New provocation against WikiLeaks

[Antid Oto]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

New provocation against WikiLeaks
23 August 2010

The World Socialist Web Site denounces the ongoing campaign by the US government
and its military and intelligence agencies against WikiLeaks and its founder
Julian Assange. The rape charges against Assange, announced Friday by Swedish
prosecutors and then withdrawn Saturday, bear all the hallmarks of a US-inspired
provocation against the Internet-based organization in retaliation for its
exposure of US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Obama administration has evidently exerted enormous pressure on the Swedish
government to fabricate the charges against Assange. Not since the Nixon
administration compiled its “enemies list” has an American government proceeded
so brazenly to target its political opponents for what Assange described
accurately as “dirty tricks.”

The exact circumstances surrounding the charges are murky. The news was first
made public by a Swedish tabloid and then confirmed to the Associated Press by a
spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office in Stockholm, who said that Assange had
been indicted “in absentia” and an arrest warrant issued.

Less than 24 hours later, the chief prosecutor of the Swedish Prosecution
Authority, Eva Finne, declared that there were no grounds to suspect Assange of
rape and that the warrant had been cancelled. There were unconfirmed reports,
however, that a second charge of “sexual molestation” was still being
investigated. According to press accounts in Sweden, two women who were in
contact with police did not make an official complaint, and police and
prosecutors took the initiative to bring the charges.

Both Assange and WikiLeaks have denounced the warrant as a politically motivated
attack. The official blog at WikiLeaks.org said the group was “deeply concerned
about the seriousness of these allegations.” It continued, “We the people behind
Wikileaks think highly of Julian and he has our full support.”

Assange called the charges against him “completely baseless.” He told the
Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that he did not know who was “hiding behind” the
claims of rape, but that he had been warned previously that the Pentagon “could
use dirty tricks” against himself and WikiLeaks.

The attack on WikiLeaks and Assange comes only a few days after the group said
it was preparing to release another 15,000 documents of the US war in
Afghanistan, in addition to the 76,000 internal military reports released last
month. The documents expose what is well known in Afghanistan but kept secret
from the American people by the Obama administration and the
corporate-controlled media: the systematic, illegal killing of hundreds of
Afghan civilians by US military units, particularly the now-notorious Task Force
373, a death squad formed to target suspected insurgents for assassination.

The US government is officially denying that it has anything to do with the
attempted prosecution in Sweden, or with legal action against WikiLeaks by any
other country. According to the New York Times, “Spokesmen for the Justice,
State and Defense Departments all denied on Saturday having any such contacts
with foreign governments about WikiLeaks or Mr. Assange.”

This is contradicted by a report on the investigative web site TheDailyBeast.com
that the Obama administration is “pressing Britain, Germany, Australia and other
allied Western governments to consider opening criminal investigations” into
Assange and to limit his ability to travel freely.

The involvement of the Swedish government shows the complicity of the European
ruling classes in the ongoing bloodbath in Afghanistan, which props up a puppet
regime of war profiteers and narco-traffickers in Kabul.

There are three likely goals in this provocation: first, to smear Assange
personally and his colleagues by association, using the unsubstantiated charges
of rape and molestation. In that context, the role of Australia is of particular
significance, and not merely because Assange was born there and holds an
Australian passport. The Australian government has direct experience in the use
of phony rape charges against individuals regarded as political obstacles. It
used just such a charge in its long-running campaign against Julian Moti, the
former attorney general of the Solomon Islands who is opposed to the Australian
military takeover of that island chain.

Second, the smear campaign could undermine Assange’s standing in Sweden in
particular, where he has recently agreed to write a regular newspaper column for
Aftonbladet in order to bring his activities under the protection of Sweden’s
relatively liberal press laws. Sweden’s Pirate Party, a group focused on
supporting Internet freedom, announced August 17 that it would host several new
servers for WikiLeaks, providing it additional bandwidth free of charge. “We
desire to contribute to any effort that increases transparency and
accountability of power in the world,” the party said.

Third, the intention may well have been to force Assange to surface publicly, so
that he could be targeted for seizure or physical violence by US government
agents. In that context, the Swedish prosecutor’s initial demand that Assange
“should contact police so that he can be confronted with the suspicions,” is
particularly ominous. One of the main complaints of the Obama administration and
the American media is that Assange is constantly on the move, traveling
frequently from country to country, and is just as difficult to track down as
his loose, Internet-based organization.

It must not be forgotten that in the first days after WikiLeaks posted the
Afghanistan war documents, a Pentagon spokesman warned the group not to continue
such leaks of information and made an open threat of unspecified retaliation,
saying, “If doing the right thing is not good enough for them, we’ll figure out
what other alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing.”

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday, in the midst of the media frenzy over
the rape charges against Assange, that “the Defense and Justice departments were
now exploring legal options for prosecuting Mr. Assange and others involved on
grounds they encouraged the theft of government property”—that is, the secret
military reports documenting US war crimes.

The Journal cited a letter from Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Charles
Johnson to a lawyer for WikiLeaks last week, which stated: “It is the view of
the Department of Defense that WikiLeaks obtained this material in circumstances
that constitute a violation of United States law, and that as long as WikiLeaks
holds this material, the violation of the law is ongoing.”

This effectively declares WikiLeaks to be an “ongoing” criminal enterprise, a
designation that, combined with the sweeping powers assumed by the US executive
branch under its self-declared “war on terror,” could be used as a pretext for
virtually any kind of action, including state violence or “extraordinary
rendition”—the kidnapping of Assange and his dispatch to a secret CIA prison or
even the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

Patrick Martin

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/pers-a23.shtml

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66 uwvoornaam uwachternaam
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********