The Russians call it Kompromat – the use by the state of sexual accusations to destroy a public figure. When I was attacked in this way by the government I worked for, Uzbek dissidents smiled at me, shook their heads and said “Kompromat“. They were used to it from the Soviet and Uzbek governments. They found it rather amusing to find that Western governments did it too.
Well, Julian Assange has been getting the bog standard Kompromat. I had imagined he would get something rather more spectacular, like being framed for murder and found hanging with an orange in his mouth. He deserves a better class of kompromat. If I am a whistleblower, then Julian is a veritable mighty pipe organ. Yet we just have the normal sex stuff, and very weak.
Bizarrely the offence for which Julian is wanted for questioning in Sweden was dropped from rape to sexual harassment, and then from sexual harassment to just harassment. The precise law in Swedish, as translated for me and other Sam Adams alumni by our colleague Major Frank Grevil, reads:
“He who lays hands on or by means of shooting from a firearm, throwing of stones, noise or in any other way harasses another person will be sentenced for harassment to fines or imprisonment for up to one year.”
So from rape to non-sexual something. Actually I rather like that law – if we had it here, I could have had Jack Straw locked up for a year.
Julian tells us that the first woman accuser and prime mover had worked in the Swedish Embassy in Washington DC and had been expelled from Cuba for anti-Cuban government activity, as well as the rather different persona of being a feminist lesbian who owns lesbian night clubs.
Scott Ritter and I are well known whistleblowers subsequently accused of sexual offences. A less well known whistleblower is James Cameron, another FCO employee. Almost simultaneous with my case, a number of the sexual allegations the FCO made against Cameron were identical even in wording to those the FCO initially threw at me.
Another fascinating point about kompromat is that being cleared of the allegations – as happens in virtually every case – doesn’t help, as the blackening of reputation has taken effect. In my own case I was formerly cleared of all allegations of both misconduct and gross misconduct, except for the Kafkaesque charge of having told defence witnesses of the existence of the allegations. The allegations were officially a state secret, even though it was the government who leaked them to the tabloids.
Yet, even to this day, the FCO has refused to acknowledge in public that I was in fact cleared of all charges. This is even true of the new government. A letter I wrote for my MP to pass to William Hague, complaining that the FCO was obscuring the fact that I was cleared on all charges, received a reply from a junior Conservative minister stating that the allegations were serious and had needed to be properly investigated – but still failing to acknowledge the result of the process. Nor has there been any official revelation of who originated these “serious allegations”.
Governments operate in the blackest of ways, especially when it comes to big war money and big oil money. I can see what they are doing to Julian Assange, I know what they did to me and others (another recent example – Brigadier Janis Karpinski was framed for shoplifting). In a very real sense, it makes little difference if they murdered David Kelly or terrified him into doing it himself. Telling the truth is hazardous in today’s Western political system.
dreoilin – “… Irish people didn’t agree to troop or rendition flights going through Shannon Airport, and of course they were never asked”.
Yes, quite. It’s the sort of reason why “Not In My Name” seemd so important to say, perhaps ? It was to me, anyway. But I can make the same mistake myself, it’s very easy to do – and saves a lot of typing, if only it can be taken as intended.
Ubuntu – I’m not a great one for the advocacy, but if you are thinking of it anyway I definitely second the idea. One advantage of Ubuntu, as opposed to all the other flavours of Linux there are out there (they’re all the same programs underneath, just different ideas about how to bundle them up and make it easier) is that lots of other beginners use it, and have done for quite a few years now; all the obvious questions have already been asked, and – the whole thing being Free – the answers are public and can be found through the usual search engines. There’s a vast amount of help out there (and, I think, more than one of us here who’d help if necessary).
Yay for Free Software, basically. Free Software is a Good Thing.
It’s also really nice that it doesn’t cost money, of course. Oh, and it works.
Once you get used to it. …
at September 7, 2010 1:41 PM: “Please all argue like hell.”
Now you mention it, this alternative trailer to Plan 9 in color (sic) does mention creatures “from the bowels of hell” (0:34):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjmFLx9bGeI&feature=related
It even shows a skeleton in clothing that is pink on the inside (1:45)! Could there be a connection with current events? Even Bela Lugosi isn’t immune, vampires being impotent in the face of people armed with garlic and Greek yogurt.
i imagine everyone in hell gets on quite well…
technocolour: “i imagine everyone in hell gets on quite well…”
I thought they weep for themselves, and curse and swear on being told that George Bush and Tony Blair have escaped that fate..
“In my view, the coincidence b/w Wikileaks’s release of the files and the typical accusations against Assange is suspicious to say the least. We’ve seen this type of thing, uhm, how many times before? It is a typical tactic used to discredit dissidents,”
So if you were setting up a fake dissident, you’d follow the same routine wouldn’t you — “the typical tactics … accusations …”
So the suggestion you are making that Assange is likely on the up and up because he was set up appears to have no weight at all.
And the feebleness of the alleged “smears” and the way they have disintegrated suggest either that they were not “smears” at all, just the side effects of Assange’s way of life or perhaps phony “smears” designed to fall apart thus providing the basis for allegations of of a smear, which would redound to Assange’s credibility.
And then again, that might be what They want you to think ? or perhaps They want you to think that they want you to think that they want you think that they want you to think that ?
http://search.ubuntu.com/
A great starting point for all Ubuntu questions. The public forum is extensive, and the official documentation is also searched from the same link.
The bit of Ubuntu installed on your PC is just the tip of the iceberg. Ubuntu connects securely to various ‘repositories’ which contain nearly thirty times as much software as the default install, all maintained for security and reliability. No hunting the Web for bits of freeware that could contain trojans. I’m through with Windows, I have no need of it.
That’s called something, Richard, isn’t it? I remember reading somewhere recently… ah yes, here it is. Third, fourth or fifth order intentionality. From Richard Dawkins, who got it from Daniel Dennett.
Faith-based??? Me?? Ha!! That’s a real joke. That’s a pie-in-the-face joke like Oliver Hardy. Right now, I’m reading Dawkins’s ‘The God Delusion’.
Are our agencies (and particularly those of the US) really that competent? Could they all appear so genuinely outraged that the lives of Afghans not blown up by us in wedding parties could be endangered by these leaks, and just run that right-wing hate machine at Assange even while he’s in on the game?
Could they have got the Swedish woman to besmirch her personal reputation with a withdrawn accusation, and get the Swedish authorities to make a show of taking it seriously, for a short while? Would they have thrown Pvt Manning in jail as a willing accomplice to a sham exercise?
All seems kind of unlikely to me. It also seems unlikely that some AQ or Taliban types hiding out in caves or their notorious “compounds” would be furiously downloading and pouring over 90,000 raw intelligence documents in terse military jargon, then go chasing off around the country to find the “Ahmed Abdulla” or “Mohammed Mohammed” that was named as having provided possible assistance to the Americans.
The earlier revelations by Manning about the helicopter’s murderous adventure in killing Reuter’s journalists caused a great deal of official upset – for good reason. Gung-ho and reckless the US military may well be (and indeed is), but having it made public is terribly unwelcome to authorities. (And to the UK,for that matter, for aiding and abetting their crimes.) The “black unit”, the “kill or capture” without trial on a subsequent massive leak in Afghanistan too – highly unwelcome revelations, to say the least, that seriously undermines any remaining faith in entire mission and its execution.
This is a huge price, and an enormously sophisticated operation that has ran without a hitch to date, if it is indeed just a giant fishing exercise, to trap unwary genuine whistle-blowers. So much so, that the idea is terribly unlikely. Wikileaks and Assange seem genuine to me for these reasons.
Glenn, I think the rubric you portray is the most likely one. Sums it up. Good post.
Very well put, Glenn.
I sometimes wonder if we give the “secret services” far too much credit.
Glenn,
I am not sure that the price, for the US militarists, of the release of the helicopter murder video is really that high. There’s plenty of other stuff as brutal already on the Web, and much of that will already have been seen by most of those who will see the helicpoter murder video.
And there’s nothing new in that video. The US military announced before “Shock and Awe” that they’d kill journalists who were not embedded (“we’ll bomb your radio uplink”) and we saw that they did so, by the dozen (including Jon Snow, almost):
http://cpj.org/reports/2008/07/journalists-killed-in-iraq.php
We know that they also killed between 100,000 and a million civilians, drove four million from their homes, made two million into international refugees and poisoned the air, soil and water with uranium. Does watching them shoot a few innocent women children and journalists make any difference? Not to me.
But if you are setting up a fake leak operation, you’ve got to provide window dressing, which means leaking something that looks important. And certainly cold-blooded murder, which is what US foreign policy involves on a massive scale, is important.
But as you say, all is hypothesis. it’s just that I am beginning to lean to a different conclusion to you. I also think that Craig’s post provides a poor analysis. It’d be OK for the Guardian or some other pillar of the Neocon state, but it hardly rates as the work of a serious intellectual. Of course, for a man with drywall dust in his hair, we can make allowance.
It seems to me that the Zionist spambot, Larry, is telling us something. The description it refers to of Assange’s relations with two Swedish women provide the simplest hypothesis as to how a fake smear could have been arranged. Assange, knowing the absurdity of Swedish law, exploited a couple of groupies by treating them in a way that was all but guaranteed to produce a violent reaction: Assange organized the smear himself.
“Faith-based??? Me?? Ha!! That’s a real joke. That’s a pie-in-the-face joke like Oliver Hardy. Right now, I’m reading Dawkins’s ‘The God Delusion’.”
Congratulations on reading skeptical literature – although I would suggest that you apply the same skeptical tools to other fantasies concocted by weak minds.
Your opinion on Assange is faith-based because it’s unfalsifiable. I would have better luck convincing a homeopath that homeopathy is bullshit.
In any event, it’s good to hear that you’ve abandoned religion.
“Assange, knowing the absurdity of Swedish law, exploited a couple of groupies by treating them in a way that was all but guaranteed to produce a violent reaction: Assange organized the smear himself.”
Now this sort of crazy is exactly why I keep coming to this site.
Alfred, why on earth would Assange bother to do that? He and Wikleaks are already regarded by many as genuine – it’s a minority, I think, who are convinced that he’s not – and even if he had planned such a hare-brained scheme, what guarantee would he have had that it wouldn’t have been taken seriously and led to prosecution and the destruction of his reputation?
And it would’ve come out, too, in such a prosection, if he’d arranged the scam himself. So either way, it’d have been pointless for him. Why toss away the credibility he’s been granted (whether or not you agree with it) simply to gamble in this way, what, just to convince some skeptics? I am no more or less convinced after the honeytrap episode (or whatever it was) than before. It’s the issues that count, in any case – and you rightly point out the magnitude of death that has been caused by these wars.
Alfred: Nothing could be further from the truth. No human being likes to be accused of rape, and in the same way no human being likes to be accused of molesting children. Only an insane person would intentionally scheme to have themselves falsely accused of either. It is however exactly the sort of thing you would use to frame someone.
In this case it is the timing that is very suspicious to people. But the secret services do understand that the general public are not that stupid or gullible. I believe what really happened was when these women were cross examined their stories were just not convincing enough and they were advised to withdraw, secure in the knowledge of a reasonable pay-off. Remember also that Assange is wanted for questioning and not so stupid to rape/molest/harass one woman let alone two.
No Julian needs to be careful of ‘the unfortunate accident’ – please drive yourself and do not charter private planes.
Here is an interesting link to a piece on Gareth Williams – it also mentions Assange – on the excellent Wikispooks:
http://wikispooks.com/wiki/Gareth_Williams
Suhayl: from wikispooks
“Williams was a geek, or boffin as the British call them, and he took a dim view of setting off a nuclear device in downtown Manhattan to assist Israel in her domestic and area problems. The redoubtable Dr. Kushner, a specialist on Israel and a contract worker for various government agencies, has written a very clear, and very frightening, analysis of the current situation.”
Hence my warning Suhayl – I only hope I do not end up in a modern day Aesop fable.
Here’s the full article by Professor Kushner, who also wrote what looks like a fascinating book:
http://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Israel_v_the_United_States_and_Iran
I hope he’s not correct. The scenario he posits is monstrous.
Suhayl: “Faith-based?..That’s a real joke..I’m reading Dawkins’s ‘The God Delusion’.”
There was a famous (and quite amicable) discussion on the BBC between the atheist Marghanita Laski and the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Anthony, published in the book “God and Man”. You might find it interesting, but I make no claim to the archbishop’s level of spirituality!
Suhayl – “Third, fourth or fifth order intentionality”
I could have gone on longer … 🙂
Suhayl,
What i find puzzling is the way that so many people insist on reading the evidence only one way. For example,
“why on earth would Assange bother to do that (fake a smear against himself)?”
So that people will think, as you do, that Assange is being smeared by one of the security services and, by implication must, therefore, be a genuine dissident. And, obviously, if you’re any good at the intelligence racket and you are setting up a phoney leak organization you must know how people like you think!
“He and Wikleaks are already regarded by many as genuine – it’s a minority, I think, who are convinced that he’s not”
Hey, stop waffling. You have no means of knowing what most people think. But in any case, its the others, minority or not, who are not already duped who have to be convinced by further window-dressing.
“and even if he had planned such a hare-brained scheme”
What’s hare-brained about it. It worked didn’t it!
“what guarantee would he have had that it wouldn’t have been taken seriously and led to prosecution and the destruction of his reputation?”
What reputation? He’s a nobody and a nothing as far as 99.99% of the world’s population are concerned. So what’s to risk. And anyway, there are plenty of apologists for his louche behaviour — you and Craig, for example.
“And it would’ve come out, too, in such a prosection, if he’d arranged the scam himself.”
It would come out that like any psychopath he uses girls like kleenex. But what’s wrong with that? Only that it brings one into comflict with some goofy Swedish law. That’s how you’re spinning, isn’t it?
“So either way, it’d have been pointless for him.”
No, it would only have been pointless if it had not resulted in a stupid prosecution, which proves (as opposed to merely raising the possibility), to some gullible people, that he is being persecuted.
“Why toss away the credibility he’s been granted”
Granted by Craig Murray? That’s proof of incredibility to most people (Sorry Craig, but let’s be real about this.).
“I am no more or less convinced after the honeytrap episode (or whatever it was) than before.”
Well, then, why all the talk about it? You seem to think other people should be more convinced after it.
“It’s the issues that count, in any case – and you rightly point out the magnitude of death that has been caused by these wars.”
Absolutely, and so far Assange has managed to justify further carnage in Pakistan by providing supposed evidence that Osama bin Laden, who had terminal kidney disease nine years ago, is alive and well and directing the War of Terror against the West from a haven in Pakistan. How many Pakistani deaths will that justify in the stupified minds of the readers of pseudo-libertarian blogs and newspapers. Many thousands, I would bet.
And when one finds the “Assange was set-up” account by Israel Shamir on the CounterPunch (no 9/11 inside jobbers here) site, the implausibility of the postulated security services smear is greatly enhanced.
http://www.counterpunch.org/shamir08272010.html
Mark
You say:
“No human being likes to be accused of rape.”
Well, I’m no expert on psychopathia sexualis, but to claim that no human being likes to be accused of rape” seems sweeping to me. We had a guy here in BC who boasted of killing 49 prostitutes and said he was disappointed to have been apprehended before he could reach his half century.
you say, “in the same way no human being likes to be accused of molesting children.”
I dunno, we had another guy here named Clifford Robert Olsen, Jr. who — well I spare you the sordid details. But in any case, Assange was not accused of child molestation.
What’s more, he was not accused of rape as that term is normally understood. According the Israel Shamir’s account, a woman named Ardin “invited Julian Assange to a crayfish party, and they had enjoyed some quality time together. When Ardin discovered that Julian shared a similar experience with a 20-year-old woman a day or two later, she obtained the younger woman’s cooperation in declaring before the police that changing partners in so rapid a manner constituted a sort of deceit. And deceit is a sort of rape.”
Two girls in two days? What’s to worry about that? Nothing according to Craig and Suhayl. Nothing according to most Richard Dawkins followers. We all have a contempt for old fashioned ideas about sexual morality don’t we?
So your conclusion, that “Only an insane person would intentionally scheme to have themselves falsely accused of either” doesn’t stand up.
Alfred: “who had terminal kidney disease nine years ago”
Where’s the evidence that Osama had terminal kidney disease? What sort of kidney disease?
The response to Mark above was mine, thus the place referred to as “here” is British Columbia.
To Anon, there is an abundance of evidence that OBL had terminal kidney failure and was being treated in both American and Pakistani miltary hospitals (which is understandable, since OBL was a western intelligence asset).
Here’s a report from CNN
http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/south/01/18/gen.musharraf.binladen/
“Pakistan’s president says he thinks Osama bin Laden is most likely dead because the suspected terrorist has been unable to get treatment for his kidney disease.
“I think now, frankly, he is dead for the reason he is a … kidney patient,” Gen. Pervez Musharraf said on Friday in an interview with CNN.
Musharraf said Pakistan knew bin Laden took two dialysis machines into Afghanistan. “One was specifically for his own personal use,” he said.
“I don’t know if he has been getting all that treatment in Afghanistan now. And the photographs that have been shown of him on television show him extremely weak. … I would give the first priority that he is dead and the second priority that he is alive somewhere in Afghanistan.””
Alfred – “So your conclusion, that “Only an insane person would intentionally scheme to have themselves falsely accused of either” doesn’t stand up.”
Is it possible that your counter-examples _were_ insane ?
Richard,
“Is it possible that your counter-examples _were_ insane ?”
You have a point there. I guess that, by definition, such people are considered insane. But in that case, Mark’s argument was merely tautological.
Alfred, so you think that spotty intel is absolutely true if it benefits you, correct?
Do you take Musharraf at his word on everything else?
Except that I see that Mark said nothing about insanity. So, I am not sure of your point Richard.