James McEnteer : Escape to Ecuador

Edward Snowden and the flag of Ecuador. Image from Salon.com.

Rehanging the crepe paper:
Escape to Ecuador

Edward Snowden is the latest insider who pulled back the curtain to reveal the wizardry of American Freedom as the diabolical machinations of a surveillance state.

By James McEnteer / The Rag Blog / June 25, 2013

QUITO, Ecuador -- The colored crepe paper we hung up has tattered and fallen. The balloons we tied to the walls and ceiling have deflated or popped. Confetti remains in bags, unthrown. The welcome party we planned for the arrival of Julian Assange has had to be postponed indefinitely. Graffiti on the city walls prophesying his advent have begun to chip and fade away.

We know Assange is safe and still active in his Ecuadorian Embassy sanctuary in London. But we can’t help feeling disappointed that he never actually landed here among us. It’s not simply that we wanted the spotlight of his celebrity to shine a bit on the rest of us. There is so much here that we wanted to show him.

The bracing air of the Andes would revive his spirits. The sight of snow-covered volcanic peaks bespeaks a primordial reality which dwarfs the foolish vanity and paranoia of the people and the governments who want him silenced and punished. Julian Assange and Wikileaks have spotlighted the new political reality.

Our primary struggle now is not a conflict of countries or religions or ideologies against one another, but the wars of governments against their own peoples. The governments of China, Russia, and the United States have more in common with one another than they do with their own populations. Ours is a battle between state control and personal freedom.

The Turkish people know this. So do the Syrians and the Brazilians and the Egyptians. They have fewer illusions than Americans do because they can’t afford them. They have learned to trust their own eyes and ears rather than rely on the televised, predigested propaganda churned out by corporate U.S. media in service to the state.

Julian Assange and Ecuador's Foreign
Affairs Minister Ricardo Patiño Aroca
at Embassy in London.

Americans cling to their comforting delusions, that we are the greatest, freest country on earth, that the political landscape is painted blue and red, that liberals and conservatives are battling for dominance, and the extremes of tea-party libertarianism and radical leftist socialism should be reviled and feared.

All this is irrelevant and distracting, like the clash of Christianity versus Islam. Or the flood of professional sporting events and pornography that drowns our awareness with vivid images. Americans are bad at organizing, still suffering from the cult of rugged individualism. But when we do form trade unions or progressive political groups or student protests against wars or the depredations of Wall Street, the tentacles of government are quick to infiltrate, defame, and destroy.

Edward Snowden is the latest insider who pulled back the curtain to reveal the wizardry of American Freedom as the diabolical machinations of a surveillance state. Is he a hero or a traitor? Where you stand depends on where you sit. For all those growing fat off the surveillance state, the toady media, the corporate Congress, the social networks and other minions of the ruling oligarchy, Snowden is a trouble-maker, messing with the dominance of their masters.

For the rest of us, trying to survive and live our lives as well as we can, Snowden is a freedom fighter, exposing the intrusion of the state apparatus into our private affairs. That is why we have begun to rehang the crepe paper here, inflate new balloons and prepare once again for a welcome party fit for a man of principle and courage.

Snowden would add luster and gravitas to our community. We can only hope he really comes. Then we have to find a way to spring Bradley Manning. Manning’s only crime was believing he could appeal to the conscience of the American people over and above the violent authoritarian regime masquerading as a democracy.

It would be great to have Assange, Manning, and Snowden all here in Ecuador. They could all have faculty positions at the IIF (International Institute of Freedom). I think they’d have a lot of valuable lessons to teach. You know we’ll have a good time then.

[James McEnteer is the author of Shooting the Truth: the Rise of American Political Documentaries (Praeger). He lives in Quito, Ecuador. Read more of James McEnteer's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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James McEnteer : Julian Assange, Come on Over

Stencil of Julian Assange from Bold Legume.
Insane Asylum?
From Center Stage to Middle Earth

Is Julian Assange crazy to want to go to Ecuador, of all the obscure places on this globe?

By James McEnteer / The Rag Blog / June 20, 2012

QUITO, Ecuador -- After the UK waived the right of Julian Assange to resist extradition to Sweden, Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. He is seeking political asylum in Ecuador to avoid prosecution in Sweden and possible deportation to the United States for exposing state secrets via Wikileaks.

Western media are second-guessing Assange’s choice. Is he crazy to want to go to Ecuador, of all the obscure places on this globe? UK and U.S. officials are already putting pressure on the government of Ecuador to hand Assange over for prosecution for violating the terms of his bail. That pressure will no doubt intensify.

Assange interviewed Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa last month on his syndicated talk program with world leaders. The two men appeared cordial. After Wikileaks exposed U.S. accusations of Ecuadorean police corruption and presidential malfeasance, Ecuador expelled U.S. Ambassador Heather Hodges from the country in 2011.

The United States and Ecuador have been on touchy terms since Correa’s presidency began in 2007. Correa refused to renew the U.S. air base in Manta, on Ecuador’s Pacific coast, choosing instead to open an oil refinery there in partnership with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Correa said at the time that he would be glad to let the U.S. maintain its base in Ecuador if Ecuador were allowed to open a military base in Florida. Rafael Correa is not likely to be easily intimidated.

Critics of Assange’s decision to seek asylum in Ecuador cite Rafael Correa’s crackdown on oppositional media. From the start of Correa’s term in office, media have attacked him politically and personally. He has responded with law suits, prosecutions of individuals and confiscations of media outlets, accusing his critics of colluding with the largest banks against the interests of the majority.

Correa’s censure of local media has brought him international criticism from organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Inter American Press Association. Under intense international pressure he pardoned several high-profile journalists who had been fined and sentenced to prison. To oppose a free press would seem a vile act. But opposing a Murdoch-like press, itself a vile species, is much less so. Quoth A.J. Liebling: “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one,” aka the 1 percent.

Critics who believe Correa’s press crackdown should give Assange pause fail to realize that both men abhor media corruption, especially the complicity of mass media with governmental and financial interests and pressures.

Changes in the new Ecuadorean constitution, written since Correa took office, have empowered the environmental movement on several fronts, on land and at sea. Assange will find Ecuador one of the greenest governments on earth. And with his popularity at a continued unprecedented high, Correa is highly likely to maintain the country’s presidency in the upcoming 2013 elections. So there would be no likely radical change of policy in the foreseeable future.

Though it’s a small country, Ecuador is ethnically and environmentally diverse, with lovely tropical coast, high volcanic Andes, and Amazon rainforest. Indigenous peoples and Afro-Ecuadorians enrich the culture. Increasing numbers of U.S. retirees are choosing to move here. So while Ecuador may seem like a “last resort” for Julian Assange, he will actually have a number of resorts -- and climates -- from which to choose.

Mr. Assange will also find more than adequate high-speed Internet connections available, at least in the urban areas. It’s not exactly a hardship post. And at least some of us who have chosen to live in Ecuador would be proud to have Julian Assange as a neighbor. There’s a perfectly comfortable two-bedroom apartment downstairs from us that’s currently available.

Julian, come on over!

[James McEnteer is the author of Shooting the Truth: the Rise of American Political Documentaries (Praeger 2006). He lives in Quito, Ecuador. Read more of James McEnteer's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Danny Schechter : WikiLeaks and the Fetish of Secrecy

Graphic from APS.
Wikileaks and the secrets that deceive us

It's the age-old battle between our right to know and their right to keep us from knowing.

By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / December 21, 2010

In the days of Stalin’s Russia, not only would dissidents “disappear” but also, even in the pre-digital era, photographs of officials at May Day reviewing stands would be erased from photographs when their political stars fell. Our own “Kremlinologists” would know who was in, and who was out by comparing last year’s pictures with this years.

That’s one way of concealing information.

Just last week Republicans on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission pushed to have certain words removed from the report they were writing because they posed a conflict to their view that only the government was to blame for the financial collapse

Explained economist Paul Krugman,

Last week, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, all four Republicans on the commission voted to exclude the following terms from the report: "deregulation," "shadow banking," "interconnection," and, yes, "Wall Street."

When Democratic members refused to go along with this insistence that the story of Hamlet be told without the prince, the Republicans went ahead and issued their own report, which did, indeed, avoid using any of the banned terms.

In our media today, omission of images and ideas is as key to sanitizing the news as is commission, What is not reported or perhaps even known is often more important than stories that are twisted by bias.

Enter WikiLeaks and an age-old battle between our right to know and their right to keep us from knowing. Its critics make a fetish about keeping secrets as if it is a holy duty and not a system of keeping the public uninformed about what their government is doing in its name.

The public has a right to know if officials are saying one thing in private and another in public, if they are concealing information or just plain lying.

The Pentagon Papers showed us that wars could be waged deceptively, based on deliberate falsehoods. WikiLeaks revelations about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars tell a similar story. We have learned how torture and civilian deaths were pervasive -- and covered up.

Veteran investigative reporter Bob Parry argues that in the national security area, journalists -- and the people -- need leaks from officials of conscience.

He writes:

Whatever the unusual aspects of the case, the Obama administration’s reported plan to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for conspiring with Army Pvt. Bradley Manning to obtain U.S. secrets strikes at the heart of investigative journalism on national security scandals.

That’s because the process for reporters obtaining classified information about crimes of state most often involves a journalist persuading some government official to break the law either by turning over classified documents or at least by talking about the secret information. There is almost always some level of “conspiracy” between reporter and source.

Contrary to what some outsiders might believe, it’s actually quite uncommon for sensitive material to simply arrive “over the transom” unsolicited. Indeed, during three decades of reporting on these kinds of stories, I can only recall a few secret documents arriving that way to me.

It’s not just the government that hides behind secrecy rules it puts in place. The private sector does too -- with the complicity of much of the media, which did not warn us about the financial crisis that was building. We didn’t learn about the pervasive fraud in the banking and real estate industries and still don’t know the full extent of the crimes of Wall Street.

Do we have to wait for historians to tell us that the stories we are being told are a crock?

Anyone remember reading about the Spanish American war? That’s the one which also marked the beginnings of “yellow journalism” when screaming headlines and falsified photos were used to mobilize the public for war.

Back then, at the turn of the last century, an American battleship, the USS Maine, sank in Havana Harbor. The incident sparked a battle cry, “REMEMBER THE MAINE.” We were told that “THEY” sank it. The incident led to war which later spread to the Philippines at a cost of six million lives.

Eighty years later, a submersible submarine went down to the remains of the Maine on the harbor floor. What they found was that no one -- no terrorists, no Spaniards, no Cubans, nobody sank the Maine. There had been an accident in the engine room. The whole war was based on a well publicized event that never happened.

If we had known that at the time, many lives would have been saved and U.S. foreign policy might not have gone in an imperial direction.

So, back to today:

What do we gain from persecuting and prosecuting Bradley Manning who was among three million people with access to the diplomatic cables we are now reading about? What will we gain by jailing or killing (as some right wingers advocate) Julian Assange, who is already being called “the Che Guevara of the Information Age”?

The CIA’s murder of the original Guevara created a global martyr whose image is still among the most popular icons in the world. Guevara had his own problems with hostile women. One, Molly Gonzales, tried to break through barricades upon his arrival in New York with a seven-inch hunting knife. He later became famous for saying, “the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love."

Assange is being accused of sexual crimes in Sweden, a country, ironically, recently condemned by Amnesty International for not enforcing its own laws against rape. Now, the WikiLeaker-in-chief, is being targeted by the leak of a Swedish police document detailing charges against him. (They are charges, not facts, and may be serious under Swedish law.)

The ongoing and well-orchestrated war on WikiLeaks is also outraging millions worldwide who see the United States as a secretive and manipulative colossus that lives on lies and deception.

For many, this issue has reached a level of hysteria which, like the “Red Hunts” of the 1920s and the commie “crimes” of the cold war era, will only bring more shame to a Washington desperate to change the story away from the content of the leaked cables to allegations of wrongdoing by Assange. The Administration is also virtually torturing the man who dumped the documents, Bradley Manning, in Gitmo-like conditions, in an effort to turn hum against Assange. He has yet to be tried.

We can’t put the leaks genie back in the bottle. We might do better reflecting on the meaning of these disclosures for our democracy and media. The big secret is the one we don’t want to see: that we are building support and respect for WikiLeaks even as officials fulminate against it.

["News Dissector" Danny Schechter is a journalist, author, Emmy award winning television producer, and independent filmmaker. Schechter directed Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, and a companion book, The Crime of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail. Contact him at dissector@mediachannel.org.]

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Marc Estrin : Kicking the Dog

Image from Photobucket.
Passing of the lantern:
Kicking the dog

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / December 20, 2010

So Julian Assange is now without his passport, braceleted under house arrest, waiting for the Wheels of Injustice to slowly grind. At this point, his story is not so much that of killing the messenger (though that is what many in the U.S. are calling for), as that of kicking the dog.

The dog in question was Julian’s close ancestor, Diogenes, a contentious fanatic foolish enough to spend his life with a lantern, looking unsuccessfully for "an honest man." Some say he sought “a human being.” His writings did not survive, but there are legends.

Notorious for his provocative behavior, people called him a dog, a nickname he embraced. “Other dogs,” he said, “bite their enemies. I bite my friends to save them.”

He wasn’t kind to his enemies either. At a sumptuous dinner given by a wealthy man, a guest became so outraged by Diogenes' behavior that he began to throw bones to “the dog." The philosopher got up, lifted his leg and toga, and took a leak on him.

Like Assange’s, Diogenes' life was a relentless campaign to promote reason and virtue, and to debunk the values and institutions of a corrupt society. In doing so he disregarded laws, customs, conventions, public opinion, reputation, honor and personal dishonor.

Political authority was a main target for both -- its folly, pretense, selfishness, vanity, self-deception, corruption, and artificiality of conduct. Diogenes said: “Those who have virtue always in their mouth, and neglect it in practice, are like a harp which emits a sound pleasing to others, while being itself deaf to the music.”

So together the dogs -- Diogenes and Assange -- challenge the false coin of human morality, sharing Socrates' belief that one can be a doctor to men’s souls, and morally improve humanity, while being contemptuous of its behavior.

Sitting alone in a Dickensian prison, or now with wi-fi in a mansion, Assange has not yet been assassinated, as many have called for. He may or may not end like Socrates, taken out by the State. But Diogenes lived a long while, and one hopes the same may be true for Julian Assange.

One legend of Diogenes' death is that, at 90, he committed suicide by holding his breath. If or when Assange does die, it will likely be because he, too, is no longer allowed to breathe, speak, or leak out his documents.

[Marc Estrin is a writer, activist, and cellist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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Tom Hayden : Julian Assange and the Lynch-Mob Moment

The lynch mob in Frankenstein. Is Julian Assange next?
The lynch-mob moment:
The frenzy over Julian Assange and WikiLeaks

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / December 15, 2010

We know that conservatives are extremists for order, but why have so many liberals lost their minds and joined the frenzy over Julian Assange and WikiLeaks? As the secrets of power are unmasked, there is a growing bipartisan demand that Julian Assange must die.

Once-liberal Democrat Bob Beckel said on FOX that someone should "illegally shoot the son-of-a-bitch." A few days ago center-liberal legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said on CNN that Assange is "absurd, ridiculous, delusional, and well beyond our sympathy." The Washington Times called for treating him as an "enemy combatant"; Rep. Peter King of the Homeland Security Committee wants him prosecuted as a terrorist; and of course, Sarah Palin wants him hunted down like Osama Bin Ladin or a wolf in Alaska.

This is a lynch mob moment, when the bloodlust runs over. We have this mad overreaction many times since the witch burnings and Jim Crow, including the Palmer Raids of the 1920s, the McCarthy purges of the 1950s, the Nixon-era conspiracy trials, the Watergate break- ins, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11.

Most Americans know now that those periods of frenzy and scapegoating did nothing for our security but damaged our democracy and left in their wake a secretive National Security State.

There's wisdom in expecting calmer heads to prevail in the WikiLeaks matter, but what can be done when the calmer heads are going nuts or hiding in silence?

Do the frothing pundits remember that we have a legal system in which the accused is entitled to due process, legal representation, and the right to a defense? The first obligation of our threatened elected officials, bureaucrats and pundits is to calm down.

No one has died as a result of the WikiLeaks disclosures. But the escalation by the prosecutors in this case could lead to an escalation, with more sensitive documents being released in a retaliatory spiral of this first cyber-war. Imprisoning the messenger will amplify his message and further threats of execution.

I can understand the reasonable questions that reasonable people have about this case. It is clearly illegal to release and distribute the 15,652 documents stamped as "secret." Why should underground whistleblowers have the unlimited right to release those documents? There is a risk that some individuals might be harmed by the release? There is a concern that ordinary diplomatic business might be interrupted.

All fair questions. These concerns have to be weighed against two considerations, it seems to me. First, how important is the content of the documents? And how serious is the secrecy system in preventing our right to know more about the policies -- especially wars -- being carried out in our name? And finally, is there a reasonable alternative to letting the secrets mount, such as pursuing the "transparency" agenda, which the White House purports to support?

Let me weigh these questions with regard to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and the "Long War" scenario that has occupied my full attention these past nine years.

It will be remembered that the Iraq War was based on fabricated evidence by U.S. and British intelligence services, the Bush-Cheney White House, and even The New York Times through the deceptive reporting of Judith Miller. The leading television media invited top military officials to provide the nightly narrative of the war lest their be any doubts in the mesmerized audience.

Secrecy and false narratives were crucial to the invasions, special operations, renditions, tortures, and mass detentions that plunged us into the quagmires where we now are stranded. The secret-keepers were incompetent to protect our national security, even when cables warned of an immanent attack by hijacked airliners.

The secrecy grew like a cancer on democracy. Earlier this year, the Washington Post reported in "Top-Secret America" that there were 854,000 people with top- security clearances. [William Arkin, Dana Priest, "Top Secret America," Washington Post, July 19, 2010] That was the tip of the iceberg. The number of new secrets rose 75% between 1996 and 2009, to 183, 224; the number of documents using those secrets has exploded from 5.6 million in 1996 to 54.6 million last year. [Time, December 13, 2010] The secrecy cult appears uncontrollable: the Clinton executive order 12958 [1995] gave only 20 officials the power to stamp documents top-secret, but those 20 could delegate the power to 1,336 others, while a "derivative" procedure extended the power to 3 million more officials and contractors. [Time, December 13, 2010]

The 1917 U.S. espionage statute requires that Assange received secret documents and willfully, with bad faith, intended to harm the United States by releasing "national defense information." That's a tough standard. Perhaps in order to close what U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder describes as "gaps in our laws," the State Department sent a letter demanding that Assange cease the releases, return all classified documents and destroy any records on WikiLeaks databases. [Washington Post, November 30, 2010]

These are difficult legal hurdles for the Justice Department under the First Amendment, but, according to a source close to the defense with experience in such cases, it seems clear that the U.S. government will prosecute Assange with every tool at their disposal, perhaps even rendition.

"What President Obama needs is a photo of Assange in chains brought into a federal court," the source said.

[U.K. prosecutors seeking to overturn a ruling granting bail to Assange will have their appeal heard by a London judge tomorrow, December 16.]

Should there be an attempt to extradite Assange, he has the right to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

Assange has a very strong base of support in London where public anger over the fabrications that led to war still runs high. An extradition fight in London could carry on for weeks, providing an important platform for the defense. Or the UK government could take the risk of an accelerated emergency deportation process to send him to Stockholm, or even the U.S. in the most extreme scenario.

If Assange winds up in Stockholm, it could take several weeks to fight his way through a bizarre and complicated sexual harassment trial. Anything is possible there, from all charges being dropped, to the finding of a technical infraction, to jail time. Or Sweden could make an emergency finding to extradite him straight to the U.S., risking an adverse public reaction for serving as to a handmaiden of the Pentagon.

In the atmosphere of hysteria ahead, it is important for peace and justice advocates to remember and share what Americans owe to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

1. WikiLeaks has disclosed 390,136 classified documents about the Iraq War and 76,607 about Afghanistan so far. No one died as a result of these disclosures, one of which revealed another 15,000 civilian casualties in Iraq which had not been acknowledged or reported before;
2. Fragmentary orders [FRAGO] 242 and 039 instructed American troops not to investigate torture in Iraq conducted by America's allies;
3. The CIA operates a secret army of 3,000 in Afghanistan;
4. A secret U.S. Task Force 373 is assigned to nighttime hunter-killer raids in Afghanistan;
5. The U.S. ambassador in Kabul says it is impossible to fix corruption when our ally is the corrupt entity;
6. One Afghan minister alone carried $52 million out of the country;
7. U.S. Special Forces operate in Pakistan without public acknowledgment, apparently in violation of that country's sovereignty;
8. America's ally, Pakistan, is the chief protector of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
9. Following secret U.S. air strikes against suspected al-Qaeda militants, Yeme's President Ali Abdullah Saleh told General David Petraeus, "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours."

The secretive wars exposed by WikiLeaks will cost $159.3 billion in the coming fiscal year, and several trillion dollars since 2001. The American death toll in Afghanistan will reach 500 this year, or 50 per month, for a total of 1,423, and 9,583 wounded overall -- over half of the wounded during this year alone. The Iraq War has left 4,430 U.S. soldiers dead and 32,000 wounded as of today. The civilian casualties are ignored, but range in the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistanis.

Is it possible that Julian Assange is the scapegoat for arrogant American officials who would rather point the fingers of blame than see the blood on their own hands? What else can explain their frenzy to see Assange dead?

It may be too late to prevent an escalation. The lynch mob is rabid, terrorized by what they cannot control, completely out of balance, at their most dangerous. If they realize their darkest desires, they will make Assange a martyr -- a "warrior for openness" -- in the new age now beginning. A legion of hackers are fingering their Send buttons in response, and who can say what flood they may release?

The trial of Julian Assange is becoming a trial of secrecy itself. Wherever the line is drawn, secrecy has become the mask of power, and without new rules, the revolt of the hackers will continue.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. This article was also published at The Nation and Progressive America Rising.]

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Dave Lindorff : The Strange Case of Interpol's Red Alert

A supporter of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange holds up a placard outside the City of Westminster Magistrates Court in London. Photo from The Hindu / AP.

UPDATE: A British judge granted bail to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday, saying he must abide by strict bail conditions as he fights extradition to Sweden in a sex-crimes investigation...

Supporters outside City of Westminster Magistrates' Court erupted in cheers when they heard news of the judge's ruling. -- AP / NPR / December 14, 2010

Something is rotten:
The strange case of Interpol's Red Alert
on Julian Assange

By Dave Lindorff / December 13, 2010

The other Interpol Red Alert sought by Swedish prosecutors this year was for Jan Christer Wallenkurtz, a 58-year-old Swedish national wanted on multiple charges of alleged sex crimes and sex crimes against children.

Far be it from me to minimize the issue of rape, but to borrow from the Bard, in the case of the “rape” case being alleged against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (technically, Swedish prosecutors say it's not rape, it's "sex by surprise"), currently being held in a British jail without bail pending an extradition request from Stockholm: “Something is rotten in Sweden.”

As I wrote earlier, the alleged sexual crimes that Assange is currently being sought for by a Swedish prosecutor are:

1. Allegedly failing to halt an act of consensual sexual intercourse when his sex partner and host, Anna Ardin, claims she somehow became aware that the condom he was using had “split” and,

2. Having consensual sex with a second woman a few days later without informing her that he had just been with Ardin, and then, a day later, allegedly refusing to return a phone call on his cell phone, when she tried to call him to ask him to take an STD test.

(Assange says he had turned off and was not using his phone for fear he was being traced through it, not that refusing to take a call from a woman one recently slept with should be considered criminal. Cold or even cruel, maybe, but not justification for a rape charge!)

In most countries, including the U.S. and UK, these would not pass the test to be considered a crime, much less qualify as a category of “rape," but Swedish authorities, who in all of this year have only submitted one other request to Interpol for assistance in capturing a sex crimes suspect, asked the international police agency to issue a so-called Red Alert for Assange, who was subsquently asked by police in the UK, where he was staying, to turn himself in or face arrest.

(The other Interpol Red Alert sought by Swedish prosecutors this year was for Jan Christer Wallenkurtz, a 58-year-old Swedish national wanted on multiple charges of alleged sex crimes and sex crimes against children.)

You have to ask, given that Sweden has the highest per-capital number of reported rape cases in Europe, how it can be that only these two suspects -- Wallenkurtz and Assange -- are brought to Interpol.

You also have to wonder how it is that Assange -- charged only with consensual sex “offenses” -- is denied bail by a British court magistrate, despite having several people at his arraignment hearing, including a well-known British filmmaker, ready to post whatever bail might be required to assure his return to court for an extradition hearing, while even people charged with aggressive rape are apparently routinely released on bail in both the UK and Sweden.

Here’s an interesting letter that ran in The Guardian in England, authored by Katrin Axelsson, of the British organization Women Against Rape:

Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at the unusual zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued for rape allegations. Women in Sweden don't fare better than we do in Britain when it comes to rape. Though Sweden has the highest per capita number of reported rapes in Europe and these have quadrupled in the last 20 years, conviction rates have decreased.

On 23 April 2010 Carina Hägg and Nalin Pekgul (respectively MP and chairwoman of Social Democratic Women in Sweden) wrote in the Göteborgs-Posten that "up to 90% of all reported rapes never get to court. In 2006 six people were convicted of rape though almost 4,000 people were reported." They endorsed Amnesty International's call for an independent inquiry to examine the rape cases that had been closed and the quality of the original investigations.



Assange, who it seems has no criminal convictions, was refused bail in England despite sureties of more than £120,000. Yet bail following rape allegations is routine. For two years we have been supporting a woman who suffered rape and domestic violence from a man previously convicted after attempting to murder an ex-partner and her children -- he was granted bail while police investigated.



There is a long tradition of the use of rape and sexual assault for political agendas that have nothing to do with women's safety. In the south of the U.S., the lynching of black men was often justified on grounds that they had raped or even looked at a white woman. Women don't take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst.

The long arm of the U.S. in this case is hard to miss here.

Especially in view of one of the latest WikiLeaks State Department cables to be disclosed in The New York Times, which in an article on Thursday laid out how the U.S. had strong-armed even the powerful German government into blocking German prosecutors from indicting and requesting the extradition to Germany of 13 CIA agents involved in the illegal kidnapping and renditioning to Bagram prison in Afghanistan of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen wrongly thought by the CIA to be a terrorist.

El-Masri was kidnapped by these agents in 2003, stripped, bound, placed in an adult diaper with a plug in his rectum, and flown by the CIA to Bagram, where he was repeatedly tortured, sodomized, injected with mind-altering drugs, and held for months, before being simply dropped off by the CIA on an Albanian roadside, after it was determined by the U.S. that a “mistake” had been made.

The U.S. did not want its rendition program and its policy of officially-sanctioned torture disclosed and so it pressed German authorities to drop all prosecution of the agency kidnappers, threatening “the implications for relations with the U.S.” (El-Masri has been barred from suing the U.S. government for damages.)

It strains credulity to believe that the same U.S. government that put such pressure on Germany, a NATO ally, is not behind Swedish prosecutors’ sudden intense interest in this preposterous case of consensual sex and a broken condom -- particularly as the initial prosecutor in the case dropped it after learning that the two women, far from being upset following their nights with Assange, had in one case thrown a party for him following the alleged incident, and in the other, left him in her bed while she went out to buy him breakfast.

(Both women reportedly sent twitters to friends bragging about their conquests, messages they later tried to have expunged from the Twitter system).

It also strains credulity to believe that the denial of bail to this particular suspect by a British court -- particularly given that he is not charged with any violent act, and has no criminal record -- is not the result of behind-the-scenes U.S. pressure.

Indeed, it appears that the U.S. is busy trumping up more serious charges against Assange, with his lawyers saying they are anticipating that the U.S. Justice Department (already reportedly in discussions with Swedish authorities about getting their hands on Assange), is planning soon to charge him under the 1917 Espionage statute, the same law that the Nixon Justice Department tried to use unsuccessfully against Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case. That could explain why efforts are being made to try to keep Assange held in a cell.

It could also explain why Assange is challenging the Swedish extradition request.

Opposition to the Afghan and Irag Wars is intense in the UK and is supported by the overwhelming majority of British citizens, which makes Assange something of a hero in Britain for his WikiLeaks exposes of the ongoing crimes by U.S. and UK forces in those conflicts. British government acquiescence to an extradition order from the U.S. on espionage charges would likely lead to massive opposition by British citizens.

Sweden, on the other hand, which is not a member of NATO, but which has some 500 troops participating in the "NATO" war in Afghanistan, does not face the same kind of popular opposition to its role, and Assange may fear that Sweden, a very small country, could be pressured much more easily to hand Assange over to U.S. authorities, with little resulting fuss from the Swedish public.

Back in the U.S., there has been no move by news organizations to come to Assange’s defense. In fact, the corporate media reaction to this whole issue has been the opposite. For the most part, the Swedish charges, and his arrest in Britain on the basis of the Interpol Red Alert, are reported as being about “rape,” without any explanation of the actual “violations,” which would not even rise to the level of a crime in the U.S.

Meanwhile, most editorial pages are condemning the violation of diplomatic secrecy, not the government’s efforts to shut down a source of important news about government ineptness, malfeasance, and deceit.

Yet if it turns out, as I’m confident it will, that the U.S. government has been the driving force behind both the arrest and imprisonment of Assange, and his extradition to Sweden, and if it turns out, as appears increasingly likely, that the U.S. government has also been behind simultaneous decisions by Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, and several Swiss banks to refuse to handle donations to WikiLeaks, as well as by Amazon, which withdrew Wikileak's access to its cloud data storage system, and a DNS registry which de-registered WikiLeak's URL, publishers and broadcasters, and journalists themselves, should be up in arms defending him.

As I wrote earlier, this kind of attack on a news source for purely political reasons is a threat to the First Amendment as profound as the Nixonian attack on Daniel Ellsberg, and the attempt to block The New York Times from publishing his purloined documents about the origins of the Vietnam War.

Andreas Fink, CEO of DataCell ehf, the Swiss company that has been accepting donations on behalf of Wikileaks via Visa, had this to say about the Dec. 8 decision by Visa to cease processing Wikileaks donations:

The suspension of payments towards Wikileaks is a violation of the agreements with their customers. Visa users have explicitly expressed their will to send their donations to Wikileaks and Visa is not fulfilling this wish. It will probably hurt their brand much much more to block payments towards Wikileaks than to have them occur.

Visa customers are contacting us in masses to confirm that they really donate and they are not happy about Visa rejecting them. It is obvious that Visa is under political pressure to close us down. We strongly believe a world class company such as Visa should not get involved by politics and just simply do their business where they are good at. Transferring money.

They have no problem transferring money for other businesses such as gambling sites, pornography services and the like so why a donation to a Website which is holding up for human rights should be morally any worse than that is outside of my understanding.

Contributions can still be made to Wikileaks and to Assange’s defense by wire transfer and by check and ordinary mail. To find out how to contribute, go here.

By the way, if there is anyone out there working for Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, or any banking organization, or in a government office, who can provide me with evidence that the U.S. has been behind the decision of any of those organizations to freeze out WikiLeaks and destroy it financially, I will guarantee your anonymity at all costs. Please contact me or send me documentation.

[Dave Lindorff is a regular columnist for Counterpunch and has also written for such diverse and seemingly mutually exclusive publications as BusinessWeek, The Nation, Extra!, Treasury & Risk, and Rolling Stone. This article first appeared in This Can't Be Happening and was distributed by Truthout.]

Also see:

• J'Accuse: Sweden, Britain, and Interpol Insult Rape Victims Worldwide by Naomi Wolf / Huffington Post / December 13, 2010
• What the Assange case reveals about rape in America by Jessica Valenti / The Washington Post / December 10, 2010

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Ted McLaughlin : The WikiLeaks Brouhaha

Political cartoon by samir alramahi / toonpool.com.
WikiLeaks brouhaha:
A danger to our security,
or serving the public's right to know?

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / November 29, 2010

I doubt if there's any established government on earth that can't access that kind of information, which means the only people these "secrets" are being kept from are the voting public.

The internet site called WikiLeaks is in the headlines again, and once again they are embarrassing the United States government (and a bunch of other governments also, this time). They are in the process of releasing hundreds of thousands of U.S. State Department cables, which the government is claiming to be "classified" material.

Some of the material is just embarrassing, such as when government officials make unflattering remarks about other countries' officials. Other cables show us some "secret" discussions between governments that could have serious repercussions for American citizens, such as cables that show that countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia have been putting a lot of pressure on the United States to attack Iran (and at least destroy their nuclear facilities).

The big question being debated right now is whether the release of these cables to the public (several news organizations are making them widely known to the public at large) poses a real danger to the United States government and the citizens, or does it just expose some things that probably should be public knowledge anyway in a democracy (regardless of whether some officials are embarrassed or not).

The Obama administration is taking the tack that the release of this information poses a danger. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs says:

To be clear, such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government. These documents also may include named individuals who in many cases live and work under oppressive regimes and who are trying to create more open and free societies.

By releasing stolen and classified documents, WikiLeaks has put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals. We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information.

But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange counters that the United States is just trying to cover up its participation in serious "human rights abuse and other criminal behavior." The New York Times, which is printing some of the exposed diplomatic cables, says "the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match."

After much thought, I have to agree with WikiLeaks and The New York Times. This is information that the American people have a right to know. Are there times when a government needs to keep a secret for national security? Yes. But I believe a Democratic government needs to keep as few secrets as is possible, and there is little doubt that our government keeps far too much from the voters (who have the right to know as much as possible to make intelligent decisions when they go to the polls).

If the government is just covering up embarrassing blunders or statements by government officials, then they are wrong -- that kind of thing should not be a "state secret." If they are indeed covering up human rights abuses or criminal behavior, that is even worse. The American people needs to know if its government is acting in such a way.

I also have to wonder just how secure these "secrets" were if an organization like WikiLeaks could get hold of them. Frankly, any government that sends real secrets by cable or electronic transmission in this information age is pretty stupid anyway (and that is something else the people need to know).

I doubt if there's any established government on earth that can't access that kind of information, which means the only people these "secrets" are being kept from are the voting public. The idea that WikiLeaks has been able to access information not available to any interested intelligence service is just ludicrous.

The most intelligent comment on this WikiLeaks mess that I've heard comes from Professor Michael Cox, associate fellow of Chatham House Think Tank. He says:

It's a great treasure trove for historians and students of international relations. It is a sign that in the information age, it is very difficult to keep anything secret. But as to whether it's going to cause the kind of seismic collapse of international relations that governments have been talking about, I somehow doubt.

Diplomats have always said rude things about each other in private, and everyone has always known that. Governments have a tendency to try to keep as much information as possible secret or classified, whether it really needs to be or not. The really secret information, I would suggest, is still pretty safe and probably won't end up on WikiLeaks.

I seriously doubt that any of these released cables will hurt the security of the United States. I do think that there will be officials of the U.S. government (and other governments) who will be embarrassed by exposure of stupid or criminal actions. That is a good thing. I just don't care if government officials are embarrassed, and I care even less if officials from other countries are embarrassed or exposed.

The American people need to know how these other countries are thinking and acting. As for our own officials, they shouldn't be doing or saying anything they wouldn't want their fellow citizens to know about.

Are the folks at WikiLeaks traitors or heroes? I'm voting for heroes -- albeit minor ones.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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Marc Estrin : Unhallowed

"See No Evil." Painting by Morwenna Morrison.
UNHALLOWED

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / October 30, 2010

Halloween is my least favorite holiday, the one that has strayed furthest from its original intentions, and has been most overwhelmed by candy-capitalism. The worst part about it, from my point of view, is that it now involves treats with no tricks. I am on full general strike against it.

It's not so much that I want to see infantile maliciousness attack the community but that I am a great fan of the word “or." “Trick or treat”? -- the homeowner has a choice, and should he choose the former, the onus is then on the tricker to come up with punishments that fit the crime. What tricker is prepared for that these days? Our corporate criminal element cultivates both treat and trick. Should not our children practice running the world?

It's not only the loss of imagination that I mourn, but even worse, a loss of the sense of Evil as a power to be meditated upon and respected. I left a career -- or rather was invited out -- as a minister because my congregations were unenthusiastic about exploring the evil around us. A personal critique of my denomination can be summed up in one sentence: they want Easter without Good Friday, transfiguration without death. "The world out there is bad enough -- we don't need to go through it here on Sundays."

In short, they had no theology of evil. Which these days, we need more than ever.

The great seasonal gift of this past week has been the Wikileaks release of 400,000 internal documents related to our military behavior in Iraq. It was both trick and treat, an apotheosis of Halloween behavior. And of course, in a culture which refuses to acknowledge its own evil, our government's initial response has been to shoot the messenger, with the mainstream media predictably complicit.

While media worldwide -- mainstream and otherwise -- focused on the contents of the communications -- prisoners abused, raped and murdered; the civilian death toll covered up; the shooting of men trying to surrender (“you can't surrender to a helicopter”); the abuses of our private security firms; the hundreds of civilians killed at checkpoints -- the U.S. media focused almost entirely on whether Julian Assange had the right to release such documents, whether he is a sexual offender or not, and what punishment for him is appropriate.

This refocusing is perhaps predictable in our celebrity culture: everything comes down to the actions of particular, lime-lighted people, and the underlying currents are ignored. Julian Assange and Wikileaks are not the abscesses that need to be opened in order to heal. Their targets are. We should thank them for reviving the true spirit of Halloween.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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