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.
It seems as though we”ll all be in line to get our heads chopped off for producing anti-government sentiment
I studied the rise of fascism in Germany at university but I never in a million years would have thought that the UK would take that path.
Ah, the Koran burning has beencalled off – just read about it on the BBC website, but strangely Terry Jones appears to believe that the imam of the planned mosque at Ground Zero has agreed to move it, while the organisers say that there has been no such decision. Curiouser and curiouser.
Ruth – what’s this about the rise of fascism in the UK?
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Mussolini
On 3 July 1988, over the Strait of Hormuz, Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian airliner was shot down by US missiles fired from USS Vincennes commanded by Captain Rogers killing all 290 passengers and crew including 66 Iranian children.
Three years after the incident, Admiral William J. Crowe admitted on American television show Nightline that the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters when it launched the missiles.
Commander David Carlson, commanding officer of the USS Sides, the warship stationed near to the Vincennes at the time of the incident, said that the destruction of the aircraft “marked the horrifying climax to Captain Rogers’ aggressiveness, referring to incidents on 2 June, when Rogers had sailed the Vincennes too close to an Iranian frigate undertaking a lawful search of a bulk carrier, launched a helicopter within 2?”3 miles of an Iranian small craft despite rules of engagement requiring a four-mile separation, and opened fire on a number of small Iranian military boats.
America has never apologised to Iran or admitted responsibility, agreeing to pay compensation amid international pressure.
Time to retire. I leave you with the first national anthem of post-Communist Russia (they’ve since changed the tune to the Soviet one):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czMFfEXxWug&feature=related
Mark: Not only did America never apologise, that Captain Rogers later got awarded a medal.
Abe: I beg to differ with you about your assertions regarding Nazis and paganism. Not only did Nazi insignia carry “gott mit uns” on it, Hitler was actually a Catholic, and has not (to this day!) been excommunicated posthumously. Plenty of others have for minor “crimes”, such as performing a life-saving abortion on a pregnant woman who was sure to die otherwise.
The idea that Hitler carried on as he did in the name of paganism is ludicrous.
Ruth,
sorry, I should have replied to you earlier, but I was short of time, and frustrated with Alfred. I fully agree that secret services are quite capable of building traps for whistleblowers. But my so far brief exploration of the WikiLeaks site has further convinced me that it is genuine. The material there is very diverse. Many corporate excesses are exposed. Classified material is less common, but there is some. I shall continue to look when I have time. There seems to be a lot of material and it will take more people than just me to assess just how damaging it is to which organisations. My impression so far is that most of the documents there are damaging to the interests of money and power, and would not have been published by a secret service front as the price would have been considered too high.
Despite Alfred’s criticism, I do comprehend his argument and my mind is not closed. I just think he is wrong about this on the basis of what I have seen so far. If, as I believe, WikiLeaks is genuine, the authorities would be delighted if the rumour that it was a front became widespread.
Eid Mubarak all!
Alfred: I didn’t respond to your letter of 8/9, 03:24.
About the ‘too smooth’ smear operation – I had worded that a bit clumsily. It was all too standard – along comes the accusations making out the person in question is a drunk/liar/sexual deviant. All at once, we’re supposed to believe Assange decides to embark on a career of rape during the height of the Wikileaks problem, as a friend of his put it. Now either the secret services had nothing at all to do with it, it’s all just coincidence in the timing and the accusations happened to be completely false too, or it _really was_ the secret services attempting a smear.
I’m not disputing anything you say about _some_ of those fighting in Iraq for the US being utter psychopaths, particularly the contractors. Many are complete religious nutjobs, particularly in the USAF. White supremacists and criminals are welcomed into the ranks, with sentences cut short for those signing up. A notable example would be the insane son of the Ho from Wasilla, Palin’s son Brick or Whack, or whatever he’s called, who was given a choice by the judge – serve in Iraq, or go down for vandalising school buses when he _cut the brake lines on them_. Just the sort of material the US army wants. That doesn’t stop Palin parading around as the Proud Mom of a serving military soldier.
What the Wikileaks documents about Afghanistan appear to show is case after case after case, of people being blown up, shot, run over, people taken into custody for no reason at all after having their doors kicked in and their place turned over. When they release them, the Taliban think they must be suspect, and they end up being killed by one side or the other. Or they provide names which turn out to be more useless “suspects”, just like in Iraq. It’s the drip, drip, drip of a pointless, unwinnable situation that will never end as long as we are there. Attack, counter-attack, reprisals, misery, death and destruction. And it’s just routine, on such a scale that it is simply staggering. That is the point of these leaks, to show the cost (not just in money terms or even our soldiers’ welfare) than this war is imposing.
The scale of it is hard to grasp, and I hate to disappoint some here who indignantly demand to know if I’ve read all the wikileaks documents (a damned fool question, obviously), but that misses the point. One gets bogged down with the grinding horror of all this cost very quickly, and then seeing the vastness of it all tells us what we need to know – if we didn’t already. We shouldn’t be there.
*
Your point about the US intellectual, saying the British were free to kill 100,000 to make a point if they wanted… I seem to remember that too, can’t recall who it was, though. It’s something John Bolton or Wolfowitz might have said, but I wouldn’t call them intellectuals. Churchill was enthusiastic about gassing Kurds and Iraqis himself, and I think Hitler advised the then British ambassador that a few thousand Indians ought to be shot every day until they saw things our way, back before WW2 (I’d have to check on the last one). People were certainly slaughtered in vast, vast numbers without the slightest hesitation. The US dropped nuclear bombs on densely populated cities, after all, and firebombed Tokyo.
The Germans were terrible people who killed civilians by bombing cities in their blitzkrieg, but that only stiffened our resolve. So naturally, we did the same to them most notably in Dresden. The logic of that would be better explained by others.
But in this case, we have almost certainly killed well over a million, with many more to come on account of DU. We just try to hide or poo-poo it these days. What Assange has done, I think, is shown without doubt that this isn’t a clean, good little war in which we are tidying things up and winning. That’s what we’re supposed to do – declare victory and get out. The evidence is there, for those interested in the truth, that it’s not happening.
Sorry for the long ramble.
More about the courage of Julian Assange in the face of a ruthless onslaught of defamation from all and sundry.
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/213080-Beware-Julian-Assange-and-Wikileaks-Darlings-Of-The-Mainstream-Media
“All at once, we’re supposed to believe Assange decides to embark on a career of rape during the height of the Wikileaks problem”
Not at all, as someone explained above. The story is that Assange bedded two women within 24 hours, each found out about the other and then made a complaint under some peculiar Swedish law.
Neither claimed to have been taken by force – which would constitute rape as that term is generally understood. And Assange’s statement that he did not have “non-consensual sex” with anyone, is tantamount to an admission that he did have cconsensual sex with the complainants.
The issue is inconsequential, and would never have come to public attention if it were not for some very strange laws and public attitudes about sex in Sweden.
Jeez… well if that’s true, it’s a good thing I didn’t live in Sweden back in the day, before getting happily married and settled down! Ahem… nobody heard me say that, did they? I did say that to myself… right?
Glenn,
“What the Wikileaks documents about Afghanistan appear to show is case after case after case, of people being blown up, shot, run over, people taken into custody for no reason at all after having their doors kicked in and their place turned over. …”
That may be what the Wikileaks documents show, but it’s not what the media focused on when they covered the story. They focused instead on the unlikely story that Osama Bin Laden is still alive, that he has refuge in Pakistan and he is directing the war against the US in Afghanistan — all good pro-war propaganda. This is one of the central facts about Wikileaks that annoys Clark to think about. He should think about it.
And despite what Clark may find as he digs through 100,000 leaked Pentagon documents, it will be via the mainstream media that the vast majority of the population learn about the contents of those documents.
And sure the Wikileaks document detail massacres and massive collateral damage. But we knew all that already. Heck, in the case of Iraq, we knew it before the war started. Here’s what Postman Patel wrote on March 19, 2003 (http://canadianspectator.ca/stuff/beekeepers.html):
“‘… As many as half a million Iraqi soldiers may be intentionally killed and perhaps 100,000 civilians written off to collateral damage. Think of the grief of millions after this slaughter, the conversion of that grief into rage, combine that with the internecine struggles based on historical ethnic fault lines (that the Ba’ath Party has repressed), and we begin to appreciate the explosive complexity of post-invasion Iraq.”
True, Edward may have underestimated the civilian death toll a tad. According to the Johns-Hopkins-University supervised survey (using methods considered sound by Britain’s Chief Government Science Advisor), a million Iraqi civilians died. But, kill a thousand, kill a million, most people won’t really discriminate. And in any case the high estimate was discussed at length in Science magazine, and many other mainstream sources.
That’s why I don’t think there is much significance in anything Assange has revealed so far. However, my main point here has been that an intermediary increases a leaker’s risk of either elimination before a leak actually occurs, or of exposure if the leak does occur (because the trustworthyness of the intermediary can never be known with certainty (This is a mundane fact — much as it annoys Clark — not a smear.), and I question whether these risks are necessary.
Also, as I have noted above, I believe that the best way of leaking information that should be in the public domain is to do it as Clive Ponting did, i.e., publicly — accepting full personal responsibility. We then have a chance to assess the motives and sincerity of the leaker. In Ponting’s case, a jury decided that he acted conscientiously and that the classified information that he made public should not have been held secret by the government, and accordingly, they brought in a “not guilty” verdict despite direction to the contrary from the judge.
Interesting item on Brick, no Trick, or Track maybe, Palin. Presumably he’ll come back a decorated hero and run for Congress..
Here’s a good smear on Wikileaks: they had a fake Advisory Board.
LOL
Confirming my point that leaking via Wikileaks can be dangerous, the Mother Jones article linked to above reports that:
“Even with high-tech tools to protect sources’ identities, revealing the truth remains a dangerous business. As part of its ongoing focus on Kenya, in late 2008, WikiLeaks published a report linking the country’s police to the torture and deaths of 500 suspected opposition members. The Sunday Times of London picked up the story, and the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions called for Kenya’s attorney general and police commissioner to be fired. Four months later, two local human rights lawyers were shot to death in broad daylight in Nairobi. WikiLeaks condemned the killing of these “WikiLeaks related” investigators; Assange says they were connected to the report but were not the source of its leak. The problem, he says, was that they “weren’t acting in an anonymous way.”
Makes much of WMR. The dodgy in denunciation of the dodgy?
But it illustrates the kind of risks one runs trafficing in classified information with entities about whose bona fides one cannot be sure.
Hey, maybe someone else would do some research instead of lolling around chatting about green tea and magic mushrooms.
Are you a caterpillar, ‘More on Assange’? A walrus? Or a carpenter?
Try some nutmeg.
Of course it’s extremely dangerous being a human rights advocate (a genuine one) and going up against the powerful – in any country but especially those where extra-juducial assassination is not uncommon (though with the murder in Pimlico, whose provenance remains unknown as yet I would suggest that the UK has nothing to be smug about). That would be the case whether or not Wikileaks existed. It has been the case for centuries.
Is it not hilarious that this wannabee book-burner shares a name with the Monty Python who around 15-20 years ago made an excellent popular historical TV documentary series (plus book) on The Crusades (not to mention Life of Brian, etc., etc.)?
Is reality always stranger than fiction?
Hi I have read your comments with interest. I at first thought that this Wikileaks was just a fringe thing. Then the Manning row brought it into focus. I felt sorry for him and looked for those who supported him. Found the petition site and a group called Courage to Resist. There is also a Mike Gogulski running a site for him. Then I started looking into Julian Assange. He hacked into US facilities way back when a youth. Obviously very smart. Then I wondered where does he get the money from for Wikileaks etc. Then I sort of made a Soros connection. Then I found a person called ‘Texas Goldbug’ who maintains that Brad manning is a Public Perception Management Op and then I looked that up. I note that the posters here are quite forensic and so I wait to be told that I’ve got it wrong.
A couple of other points I’m wondering about.
33 Miners trapped underground. NSA helps. Socialogical experiment? It’s this 33. 33 pastry chefs on P&O cruise ship in 3 teams of 11…
Seems I read Cameron in ’94 in South Africa, nukes go missing while being transferred by UK, payment to Tory party funds…. gosh my memory is getting a bit hazy…
OK over to the forensic brigade. What’s the verdict?
Suhayl, now what have you learned on prisonplanet.com today?
How very interesting. How very, very interesting.
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Glenn: Hitler appears to have claimed to be a Catholic, but of what kind is a good question. His views are dealt with in the following wiki article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler's_religious_views
We might say that the inspiration of Nazism was racism above all else, pushing Christian influences out of the way whenever necessary. “Gott mit uns” was thus based on a racist perversion called “German Christianity” which had the cross changed into a swastika. It was this that people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer protested against with the Barmen declaration of 1934.
Outright paganism appears to have been engaged in not by Hitler but by some of his associates like Himmler.
I recall reading in a book by the late comedian Michael Bentine in the 1980s that after the second world war evidence was discovered of the involvement of the Nazi leadership in occultism, but it was not used at Nuremberg because it would have bene used by the defense to prove that the people on trials were insane and not responsible.
Eid Mubarak
Vive la France. Italy produces a few thugs to beat up Romanians, but France shamelessly utilises international law to expel them. There must be a few in the National Front who wish our government could be so brazen in its racism.
Although there was anti-semitism in Germany for hundreds of years, including in Luther’s writings, it takes a certain courage to knowingly embrace the chaos of state-enforced racism.
That courage came from Zionists who wished to purge Judaism of its loser, adapt-and-survive, mentality. So also with the Zionist-assisted 9/11 attack.
They want to purge US Jewry from their comfortable position of dominance in US culture, and galvanise them into nationhood, based on the lands they were originally transferred from the Egyptians after Pharaoh and his people were drowned
Paganism in Nazism was used like ‘The Sound of Music’ to make German culture appear shallow, whereas in fact it was the birthplace of Protestant Reformation
rebellion. Message to Jews: Go to Palestine and build a real nation.
What is needed today is a reformation of Islam, to throw out all the Islamic thinkers who want to strengthen Islam by politicking and dirty deals. So that ordinary people can recognise the truth of Islam.
There will only be change in the UK when ordinary people start to see Muslims as honest and respectable, fellow humans. Instead of two-faced, greedy, rip-off merchants as they do now.
Anno: There must be a few in the National Front who wish our government could be so brazen in its racism.”
Oh, it is. Gypsies and travellers are facing increased persecution and violent evictions across the UK, particularly in Essex.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf-z0VPJwCQ
Otherwise I think it’s silly to bang on about Zionists. The forces arrayed against the vulnerable are manifold, and a ‘Zionist’ (they can come in many shades) does not necessarily support any of them.
The brilliant American psycho war unit publicity stunt involving the Koran burner and now linked to the Imam Rauf’s non-existent mosque and the magically moving Ground Zero community center[sic] has reached the stratospheric rarefied heights of Youtube’s top videos, nudged between, ‘Best Soccer Goal Ever’ and ‘Mandy’s playtime musings’ – Yo! folks the Internet can of course work against the ‘truth movement’ so desperate to exploit the World Trade Centre destruction anniversary.
Hmm the main stream media story a minute past mid-night tonight, will be headlined, ‘Imam meets with Pastor in New York’ no doubt.
Yes! I am miffed – I am fucking miffed – but we can’t have all our own way – can we?
http://tinyurl.com/feisal-abdul-rauf
Hang on, Anno – I’m an ordinary person, so are a bunch of people I know, and we _do_ see Muslims “as honest and respectable, fellow humans”. Perhaps it’s time _some_ Muslims (yourself included, perhaps) saw their way to regarding ordinary UK citizens as people who are not filled with mindless prejudice and hostility towards Muslims?
http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/2010/09/09/exclusive-wikileaks-collaborating-with-media-outlets-on-release-of-iraq-documents.html
Mark Hosenball/Newsweek
glenn, agreed, but must be pretty hard when you see the tabloid press.