. ‘Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Wikileaks:
. Can the global support movement hold the line?’

 

The Support Assange and WikiLeaks Coalition was formed to oppose the political persecution of Julian Assange and the attempts to shut down WikiLeaks. We meet regularly to organize actions and spread the word about Assange and WikiLeaks. We keep a watching brief on the fate of Bradley Manning.

Anyone who shares our aims is welcome to join us. The Coalition has no membership structure, no political affiliations and funds its own activities. We are one of many support groups in Australia and around the world. And I’d like to acknowledge my Coalition friends here tonight.

I have been involved with the Coalition since the beginning of this year, but I have been a supporter of WikiLeaks longer than that; probably, like many people, since the release of Collateral Murder. For me as an archivist, concerned with recordkeeping in all forms as a means of holding the powerful to account, their work and what they have achieved stands in stark contrast with the conventional methods of delivering the right evidence at the right time to actually correct wrongs - to make a difference. This is what drew me to them and which continued to engage me as I work to build more humane recordkeeping and information delivery systems in my sphere of work.

So what is it that we in groups like the Coalition and others in the global support movement are holding the line against? You probably all know the basics of what WIkileaks does, but worth a quick recap.

WikiLeaks is a not for profit free press organization who have brought high level cryptographic skills and online hyper-dissemination to facilitate both small and large scale publishing of material from anonymous whistleblowers. They have been in operation for some five years but it was their 2010 publishing activity that brought them to worldwide attention.

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Of course these started with Collateral Murder, the video of a US Apache helicopter mowing down civilians on a Baghdad street with the casual banter of its operators sounding for all the world like a couple of teenage boys playing computer games.

As we near the 11th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan on October 7, recall that over two years ago WikiLeaks released the Afghan War Diary, an extraordinary compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010.

And also in 2010 we saw the Iraq War Logs and on November 28, 2010, WikiLeaks began publishing over 250,000 United States embassy cables. The release, widely known as Cablegate, contains diplomatic analysis from world leaders and diplomats' assessment of host countries and their officials. The documents give the world an unprecedented insight into the US government’s foreign policy and actions in almost every corner of the globe. Significant flow on effects from the cable releases have been felt in the Arab world, in post tsunami Japan, Latin America and in South East Asia; giving people the information they had been lacking to understand and address administrative and political wrongs.

And some people don’t realize this but WikiLeaks’ publishing activities have continued through 2011 and into 2012; with the Spy Files, the Global Intelligence Files and most recently the Syria emails.

I think it’s important to recognize that not only does WikiLeaks reveal war crimes, corruption and abuse of power, but in fact they are giving us some pretty basic information about the world to allow us to make sense of it and make rational decisions about our governments, our interactions with companies and so on.

While WikiLeaks’ publishing activity was mainly focusing on governments and corporations in the developing world they were not exactly left alone but they operated relatively freely, defending themselves against occasional attack whether in the courts or by threats to their personnel. It is only since these 2010 releases that were of United States government records - the largest release of US Govt classified information by a publisher since the Pentagon Papers - that the true war against WikiLeaks has begun.

And there have been some very obvious offensive tactics by the United States in this war.

 

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Such as the financial blockade of Wikileaks…

Since 7th December 2010 - within ten days of the launch of Cablegate - an arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade of payments to Wikileaks has been imposed by Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union. The attack has destroyed 95% of their revenue.

They depend entirely on donations from supporters, they do not have advertising or corporate backers, so this has been a very effective attack.

And it is still in place now, two years later, with no sign of being lifted - despite the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, amongst many others, having openly criticized it.

Of course the lead was taken on this blockade, by these US corporations acting under extreme political pressure. PayPal founder Peter Thiele admitted as much at a public forum in January 2011 speaking of the ‘incredible pressure brought to bear on companies to cave’.

And unfortunately it was made all too easy for Australian branches of these companies to toe the line when early in 2011 we had Prime Minister Gillard declaring Wikileaks ‘illegal’ and then Attorney General McLelland threatening to cancel Assange’s passport.

Indeed, after being pressed on the matter by a WL supporter and subsequently in the press, the Vice President of Mastercard in Australia David Masters actually said regarding MasterCard’s decision to suspend acceptance of payments to WikiLeaks:

“Given the serious nature of the allegations and some of the public comments by senior elected officials from around the world we believed it was prudent to suspend acceptance.”

Is worth noting Mr Masters is an ex ALP staffer and associate of the former Attourney General Robert McLelland (thank you Matt).

Visa has made similar statements about suspending services to anyone who has broken the law. And yet Wikileaks has broken no law, but Visa - and the others - continue to provide services to an organization like News International - who has been shown in the UK to have repeatedly broken laws in relation to phone hacking. These activities have also been ‘condemned by senior elected officials from around the world’, haven’t they? And yet they have not had their use of these services suspended.

To any reasonable person, surely the blockade cannot be defended in terms of logic. We can only fall back to its political aim of shutting down a publisher that has embarrassed a super power. Do we agree with this? If we don’t we should, as Senator Scott Ludlam of the Australian Greens has urged us, ask our politicians what the hell they think they’re doing, allowing this kind of censorship and interference in our civil liberties to stand.

And we should keep this pressure up - otherwise who will be next? As the old media orgs like Fairfax fall by the wayside new media supported by subscribers and donation becomes essential. Will Crikey or New Matilda be cut off if they publish something the US government doesn’t like?

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The other most obvious offensive tactic by the US is the WikiLeaks Grand Jury - obvious to everyone, that is, except the Australian Government, according to Senator Carr’s recent public statements.

Confidential emails obtained from the US private intelligence firm Stratfor (the Texas based intelligence firm with the ear of Washington) show that the United States Government has had a secret indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for more than 12 months.

Fred Burton, Stratfor’s Vice-President for Counterterrorism and Corporate Security, is a former Deputy Chief of the Department of State’s counterterrorism division for the Diplomatic Security Service. So clearly he is well connected in Washington.

In early 2011, Burton revealed in internal Stratfor correspondence that a secret Grand Jury had already issued a sealed indictment for Assange: "Not for Pub — We have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect." We also know about the Grand Jury despite the secrecy that always surrounds these because of first hand reports of witnesses called before it.

In addition, our own embassy in Washington reported in February of this year - according to FOI documents obtained by Philip Dorling - that “the US investigation into possible criminal conduct by Mr Assange has been ongoing for more than a year”.

The embassy identified a wide range of criminal charges the US could bring against Assange, including espionage, conspiracy, unlawful access to classified information and computer fraud. Australian diplomats expect that any charges against Assange would be carefully and narrowly drawn in an effort to avoid conflict with the First Amendment free speech provisions of the US Constitution.

And yet Senator Carr, Prime Minister Gillard and Attorney General Roxon continue to stick to the carefully worded line that they have been ‘shown no evidence’ of such an investigation or indictment and so the investigations go on - including the gathering of evidence at Bradley Manning’s pretrial hearings. Basically the view of many of us is that the US is patiently biding its time before Assange is in a Swedish jail, held incommunicado and able to be swiftly and secretly brought to the US under the Swedish - US bilateral extradition treaty.

So we have this kind of clear evidence of these threats on which to base resistance and protest.

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But other attacks can prove more difficult to deal with - whether because of the sophisticated way in which they are deployed or because of the way they can polarize opinion. It is these that I want to also spend a little time talking about.

There have been an array of different kinds of reputational and operational attacks on WikiLeaks and its infrastructure.

As Assange observed in a recent interview, we see politicians and others make frequent use of the rhetorical trick that WikiLeaks has ‘blood on their hands’ - when no single instance of death or harm has been reported as a result of their releases. And these statements are coming from US politicians who are quite prepared to live with the blood of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians on their hands as a result of unmanned drone strikes and other war crimes.

There have also been many occasions where WikiLeaks’ infrastructure has come under attack from what are called Distributed Denial of Service Attacks - coordinated attempts (often successful) to shut down websites by using millions of computers to hit them at once. This is particularly diabolical in that the group that claims to be behind the most recent attack has branded itself as part of the Anonymous movement - a group whose members are overwhelmingly WikiLeaks supporters, and whose ranks have been infiltrated by organizations like the FBI with increasing regularity recently.

There’s the ‘I support WikiLeaks but I don’t like Assange’ meme.

As much as there is a team of individuals who have worked on WikiLeaks and continue to do so, it is Assange’s vision; and its future is inextricably bound up with his. And, as editor in chief, of course his struggle against smear and attack over the last couple of years is simply one facet of the overall barrage of attacks faced by WikiLeaks. To suggest, as some have, that he should simply quietly remove himself to give WikiLeaks a chance to continue misses the whole point of what has occurred. Only by Assange fighting for his own reputation and freedom can WikiLeaks’ - and other future WikiLeaks’ - reputation and freedom to publish be assured.

I think also that this desire to separate out Assange’s fight from the work of WikiLeaks is because the underlying forces at work attacking him are confronting and uncomfortable for some. Using the evidence to understand his situation is in many ways like using WikiLeaks releases to really dig down into the mire of power and money flows that drive political outcomes. It’s not easy nor is it comfortable. Much easier in general to stick with the message about the need for free press (as important as that is).

 

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So, as someone who has observed things closely over the last couple of years I would suggest that attacks on Assange’s person often stem from things like:
- the Swedish case
- his criticism of the media and journalists, or
- his politics

So with regard to the Swedish case, there are a number of concerns that I would classify as being about proportionality, abuse of process and political interference.

The basic facts of this matter are that two women approached a police station in Stockholm to ask a question about whether someone could be forced to take an STD test. Neither has alleged that Assange was violent, and indeed they remained on good terms with him after the events eventually documented by the police - we have seen photos and tweets that prove this. Where it ended up a few months later was with the issue of a European Arrest Warrant and an Interpol Red Notice - the kind of legal instrument issued in the past for Muammer Gaddafi.

And - and these are details that many people are not aware of - in between these two events he made himself available to answer questions before seeking permission to leave Sweden, which was granted by the Prosecutor Marianne Ny.

Only after he had left and within a week of publishing Cablegate, did Sweden issue the Red Notice to answer some questions, which he had already answered, on an ambiguous matter with no charges in sight.

As feminist Naomi Wolf commented at the time, a highly disproportionate response to things which, if true, would not even fall into the criminal domain in most countries.

And there are many other red flags in this matter.

There have been abuses of process throughout the case, including

● Leaks by police and the prosecution to the media, and
● Breaches of police procedures in the investigation of the allegations - including the fact that the police officer who interviewed the complainants was a friend of one of them.

And there have been signs of political interference, such as:

● The disproportionate behaviour of the Prosecutor in refusing voluntary offers for cooperation and refusing to make use of alternative methods for interviewing Julian - insisting instead on an international warrant which unduly restricted his liberty;
● The adverse and prejudicial media coverage, fuelled by the state-funded lawyer for the complainants and the country’s most senior politicians, including the Prime Minister.

Assange and his team would actually like the opportunity to resolve this matter. It should have been resolved months ago. But neither the Swedish nor the UK Governments will give him any assurances about onwards extradition to the US, and so he has fought.

Essentially by doing so he has been in limbo and his liberty severely constrained for almost two years now.

And sometimes these matters have been challenging for those who support Assange and Wikileaks to respond to.

Of course there are always the facts of the matter to speak about, but what I mean by challenging is that the conversations on gender politics can very easily deflect attention away from other aspects of his situation, and indeed in many cases shut it down completely. It is very hard to talk about the persecution of Assange for his publishing activities or about his right to proper process and maybe even a little bit of privacy - when the response becomes instead a debate on women’s rights or acceptable boundaries for State intervention in men’s and women’s relationships.

Of course the proper protection of women’s rights needs demands our attention, as does getting the balance right on appropriate kinds of State intervention in personal relationships - particularly in Sweden - but it is unfortunate that these questions come to confuse and overshadow some of the very real concerns about what is behind the extradition process and what could lie in the future for Assange.

 

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My own view is that this whole thing has been a very handy opportunistic strategy - where you have political actors in Sweden who are perhaps keen to make a name for themselves or to please powerful friends we can see how this initially minor and probably easily resolvable matter involving Assange coming up in mid 2010 could be seen as a great opportunity to curry favour with power, whether in Sweden or indeed with US interests.

So yes, he has fought the extradition process and yes, he calls out media outlets and journalists when they talk about him facing charges (there are none) or even being a rapist.

He picks up on and seeks to correct libel, false media statements and this is often interpreted as narcissism. I think a more interesting question is why don’t more people fight? Why do they simply shrug and say “Oh the media makes things up...”?

 

So as a journalist, he makes enemies in the media, where he sees not only sloppy reporting, but patterns of corruption. And I’m not just talking about brown envelope type corruption, but what he is often talking about are more opaque networks of mutual benefit and influence, generally feeding more wealth, power and influence to the elite of the West - and supporting their political worldview. To say these things about the Guardian newspaper or others that have elements of good and honest work is not popular or well understood, and easily turned into sound-bytes by detractors - often - unsurprisingly in the media themselves. Much of what they are reacting to is not just Assange’s frank assessments of the broader context in which they operate, but the lowered standards of journalism in a world where spin and pizazz trump detailed evidence to back up a story every time. Assange espouses the technique of scientific journalism where source materials are always provided with the story, while often the journalists he calls out are practicing what Antony Loewenstein calls stenography, despite claims of independence.

Sometimes I think the defense of WikiLeaks and Assange can be muddled when people assume that because they believe in the human rights and justice related principles defended by WikiLeaks, that WikiLeaks is itself aligned with other aspects of their own politics or parties’ platforms - and then they get hurt or angry when this accord is not apparent or subverted by some action by WikiLeaks or Assange. You can see this happening quite frequently in the liberal media.

Actually, WikiLeaks is about understanding for yourself the full range of actions, reactions and relationships that exist in any given situation and making up your own mind - and saying that the ability to do this should not be limited to only a few. It is about independent thinking based on fact, not messages fed through the filter of corporate media, political spin and vested interests. This independence of thought, importance of free speech and reliance on the evidence above all else, sits above political parties, left, right or other.

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My friend Suelette Dreyfus has occasionally spoken of Wikileaks’ work with a very apt quote from Hollywood - the scene in “A Few Good Men” when Jack Nicholson says after being pressed by Tom Cruise to reveal secrets: “You can’t handle the truth’.

Because what Wikileaks does is show us unexpurgated truth - the unpublished, hidden and often uncomfortable version of events. Can we handle the truth?

Do we have the maturity and the will to break out of the cycle of messages fed to us by government and the media that are designed to reinforce stereotypes, make sure we understand who the goodies and the baddies are, and feel comforted that the interests that will directly support us in achieving wealth or privilege remain un-assailed?

Do we want to properly understand the true situations of global diplomacy, the war in Afganistan or the endemic surveillance on citizens the world over as we go about our lives online?

Can we be bothered understanding the facts about what has happened to Julian Assange? Or would we would prefer to swallow the tabloid line that he is he simply an out of control, US hating narcissist, rapist, terrorist and conspiracy theorist?

I think we can handle the truth and I think those of us who bother to dig a little deeper, deal with the complexities and see past the spin, will find a way to share that truth and make it heard.

Thank you.

...... Spoken by Cassie Findlay at "Politics in the Pub", September 21, 2012