Bickering, Assange And Wikleaks.

I hadn’t realised it but apparently there is a lot of bickering behind the recent leaks on Gitmo:

“The fight over who had what when, and was supposed to use it how, is leading to some especially hard feelings, including between folks who once got along. The gist seemed to be, “Is there no decency anymore?” Over here we have Wikileaks (presumably Julian Assange), tweeting annoyance over former colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s alleged sneakiness.
“Domschiet, NYT, Guardian, attempted Gitmo spoiler against our 8 group coalition,” tweeted the Wikileaks account. “We had intel on them and published first.” And over there we have Pentagon press secretary and former NBC correspondent Geoff Morrell complaining about the New York Times’ Easter offensive. “Thx to Wikileaks we spent Easter weekend dealing w/NYT & other news orgs publishing leaked classified GTMO docs,” Morrell tweeted earlier today.

That Wikileaks earns the sarcastic thanks in Morrell’s account, considering that Times executive editor Bill Keller says in Calderone’s piece that “WikiLeaks is not our source.” But I guess it’s still a bit easier and less relationship damaging for the Pentagon to go after Assange and company than Keller and his team. “

Michael Calderone at HuffPost covers it too.

TPM LiveWire seems to get to the nub of the issue:

“Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's reputation as a fighter for transparency and destroyer of secrets ought to be thoroughly demolished by today’s spectacle of the New York Times literally forcing him to give up the Guantanamo Bay files he’d been hoarding for months.

Assange has been sitting on the 700-plus Gitmo detainee files since at least May of last year, when accused Wikileaker Bradley Manning confessed in a chat session to passing them to Wikileaks along with a plethora of classified military reports and diplomatic cables. They were the final sizable arrow in Assange’s anti-government quiver, and for months we’ve been waiting, and waiting, and waiting for their inevitable release. But Assange kept holding back.

They were published last night, at long last, only because the New York Times finagled its own copy–presumably from Wikileaks defector Daniel Domscheit-Berg–and shared it with NPR and the Guardian. Wikileaks, which had been working with the Washington Post and other papers on the Gitmo papers but was still keeping the information embargoed, scrambled to get its own version up. “

Update 1: Lest I forget, the NY times a good piece, a History of the Detainee Population.

Julian Assange at Kensingston Town Hall.

The New Statesman failed to organise Live Streaming of their recent event with Julian Assange and couldn’t even get themselves organise to put it on YouTube.

Still, someone has done the job for them.

The clip below is just Assange, more might turn up later, but it is funny that the British media go on and on about ‘new media’ ‘Internet 2.0’, Twitter, and other buzz words they clearly don’t understand, yet they don’t have the wherewithal to upload a simple video to YouTube, how useless.

Update 1: Read more of the New Statesman’s self congratulatory guff at:

This house believes whistleblowers make the world a safer place: Part I

This house believes whistleblowers make the world a safer place: Part II

Julian Assange, Secrets And The Metropolitan Elite.

It is very hard in the Internet age to keep a secret, as Wikileaks have shown. Someone will normally release a document or better still an incriminating video, and then the whole world knows.

YouTube is replete with every form of embarrassing video clip known to humanity, and then some.

However, if you were to look for a video clip of Julian Assange’s latest outing at the Kensington Town Hall, you won’t find anything, yet.

Not only that, but if you weren’t part of the Metropolitan Elites, a New Statesman reader or an interested media type then you probably wouldn’t know it was actually going on, in the first place.

If you did make it, then entry would cost you £20, concessions costing £15.00, not cheap in the age of austerity.

Hunting around assiduously you might find a slightly incoherent page on the New Statesman which purports to be live blogging, but it is next to impossible to follow the debate between Julian Assange and Douglas Murray, etc

Certainly, from the photos it seems to be well attended, by the Metropolitan Elites, but that doesn’t help anyone outside of London wanting to follow the debate.

I would speculate that the New Statesman might have considered doing Live Streaming during the planning of this event, as it is cheap and easy to do, but could have been overruled by a paranoid Julian Assange?

I say that as Assange has a bit of a track record with this type of behaviour. When doing the rounds in Cambridge and sucking up to the would-be elites Assange forbade video recording when he spoke.

It is all rather peculiar, all rather 1950s, keeping discussions within a self selecting few and restricting information on the wider issues.

Readers might think that goes against the ethos of Wikileaks, but it’s hardly surprising, those who have power and control, however, small it is, will often abuse and use it for their own ends. Julian Assange and the Metropolitan Elites are no different in that respect.

Still, I am not sure that Julian Assange or his hosts have a sufficiently well developed sense of irony to see the problem with their own conduct!

Who knows, perhaps, someone will secretly release a bootleg video of the event?

Update 1: Esther Addley adds more:

“But the political commentator Douglas Murray, director of the centre for social cohesion, challenged Assange over the website’s sources of funding, its staffing and connections with the Holocaust denier Israel Shamir, who has worked with the site.

“What gives you the right to decide what should be known or not? Governments are elected. You, Mr Assange are not.”

Murray also challenged the WikiLeaks founder over an account in a book by Guardian writers David Leigh and Luke Harding, in which the authors quote him suggesting that if informants were to be killed following publication of the leaks, they “had it coming to them”.

Assange repeated an earlier assertion that the website “is in the process of suing the Guardian” over the assertion, and asked if Murray would like to “join the queue” of organisations he was suing.

The Guardian has not received any notification of such action from WikiLeaks or its lawyers.

Jason Cowley, the editor of the New Statesman and chair of the debate, interjected to ask: “How can the great champion of open society be using our libel laws to challenge the press?” “

Continuing Coverage: Wikileaks And Assange.

Some new material has been released into the public domain concerning the allegations against Julian Assange.

I can’t make my mind up on it. I think it tends to detract from the issues which have come out during these Wikileaks, Techworld reports:

“Text messages sent by the two women who accuse WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of rape and assault mention “revenge” and “economic gain,” according to testimony during the second day of his extradition hearing.

Defense witness Björn Hurtig said he was allowed under police supervision to examine hundreds of messages, which “suggest things that go against what the claimants have said regarding the rape.”

Hurtig, who is Assange’s attorney in Sweden, said he saw text messages “speaking of revenge” and taking “economic advantage” of Assange, who is wanted for questioning related to alleged incidents with two women in mid-August 2010.

He faces possible charges of unlawful coercion, sexual molestation and rape, but his legal team presents those accusations as a veiled attack related to WikiLeaks’ release of secret U.S. diplomatic cables.”

His solicitors, Finers Stephens Innocent, have other material on their site here.

I haven’t looked through it if anyone finds anything good then please let me know.

And some of my other posts on the matter:

Sorry To My Female Readers.

Julian Assange: Fool? Historically illiterate ? Or Worse?

Julian Assange And The English Middle Class.

Shamir, Stupidity And Julian Assange.

Wikileaks Bits.

Wikileaks, Cyber-attacks And Wandsworth Prison.

Conspiracies, The CIA And The Racist, Israel Shamir.

Sorry To My Female Readers.

I have had time to reflect and I wish to say sorry to my female readers, who I may have inadvertently offended in the discussions around Julian Assange’s Arrest And The Broken Condom.

I feel I was often too caustic, and not sufficiently attuned to the issues, as seen from a different perspective.

Regrettably, I tend to focus on political matters, sometimes to the exclusion of more intricate points.

So my apologies, particularly to any of my female readers who were rightly offended by my unnecessary and direct comments.

Sorry.

Julian Assange’s Arrest And The Broken Condom.

Julian Assange has been arrested on the grounds of rape.

But that might not be the full story, it makes a good headline and him a less sympathetic individual but that’s not the full story.

It seems that Mr. Assange whilst in Sweden months back had sex when a condom broke. It might be that later on he also had unprotected sex with another woman, all very consensual.

But apparently under Swedish law rape can be defined as “unprotected sex”.

This is despite the fact that the case was originally dropped by the prosecutor.

Back in Auguest 2010 according to Karin Rosander, communications head at Sweden’s prosecutors’ office:

“”The [chief prosecutor] will look into that later. She hasn’t been able to do that, but that’s not enough for being arrested. It’s not a serious enough crime.”

That was back in August 2010 before the release of the quarter million documents, which have embarrassed governments across the globe and made Mr. Assange some rather thin-skinned enemies.

In my view, it seems like a pretext to arrest him and eventually deport him to America, and if he lives then he’ll probably be fitted up under some spurious espionage charge.

We have already seen how American politicians openly called for his assassination, he won’t receive a fair trial in America and at the best is destined for years and years of incarceration, for his political crimes.

His crime? Humiliating politicians, potentates, dictators, mandarins and bureaucrats across the world.

His crime? Shining a light onto their incompetency and misrule.

He should be congratulated not punished.

Update 1: Naomi Wolf has her view on the matter too.

Update 2: I missed this before but it certainly has bearing on the case and I feel it should be shown:

“For three months Assange had been waiting in vain to hear whether media statements by and for the two female “victims” that there was no fear or violence were going to be embellished so the charges might be carried forward due to greater seriousness. Such statements would stop a rape charge in any Western country dead in its tracks. Rape is a crime of violence, duress or deception. You can rape someone by deluding them into thinking you are someone else or by drugging them or by reason of their young age but essentially it’s a crime of violence.

The women here are near to and over 30 and have international experience, some of it working in Swedish government embassies. There is no suggestion of drugs nor identity concealment. Far from it. Both women boasted of their celebrity connection to Assange after the events that they would now see him destroyed for.

That further evidence hasn’t been confected to make the charges less absurd does Sweden no credit because it has no choice in the matter. The phenomena of social networking through the internet and mobile phones constrains Swedish authorities from augmenting the evidence against Assange because it would look even less credible in the face of tweets by Anna Ardin and SMS texts by Sofia Wilén boasting of their respective conquests after the “crimes”.

In the case of Ardin it is clear that she has thrown a party in Assange’s honour at her flat after the “crime” and tweeted to her followers that she is with the “the world’s coolest smartest people, it’s amazing!”. Go on the internet and see for yourself. That Ardin has sought unsuccessfully to delete these exculpatory tweets from the public record should be a matter of grave concern. That she has published on the internet a guide on how to get revenge on cheating boyfriends ever graver. The exact content of Wilén’s mobile phone texts is not yet known but their bragging and exculpatory character has been confirmed by Swedish prosecutors. Niether Wilén’s nor Ardin’s texts complain of rape.

But then neither Arden nor Wilén complained to the police but rather “sought advice”, a technique in Sweden enabling citizens to avoid just punishment for making false complaints. They sought advice together, having collaborated and irrevocably tainted each other’s evidence beforehand. Their SMS texts to each other show a plan to contact the Swedish newspaper Expressen beforehand in order to maximise the damage to Assange. They belong to the same political group and attended a public lecture given by Assange and organised by them. You can see Wilén on the YouTube video of the event even now.”