[D66] US military brands Assange, WikiLeaks as “the enemy”

[Antid Oto]

US military brands Assange, WikiLeaks as “the enemy”
By Bill Van Auken
28 September 2012

Secret US Air Force documents reveal that the American military has 
branded WikiLeaks and its editor Julian Assange as “the enemy”, placing 
them on a legal par with Al Qaeda and threatening them with the same 
treatment: indefinite detention without trial, and death.

The documents, released under US freedom of information laws and first 
reported in the Australian daily Age, stem from an investigation by the 
Air Force’s counterintelligence branch, the Office of Special 
Investigations. They had been classified “Secret/NoForn,” meaning they 
were not to be shared with any non-US personnel.

The target of the investigation was a US Air Force cyber systems analyst 
stationed in Britain, who was accused of sympathies for Assange and 
WikiLeaks and participating in protests on their behalf. WikiLeaks’ 
publication of secret documents exposing US crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan 
and elsewhere have earned it broad popular support, while provoking an 
international campaign of persecution and vilification by the US 
government and the corporate media.

The Air Force investigators were investigating whether the analyst, who 
had access to the US military’s Secret Internet Protocol Router network, 
had passed on secret documents to WikiLeaks supporters.

What was most significant about the document is that the WikiLeaks 
supporters were defined as an “anti-US and/or anti-military group,” and 
the charge being contemplated in the case was “aiding the enemy” under 
Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Under this same code, “enemy” is defined as “organized forces of the 
enemy in time of war, any hostile body that our forces may be opposing, 
such as a rebellious mob or a band of renegades, and includes civilians 
as well as members of military organizations.”

For those found guilty in a court martial, aiding the enemy carries the 
death penalty.

The analyst denied giving any classified material to WikiLeaks, and 
charges were dropped, while her access to such information was suspended.

Bradley Manning—the US Army soldier who was arrested in Iraq and charged 
with providing WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of classified US 
military and diplomatic cables, exposing massacres and civilian 
casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as US conspiracies 
worldwide—has also been charged with aiding the enemy.

In Manning’s case, however, the military has argued that by allegedly 
helping WikiLeaks publish secret US documents, he had provided aid to Al 
Qaeda. Chillingly enough, given that anyone in the military speaking to 
the media would run the risk of such a charge, it defined Al Qaeda and 
not the media itself—in this case, WikiLeaks—as “the enemy.” With the 
declassified Air Force document, however, this distinction has been erased.

Michael Ratner, Assange’s US attorney and president emeritus of the 
Center for Constitutional Rights, described the implications of this 
shift as extremely serious for his client. He noted that the Air Force 
expressed no specific concerns over documents being published and 
thereby supposedly made accessible to Al Qaeda, as in the Manning case, 
but rather concentrated solely on the alleged threat of secrets being 
shared with Assange or his supporters.

“It appears that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are the ‘enemy,’” said 
Ratner. “An enemy is dealt with under the laws of war, which could 
include killing, capturing, detaining without trial, etc.”

The WikiLeaks editor has been confined for the last three months to the 
London embassy of Ecuador, which has granted him asylum, concluding that 
Assange faced a grave threat of political persecution at the hands of 
the US government if the British government carried through its plan to 
deport him to Sweden. The Swedish government, which has charged him with 
no crime, has demanded that he be extradited there to face trumped-up 
allegations of sexual misconduct. Detention in Sweden would pave the way 
for Washington to seek his extradition to the US on espionage or 
conspiracy charges, which have already been presented to a secret grand 
jury in Virginia.

It was from this London embassy that Assange addressed via video a 
packed audience at a meeting organized Wednesday at the United Nations 
in conjunction with the opening of the General Assembly.

Assange used the address to issue a stinging rebuttal to the 
hypocritical and lying address delivered to the UN General Assembly the 
day before by US President Barack Obama.

The WikiLeaks editor stressed that his own case gave the lie to Obama’s 
posturing as an international champion of democratic rights, and he 
denounced him for “criminalizing more speech than all previous US 
presidents combined.”

The Obama administration, he charged, “is trying to erect a national 
regime of secrecy. A national regime of obfuscation. A regime where any 
government employee revealing sensitive information to a media 
organization can be sentenced to death, life imprisonment or for 
espionage and journalists from a media organization with them.”

Assange began his remarks with what he called “an American story,” a 
tribute to the imprisoned soldier Bradley Manning that deliberately 
tracked Obama’s recent United Nations address, which began with a eulogy 
for the US ambassador killed in the assault on the American consulate in 
Benghazi, Libya.

“Bradley Manning, science fair all-star, soldier and patriot was 
degraded, abused and psychologically tortured by his own government,” 
Assange said. “He was charged with a death penalty offense. These things 
happened to him, as the US government tried to break him, to force him 
to testify against WikiLeaks and me.” He noted that as of Wednesday 
Manning had been detained without trial for 856 days.

The WikiLeaks editor also ridiculed Obama’s claim that Washington had 
“supported the forces of change” in the Middle East.

Referring to the Tunisian fruit vendor whose death ignited the revolt in 
Tunisia, the beginning of the so-called Arab Spring, Assange said, 
“Mohammed Bouazizi did not set himself on fire so that Barack Obama 
could be re-elected.”

He added, “The world knew, after reading WikiLeaks publications, that 
the Ben Ali regime and its government had for long years enjoyed the 
indifference, if not the support, of the United States—in full knowledge 
of its excesses and its crimes.”

Assange continued: “It must come as a surprise to the Egyptian teenagers 
who washed American teargas out of their eyes that the US administration 
supported change in Egypt. It must come as a surprise to those who heard 
Hillary Clinton insist that Mubarak’s regime was ‘stable,’ and when it 
was clear to everyone that it was not, that its hated intelligence 
chief, Suleiman, who we proved the US knew was a torturer, should take 
the realm.”

Citing Obama’s sermonizing to the assembled leaders at the UN that 
“those in power have to resist the temptation to crack down,” Assange 
demanded that the US president heed his own words. “It is time for the 
US to cease its persecution of WikiLeaks, to cease its persecution of 
our people, and to cease its persecution of our alleged sources,” he said.

The Obama administration has not the slightest intention of heeding this 
demand, however. As the declassified Air Force documents make clear, it 
is escalating its attack on WikiLeaks. The US ruling establishment is 
intent on destroying Assange and WikiLeaks as an example for all those 
who would dare to expose its bloody crimes.

Should it succeed in this attempt, it would spell a profound 
intensification of the assault on basic democratic rights waged in the 
US and internationally under the pretext of a “war on terror.”

The fight to defend WikiLeaks, Assange and Manning cannot be carried 
forward through appeals to Obama. It requires the broadest mobilization 
of workers and youth in the US, Britain, Australia and internationally 
in their defense as part of a political struggle against the governments 
involved in their persecution, and the capitalist system itself, which 
is the source of the assault on basic democratic rights.

http://wsws.org/articles/2012/sep2012/wiki-s28.shtml