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.
I missed this:
Alfred: “there is an abundance of evidence that OBL had terminal kidney failure”
If you think third-hand accounts of hearsay upon hearsay is an “abundance of evidence”, I’d hate to have you on a jury.
Is there any form of documentary evidence that shows bin Laden has fatal kidney issues?
Off topic for this post, but concerning human rights in Ghana:
http://www.indiegogo.com/witch_camp
Do you believe in witches? Older women (for the most part) in Ghana are being driven from their homes and confined to camps as “witches”, by “priests” who charge a fee for their services.
I received this from my friend Zoe some days ago, but I’ve been preoccupied with other things, and, to my shame, I have permitted the likes of “TM” and Alfred to draw me into defending WikiLeaks against their totally spurious accusations.
Zoe and her group have so far raised only $255 of their $5000 target, with only four days left to go. If you can’t donate yourself, please try to publicise the campaign. If any of Craig’s helpers see this, please draw his attention to it as he may be willing to help.
Alfred,
it’s in Marks very next sentence: “Only an INSANE person would intentionally scheme to have themselves falsely accused of either”. You are lying.
All:
Alfred is wasting our time. There is no more sense to this stuff than there is in his “genocide in Leicester” argument.
Suhayl, did you notice the derivation is contested by Kushner. I have come to believe that British intelligence are aware of an attack on Iran this year.
Warships in the Persian Gulf according to my source are on defence alert (damage control state 2 Zulu) and I await state 1.
Williams may have known an attack is imminent – I cannot be sure.
oops – me above.
“Except that I see that Mark said nothing about insanity. So, I am not sure of your point Richard”
“No sane human likes …”. What you ‘see’ now is one thing, but you did quote it yourself, in what appeared to be a reply to him. If you can’t see how my reply bears on the point of that reply, then I can’t understand you either, so nyer.
Yes, Clark, I think it’s a waste of time too.
Thanks, Mark, that’s interesting. Yes, the whole thing is very concerning. Abe, I’ll check it out. Alfred, where were you in the ’60s, man? (!)
Time to retire as the body tireth. To end with tonight, a combination of religion, science and crystalline beauty – literally:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHHVz7csWoI&feature=fvst
Rape accusations: I prefer to not judge too quickly. Every alleged rape victim should be taken serious. Every alleged rapist should be innocent until proven guilty.
Nevertheless when Assange was accused of some kind of rape or sexual … whatever my first thought was “smear”.
“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 ”
–Suhayl
There’s a note on that page saying
Document Provenance
“The article is a forgery – ie it is NOT by Dr Phillip L Kushner”
and
“The real Dr. Phillip L. Kushner is Head of Mathematics Dept., University of Texas-Austin
“The forged article was published on the TBR website on 4 September 2010”
and
“More info on this forgery and its use to connect Mossad with the Gareth Williams murder soon.”
and at the bottom
“This page was last modified on 7 September 2010, at 20:41.”
Suhayl Saadi,
Mark Golding,
regarding Suhayl Saadi’s September 7, 2010 8:16 PM post and link:
http://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Israel_v_the_United_States_and_Iran
I think that article may have been updated since Suhayl’s visit. It now begins with an e-mail exchange between Dr. Kushner and John Young of Cryptome.org indicating that the article is not by Kushner.
Dreoilin,
Ah, I see you beat me to it! See also:
http://cryptome.org/0002/israel-v-us-ir.htm
German Girl – yes, that’s about it.
Stuff like “proper investigations” and “fair trials” are among our better ideas, I think.
Finally you creepy conspiracy theorists have a monument:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/construction-complete-on-911-truther-memorial,18034/
Yep, we’re all in the same ward, drooling into our porridge and talking conspiracies.
“Right now, I’m reading Dawkins’s ‘The God Delusion’.”
It’s quite good and clearly not as strident as some have made it out to be. But I remember thinking, when reading it, this is all very good but who’s going to read it except the already converted. A woman from Belgium who saw me reading it said, “Oh, my dad read that recently and converted to atheism. He’s eighty years old!”
Wow! That’s a bit of an argument against interest, I thought.
Alfred: “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.”
Ha ha!
“It would come out that like any psychopath he uses girls like kleenex.”
I do that too. They keep yelling, “Oi! Don’t wipe your bogies on me!”
“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.”
Y’see, kids? This is what happens when you inhale too much tinfoil.
Dreiloin: “Very well put, Glenn.
I sometimes wonder if we give the “secret services” far too much credit.”
Ya think?
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/the_911_post.html
Clark said,
“Alfred,
it’s in Marks very next sentence: “Only an INSANE person would intentionally scheme to have themselves falsely accused of either”.
Oh, OK but so what. You are just attempting to bury the argument I made with a huge pile of extraneous crap.”
“You are lying.”
Did I ever call you a horse’s arse before, Clark? If not I do now.
“All:
Alfred is wasting our time.”
God, Clark is either an intelligence asset charged with protecting Craig Murray’s credibility – a job he does with the subtlety of a bulldozer, or he’s a deluded groupie.
Here’s the argument, which noone has so far demolished:
If you adulate Julian Assange, you must believe that
(a) Assange is an honest man, which he could well be(I have never said otherwise);
(b) That anyone possessed of secret information (whether state secrets or proprietary information, or whatever) that, if released, would promote an important public interest, they have a moral obligation to leak that information (this being a contention that I would judge on a case by case basis, but which in certain circumstances could be justified even though the leak would be a serious breach of the law);
(c) that Wikileaks will in some way either help publicize you leak or protect the leaker from the consequences of his or her action.
And if you so admire Julian Assange that you are determined to force acceptance of the above assumptions on everyone, as Clark does, then if your assumptions are wrong, you you will:
(1) Giving credibility to an agent of the secret government;
(2) Encourage naive persons to place themselves in the hands of a agent that seeks either to destroy them or at least to nullify the effectiveness of their effort to leak.
(3) Distract prospective leakers from alternative routes to publicize their information.
This, if rather hastily stated, is simple logical analysis that is, for some reason, beyond Clark’s grasp.
“There is no more sense to this stuff than there is in his “genocide in Leicester” argument.”
Did I already say your are a horse’s arse, Clark? Well for the sake of certainty, let me say here: Clark, you are a horses arse.
Anon, you shrinking violet,
Of course I don’t think that “spotty intel is absolutely true,” whoever it benefits.
Unfortunately, I do not own the MI6 file on OBL, otherwise I’d leak it right here and now.
The fact is there were many reports at the time of OBL’s kidney disease and hospitalization for dialysis in 2001. So why not look them them up for yourself you lazy bugger.
Are those reports true? How the hell do I know? But it is more likely that they are true than otherwise since there have been no authentic statements by OBL since 2001. And that is consistent with the fact that the mortality rate among Afghanistan patients with end-case kidney failure is likely close to 100% per year.
Look Richard,
Your point was pointless. It was just part of the cloud of irrelevance thrown up here if anyone deals with the logic and facts of the case.
Concerning the individuals I mentioned, neither pleaded insanity during their trial and neither is incarcerated in an institution for the criminally insane. Therefore, technically, they are not insane, though to common sense they probably are. However, to common sense they are probably no more insane than Dick Cheney, George Bush or Tony blair.
But anyway, did I say, your point was pointless since it does not negate the point I made, which was that the rape charge against Assange was ludicrous, based on the indignation of two women on finding that he’d screwed them both with 24 hours. If you think boasting of screwing two girls within twenty four hours constitutes insanity, then you have to classify every wannabe Don Juan (about half the human race) including our hororable host Craig Murray as insane.
“Nevertheless when Assange was accused of some kind of rape or sexual … whatever my first thought was “smear”.
Yeah, maybe that’s what you were meant to think.
glenn at 6:12 – Yes. That seems a lot more likely and sensible. But
“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.”
I’m not quite so sure of that bit. I can’t see that it’d necessarily be beyond them if they wanted to.
(“Badly enough”, possibly. Question of cost, how expensive it would be; hard to be sure without looking at the things. But they’re not exactly penniless, are they ?)
Okay, Alfred, I think I have you this time. If someone takes a position that to you is unreasonable, then you don’t think the arguments in favour of it stand up. Is that it ?
“The fact is there were many reports at the time of OBL’s kidney disease and hospitalization for dialysis in 2001.”
How did they stack up against the many, many reports that year of UFOs and crop circles and the effectiveness of homeopathy?
I think you’d better come up with something better than what could easily be bad intel on the part of Pakistan.
Oh, Angry… always trying to come up with a 9/11 angle, you old campaigner 😉
*
But Alfred… surely if there was no accusation of deviancy, that too could have been construed as making us continue to think as we were meant to think (about Assange)? i.e., no accusation – Assange is a decent fellow, as we thought. But if there are accusations – well, it has to be a smear! It would work either way. The operation was a bit too smooth to be anything but the standard practice fairly incompetent smear tactics (as with Scott Ritter, Craig Murray, etc.). By too smooth, I mean too smooth for a “false-flag” smear operation.)
Your point about the atrocities already well documented are very valid and of course perfectly true, however, such documentation does not show the unalloyed glee with which the military thugs go about their business. “Can we shoot? Can we _pleeeease_ have a decision?”, together with the enthusiasm with which they went about killing the “enemy”, the bored indifference to others trying to rescue them with the casual assumption that anyone rescuing another must also be a terrorist, by dint of their first assumption. The fact that they had clearly shot up children was dismissed as the collective fault of the reporters, sorry, “terrorists”, with no remorse shown at all (“What do you expect if you take your children along to a terrorist operation?” or words to that effect). On the contrary, a hand-waving indifference to the fact that they were _knowingly shooting at children_ when the American gunmen were in no danger whatsoever themselves, and nor were their comrades, did not bother these filthy murderers in the slightest.
That is not the way the proud and glorious heros, to whom it is almost obligatory to say, “Thank you for your service”, want to be regarded when returning to the US, having supposedly just rescued it from the savage hordes at the final hour. Yet again.
For “fake window dressing”, it certainly looks pretty bad! Do you think a couple of privates (and the crews under investigation for this particular war crime) were thrown under the bus for this fake-window dressing operation, or were they in on it too? The reporters and children murdered and wounded were not.
What sort of whistle-blowers do you think the Wikileaks alleged cover organisation wants to flush out? Is there anything worse than just material examples of what we already know, or do you think the operation is to catch someone coming forward with video evidence of a cackling Barbara Bush remotely piloting a plane into the Pentagon for example?
(For the severely humour impaired (viz – AS), the above was a joke.)
*
Always appreciate arguing these things with you, Alfred – glad you’ve returned.
“For the severely humour impaired (viz – AS), the above was a joke” (glenn)
That onion article that someone posted above is pretty funny, too. It’s a pity the illuminatifaqs.com they refer to doesn’t exist, really.
Hi Richard… We might be having a leftover idea of the organisational powers of AQ, from the time that damned fool and liar Rumsfeld showed cut-away diagrams of mountains which acted as their headquarters. SPECTRE had nothing on them. These futuristic dug-outs included air conditioning, nuclear refinement areas, WMD factories… they might not have benefited from bikini-clad babes, but it certainly had the rest.
In “The Great War for Civilisation”, R. Fisk recounts his meetings with the same people. They were very eager to pour over old editions of The Independent and various other obsolete documents Fisk was carrying, very far removed from cutting edge military intelligence, trying to get some clue as to what was going on in the world. And that is when they were completely free to go about their business, with nobody really troubling them at a serious level.
[Note to self: Must get beyond chapter 1 of that 2000 page book sometime.]
Certainly, they’ve gained a lot of money and weapons material through our various alignments and bribing them, but a sophisticated intelligence gathering and enforcement agency? It seems hard to believe that AQ would be faster off the mark than all of the US (and sundry stooges such as the UN, UK etc.) intelligence collective could move in to protect them. If, that is, we were genuinely as bothered about these translators/facilitators as we intimated, as we jumped up and down in horror and outrage while contemplating their security.
“Certainly, they’ve gained a lot of money and weapons material through our various alignments and bribing them, but a sophisticated intelligence gathering and enforcement agency?”
What kind of sophistication is needed to download the Wikileaks files? Someone in ISI must have a computer.