There are many thousands of people imprisoned in Uzbekistan alone who should not be imprisoned and who suffer much worse conditions than even the genuine horrors of Wandsworth being visited on Julian Assange. But the Assange case has implications for ever deteriorating Western freedoms which should not be overlooked.
Then there are many war criminals who ought to be in jail and who are not. Most prominent of these are Bush, Blair, Cheney, Straw and their crew. A minor figurewho ought to be in jail is Anna Ardin. Here are two tweets she published after being “raped” by Julian Assange:
‘Julian wants to go to a crayfish party, anyone have a couple of available seats tonight or tomorrow? #fb’
‘Sitting outdoors at 02:00 and hardly freezing with the world’s coolest smartest people, it’s amazing! #fb’
She subsequently deleted and tried to expunge those. I doff my hat to Rixstep:
http://rixstep.com/1/20101001,01.shtml
For another avowed feminist trying to bring Assange down, analyse the use of language in this article by the Guardian’s useless Helen Piddle. For a worm like her to use words like bizarre and raggle-taggle in relation to John Pilger really defies rationality.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/08/julian-assange-celebrity-supporters
“Sorry to be tedious repetitive, but where are the demos (or are they just not being reported – anyone know?)?…”
And sorry for me being repetitive, but this kind of subject – at a time when people are worried about jobs, paying bills, keeping warm – only appeals to the liberati. Most people couldn’t give a toss. You might not like it, but it’s true. Don’t kid yourself that the real world is anything like this blog.
Although having said that i cant help but be struck by the potentially oxymoronic phrase “Nigeria’s anti-corruption body”.
Surely there’s more than one bloke working there? 🙂
well, yeah, jives, but I wouldn’t call WAGS generally ‘evil’.
The sufragettes were ‘feminists’. It’s pretty strange to see their legacy attacked so indiscriminately,
My sexual technique,fortunately,is always worth waking up for Craig.
Until i can find a nice woman to share my bed..:-)
Possibly you misread what was intended as a slightly arch statement Technicolour?
No woman hater me I,and i agree with your broader point..
It’s great to see such a high level of misogyny here. Liberal values eh? The fact is that you can speculate as much as you like but the only three people who know the truth of what happened are Assange and the women. Pace Macpherson, if two women claim sexual assault shouldn’t we accept that at face value? If not, you are into the realms of CIA stooges and all the usual dreary conspiracy theories that besmirch this site.
Julian Assange: Neocon Tool?
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/julian-assange-neocon-tool/
The WikiLeaks founder is an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda
http://www.slate.com/id/2276857
Turn Yourself In, Julian Assange
The WikiLeaks founder is an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda.
By Christopher Hitchens
Updated Monday, Dec. 6, 2010, at 12:14 PM ET
In my most recent book, I reprint some words from a British Embassy cable, sent from Baghdad to the Foreign Office in 1976. The subject is Iraq’s new leader. His quiet coup d’etat is reassuringly described as “the first smooth transfer of power since 1958.” It is added, as though understatement were an official stylistic requirement in official prose, that although “strong-arm methods may be needed to steady the ship, Saddam will not flinch.” Admittedly, these words were used before the “smooth transfer” had been extended to include Saddam’s personally supervised execution of half the membership of the Baath Party. But Saddam already had a well-established addiction to violence and repression.*
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Facebook Digg RedditStumbleUponCLOSEI came across this cable after it had been declassified a few years ago, and I reprinted it because it very accurately reflected the tone of what I’d been told by British diplomats when I was visiting Iraq at the time. And I ask myself: What if I had been able to get my hands on that report when it was first written? Not only would I have had a scoop to my name, but I could have argued that I was exposing a political mentality that?”not for the first time in the history of the British Foreign Office?”chose to drape tyranny in the language of cliche and euphemism.
But what else, aside from this high-minded ambition (or ambitious high-mindedness), ought I to have considered? A democratically elected British Parliament had enacted an Official Secrets Act, which I could be held to have broken. Would I bravely submit to prosecution for my principles? (I was later threatened with imprisonment for another breach of this repressive law, and it was one of the reasons I decided to emigrate to a country that had a First Amendment.) The moral “other half” of civil disobedience, as its historic heroes show, is that you stoically accept the consequences that come with it. Then there is diplomacy itself. One of civilization’s oldest and best ideas is that all countries establish tiny sovereign enclaves in each other’s capitals and invest these precious enclaves of peaceful resolution with special sorts of immunity. That this necessarily includes a high degree of privacy goes without saying. Even a single violation of this ancient tradition may have undesirable unintended consequences, and we rightly regard a serious breach of it with horror. We found out everything we would ever need to know about Ayatollah Khomeini and his ideology when he took diplomats as hostages.
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The cunning of Julian Assange’s strategy is that he has made everyone complicit in his own private decision to try to sabotage U.S. foreign policy. Unless you consider yourself bound by the hysterically stupid decision of the Obama administration to forbid all federal employees from downloading or viewing the WikiLeaks papers, you will at the very least have indulged in a certain amount of guilty pleasure. In a couple of major instances, the disclosures are of great value to the regime-change die-hards among us. More Arab regimes want Washington to take on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and more urgently than anyone had guessed; I would very much rather know this now than 20 years later. Iran was able to acquire some missile capacity from North Korea; so would Saddam Hussein have been if we had left him in his so-called “box.” We already know that his envoys were meeting North Korean missile dealers in Damascus before the threat of the coalition’s intervention caused the vendors to return hastily to Pyongyang. The latest leaks complete an important part of an important case.
As for the public’s right to know and the accountability of our covert or confidential agencies, it is only a short time since the entire American liberal consensus was witlessly applauding a clumsy and fruitless prosecution, directed entirely at the hopelessly overdramatized exposure of a relatively minor CIA official, married to a monster of conceit who makes Assange look bashful. It then turned out that Valerie Plame’s job description had been made public by Robert Novak and Richard Armitage, who also had in common with Assange a rooted opposition to the administration’s Iraq policy. Elements of the left and the right appear to have switched positions on full disclosure since then.
Attempts to prosecute Assange will, I predict, be either too little or too late, or both, or worse. There is a good reason the Espionage Act of 1917 has such a rusty and unused sound to it. It was a panic measure passed during a time of Wilsonian war hysteria, and none of its provisions will serve in the cyberworld. Meanwhile, the very word Interpol has been a laughing stock for decades in law-enforcement circles, and, though I find it easy to picture Assange as a cult leader indulging himself with acolytes, the sex charges against him don’t appear to amount to rape and have a trumped-up feel to them. They also give him an excuse to recruit sympathy and stay out of sight instead of turning himself in.
And that, of course, prosecution or no prosecution, is what he really ought to do. If I had decided to shame the British authorities on Iraq in 1976, I would have accepted the challenge to see them in court or otherwise face the consequences. I couldn’t have expected to help myself to secret documents, make myself a private arbiter of foreign policy, and disappear or retire on the proceeds. All you need to know about Assange is contained in the profile of him by the great John F. Burns and in his shockingly thuggish response to it. The man is plainly a micro-megalomaniac with few if any scruples and an undisguised agenda. As I wrote before, when he says that his aim is “to end two wars,” one knows at once what he means by the “ending.” In his fantasies he is probably some kind of guerrilla warrior, but in the real world he is a middle man and peddler who resents the civilization that nurtured him. This Monday, in two separate news reports, the New York Times described his little cabal as an “anti-secrecy” and “whistle-blowing” outfit. Such mush-headed approval at least can be withheld from the delightful Julian, even as we all help ourselves to his mart of ill-gotten goods.
There is clearly some vindictiveness in going for Assange personally but from the US point of view there are some beneficial side-effects. One, it distracts attention from the content of the leaks and focuses protest on the fate of Assange rather than on what the leaks describe; two, it distracts attention from the exceedingly brave WikiLeaks’ reported source, Army Pvt. Bradley Manning (and what’s happening to him, by the way? Do you think he has any vestiges of mind left at all?); three, it distracts attention from the staggeringly incompetent decision to make allegedly ‘secret’ information available on-line to 3 million people.
Seems to have worked, too.
No eddie, we should never accept serious accusations at face value.
People lie and invent stories all the time,for myriad reasons.Of course accusations should be questioned,ideally to deduce truth from fabrication,to protect the innocent and convict the guilty.
You seem rather simple in your understanding of
basic legal principles eddie.
Havent you heard tales of A Good German?
“..I find it easy to picture Assange as a cult leader indulging himself with acolytes..”
Political correctness interacts with feminism. It has become fashionable to proclaim that there is no inherent difference between the life goals of men and women. From this it follows that “feminism” is simply a struggle against an entrenched male power base.
There is an entrenched male power base, but this is only part of the story. Biology enforces differences between the objectives of males and females; the power struggle would still be present even if some kind of “equality” could be agreed upon.
Thus the word “feminism” is used to label two quite different things. Properly, it names the struggle to end discrimination against women. But it is also useful to women as a weapon that can be used against men, or against a specific man.
Chilcot is recalling Bliar (and Straw I think I heard) in the New Year. That’s their Christmases ruined then. Goodee.
Here’s a link specifically for the likes of Eddie & Alan Campbell, who seem very keen to take Assange’s accusers (Anna Ardin & Sophia Wilen)at their own estimation. Enjoy it, boys-
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/12/07/julian-assange-in-the-honey-trap/
Justin Raimondo may turn up the rhetorical volume too far in this article, but, as a disinterested gay man, for me he gets close to the likely truth of this episode. And as a gay man, he certainly knows how to twist the verbal stiletto with venom and panache.
Megalomania, paranoia, acolytes, groupies. And that’s just on this blog.
oh the random insult generator’s started up again. alan, sorry, alfred, sorry, alan, you should really do something about people posting in your name.
“A fading, golden glow, that’s receding, fading away as we watch, and remember.”
Eloquent as ever, writerman, but maybe the reverse of the truth. I think our politicians were always shits and it’s only in recent time that we’ve managed to stitch together enough of our thinking (thank you, internet) to get a clear diagnosis of what has been a very long-running illness. Depression at the awfulness of things is a useful advance on our historic position, which was not realising that things were awful in a systematic and predictable way. You remind me of Dover Beach:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Sounds bad, but actually it was good. Arnold’s ‘Sea of Faith’ was a pretty septic pond. I hope we are now hearing the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of a septic polity.
On other matters (with apologies to somebody) I have attempted sex with a woman who was asleep, feeling that it was an agreeable way to wake her (later corroborated). I have also had sex with a woman who was saying no. At the time I guessed she didn’t mean it, and this also was subsequently corroborated. I realised not very much later that these things might have turned out differently and I could have been in trouble.
On the other hand, I’ve had grief from women for not recognising and responding to a sexual invitation. Sometimes I really was too dense to recognise it, sometimes I noticed but didn’t respond. The non-responses were usually on some moral ground – she was with someone else, or I was with someone else – foolish scruples regretted at leisure now, in my dotage. The whole sex thing seems much too complicated, difficult to formalise in law – I’m glad I’m old and past it. Swedish attempts to codify all this stuff certainly sound like some sort of naive fascism, and could result in the loss of simple protection against assault.
Eddie ?” you’re presumably referring to this piece by Naomi Wolf:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/interpol-the-worlds-datin_b_793033.html
How could you miss that it’s satire?
“Never trust a Campbell..” is an old Scots saying.
Or… never trust a campbell…
Take your pick…we have one here who constantly turns on his hosts.
Plus ca change eh alan?
Alan the article by Hitchens says it all. Hitchens, like Orwell, is right on all the key issues. Assange’s response to the John Burns article and his petulant response to the CNN and Larry King interviews reveal his mental state of mind – delusions of grandeur, a dictator complex and an over-inflated ego – all the signs of a sociopath surely? Rape and sexual assault would fit the character profile.
I’m well aware that the Wolf article is an attempt at satire. Doh.
seriously, what the hell has one man’s sexual history got to do with the *information*?
i still don’t understand why Assange didn’t go Venezuela or similar, unless he wanted to be arrested, but that’s by the by too. Otherwise international politics is all looking like the plot for a bad, conspiracy packed, thriller but this is hardly the viewer’s fault.
“…his petulant response to the CNN and Larry King interviews reveal his mental state of mind”
I thought his response to the CNN “interview” was perfectly appropriate. I certainly shared his frustration that the interviewer should try to waste the few minutes available on trifling matters while the contents of the recently-released documents raised no interest whatsoever.
Ah! Edward, you have returned again! Business slack, eh?
Yes, I know, Alan (at 2:22pm), it’s a good point re. the demos. So perhaps my point ought to have aimed more broadly: where are the mass demos against the banks, stupid and unnecessary frontline job cuts and the rest of the daylight robbery that is occurring right now as we speak…? Apart from the students, that is, who are demonstrating about fees, etc. Because unless such direct political action is organised against these things, the type of abuse of human rights that is represented by the Assange arrest will continue, essentially (in practical terms) unopposed. You can’t have one without the other. Democracy – real democracy requires all of this and more.
There needs to be a systemic mass movement which can be directed against the entire economic system – and that would include against rapacious banks (now what the banks-govts have done is rape, people) waging stupid (but highly profitable, for the arms dealers and private armies et al) wars in foreign lands while our ruling classes (of which the Govt is the front company) cut classroom assistants and home carers at home and toss fantastic, wonderful people onto the dung-heap. Social engineering on a grand scale; the end-game of Thatcherism.
Here’s an interesting piece. Actually, in my experience, in spite of all the political propaganda that is contemporary televisual ‘entertainment’, many, many people remain able to see right through it. They know exactly what’s going on, they just don’t have a vehicle or medium through which to change it. At a very profound mental level – this is a mental war – they/we have become systematically and personally depoliticised and that is a bad thing, and anti-democratic thing. And the campaign against Wikileaks is a central part of this. If Assange were a politically active trade union leader (I mean politically active, not confining their remit to collective bargaining), it is highly likely that similar tactics would be used against the, Look at the way the security services and the media targeted Arthur Scargill – a pack of lies, harassment and all the dirty tricks in the book.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhai-brown/yasmin-alibhaibrown-ann-widdecombe-and-the-rise-of-strictly-come-democracy-2152214.html
Well, I have read/watched some internet reports/clips over the female Swedish accuser who is apparently a female “activist” there. Is she connected to a notorious Anti-Castro group and to the well known airliner bomber named Possada?….
If it is true, she (they) is a poor woman who is only being used by powerful American politicians, say, like an expendable asset is used. Young people from broken families who get no good advice from parents often end up like this poor woman, I think. I am really sorry for her….
Sweden is a proud host of the Nobel Prize, of course, but its modern history is not as clean or proud as tourist agencies worldwide tell us, right?
As far as I know, the Kingdom ran a compulsory sterilization (eugenistic law; crime against humanity) policy for unfortunate people (like mentally ill people) even after the Hitler’s Germany fell. Just like the Japanese doctors who have been sterilizing leper patients inside the special colony until very recently while killing their newborns as well….
I don’t know much about the Swedish sterilization policy but I saw that allegation many years ago on a Japanese TV news. I am sure J. Assange will never be sterilized even after he gets extradited to there, though.:)
Following the Swedish state inquiry, such a hideous “state crime” became known to the public a decade ago. Now the Wikipedia community knows it, too.
You can read here; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization#Sweden
Who believes the accusation against Assange and Wikileaks by a country like this “criminal state”?
So, now comes the Assange case brought to us by the same clean and criminal Kingdom. But I have to say it was very unfortunate for the Swedish Kingdom to dance to the tune of their American “masters”.
Maybe that Kingdom is still a mere satellite monarch for a certain large empire, the way it was in the Napoleon’s time. Sweden is as sad as Japan, I think.
I agree with technicolour: this arrest very clearly is an attempt to personalise the matter and to divert attention from the context of the leaks. It’s Hollywood. It serves the purposes of the war-makers.
Let us focus the microscope on empire, the war-makers and their strategies. Let us scrutinise the content of the leaks in that context.
People are dying daily in manufactured foreign wars generating profits for fat cats all over the globe – working-class British soldiers are dying unnecessarily – and an analysis of imperial policy allows a systemic critique to be made of this crime. The leaks are part of that discourse. It is not simply a chatterati topic – it is about mass murder of Iraqis, Afghans and also the ongoing deaths of British people. But who gives a damn, really?
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=15682
Julian Assange
He’s a guy with a vague history…
Who travels the world without visible means of support…
His parents: Members of an LSD “cult” that abused kids…
Hmmm…
He’s not against war…
He hates the 9/11 truth movement…
He has no info about the Bush or Obama White House… or the Federal Reserve Bank… or Goldman Sachs (but he is helping take down Bank of America)…
His “leaks” paint Pakistan as a threat and foreign politicians the CIA doesn’t like as jerks…
He believes Osama is alive… and probably in Pakistan…
Everything else he “leaks” is stuff we all already knew…
The mainstream media loves him…
The right wingers love to hate him and are using him as a justification to censor the Net…
If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck and smells like a duck…
Another intelligence agency spectacle.
Craig: just glanced down the original blog post. Really, using the word ‘feminist’ as some kind of general inditement isn’t right. Erica Jong, Margaret Atwood, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, Naomi Wolf, the Pankhursts, Helena Kennedy? All self-declared feminists.
What has feminism got to do with rape allegations, or with someone who’s written a book on cycling, and otherwise does not share your perspective (or most other Guardian readers’ perspectives, I imagine)?
I disagree that Assange’s ‘arrest very clearly is an attempt to personalise the matter and to divert attention from the context of the leaks.’
Its purpose is far more likely to make Assange look like a genuine leaker rather than an intelligence asset.
Perhaps Assange is both a crusader for freedom and a rapist? Why should one automatically rule out the other? Martin Luther King was no angel. In today’s climate he would have been Clarence Thomased too. And why not?
Another US pundit of Fox News, or maybe that should be Fucks News! has called for the assassination of the traitor Assange by US special forces. Lovely country, lovely people, sparkling, bright.
It’s outrageous really. It sounds like fascist state, which is arguably what the United States has degenerated into. The mass slaughter of foreigners has become the norm, so offing Assange is only the next step in their degrading decline into open terrorism and babarism. Just ask the families of the 2000 drone attack victimes along the AfPak border, civilians who’ve been casually murdered, “collateral” damage, in order to “take out” a mere handful of “badmen.” Grotesque really.
I find it odd that Assange can be arrested and jailed without bail in the UK without his lawyers or the Judge being informed of the exact charges he’s accused of in Sweden. Whether one supports him or not, this should concern people, or is that too subtle an argument?
So the Swedish authorities want him for questioning, is that really enough to warrant an Interpol wanted alert? Remember no specific charges, only alligations and questions?
According to his lawyers they have tried to arrange an interview with the Swedish authorities for months so that he could answer the alligations, but they have simply refused to tell the UK lawyers what the alligations are in writing, or in english.
Even in court in London the prosecution mentioned the serious alligations, but not the charges. It’s a bit odd.
One of the womens lawyer gave an interview in Sweden where he said that Assange should answer the charges, if he was innocent, and had nothing to hide. To give his version of the events. This is an bizarre concept, even in Swedish law. How can one answer or defends oneself in relation to such serious alligations, the alligation of rape, when one doesn’t know precisely what the alligations are.
Assange risks being put in an isolation cell if he’s forced back to Sweden for a long time. This technique is widely used in Sweden, to soften up prisoners before trial. The isolation can last for months, and many Swedeish lawyers regard it as a form of psychological torture.
Also jury trial are seldom used in Sweden, which means that getting the result the prosecution wants is easier than in the UK or the US for that matter.
And Sweden doesn’t have the same history of supporting civil liberties that characterises UK law and practice, so it would be far easier for the US to get Assange out of Sweden than the UK. Also a trial conducted in a foreign language, Swedish, a language Assange doesn’t understand or speak is problematic as well for obvious reasons. So Assange and his lawyers have to fight like hell to prevent his extradition to Sweden at all costs, because once he’s there he’ll be a sitting duck for the Americans who’ll get hold of him with ease.
We should all remember that the alligations against Assange refer to acts, or “sex crimes” that are not, repeat not, crimes in the UK and the US.