More on the ubiquitous founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. I maintain a neutral to positive rating on Assange, despite criticism of him. The whistleblower emails on anthropogenic global warming that were published on Wikileaks (climategate) hugely damaged the climate cabal, but there are some credible writers who maintain that he’s passing off disinfo as well. I honestly can’t tell one way or other. Lately it’s occurred to me that that the controversy might relate to infighting between factions of the intelligence community, but how is the question. Anyway, that’s pure speculation on my part.
Here’s the piece, in the UK’s First Post:
“The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who is at the centre of a US security scare, has emerged from hiding to say that he is not afraid of the Pentagon but that he has been advised by his lawyers to avoid travelling to the United States.
Assange (above) broke cover when he spoke at a seminar at the European parliament in Brussels about freedom of information. He told the Guardian: “Politically it would be a great error for them [the Pentagon] to act. I feel perfectly safe… but I have been advised by my lawyers not to travel to the US during this period.”
The Australian-born hacker, who started WikiLeaks as “an anonymous global avenue for disseminating documents the public should see”, has been sought by the US military authorities ever since a young US Army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, was arrested in Baghdad last month and taken into military custody.
It is assumed Bradley leaked the footage of a US Apache helicopter crew gunning down innocent civilians in Baghdad in July 2007 – a piece of film that became known as ‘Collateral Murder’.
Manning is also thought to the source of another film, as yet unshown on WikiLeaks, but expected to be posted soon – namely, footage of the American bomb attack on the village of Grania in Afghanistan in which 140 civilians died in May 2009.
But what is really exercising the Pentagon is not the embarrassment of these two pieces of film, but the allegation that Manning also sent WikiLeaks 260,000 sensitive US State Department cables concerning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As the Guardian reports, “The prospect of the cache of classified intelligence on the US conduct of the two wars being put online is a nightmare for Washington.”
As a result, a US official has been quoted as saying of Assange: “We’d like to know where he is we’d like his co-operation in this.”
Hence the media reports that Assange is the subject of a Pentagon-run manhunt, with Daniel Ellsberg, the veteran whistle-blower who leaked incendiary material relating to the Vietnam war in the 1973, saying: “I would think that [Assange] is in some danger”.
However, Ellsberg did say that Assange’s notoriety might now provide him with “some degree of protection” – and that, indeed, is what Assange appears to be banking on.
In the meantime, Bradley Manning remains in US Army detention in Kuwait where he has been held for more than three weeks without charge.
Assange said WikiLeaks had hired three US criminal lawyers to defend Manning but that they had been refused access to him. Manning has instead been assigned US military counsel.
John Young at Cryptome makes a pretty good case that Assange is fraud.
What you want to do is not so much actually go after the guy, but make him think you are out to get him. Stoke his paranoia and fear, continue to isolate and alienate, leading him down a path of self destruction. That’s how you do it.
I’ve posted on Young and the whole business…
He backed off his criticism later, maybe because people were accusing him of sour grapes. Maybe he thinks things Assange has done are useful
I have far more respect for Assange than Taibbi I can tell you.
I used to like to read Taibbi’s stuff at the Post. But no more. He’s performed a disservice in the last year or so. It’s not just the plagiarism. It’s the bashing of people who are really trying to get things out……tiresome.
Usual spoiled brat, foul mouthed, I’ll poop wherever I want to entitlement playing to the ugliest kind of misogyny
No use for that kind of thing any more.
You confuse misogyny with having lived in Russia.
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