr. Assange.
One of the charges is that he had unprotected sex with a woman, identified only as Miss A, when she insisted he use a condom.
Another is that he had unprotected sex with another woman, Miss W, while she was asleep, the
BBC reported.
Mr. Assange has vowed to fight extradition to Sweden, fearing that that could lead to extradition to the US.
For, in the US, the release of State Department cables has infuriated many, who now seek revenge and demand that the Australian be prosecuted.
The WikiLeaks guy should be in jail for the rest of his life…
These are bad people doing bad things and they're going to get Americans and our allies killed and we should recognize that and recognize that is in effect an act of war against the United States, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich
told Fox.
Information warfare is warfare, and Julian Assange is engaged in warfare. Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed, is terrorism, and Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism. He should be treated as an enemy combatant, he added.
I have no doubt someone can or will die as a result of these leaks, NY Republican Rep. Peter King
told CNN. He claimed that the leaks were
an invitation to murder.
He
urged the Attorney General to designate WikiLeaks
a foreign terrorist organization, claiming
it posed a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.
Former Arkansas Governor and Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee stated that
whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason. And I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty. They've put American lives at risk…and any lives they endanger they're personally responsible for and the blood is on their hands, he
told CNN.
It should be said however, that at this stage there is no evidence that Mr. Assange is directly or indirectly responsible for the leaking of the cables.
Instead, PFC Bradley Manning has been accused of doing so and is currently in detention..
Former President Clinton also condemned the leaks.
I'll be very surprised if some people don't lose their lives over these leaks. And goodness knows how many will lose their careers, he
said.
Sarah Palin
accused Assange of being
an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.
Incidentally, a former adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called for Assange’s assassination.
I think Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something, he
told CBC.
Mr. Assange however, had taken all necessary precautions to ensure that the names of all those who could suffer from public exposure were removed.
In fact, the cables were not initially posted on the WikiLeaks website, but entrusted to the recipients,
The New York Times,
Le Monde,
The Guardian,
El Pais, and
Der Spiegel. They did the redacting.
To date, only about 1,300 of the cables have been released, or
less than 1% of the total.
For its part, the
NYT even sent the cables it intended to publish to the Obama administration for review beforehand!
After reviewing the cables, the officials — while making clear they condemn the publication of secret material — suggested additional redactions. The Times agreed to some, but not all, the newspaper
indicated.
Assange even
invited the State Department on several occasions to pinpoint those cables it considered could undermine the national security of the US, but it declined to do so.
Assange had not been so meticulous when posting the previous installments relating to the Afghan and Iraq wars earlier this year.
Yet, the accusation made then that the revelations would lead to the deaths of many troops and US contacts proved baseless.
There is no evidence to date that anyone died because of the WikiLeaks revelations, according to…the Pentagon
.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell has said previously that there was no evidence that anyone had been killed because of the leaks. Sunday (November 28), another Pentagon official told McClatchy that the military still has no evidence that the leaks have led to any deaths. The official didn't want to be named because of the issue's sensitivity.
« We have yet to see any harm come to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the WikiLeaks documents, » Morrell told the Washington Post on Aug 11. But « there is in all likelihood a lag between exposure of these documents and jeopardy in the field »,
McClatchy reported.
The same accusations, nevertheless, are being parroted anew.
As a result, the US Justice Department is currently evaluating its legal options, seeking ways to indict Mr. Assange.
We have a very serious active, ongoing investigation that is criminal in nature. I authorized just last week a number of things to be done so that we can hopefully get to the bottom of this and hold people accountable, as they should be, Attorney General Eric Holder
declared.
Some believe that the
1917 Espionage Act would be suitable to prosecute the Australian. Under this act, it is illegal to
willfully communicate classified information that could undermine US national security.
I think there is a very good chance of a prosecution under the Espionage Act. His actions are not those of a responsible journalist that would enjoy the protection of the Constitution. He solicited people to commit a crime by sending him classified information. And then he disclosed it on a transmission belt, Jeffrey H. Smith a former general council at the CIA and now Washington lawyer,
told McClatchy.
Yet, journalists have seldom been prosecuted on such grounds in the past.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, believes Assange will have
a pretty good defense, if it were shown the classified cables were sent to WikiLeaks without his involvement. The Supreme Court has said the "innocent recipient of unlawful information" is usually protected in publishing it, she
told McClatchy.
In addition, it may prove extremely difficult to establish that Julian Assange’s intent was undermining US security by releasing the cables.
As indicated above, he consulted the State Department prior to publication.
The problem here is for the United States to prosecute Assange, and in most other civilized countries, they have to show an intent. A crime has to be an intentional act, and if Assange did not intend in any way to harm anyone's interests -- and in fact, intended to further the interests of the [people of the] United States and the rest of the world -- that would be a difficult point to try to prove by the United States, that he had an evil motive here to further terrorism. That would be almost impossible to prove in court, Larry Klayman, a former prosecutor and founder of
Judicial Watch and
Freedom Watch,
told RFE/RL.
Could he be charged with conspiracy?
The prosecution would need to prove that Assange solicited the documents and aided and abetted the informant. To date, no such evidence has been brought forward.
Trafficking in stolen government property may be another option.
Yet, the leaked documents are copies of those still in government possession.
Hence, they are not covered by property law, but by intellectual property law
This is less about stealing than it is about copying John G. Palfrey, a
Harvard Law School professor specializing in Internet issues and intellectual property,
told the
NYT.
Government documents however, cannot be copyrighted…
In essence, Mr. Assange may have broken no laws at all…
This could explain the virulent campaign that has been launched in order to discredit him and his organization.
Some U.S. politicians and commentators have even called for the assassination or killing of Julian Assange. This is pretty extraordinary and lawless stuff. What this shows about the U.S.'s own conduct is that it is really trying to discredit WikiLeaks by shifting the focus from wrongdoing by the United States in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, spying on the United Nations and so on -- and instead, trying to focus all the legal attention, all the attention on crime and illegality, to WikiLeaks, Ben Saul, co-director of the
University of Sydney's Centre for International Law in Australia,
told REF/RL.
A number of major American corporations have severed all links with WikiLeaks.
MasterCard and PayPal announced that they would no longer accept donations intended for the website.
At the behest of Senator Joseph Lieberman, head of the US Senate’s homeland security committee, Amazon.com removed WikiLeaks from it servers, no longer hosting its website. It quickly found another home, however (
wikileaks.ch).
In fact, more than
1,300 mirror sites have emerged, such as the
one in the French newspaper
Libération, ensuring WikiLeaks could never be driven from the internet.
Assange’s Swiss bank account was
frozen, depriving his defense fund of some 31,000 Euros.
Although neither WikiLeaks nor Assange have been charged with any offense, the latter is being treated as if were a high profile member of al-Qaeda.
As a result, this has led to spontaneous retaliatory actions against those WikiLeaks sympathizers accuse of persecuting the Australian.
An amorphous group of activists called
Anonymous has launched cyber
attacks against the web sites of MasterCard, Visa, the Swiss bank that closed Assange’s account, and the law firm representing the two women who have accused him of sexual misconduct.
While we don't have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons. We want transparency and we counter censorship. The attempts to silence WikiLeaks are long strides closer to a world where we can not say what we think and are unable to express our opinions and ideas, the group said in a
statement.
These attacks were part of what these activists have called
Operation Payback.
Some have likened this campaign to one of civil disobedience, targeting corporaions that preferred to preserve their financial interests and submit to the will of the powerful instead of fostering freedom of speech.
The hacktivists of Anonymous may be accused of many things – such as immaturity or being run by a herd instinct. But theirs is the cyber equivalent of non-violent action or civil disobedience. It disrupts rather than damages,
wrote The Guardian in an editorial.
Many other free speech advocates, though not participating in the cyber retaliatory campaign voiced their dismay and anger at the onslaught against WikiLeaks.
I can use my credit card to send money to the Ku Klux Klan, to antiabortion fanatics, or to anti-homosexual bigots, but I can't use it to send money to WikiLeaks. The New York Times published the same documents. Should we tell Visa and MasterCard to stop payments to the Times, Jeff Jarvis director of the interactive journalism program at the
City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism,
told the
WP.
What, in the end, are Julian Assange and WikiLeaks trying to accomplish?
This organization practices civil obedience, that is, we are an organization that tries to make the world more civil and act against abusive organizations that are pushing it in the opposite direction, Assange
told TIME.
We don't have targets other than organizations that use secrecy to conceal unjust behavior, he added.
Some cables that were released exposed such targets. For instance, contrary to what the US government officially claimed, American and not Yemeni warplanes did engage in bombing raids in Yemen, some of which killed countless civilians.
This escalation of Obama’s secret war in Yemen was never publicly revealed until now.
In the December 17, 2009 attack, forty-one civilians were
killed including fourteen women and twenty-one children, according to
Amnesty International.
One of these targets, who escaped unscathed, was Anwar al Awlaki, US-born Islamic militant cleric accused of being an
AQAP operative.
Saleh (the President of Yemen)
lamented the use of cruise missiles that are “not very accurate” and welcomed the use of aircraft-deployed precision-guided bombs instead. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh said (in a conversation with General Petraeus, then Commander of US Central Command)
prompting Deputy Prime Minister Alimi to joke that he had just “lied” by telling Parliament that the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa were American-made but deployed by the ROYG (Republic of Yemen Government) WikiLeaks
cable 10SANAA4 stated.
On December 15, 2009, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley
denied any US involvement in military operations inside Yemen…
In another interesting cable, WikiLeaks revealed that in July 2009, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton ordered diplomats to
spy on UN officials, and collect information such as email addresses, phone, fax and credit card numbers, including
biographic and biometric information on UN Security Council permanent representatives.
Other revelations that fall into this category are the following:
*the UK government
assured the US that measures had been taken to ensure that the Chilcot inquiry, formed to investigate Britain’s role in the war in Iraq, would not undermine US interests, thus potentially limiting the scope and significance of the investigation;
*the Bush Administration attempted to
prevent Germany from investigating allegations that one of its citizens,
Khalid El-Masri, abducted by mistake, was tortured by the CIA;
*the Obama Administration exerted immense
pressure on the Spanish government to indefinitely postpone the prosecution of six Bush Administration officials charged with
creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture.
Julian Assange is well founded to argue that unethical and deceptive behavior on the part of governments should be exposed.
WikiLeaks’ message, according to Assange, is to report the truth.
WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately? Assange
wrote in
The Australian.
It is not clear however, what value resides in releasing cables that reflect private, unofficial perceptions of foreign leaders.
Revealing
speculations regarding the
mental health of the President of Argentina Cristina Kirchner, or descriptions of the Putin/Medvedev relationship (
likened to Batman and Robin) for instance, only needlessly embarrass those involved.
Such information should remain confidential for these revelations can only disrupt if not harm international relations.
So, why release them as well?
However good his intentions may be, Assange’s inability to consistently discern what should be revealed, and what should not undermines his mission, his credibility and only empowers the enemies of transparency who want to shield all government activity from public scrutiny, and seek to control all the information that is released, including on the web.
Are we on the verge of the
first great cyber war?
If so, the US government has lost the initial battle.
Its inability to prevent the release of classified documents has encouraged those inside its own government structures to leak revealing and embarrassing documents, alienated by recent past abuses such as, and the list though not exhaustive, is a distressingly long one: warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, torture, Guantanamo, Bagram, endless detention, enemy combatants, military commissions, the Afghan and Iraq wars that have led to thousands of deaths, etc, etc…These abuses have spawned a culture of secrecy within the US government currently obsessed about preventing the release of information that could prove not only embarrassing but also potentially immoral if not illegal.
Yet, the US, (and governments in general), has lost the ability to control the information it possesses, and is now desperately trying to reassert that control, whatever the cost may be, hence the vicious campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks now taking place. Its aim is clear: deter WikiLeaks and like-minded enterprises from revealing information not previously vetted by the US government.
There is an information war, and it’s about control. The choice is to either live in a transparent world or shut down the Internet, Jeff Jarvis
told the
WP.
Coldblood, a 22-yesr-old software engineer and
Anonymous activist, agreed.
I see this as becoming a war, but not your conventional war.
This is a war of data. We are trying to keep the Internet free and open for everyone, just the way the Internet always has been, he
told the
BBC.
It is vital to ensure the Internet does remain free and impervious to government intervention, and particularly, US government meddling, precisely because recent, post 9/11 history has amply demonstrated that it cannot be trusted, and that it will ignore both US and international law without hesitation if it deems it in its national interest to do so.
In the name of national security, the US government has shown that it will take all necessary measures (including resorting to torture if need be) to achieve its objectives, preventing another major attack on US soil, the end justifying the means.
In such a context, WikiLeaks can only flourish, and if we must chose between censorship imposed by deceitful and unethical governments, and unfettered free speech, embodied by exuberant and at times irresponsible sites such as WikiLeaks, I for one will select the latter without hesitation…
(The photograph above of Julian Assange can be found
here)
.
