Tag: Julian Assange

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, arrested in Britain on Swedish allegations of sex crimes, was conditionally granted bail by a British court today, an article by Reuters says this morning. The article notes that “Judge Howard Riddle, who had earlier granted Assange bail under stringent conditions, said Assange must remain in custody until the appeal is heard within 48 hours.”

Riddle, who last week said that Swedish authorities would need to show some convincing evidence if they wanted to oppose bail for the 39-year-old Australian when he appears in court to oppose extradition to Sweden, today granted Assange bail with conditions until another hearing on January 11.

Mr Assange had been refused bail Wednesday December 08, 2010 and sent to Wandsworth prison when he appeared before Judge Riddle to answer a Swedish extradition application.

The Brisbane Times reports that “Mr Assange, 39, won his temporary freedom after his lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, gave Judge Howard Riddle a temporary address where the WikiLeaks founder would stay and agreed to post a guarantee of £200,000 ($US315,280).”

…Mr Assange had not been given any of his mail, including legal letters, since he was jailed.

He was on 23½-hours-a-day ”lock-down” at Wandsworth. He was kept under surveillance on infrared video.

Ahead of his court appearance, Mr Assange blasted Visa, MasterCard and PayPal for blocking donations to his website.

In a defiant statement from behind bars, he claimed the firms were “instruments of US foreign policy” but vowed their actions would not stop the whistle-blowing website from continuing to publish thousands of confidential US diplomatic cables.

Last week, in the wake of Visa, MasterCard and PayPal shutting down donations processing for WikiLeaks, the organizations credit card processor DataCell ehf of Iceland announced its intention to sue Visa and Mastercard, with DataCell CEO Andreas Fink stating that the company “has decided to take up immediate legal actions to make donations possible again,”  and that “The suspension of payments towards Wikileaks is a violation of the agreements with their customers.”

Visa should “just simply do their business where they are good at – transferring money,” Fink wrote.

Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports today that online supporters of Julian Assange working through the Spanish-language website Free WikiLeaks called for worldwide demonstrations Saturday to press for the release of the founder of WikiLeaks from a London jail where he awaits possible extradition to Sweden, and called for the restoration of the Wikileaks.org domain, which Amazon shut down after WikiLeaks began publishing secret US Embassy Diplomatic Cables two weeks ago.

Mirrors of the WikiLeaks site state that “On Sunday 28th November 2010, Wikileaks began publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into the US Government’s foreign activities.”

The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.

The embassy cables will be released in stages over the next few months. The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice.

The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in “client states”; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.

This document release reveals the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors – and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.

Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington – the country’s first President – could not tell a lie. If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today’s document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the US Government has been warning governments — even the most corrupt — around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures.

The full set consists of 251,287 documents, comprising 261,276,536 words (seven times the size of “The Iraq War Logs”, the world’s previously largest classified information release).

The Spanish language site urged rallies at 6 p.m. (1700 GMT) in eight Spanish cities, including Madrid and Barcelona, while similar demonstrations were planned in Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Bogota and Lima, says AFP.

Meanwhile BBC News Europe also reported today that “Protests have taken place across Spain calling for the release of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is facing extradition from the UK to Sweden for alleged sexual offences” and that “The crowd outside the British embassy in Madrid wore Julian Assange masks as they called for his release”, and that the Free WikiLeaks site demanded that Visa and MasterCard restore credit card services because “no one had proven Mr Assange’s guilt”.

Saturday’s protests were some of the first street demonstrations in support of Wikileaks, although there has been a worldwide outpouring of online support shown for Mr. Assange.

The Free Wikileaks site said protests were also planned for other Spanish cities, including Valencia and Seville.  

RawStory today…

Update: Assange attorney says he’s not been allowed to meet with his client

London lawyer, Mark Stephens, told Voice of Russia, the Russian government’s international radio broadcasting service, that British officials will not allow him to meet with Julian Assange until the day before a Dec. 14 court hearing.

“The one thing that is slightly frustrating is that we have another court hearing on December 14 and I’ve not been permitted a legal visit until December 13, which, of course, gives me less than 24 hours to prepare his case,” Stephens said.

Second update: Glenn Greenwald notes that if the Department of Justice is successful in prosecuting Assange, it will be the first time a non-government employee is convicted under the Espionage Act.

[snip]

This video is from ABC’s Good Morning America, broadcast Dec. 10, 2010.

More details in the RawStory report…

Assange may be released

Peter Wilson, Europe correspondent

The Australian,  December 09, 2010 12:00AM

JULIAN Assange has received a glimmer of hope in his battle against sexual abuse allegations.

A British judge says the WikiLeaks founder may be released from jail next week unless Swedish prosecutors produce evidence in London to back up their allegations.

Senior district judge Howard Riddle said Swedish authorities would need to show some convincing evidence if they wanted to oppose bail for the 39-year-old Australian when he appears in court next Tuesday to oppose extradition to Sweden.

Mr Assange was yesterday refused bail and sent to Wandsworth prison when he appeared before Judge Riddle to answer a Swedish extradition application.

The internet activist’s lawyers say if he stays in jail, it will be much harder for them to organise his defence against the Swedish sex charges and to stave off what they believe is a US government plan to charge him with espionage-related crimes over the publication of thousands of secret American cables.

Gemma Lindfield, the lawyer representing Swedish authorities at the initial extradition hearing in the City of Westminster Magistrates Court, said she believed the strength of the evidence over the sex charges was not relevant to the process of extraditing him under a European Arrest Warrant.

Judge Riddle disagreed, saying the four charges, including rape, were “extremely serious allegations (and) if they are false, he suffers a great injustice if he is remanded in custody”.

The judge said he would “suggest” to Ms Lindfield that “if she is going to oppose bail in future”, she would need to be armed with some substantial material to back up the allegations.

Mr Assange’s lawyers, including Australian human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson QC, are worried that if, as seems likely, he is handed over to Swedish custody, the US government would then mount its own extradition case to try to prosecute him over the release of the cables on his website rather than his personal life.

Read all of it here…

It’s not a secret: the Internet was always going to radically change the world of information.  That’s nothing new.  What is new, is that the struggle over who controls and possesses information isn’t going to be fought solely in the courts or in the legislatures or the media.  It’s going to be fought out as well on the Internet itself and the weapons are going to be computers.

The present battle, fought between Wikileaks and its allies, on one side, and its well organized adversaries, including financial organizations and governments, on the other, may eventually bring information democracy, in the form of unprecedented and simple access to all kinds of information, even classified or secret information, to anyone with a modem.  Or at the other pole, it may eventually bring unprecedented censorship through even tighter control of information to the Internet and harsh penalties for publication of various kinds of information.

The New York Times reports from today’s digital battlefront:

LONDON – A broad campaign of cyberattacks appeared to be under way on Wednesday in support of the beleaguered antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks, which has drawn governmental criticism from around the globe for its release of classified American documents and whose founder, Julian Assange, is being held in Britain on accusations of rape.

Attacks were reported on Mastercard.com, which stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; on the lawyer representing the two Swedish women who have accused Mr. Assange of sexual improprieties; and on PostFinance, the Swiss postal system’s financial arm, which closed Mr. Assange’s account after saying he provided false information by saying that he resided in Switzerland.

At least some of the attacks involved distributed denials of service, in which a site is bombarded by requests from a network of computers until it reaches capacity and, effectively, shuts down.

It was unclear whether the various attacks were independently mounted, but suspicion was immediately focused on Anonymous, a leaderless group of activist hackers that had vowed to wreak revenge on any organization that lined up against WikiLeaks and that claimed responsibility for the Mastercard attack.

Anonymous, according to the Times, has expressed its philosophy in two manifestos released this past week, and is battling for nothing less than free information on a free Internet:

The group, which gained notoriety for their cyberattacks…  released two manifestos over the weekend vowing revenge against enemies of WikiLeaks.

“We fight for the same reasons,” said one. “We want transparency and we counter censorship.”

The manifestos singled out companies like PayPal and Amazon, who had cut off service to WikiLeaks after the organization’s recent release of classified diplomatic documents from a cache of 250,000 it had obtained.

In recent days, Gregg Housh, an activist who has worked on previous Anonymous campaigns, said that a core of 100 or so devout members of the group, supplemented by one or two extremely expert hackers, were likely to do most of the damage. Mr. Housh, who disavows any illegal activity himself, said the reason Anonymous had declared its campaign was amazingly simple. Anonymous believes that “information should be free, and the Internet should be free,” he said,

Information, as the law now stands, is anything but free. But the Internet for more than a decade and a half has eroded much of the traditional deference to ownership of information. Napster and its progeny have brought a generation of people who think music and film should all be free.  Readers of Blogs are never disturbed by what amounts to wholesale infringement of copyrighted photos and videos and text. Wikileaks has carried this a step further by publishing enormous amounts of material officially designated “secret”.  The trend on the Internet is toward free and unfettered access to all information.  But those who own the information have no intention whatsoever to allow it to flow without charge and without a fight.

Today’s attacks, I think, mark the Cyber Battle of Lexington and Concord.

——-

simulposted at The Dream Antilles

Stephen Webster writes this morning at RawStory that Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange has been arrested Tuesday morning by London Metropolitan police on a warrant out of Sweden:

The Guardian reports on a statement from Metropolitan police that “Assange, 39, was arrested on a European Arrest Warrant by appointment at a London police station at 9.30 a.m.

He is accused by the Swedish authorities of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape, all alleged to have been committed in August 2010.”

Assange’s attorney says they plan to fight extradition to Sweden. A full extradition hearing is expected sometime in the next 21 days. If he is successfully taken to Sweden, the Guardian noted, he could also be legally vulnerable to extradition requests from other countries as well.

His attorneys were reportedly negotiating a sum for bail, but his freedom was not certain as Swedish rape laws make bail more difficult to obtain when the charge is rape.

Assange has reportedly recorded a video statement, set to be published online later Tuesday.

Hork!

“The whole chain of command who was aware of this order, and approved it, must resign if the US is to be seen to be a credible nation that obeys the rule of law. The order is so serious it may well have been put to the president for approval,” Julian Assange told Spanish daily El Pais.

“Obama must answer what he knew about this illegal order and when. If he refuses to answer or there is evidence he approved of these actions, he must resign,” he added during an Internet chat interview published online.

“…if the US is to be seen to be a credible nation that obeys the rule of law.”

This guy has a very dark sense of humor.  He’ll be found dead in a fishing net before the US even feigns credibility on the rule of law.

In 1953 the CIA distributed to its agents and operatives a killer’s training manual (made public in 1997) full of hands-on advice:

 

“The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve… The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the ‘horrified witness’, no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary.”

Originally posted at Polizeros.com

Bloggers like Bob Morris of Polizeros have pointed out that even some who are typically rebellious in their rhetoric are condemning Julian Assange (while there are people like Jonah Goldberg and Chuck Schumer calling for his head), so I think it’s worth pointing out how historically important Assange (and Wikileaks, of course) could be.  With the caveat that we have all yet to see the effects of what Wikileaks is doing, he has the potential to play two essential and complementary roles: radical anti-authoritarian and someone who makes it safe for others to voice similar opinions.

Robert Fisk: The Shaming of America

The UK Independent, Sunday, October 24, 2010

As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims.

Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could counter every claim, every allegation against the Americans or British with some worthy general – the ghastly US military spokesman Mark Kimmitt and the awful chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace, come to mind – to ring-fence us with lies. Find a man who’d been tortured and you’d be told it was terrorist propaganda; discover a house full of children killed by an American air strike and that, too, would be terrorist propaganda, or “collateral damage”, or a simple phrase: “We have nothing on that.”

Of course, we all knew they always did have something. And yesterday’s ocean of military memos proves it yet again. Al-Jazeera has gone to extraordinary lengths to track down the actual Iraqi families whose men and women are recorded as being wasted at US checkpoints – I’ve identified one because I reported it in 2004, the bullet-smashed car, the two dead journalists, even the name of the local US captain – and it was The Independent on Sunday that first alerted the world to the hordes of indisciplined gunmen being flown to Baghdad to protect diplomats and generals. These mercenaries, who murdered their way around the cities of Iraq, abused me when I told them I was writing about them way back in 2003.

[snip]

We still haven’t got to the bottom of the WikiLeaks story, and I rather suspect that there are more than just a few US soldiers involved in this latest revelation. Who knows if it doesn’t go close to the top? In its investigations, for example, al-Jazeera found an extract from a run-of-the-mill Pentagon press conference in November 2005. Peter Pace, the uninspiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is briefing journalists on how soldiers should react to the cruel treatment of prisoners, pointing out proudly that an American soldier’s duty is to intervene if he sees evidence of torture. Then the camera moves to the far more sinister figure of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who suddenly interrupts – almost in a mutter, and to Pace’s consternation – “I don’t think you mean they (American soldiers) have an obligation to physically stop it. It’s to report it.”

Julian Assange of Wikileaks and Professsor John Sloboda of the Iraq Body Count project spoke Saturday morning in a news conference at the Frontline Club in London, England.

Sloboda gave his early assessment of what the Iraq War Logs released by WikiLeaks add to the known Iraqi death toll, while Assange defended his decision to publish the leaked documents, saying “this disclosure is about the truth” and that his hope is to correct some of the attacks on the “truth” about the Iraq invasion and occupation by the Pentagon and the American government and US mainstream media.

The BBC reported this morning, with their reporter Gordon Corera framing the initial spin UK mainstream media will put on the release of the logs: