CounterPunch Diary
Julian Assange: Wanted by the Empire, Dead or Alive
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
The
American airwaves quiver with the screams of parlor assassins howling
for Julian Assange's head. Jonah Goldberg, contributor to the National
Review, asks in his syndicated column, "Why wasn't Assange garroted in
his hotel room years ago?" Sarah Palin wants him hunted down and brought
to justice, saying: "He is an anti-American operative with blood on his
hands."
Assange can survive these theatrical blusters. A tougher question is
how he will fare at the hands of the US government, which is hopping
mad. The US attorney general, Eric Holder, has announced that the
Justice Department and Pentagon are conducting "an active, ongoing
criminal investigation" into the latest Assange-facilitated leak under
Washington's Espionage Act.
Asked how the US could prosecute Assange, a non-US citizen, Holder
said, "Let me be clear. This is not saber-rattling," and vowed "to
swiftly close the gaps in current US legislation…"
In other words the espionage statute is being
rewritten to target Assange, and in short order, if not already,
President Obama – who as a candidate pledged "transparency" in
government - will sign an order okaying the seizing of Assange and his
transport into the US jurisdiction. Render first, fight the habeas
corpus lawsuits later.
Interpol, the investigative arm of the
International Criminal Court at The Hague, has issued a fugitive notice
for Assange. He's wanted in Sweden for questioning in two alleged sexual
assaults, one of which seems to boil down to a charge of unsafe sex and
failure to phone his date the following day.
This prime accuser, Anna Ardin has, according to Israel Shamir,
writing on this CounterPunch site, "ties to the US-financed anti-Castro
and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes in
the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by
Misceláneas de Cuba…Note that Ardin was deported from Cuba for subversive
activities."
It's certainly not conspiracism to suspect that the CIA has been at
work in fomenting these Swedish accusations. As Shamir reports, "The
moment Julian sought the protection of Swedish media law, the CIA
immediately threatened to discontinue intelligence sharing with SEPO,
the Swedish Secret Service."
The CIA has no doubt also pondered the
possibility of pushing Assange off a bridge or through a high window (a
mode of assassination favored by the Agency from the earliest days) and
has sadly concluded that it's too late for this sort of executive
solution.
The irony is that the thousands of diplomatic
communications released by WikiLeaks contain no earth-shaking
disclosures that undermine the security of the American empire. The bulk
of them merely illustrate the well-known fact that in every capital
city round the world there is a building known as the U.S. Embassy
inhabited by people whose prime function is to vanquish informed
assessment of local conditions with swaddling cloths of ignorance and
prejudice instilled in them by what passes for higher education in the
United States, whose governing elites are now more ignorant of what is
really happening in the outside world that at any time in the nation’s
history.
The reports in the official press invite us
to be stunned at the news that the King of Saudi Arabia wishes Iran was
wiped off the map, that the US uses diplomats as spies, that Afghanistan
is corrupt, also that corruption is not unknown in Russia! These press
reports foster the illusion that U.S. embassies are inhabited by
intelligent observers zealously remitting useful information to their
superiors in Washington DC . To the contrary, diplomats – assuming they
have the slightest capacity for intelligent observation and analysis --
soon learn to advance their careers by sending reports to Foggy Bottom
carefully tuned to the prejudices of the top State Department and
White House brass, powerful members of Congress and major players
throughout the bureaucracies. Remember that as the Soviet Union slid
towards extinction, the US Embassy in Moscow was doggedly supplying
quavering reports of a puissant Empire of Evil still meditating whether
to invade Western Europe!
This is not to downplay the great importance
of this latest batch of WikiLeaks. Millions in America and around the
world have been given a quick introductory course in international
relations and the true arts of diplomacy – not least the third-rate,
gossipy prose with which the diplomats rehearse the arch romans à clef they
will write when they head into retirement.
Years ago Rebecca West wrote in her novel The Thinking Reed
of a British diplomat who, "even when he was peering down a woman's
dress at her breasts managed to look as though he was thinking about
India." In the updated version, given Hillary Clinton's orders to the
State Department, the US envoy, pretending to admire the figure of the
charming French cultural attaché, would actually be thinking how to
steal her credit card information, obtain a retinal scan, her email
passwords and frequent flier number.
There are also genuine disclosures of great
interest, some of them far from creditable to the establishment US
press. On our CounterPunch site last week Gareth Porter
identified a diplomatic cable from last February released by WikiLeaks
which provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the
Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the US suggestion that Iran
has missiles that could target European capitals or that Iran intends to
develop such a capability. Porter points out that:
"Readers of the two leading US newspapers never learned those key facts
about the document. The New York Times and Washington Post
reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such
missiles - supposedly called the BM-25 - from North Korea. Neither
newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the US view on the
issue or the lack of hard evidence for the BM-25 from the US side.
"The Times, which had obtained the diplomatic cables not from WikiLeaks but
from the Guardian, according to a Washington Post
story Monday, did not publish the text of the cable. The Times story
said the newspaper had made the decision not to publish 'at the request
of the Obama administration'. That meant that its readers could not
compare the highly distorted account of the document in the Times story
against the original document without searching the Wikileaks website."
Distaste among the "official" US press for
WikiLeaks has been abundantly apparent from the first of the two big
releases of documents pertaining to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The New York Times managed the ungainly feat of publishing some of the
leaks while simultaneously affecting to hold its nose, and while
publishing a mean-spirited hatchet job on Assange by its reporter John F
Burns, a man with a well burnished record in touting the various
agendas of the US government.
There have been cheers for Assange and
WikiLeaks from such famed leakers as Daniel Ellsberg, but to turn on
one's television is to eavesdrop on the sort of fury that Lord Haw-Haw –
aka the Irishman William Joyce, doing propaganda broadcasts from
Berlin -- used to provoke in Britain in World War II. As Glenn
Greenwald wrote in his column on the Salon site:
"On CNN, Wolf Blitzer was beside himself
with rage over the fact that the US government had failed to keep all
these things secret from him... Then - like the Good Journalist he is -
Blitzer demanded assurances that the Government has taken the necessary
steps to prevent him, the media generally and the citizenry from finding
out any more secrets: 'Do we know yet if they've [done] that fix? In
other words, somebody right now who has top secret or secret security
clearance can no longer download information onto a CD or a thumb drive?
Has that been fixed already?' The central concern of Blitzer - one of
our nation's most honored 'journalists' - is making sure that nobody
learns what the US Government is up to."
These latest WikiLeaks files contains some
261,000,000 words - about 3,000 books. They display the entrails of the
American Empire. As Israel Shamir wrote here last week,
"The files show US political infiltration of nearly every country, even
supposedly neutral states such as Sweden and Switzerland. US embassies
keep a close watch on their hosts. They have penetrated the media, the
arms business, oil, intelligence, and they lobby to put US companies at
the head of the line."
Will this vivid record of imperial outreach
in the early 21st century soon be forgotten? Not if some competent
writer offers a readable and politically vivacious redaction. But a
warning: in November 1979 Iranian students seized an entire archive of
the State Department, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
at the American embassy in Tehran. Many papers that were shredded were
laboriously reassembled.
These secrets concerned far more than Iran.
The Tehran embassy, which served as a regional base for the CIA, held
records involving secret operations in many countries, notably Israel,
the Soviet Union, Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Beginning in 1982, the Iranians published
some 60 volumes of these CIA reports and other US government documents
from the Tehran archive, collectively entitled Documents From the US Espionage
Den.
As Edward Jay Epstein, a historian of US intelligence agencies, wrote
years ago, "Without a doubt, these captured records represent the most
extensive loss of secret data that any superpower has suffered since the
end of the Second World War."
In fact the Tehran archive truly was a
devastating blow to US national security. It contained vivid portraits
of intelligence operations and techniques, the complicity of US
journalists with US government agencies, the intricacies of oil
diplomacy. The volumes are in some university libraries here. Are they
read? By a handful of specialists. The inconvenient truths were swiftly
buried – and perhaps the WikiLeaks files will soon be fade from memory
too, joining the inspiring historical archive of intelligence coups of
the left.
I should honor here “Spies for Peace” – the
group of direct-action British anarchists and kindred radicals
associated with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Bertrand
Russell’s Committee of 100 who, in 1963, broke into a secret government
bunker, Regional Seat of Government Number 6 (RSG-6) at Warren Row, near
Reading, where they photographed and copied documents, showing secret
government preparations for rule after a nuclear war. They distributed a
pamphlet along with copies of relevant documents to the press,
stigmatizing the “small group of people who have accepted thermonuclear
war as a probability, and are consciously and carefully planning for
it. ... They are quietly waiting for the day the bomb drops, for that
will be the day they take over.” There was a big uproar, and then the
Conservative government of the day issued a D-notice forbidding any
further coverage in the press. The cops and intelligence services hunted
long and hard for the spies for peace, and caught nary a one.
And Assange? Hopefully he will have a long reprieve
from premature burial. Ecuador offered him sanctuary until the US
Embassy in Quito gave the president a swift command and the invitation
was rescinded. Switzerland? Istanbul? Hmmm. As noted above, he should,
at the least, view with caution women eagerly inviting his embraces and
certainly stay away from overpasses, bridges, and open windows.
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."
http://www.counterpunch.org/
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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