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.
Angry: I was a bit puzzled at first as to why you were so opposed to my reasoning about Assange _not_ being a plant. Perhaps it was merely a knee-jerk reaction to anything I said, but that would be too self-flattering. No, the much more regrettable answer is that you attack anyone who tries to undermine The Establishment on principle. So anything I might say that supports this Assange fellow, needs itself to be attacked. Convoluted, perhaps, but entirely consistent with your brave (and dare I say reckless!) tackling anyone who doesn’t stand four-square behind the establishment line. Good on you, AS – a courageous stance, yet again.
Dreoilin,
Like you, I also have an open mind, though I incline to Ruth’s conclusion.
concerning the video, the leaker must have viewed it unencrypted. So why submit it to Wikileaks encrypted. Or didn’t he know what he was sending? In that case he deserves a spell in jail, I would say.
While the method of leaking I outlined is probably quite dumb, I don’t think it would have much impact on the owner of the laptop and credit card, except for the loss, obviously, of card and computer. The owner(s) would claim innocence and as they could not be connected with the leaked info. they would be found innocent.
Pity to rob them, obviously, but we’re talking of saving civilization here.
Another fact-free whine from Glenn.
In fact, he seems to be doing exactly what he accused me of earlier:”I take it you’ve decided to ignore my points above”.
I didn’t identify any “points” by you. I simply disputed your implication that the Wikileaks were of no intelligence value to the Taliban at all. I also asked you a number of questions which you decided to ignore. But I will repeat them for you:
“Have you read all the reports?
Do you have as much on the ground intel as the Taliban?
Do you know that members of the ISI are not helping the Taliban despite what Benazir Bhutto has explicitly said on a number of occasions and has been backed up by numerous journalists in Pakistan and also been confirmed by the London School of Economics (that famed school of neocons, eh?)?”
Of course, Glenn isn’t interested so much about the facts of the matter but rather how someone postures.
It appears it is not a courageous stance to doubt that Assange is an intelligence asset (I take it that was sarcasm on Glenn’s part) the corollary of which is that Alfred and Glenn are quite brave in their smearing.
I would admire Glenn’s bravery if I thought there was anything brave about it but in reality Glenn always likes to imply things or use heavy handed hints to undermine people with the added bonus that if he turns out to be wrong he can always plead that he was just asking questions and never firmly held those views in the first place. He’s radical without the responsibility. A fantasy dissident.
Hurrah for Brave Glenn!
“Angry: I was a bit puzzled at first as to why you were so opposed to my reasoning about Assange _not_ being a plant.”
Oh wait. This bit? I wasn’t opposed to your reasoning. I thought you were quite right that he wasn’t an intelligence plant. But your reasoning was along the lines of it being too complicated a job and likely to be exposed too quickly.
I agreed. I said you should apply the same reasoning to other things which you think are the product of the security services.
In your “book,” Clark, I suspect you would find no “argument” in any logic that failed to meet your preconceived view.
And if you are talking about the origin of life on Earth, which is what creationism is about, I find no more “mutually supportive evidence” for evolution than for special creation.
From the time of the Cambrian explosion, the assumption that life underwent modification as a consequence of differential survival among disparate forms, seems plausible and is supported by some evidence. But there isn’t a scrap of evidence for either special creation or evolution as the cause of life on Earth.
My own preference is for neither creationism nor evolution. More plausible to me is Fred Hoyle’s belief in panspermia in an eternal and infinite universe. Many years ago I published a paper by Hoyle, one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century, which bore on his theory of panspermia (http://tinyurl.com/34n24wa).
We edited out explicit reference to panspermia to protect the author from the gibes of those too narrow-minded to accept any but the orthodox scientific view of the world. The point was made, though, that a comet may have an infra-red spectrum consistent with the presence of a certain type of living material.
Although there’s no evidence for it, I’m open to the idea of the special creation of mankind. Not by God, but by extraterrestrials. I provide a link to my not very original thesis, below.
It’s a shame to see a blank white page on Craig’s site but understand the reasons.
As they used to say on the BBC,
‘Transmission will be restored as soon as possible’
and then they would play some anodyne music.
“It appears it is not a courageous stance to doubt that Assange is an intelligence asset (I take it that was sarcasm on Glenn’s part) the corollary of which is that Alfred and Glenn are quite brave in their smearing.”
I don’t know if Angry has totally lost it, or whether I’ve suddenly lost the ability to comprehend English. Perhaps I need more coffee.
J’ai des rossignols
US soldiers ‘killed Afghan civilians for sport and collected fingers as trophies’
http://bit.ly/cbLmks (Guardian)
[ http://bit.ly/9QyNlU ]
From Wikileaks on Twitter
But Assange doesn’t stop there – he says his website now has ‘two reliable intelligence sources that state that Swedish intelligence was approached last month by the United States and told that Sweden must not be a safe haven for WikiLeaks’.
‘The Swedish case has caused delays, significant delays in all of our projects. It’s been an enormous disruption. We have upcoming releases relating to financial fraud, the banking industry, and war crimes.’
‘An allegation has been reported all around the world’, Assange says of the continuing Swedish legal circus. ‘It’s at present on six million websites. In fact one in twenty websites mentioning the word rape also mentioned my name.’
http://rixstep.com/1/20100908,01.shtml
Every generation of the English people reproduces the stupidity of its predecessors. It’s our turn to grab the steering wheel of imperial power, to humiliate innocent foreigners and exacerbate the largely un-savage population with unequal laws e.g. the office of the deputy prime minister.
Craig Murray is, in one way, unlike the neo-jerks, who use government office like a small boy at the controls of an enourmous bulldozer. But in another way, he is just as problematical.
He refuses to acknowledge the collaboration between imperial greed and power and the psychosis of the Judae-Christian religious coalition. That Zionists co-created both the holocaust in the 20th Century and the War on Terror in the 21st.
It is not possible to understand these two events simply from the point of view of imperial domination. There is also an undeniable insanity, which derives from the failure of the Judae-christian religion to deliver to human emotional, spiritual or intellectual needs.
The burning of Qur’ans is the latest manifestation of this psychosis, a blatant projection of Judae-Christian angst on the god-fearing and powerless of Islam.
Nutters may be nutters, but they are much too close to the controls of power to be ignored.
I have learned from David Swanson that the burning of the Koran is a distraction engineered by Fox News.
http://www.coia.org.uk/bush44.jpg
Alfred,
sorry (yawn), I should have specified that I meant the special creation of individual species, not the origin of life. Yes, panspermia probably deserves more attention, but not here. Don’t you get fed up with carrying goalposts around?
Quite Mark and yet no one in any position of power will ever face the truth or say it out loud.
My remark to Mark relates to the photo he put up. Fox News carries the voice of its masters and is fanning the flames for yet another war on the Muslim people.
I completely agree with Anno about how and why these wars have been created.
One bit of good news though, BAE are obviously losing orders.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-11244219
I am sorry for the workers but they should have chosen a job where their hands weren’t going to get so blood- stained.
“Don’t you get fed up with carrying goalposts around?”
(Can’t see it. You’d think he’d have done it by now, if so).
Perhaps it’s just a “debating society” game ? The more bizarre the proposition, the more he can award himself points for his ‘cleverness’ in evading the arguments against ?
FBI Memo on burning the Koran:
http://www.coia.org.uk/pdf/burning.pdf
Rossignols ? Ah, jolies !
Yes, Mark, a distraction.
And yet a distracted priest would not be able to distract a nation that was comfortable with itself, that knew that it was a force for good in the world, and a leader for morality and civilisation.
If you heap up wealth from usury and violence and slander and immorality, you can’t live with yourself, so you do the equivalent of shooting a class of school children on a world-size scale.
Doesn’t anybody in the US or the UK think, This sucks, maybe we’ll have to think of another way of getting rid of our psychosis of absolute failure, than slaughtering the innocent every day.
Ah, De Quincey’s Ghost! Welcome back, my friend. Have a seat and a draught.
Yes, well, Alfred, I suspect that I evolved from a magic mushroom (!!)
anno: the holocaust was created by Nazi Germany. The religious inspiration of Nazism was racism, paganism, and occultism, you might say the ‘jahilia of the West’.
Abe, you’re not wrong, of course, but just as there are (in my view) highly dubious elemnets in every religious tradiition/ textual heritage, it cannot be denied that the long history of European anti-Semitism which was ‘justified’ by its proponents on the basis of some aspects of religion, provided the rubric in which Hitler and his hounds were able to perpetrate what they saw as ‘The Final Solution’ in relation to the Jewish communities of Europe.
Hitler used religion – whether it be his own, ‘native’ Catholicism, or paganism, etc. – in pursuance of his heinous goals, while also persecuting many priests, ministers, etc.
What I’m saying is that just as Muslims cannot elide the crucial issues inherent in violent Islamism by intoning that “Islam is a religion of peace” and “This is not Islam”, so too Christians cannot do the same with respect to the mass murder of Jewish (and other) people across Europe during WW2.
Of course, the Holocaust was the antithesis of what Jesus had preached, but most of the people – Poles, Germans, Austrians, Croats, etc. – committing the atrocities would have been likely to have called themselves Chistians. This is a terrible truth about humanity and about religion.
Or am I sounding too much like Richard Dawkins?
“Doesn’t anybody in the US or the UK think, This sucks …”
If you read here at all, you might have seen a few indications that one or two people do.
Suhayl: you make a good point, that antisemitic behaviour of European Christians in the past contributed to modern racism. That said, in the book of a published interview that Benedict XVI gave when he was Joseph Ratzinger, he said that he experienced as a youth in Nazi German that the Church could be a bastion as an institution against ‘totalitarian derangement’. He said that it was not Catholicism but the degenerate environment of Vienna that inspired Hitler.
The ‘terrible truth’ of crimes against humanity carried out by ostensibly religious people is effectively an ‘anti-sign’, something that makes faith more difficult. I recall reading in Jimmy Savile’s book “God’ll fix it” that if he were God faced with people guilty of inhuman behaviour, “I’d have to dish a lot of purgatory out in that case.”
“I don’t know if Angry has totally lost it, or whether I’ve suddenly lost the ability to comprehend English.”
I’d say the smart money’s on the latter!
😉
“Ah, De Quincey’s Ghost! Welcome back, my friend. Have a seat and a draught”
*applause*. Well caught, Sir !
But sadly, he’s temporarily indisposed just now, having laughed his head off over the ‘invisible ink’ bit. I expect he’ll get it back on eventually.
“Rossignols ? Ah, jolies !”
Yes indeed but, “J’ai des rossignols” colloquially, meaning “There are unexplained noises coming from my car”.
In this case, not my car but this comment section. LOL
And that was me who told you to stop shouting and give back the invisible ink.
hee hee!
On a lighter Judaic note, it’s the Jewish New Year (wot – 5771 already?). My Jewish partner was giggling – one of her friends had Facebooked that they’d just finished paying for the 5767 Camry.
Iran FM Headline today: Zionists behind U.S. church’s plan to burn Koran. Tehran on Thursday said that Israel was behind the plan by a United States pastor to burn copies of the Koran on the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the official news agency IRNA reported.
This does feel like conspiracism at work, but maybe it is not so daft. With this sort of situation you need to look at two things: (i) Cui bono?, and (ii) the timing.
As far as (i) is concerned the only big-time beneficiary seems to be Israel which always relishes and encourages any disorder which disadvantages and ideally kills Arabs. As far as (ii) is concerned Obama has put Netanyahu and Israel under unparalleled pressure to come up with a believable plan to give Palestinians rights as far as their statehood and future are concerned. One thing is for sure Israel has no intentions to concede one inch nor to be just to the Palestinians in terms the rest of the world would expect. Given that reality one way forward at present is to throw a firecracker into the negotiations and see what happens. Do something unspeakable in order to incite Muslims to do something responding to the extreme provocation, then hope the discussions will get sidelined – again.
This Terry Jones is just a ‘Rent a Loonie’ who is be played like a joker, and he is acting as no Christian.
If everyone had simply ignored the book-burners, no-one would have heard of them. Let them burn what they want. Who gives a damn? There is a sad, bathetic circularity about this, though.
1966, Bible Belt USA: silly people burning Beatles records.
1989, Bradford, silly people building pyres of ‘Satanic Verses’.
2010, Wherever, silly people burning Qurans.
And so it goes on… silliness compounding silliness.
If all of these people’s god is so pathetically weak that they have to kindle a totem of their own projected inadequacy in order to affirm their belief, is that god worth the paper he’s written on?