.jpg "Wikileaks boss is not being picked on -")
Yesterday as the jail door slammed behind Wikileaks boss Julian Assange the world split between those who want him jailed for treason and those who think he is a victim of a CIA plot to discredit him.
'Evidence' emerged that one of the women who made the accusation of sexual assault against Assange had "links to the CIA" and there was a rumour that the US government was going to try to extradite Assange on treason charges.
Many in the IT press were shocked that Assange was remanded in custody pending his appeal against extradition, and this formed the basis of the plot allegations.
What many do not understand was that the moment that the Assange turned himself in, he was going to be jailed. I have sat in countless UK bail applications in my years as a hack. They all turn out to be a very dull checklist of qualifications that magistrates or Judges have to go through.
You rarely get bail in the UK if you do not have ties to the area that you have been arrested in. You would need an address for that and staying at the home of a business associate is not enough. Assange's address on the charge sheet, if it exists at all, would be foreign or "no fixed abode".
Lawyers attempting to get NFA people bail hardly ever succeed. The logic is that if the arrested person does not have an address, it is better that we give him one.
Neither will you get bail if there is a chance that you will not turn up for your next court date. This one is harder to assess. Often this is tied to whether or not the case is serious enough to want to avoid. Murder cases are always locked up. Sex cases are sometimes serious enough too. With all the pressure on him and few cares about where he was arrested Assange could easily do a runner.
So when Assange appeared before Senior District Judge Howard Riddle he would have found the boxes filled. Riddle said there were substantial grounds to believe Assenge could abscond if granted bail, the charges were serious and Assange had comparatively weak community ties in Britain. If Riddle had let Assange go, he would have set a legal precedent on bail which was never going to happen. As far as British Justice goes there is no need to wear a tin foil hat.
So what about the "links to the CIA" charge that has been levelled at one of his accessors?
Anna Ardin's links to Cuba were posted on several websites Tuesday after Assange surrendered in London to answer a warrant issued for his arrest by Sweden.
Ardin works in Sweden's Uppsala University visited Cuba about four times between 2002 and 2006 as a representative of Swedish social democrats.
Ardin has written for Asignaturas Cubanas, a Cuban exile magazine published in Sweden, and her 2007 master's thesis at Uppsala University had the catchy title"The Cuban multi-party system. Is the democratic alternative really democratic and an alternative after the Castro regime?"
Two left-of-center websites also alleged that she was close to Cuban exile author Carlos Alberto Montaner and the Ladies in White, female relatives of Cuban political prisoners. One website claims that Montaner has links with the CIA. The links are tentative, the CIA backs a lot of anti-Castro groups it does not mean that they are all populated by its agents.
Even if that were the case, Montaner can't remember ever having met Ardin and the Ladies in White are certain that they haven't.
So what we are left with is a link between Ardin and the CIA which is more distant than her connection to Kevin Bacon.
Going through the Web II comments from readers about Ardin's connection, and the court case it seems that the moment you suggest that Assange might have just been a dickhead and treated too women badly, you will be rounded upon for drinking the CIA cool aid and that the whole thing was an obvious honey trap.
It is based on Assange's own idea that somehow Wikileaks could not function without him and that he had no chance of winning a case in court because the forces of darkness were all stacked against him.
As it turns out Wikileaks would function a lot better without him. Him staying on after the sex scandal was made public was a terrible mistake which cost the organisation manpower and skills. If he was so innocent he should have turned himself into a martyr, stood down from Wikileaks, gone to court, been acquitted and returned. However, Assange has consistently run away from doing anything like this.
As far as the wheels of Justice are concerned two women have called him a sex pest. It is fairly likely that if that is true then other women will suffer in similar circumstances therefore it is important that he be tried. If he is not a sex pest he will go free. If he is then he has to learn that his attitude to women sucks and it does not matter how he is saving the free world by releasing documents he needs to be a better human.
Some of the comments on Web II sites about the alleged crimes are particularly disturbing. They are written mostly by men who claim that it is not really rape. The assumption is that is OK to have sex with a woman even when she says no "because she said yes to start with". It is a dark assumption that, despite the rise of feminism, appears to have never been challenged.
Either way it is an assumption which should be tested in court without allegations of CIA conspiracy. The Wheels of Justice are so far turning without such emotion with everything being done by the book.
We NEED proper steering mechanism to survive the global society we created with technology. Transparency/involvement is needed. It's urgent, at this moment our society has an obsolete 200 years old steering mechanism. How can a few wise leaders understand these complex global issues pending ?
Would we have gone to Iraq over Weapons of mass destruction is we were part of the diplomatic cable discussion ?
Better of with more transparency ? Credit Crises / Cable gate shows governments are not so much in control of the global society. Wasn't it work of the press to tell us the truth ?
Can the government be specific what is so threatening, because NO ONE DIED by the cables released. People did die because the same amount of money did go to Foreign Affair as to public health care.
At least the cork out of the bottle. Fact is that secrets are harder to keep anno 2010. Shutting down is naive. Discuss it is the only option.. If democracy fails, the only solution is MORE democracy!. Fill the streets and discuss where the press fails.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wrote this Op-Ed for The Australian today:
Key lines:
* WikiLeaks is fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.
* The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the
Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians
gag the media from reporting the truth.
* (My idea is) to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.
* People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes
nations need to go to war, and there are just wars.
* The Gillard government (Australia) is trying to shoot the messenger
because it doesn’t want the truth revealed.
Text follows:
IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s
The News, wrote: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems
inevitable that truth will always win.”
His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch’s expose
that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent
British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to
shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts
led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.
Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts
that need to be made public.
I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds
bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be
corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the
Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to
what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the
truth.
These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these
core values. The idea, conceived in Australia , was to use internet
technologies in new ways to report the truth.
WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We
work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to
prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news
story, then to click online to see the original document it is based
on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the
journalist report it accurately?
Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that
media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed
some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories
about corporate corruption.
People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes
nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is
nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those
wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their
taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the
truth and the people will decide whether to support it.
If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, any of the US
embassy cables or any of the stories about the things WikiLeaks has
reported, consider how important it is for all media to be able to
report these things freely.
WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other
media outlets, including Britain ‘s The Guardian, The New York Times,
El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same
redacted cables.
Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that
has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US
government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even
though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens
of serious calls in the US for me to be “taken out” by US special
forces. Sarah Palin says I should be “hunted down like Osama bin
Laden”, a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me
declared a “transnational threat” and disposed of accordingly. An
adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister’s office has called on national
television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called
for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed
for no other reason than to get at me.
And Australians should observe with no pride the disgraceful pandering
to these sentiments by Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other
media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times
and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and
small.
We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the
messenger because it doesn’t want the truth revealed, including
information about its own diplomatic and political dealings.
Has there been any response from the Australian government to the
numerous public threats of violence against me and other WikiLeaks
personnel? One might have thought an Australian prime minister would
be defending her citizens against such things, but there have only
been wholly unsubstantiated claims of illegality. The Prime Minister
and especially the Attorney-General are meant to carry out their
duties with dignity and above the fray. Rest assured, these two mean
to save their own skins. They will not.
Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US
agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with
the State Department: “You’ll risk lives! National security! You’ll
endanger troops!” Then they say there is nothing of importance in what
WikiLeaks publishes. It can’t be both. Which is it?
It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During
that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person,
as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US , with
Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few
months alone.
US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US
congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been
compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated
there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being
harmed in Afghanistan . NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn’t find a
single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of
Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt
by anything we have published.
But our publications have been far from unimportant. The US diplomatic
cables reveal some startling facts:
The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and
information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA,
fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and
ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably
Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US Officials in Jordan and
Bahrain want Iran ‘s nuclear program stopped by any means available.
Britain’s Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect “US interests”.
Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept
from parliament.
The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed
detainees from Guantanamo Bay . Barack Obama agreed to meet the
Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific
neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept
detainees.
In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme
Court said “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose
deception in government”. The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today
reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the
truth.
Julian Assange is the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.
So what we are left with is a link between Ardin and the CIA which is more distant than her connection to Kevin Bacon."
If you just *believe* the likes of Montaner and the Ladies in White, when asked about their acquaintances, THEN YOU ARE A COMPLETE FOOL. they are known to lie all the time, especially concerning the CIA ties of themselves or others (such as Ardin). on this front, they are compulsive liars. that you take their statements of "oh, never met her!" as qualified fact, is absurd.