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.
PPS. Just looked at the English-language of Granma, and it appears that Castro really is coming off his trolley. Still, look on the bright side: it means that Communism might soon fall and we will have Truth, Justice and the American Way in Havana, complete with restaurants that stock the things on the menu!
Thanks big!
The text of the law is pretty funny Craig – i wonder what date that law’s from? It must be 19th century at the earliest from the sound of it.
Sad that so many people just believe whatever they’ve heard said most times. If they didn’t these kind of smears wouldn’t work.
the robots do at least make some amusing sentences, presumably using google translate
“restaurants that stock the things on the menu”
Big Mac.
(me at 10.27. “Remember me”, huh)
Unknown – ‘I dunno. The spambots seem to make as much sense as Larry and many of the others posting here.
LOL’
You know what, now the deluded moron has been rumbled on here by all and sundry that could be a new career move for him! Where is the drunken Lamby anyway?
9/11 was an inside job. Lamby told me so in private and made me swear to secrecy. Don’t tell him I let it slip.
Sorry to bring it to ya, but this is most likely not a conspiracy but a case of swedish feminism.
Read this swedish bloggers detailed overview of the Assange-case, from a swedish perspective. It describes what the political situation is like in sweden, the view on men and women and sex. This could have happened to any celebrity, it’s just a coincidence it happened to Assange. Sweden is a strange country…
http://aktivarum.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/the-entire-assange-case-from-swedish-perspective-analysis-by-aktivarum/
Cuba
Why does the mainstream media routinely refer to Cuba as a dictatorship? Why is it not uncommon even for people on the left to do the same? I think that many of the latter do so in the belief that to say otherwise runs the risk of not being taken seriously, largely a vestige of the Cold War when Communists all over the world were ridiculed for following Moscow’s party line. But what does Cuba do or lack that makes it a dictatorship? No “free press”? Apart from the question of how free Western media is, if that’s to be the standard, what would happen if Cuba announced that from now on anyone in the country could own any kind of media? How long would it be before CIA money ?” secret and unlimited CIA money financing all kinds of fronts in Cuba ?” would own or control most of the media worth owning or controlling?
Is it “free elections” that Cuba lacks? They regularly have elections at municipal, regional and national levels. Money plays virtually no role in these elections; neither does party politics, including the Communist Party, since candidates run as individuals.7 Again, what is the standard by which Cuban elections are to be judged? Most Americans, if they gave it any thought, might find it difficult to even imagine what a free and democratic election, without great concentrations of corporate money, would look like, or how it would operate. Would Ralph Nader finally be able to get on all 50 state ballots, take part in national television debates, and be able to match the two monopoly parties in media advertising? If that were the case, I think he’d probably win; and that’s why it’s not the case. Or perhaps what Cuba lacks is our marvelous “electoral college” system, where the presidential candidate with the most votes is not necessarily the winner. If we really think this system is a good example of democracy why don’t we use it for local and state elections as well?
Is Cuba a dictatorship because it arrests dissidents? Thousands of anti-war and other protesters have been arrested in the United States in recent years, as in every period in American history. Many have been beaten by police and mistreated while incarcerated. And remember: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. Since the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of life than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. (This is documented by Cuba in a 1999 suit against the United States detailing $181.1 billion in compensation for victims: the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding or disabling of 2,099 others. The Cuban suit has been in the hands of the Counter-Terrorism Committee of the United Nations since 2001, a committee made up of all 15 members of the Security Council, which of course includes the United States, and which may account for the inaction on the matter.)
Cuban dissidents typically have had very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government agents. Would the US government ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and engaging in repeated meetings with known members of that organization? In recent years the United States has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States. Virtually all of Cuba’s “political prisoners” are such dissidents. While others may call Cuba’s security policies dictatorship, I call it self-defense.8
The terrorist list
As casually and as routinely as calling Cuba a dictatorship, the mainstream media drops the line into news stories that “Hezbollah [or Hamas, or FARC, etc.] is considered a terrorist group by the United States”, stated as matter-of-factly as saying that Hezbollah is located in Lebanon. Inclusion on the list limits an organization in various ways, such as its ability to raise funds and travel internationally. And inclusion is scarcely more than a political decision made by the US government. Who is put on or left off the State Department’s terrorist list bears a strong relation to how supportive of US or Israeli policies the group is. The list, for example, never includes any of the anti-Castro Cuban groups or individuals in Florida although those people have carried out literally hundreds of terrorist acts over the past few decades, in Latin America, in the US, and in Europe. As you read this, the two men responsible for blowing up a Cuban airline in 1976, taking 73 lives, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada, are walking around free in the Florida sunshine. Imagine that Osama bin Laden was walking freely around the Streets of an Afghan or Pakistan city taking part in political demonstrations as Posada does in Florida. Venezuela asked the United States to extradite Posada five years ago and is still waiting.
Bosch and Posada are but two of hundreds of Latin-American terrorists who’ve been given haven in the United States over the years. 9 Various administrations, both Democrat and Republican, have also provided close support of terrorists in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iran, Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere, including those with known connections to al Qaeda. Yet, in the grand offices of the State Department sit learned men who list Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism”, along with Syria, Sudan and Iran. 10 That’s the complete list.
Meanwhile, the five Cubans sent to Miami to monitor the anti-Castro terrorists are in their 12th year in US prisons. The Cuban government made the very foolish error of turning over to the FBI the evidence of terrorist activities gathered by the five Cubans. Instead of arresting the terrorists, the FBI arrested the five Cubans (sic).
From Bill Blum’s Anti Empire Report http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer85.html
Most ladies accept smears as routine. Looks like thinking men will have to take a lesson from them.
somebody at September 1, 2010 9:06 AM:
Have you ever met a refugee from Cuba? I had that chance a year or two ago on holiday in Florida. Cuba is a repressive Communist dictatorship, and America is a paradise of freedom by comparison. That is why so many have tried to escape there. Here is Amnesty International’s latest report on Cuba:
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR25/013/2010/en
I had the pleasure of seeing this guy debut for Major League Baseball last night:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aroldis_Chapman
I’m sure he would like to go back to Cuba to visit his friends and family, but since he defected, he won’t be going home any time soon.
Larry from St. Louis: has he written any article or book about his defection? It’s the kind of story that would have made the Reader’s Digest.
Re: The Swede at September 1, 7:52 AM
and: Da at August 31, 2:18 PM,
the arrest of Assange may well be just a result Sweden’s laws and ‘feminism’, but how the matter is treated by the Mainstream Media is not. Da makes a good point. Today the BBC reports that the *WikiLeaks* rape case has been reopened – *not* Assange’s. Also, a particularly unflattering picture of Assange has been chosen to accompany the article. What is the betting that if the case is dropped again, that will be reported in connection with “Assange”?
TM and others,
how am I supposed to know that you’re not part of a CIA etc plot to discredit Wikileaks, and scare whistleblowers off leaking via that route? Do you have any good evidence that WikiLeaks is an intelligence front, apart from the content of the Afghan War Diaries? Like, whistleblowers arrested or assassinated?
Mark Golding,
there are plenty of methods of blocking spambots, but you know it’s impossible to get Craig to do anything to his website!
Earth to Tony_opmoc,
Earth to Tony_opmoc,
are you receiving? come in please.
The Political Terror Scale 2006 is generated by Mark Gibney, Belk Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Asheville:
http://www.politicalterrorscale.org/.
Gibney uses all available data from Amnesty International and the US State Department to produce a human rights score.
Cuba’s score come out equal to that of the US – which is not particularly good either.
Abe Rene,
you don’t actually *read* Reader’s Digest, do you? I thought you were meant to eat it, for fibre.
“I thought you were meant to eat it, for fibre.”
I thought a digest was the result of having done that ?
But, let’s not be unkind. I’m sure it’s very handy for those who aren’t interested to deal with the whole story.
Cuba vs. the U.S.: “Cuba’s score come out equal to that of the US – which is not particularly good either.”
Well one metric would be free speech, wouldn’t it?
I encourage all of you to travel to Cuba and attempt to exercise free speech against the government.
I encourage people to go to places they like, and enjoy themselves being nice to people there. Sheesh.
“TM and others,
how am I supposed to know that you’re not part of a CIA etc plot to discredit Wikileaks, and scare whistleblowers off leaking via that route?”
How the hell am I suppposed to know what you are supposed to know. And frankly, I don’t care.
My point was this: how is a whistleblower supposed to know whether or not Wikileaks is a whistleblower trap.
And my question to you was how can a whistleblower blow the whistle without depending on a questionable intermediary such as Wikileaks.
It seems to me a simple matter for a leaker or whistleblower to put stuff on the Internet without leaving a trail. So why would anyone but a dupe rely on Assange and his multimillion dollar organization?
The method I suggested above, which is to use a stolen laptop to upload data to the internet via an internet cafe has the weakness that customers of the Internet cafe may be recorded on videotape. However, it should be possible to find an unencrypted wireless Internet connection, just by driving around town. Then you’d upload from your car, ditch the laptop and the source of the data would be untraceable.
Incidentally, Clark, how do I know you are not working for the CIA?
LOL
Oops, the above was posted by TM, as is this:
“Well one metric would be free speech, wouldn’t it?
I encourage all of you to travel to Cuba and attempt to exercise free speech against the government.”
Hey Larry, does Fidel claim the right to assassinate Cuban citizens? I mean, I know he probably does – assassinate Cuban citizens, I mean. But does he openly proclaim the right to do it? You know, like Bam claims the right to kill Americans without charge.
Michael Moore’s TV Nation and comparisons b/w healthcare systems in the USA, Canada and Cuba: censored by the US TV network because Cuba came out on top. So they had to lie and tell the viewers that Canada won. Moore admitted this in the book about the programme, ‘TV Nation’. Political censorship at work in the USA.
The truth is, the elites in the USA don’t care a hoot about (anyone else’s) freedom, wealth, health and the pursuit of happiness. They’re very happy for countries to be like the Democratic Republic of Congo. What they hate about Cuba, Venezuela, etc. is the lesson of a good example for other ‘Latin’ American countries – or indeed any other ‘Third World’ countries. The hate is undiminshed, even after five-plus decades, it comes steaming off the sentences.
Viva Cuba!
Clark: I read Reader’s Digest mainly when I was a juvenile. It was there, in the “condensed book” section at the back of the magazine, that I first discovered the story of Kaarlo Tuomi. A few years later I was able to read the unabridged account in John Barron’s book “KGB: the secret work of Soviet secret agents”. It would be great to make a film based on his story!
Suhayl: My guess is that you have never been to Cuba. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
That was me at 5.19 pm.
TM,
a whistleblower could use the method that you outline to upload to WikiLeaks. I’m not sure that your method is so secure anyway. The originating IP address will be traceable, giving a rough geographic location. There probably wouldn’t be many people in that region that had access to the leaked information. The leaker could use something like The Onion Router, but WikiLeaks use that anyway. WikiLeaks post advice on their site on how to send information anonymously, via the Internet and via post.
The main advantage of leaking to WikiLeaks is that they will publish it on their system where it can’t be censored. It will be displayed where many people, including journalists, look for sensitive information.
Of course, you do not know that I’m not working for the CIA etc. However, I am contactable via my link, and I am open to scrutiny. Are you?
I’ve never been to Uzbekistan, Russia, Palestine/Israel, Germany, Australia, Mars or C19th either, but it doesn’t stop me commenting on any or all of these.
Look, I’m not suggesting that Cuba has an ideal system. What I am suggesting is that is has made a number of crucially important step-changes in the face of continuous, proximate, unreasoning superpower bullying. In the face, really, of ongoing neo-colonialism.
I think also that the Cuban Revolution – in the context of the equally continuous disinformation peddled by Uncle Sam-and-pals – gives downtrodden people a sense of hope, esp. in the context of ‘Latin’ America, that it is possible to face down a superpower and its various Mafias, that its is possible to change the distribution not just of wealth but of life. Cuba also helped militarily defeat apartheid South Africa (which was avidly supported by the USA) in southern Africa. That is a major historical event.
One almost never hears anything about Cuba in the UK which is not laced with the same arrogant cynicism that willy-nilly dominates coverage of those places in the world who are ‘our enemies’. There is seldom any attempt to be objective. In essence, what we get is largely propaganda.
The media and peoples of ‘Latin’ America – and many other countries – do not view Cuba in the same way as it seems to be viewed in the USA and (to a lesser extent) the UK. Much broader and deeper analysis is to be found elsewhere, not here in the UK.
There are real problems in Cuban society. And centrally-controlled state economies don’t work, and more than centrally-controlled corporate economies. I don’t agree with having political prisoners, etc. It’s abhorrent. But the USA has its own political prisoners – not only all the (often innocent) ‘rendered’ people held in ‘black sites’ throughout the world, but disproportionately it’s own African-American population (having a black president does not alter this basic social dynamic, an ongoing legacy of slavery). This is in spite of the USA’s fabulous and constantly-trumpeted wealth. We see the deleterious effects of extremist neo-liberal economics all over the world – here, right now, in the UK as once again, millions lose their jobs and homes.
So I think that we can learn from places like Cuba, learn from their mistakes and their successes. We can learn that another way of living is possible. We can learn this, whether or not we’ve been there.
‘Somebody’, that was a brilliant post of yours at 9:06am. Well written! The USA exports terrorism to Cuba (and many other places too).
Hello again everyone! *waves*
Suhayl: We _must not_ learn any lessons from Cuba, none whatsoever, which is why it’s so essential to demonise Cuba, Cubans, every aspect of their way of life, and most of all (of course) Castro.
Except maybe the lesson “Socialism – BAD, capitalism – GOOD” and various other sundry bumper-sticker slogans.
Old Abe was asking Suhayl if he’d been to Cuba. Sadly, it appears he has not. But I have – several times – so please ask away if you feel I might be able to answer a question for you.
Hey, Glenn! Good holiday, I hope?! Well, tell us something about Cuba, man.
As it happens, I had access to a magazine containing reports by travellers, and the latest issue was about Cuba. I was not too surprised to learn that things generally in this impoverished Communist country work poorly if at all. I would still be interested to learn about Glenn’s experiences, though.
But there are at least two things that we could learn from Cuba
1. Every state should provide at least basic and emergency health care for its citizens. The USA should have a ‘public option’, and Medicare for everybody.
2. Every country should protect civil liberties. The state needs to be restrained. Here Cuba serves as a _negative_ example.
I would also take a leaf out of Suhayl’s book: it is not necessary to visit Cuba to thoroughly disapprove of this repressive godless Communist regime, which may Providence bring a speedy end to.