ardin no longer cooperating with authorities...,

TheRawStory | One of the two Swedish women who have filed sex complaints against the founder of WikiLeaks has reportedly left Sweden and may no longer be cooperating with the criminal investigation.

According to a report at Australian news site Crikey.com, Anna Ardin has moved to the Palestinian territories to volunteer with a Christian group working to reconcile Arabs and Israelis.
Crikey.com reports:

One source from Ardin’s old university of Uppsala reported rumors that she had stopped co-operating with the prosecution service several weeks ago, and that this was part of the reason for the long delay in proceeding with charges — and what still appears to be an absence of charges.

Ardin's blog shows that she has recently posted from the Palestinian territories. Her most recent blog posts make no mention of WikiLeaks or its founder, Julian Assange.

Some of Ardin's most recent Tweets suggest sympathy for WikiLeaks.

"MasterCard, Visa and PayPal -- belt them now!" Ardin urged in a Tweet Wednesday, evidently referring to the cyber-attacks launched on those institutions after they severed their relationships with WikiLeaks.

In a more recent Tweet, she complained of the media reports digging into her background.

"CIA agent, rabid feminist / Muslim lover, a Christian fundamentalist, flat & fatally in love with a man, can you even be all [these things all] the time?" she Tweeted in Swedish.

Some news reports have linked Ardin to the CIA, based on her contact with anti-Castro groups in Cuba. Ardin wrote her master's thesis on these groups, while located in Havana and Miami. But others have questioned the validity of the connection.

Crikey.com notes that Ardin, an avowed feminist, has taken criticism from many prominent feminists, who, perhaps surprisingly, appear to have sided against the female accuser and with the male accused.

"Rape is being used in the Assange prosecution in the same way that women’s freedom was used to invade Afghanistan. Wake up!" Tweeted Naomi Klein.

Feminist activist Naomi Wolf penned an article sarcastically congratulating Interpol for its "commitment to engaging in global manhunts to arrest and prosecute men who behave like narcissistic jerks to women they are dating."

speaking of teaching lessons...,

Bloomberg | Former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. computer programmer Sergey Aleynikov was found guilty of two counts of stealing the firm’s trade secrets by appropriating part of a high-frequency computer source code.

Aleynikov went on trial Nov. 29 in federal court in New York on charges of violating the Economic Espionage Act and the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property Act. He faces as long as 10 years in prison on the espionage charge and five years for the interstate transportation charge.

U.S. District Court judge Denise Cote set sentencing of Aleynikov for March 18. He and his lawyer both declined comment. He will be under home confinement and electronic monitoring, Judge Cote ruled.

Aleynikov, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, holds dual U.S.-Russian citizenship, his lawyer Kevin Marino said in court.

Been a minute since I thought about this busted buster - though I gave a lot of thought to what he and his evil masters managed to perpetrate and get away with, something for everybody to consider in light of what's around that signpost up ahead for Msr. Assange...,

full.force.of.the.law...,lessons.need.to.be.learned...,

BBCNews | Lessons need to be learned from a security lapse which allowed protesters to attack the Prince of Wales' car, Prime Minister David Cameron has said.

Those responsible for the violence at Thursday's student protest must feel the full force of the law, he said.

americans will violently protest $5.00/gallon gasoline...,

Video - Students in London shout "off with their heads" at Charles and Camilla.

NYTimes | According to the French writer Agnès Poirier, “It is not in the British DNA to demonstrate. The British simply don’t believe in it.” Early last month, when Ms. Poirier, who lives in London, made her comparison between the revolutionary tradition of her native country and the stiff-upper-lip stoicism that seemed to characterize the British response to the financial crisis, there appeared little reason to argue.

But on Nov. 10 tens of thousands of students took to the streets to protest government plans to cut the education budget while sharply increasing tuition fees. Two weeks later, the students were out again, this time in even greater numbers, though the police — stung by criticism for allowing a few demonstrators to vandalize Conservative Party headquarters — responded by herding many protesters into improvised enclosures where they were kept for several hours, a tactic known as “kettling.”

Last Tuesday saw yet another twist, as students, anxious to avoid kettling, played a cat-and-mouse game with police all through central London. Instead of marching from Trafalgar Square to Westminster as planned — and where massed ranks of police, some on horseback, were prepared to turn protesters away from Parliament, which was debating a Labour Party motion opposing the government’s proposals — groups of chanting students ran through Whitehall and around Buckingham Palace while helmet-clad riot police gave chase. Smaller groups of students marched down Oxford Street and Regent Street shouting slogans at bemused Christmas shoppers.

There were simultaneous demonstrations in Brighton, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Manchester, Newcastle and Oxford. Although the police in London arrested 146 people who refused to leave Trafalgar Square, for the most part this third wave of protests ended peacefully. The British protests are expected to continue at least until Parliament votes Thursday on the proposed changes.

“Nonviolence is essential — once we resort to violence it’s the only thing the media picks up,” said Milaad Rajai, co-president of the Student Union at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, where protesters have been peacefully occupying the Brunei Gallery since Nov. 21. Students have also taken over buildings at University College London, Manchester Metropolitan University, Bristol and Cambridge.

the coming age of slaughter

Video - Black Sabbath Original

TNR | The age of mass killing, the 1930s and 1940s, was also a moment of environmental panic. World War I had disrupted free trade, and the new Europe was divided between those who needed food and those who controlled it. By the 1960s, improvements in seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides would make surpluses rather than shortages the problem. But, during the crucial 1930s and 1940s, when the decisions were made that sealed the fate of millions, European leaders such as Hitler and Stalin were preoccupied with mastering fertile soil and the people who farmed it.

World War I, in which both Hitler and Stalin played a role, had seemed to show that conquest of cropland meant security and power. It ended in 1918 during a failed German attempt to colonize Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe. To us, the “Ukrainian breadbasket” is a strange notion—perhaps as strange as the concept of “Saudi oil fields” will be 70 years from now. In the 1930s, however, it was at the center of strategic discussions in Moscow and Berlin. The Soviets held Ukraine and wanted to exploit its black earth; the Nazi leadership, ruling a country that was not self-sufficient in food, wanted to take it back.

Both Hitler’s Holocaust and Stalin’s Terror took place during an interval of environmental risk: between the identification of a critical environmental problem and the introduction of the technologies that would solve it. National Socialism and Stalinism both identified enemies to be eliminated, of course; and today, when we talk about Nazism and Stalinism, we understandably emphasize the hatred—the racial hatred of Hitler and the class hatred of Stalin. But there was an economic and environmental side to their ideologies as well: Both Hitler and Stalin made killing seem to serve a vision of economic development that would overcome environmental limitations. Perhaps we today tend to ignore this dimension because noting environmental limitations smacks of making excuses for horror. Or perhaps we see the economy as a realm of rationality and so assume that economic thought must not be implicated in apparently emotional projects such as mass killing. Or perhaps we have simply forgotten the environmental constraints of an earlier period, so different from those of our time.

We face our own environmental limitations and so have very good reason to recover this history. We have entered a new interval of environmental risk, an era in which we know that global warming is taking place but do not yet have the means to slow it. We Americans tend to see events of great importance as unique and the end of history around every corner. Of course global warming is an unprecedented challenge, and of course the Holocaust was an unparalleled tragedy. Yet the relationship is not as distant as we may think. We must use what we know of the dire environmental politics of the past to prepare for the calamities yet to come. We can recall that the most dangerous of ideologies were those that unified a promise of environmental mastery with the demonization of the group that seemed to stand in the way. Perhaps, by recalling this history, we can prevent a new age of mass murder.

how "dangerous" is hacker network defending wikileaks?

Video - Wu Tang Clan - Killa Beez

CSM | A self-styled and loosely affiliated group of Internet-freedom fighters dubbed “Anonymous” has morphed into a borderless digital militia, slinging Twitter posts and virtual handbills across cyberspace to coordinate digital attacks in defense of WikiLeaks and becoming a new force to be reckoned with on the Internet.

In the global furor since WikiLeaks' release of secret US documents and the arrest of the group's founder, Julian Assange, cyber attackers have crippled corporate websites. To do so they have deployed old digital weaponry forged by new social media tools into a novel virtual global attack system that is leaderless, anonymous and powerful.

"Operation Payback" is the name that Anonymous has given its cyber-retribution campaign against corporations that have withdrawn support and services from Mr. Assange, who was arrested in Britain this week on a Swedish rape charge.

Hackers rally to support WikiLeaks: Top 5 recent attacks

As of Thursday, the group's attacks had crippled or brought down with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks at least a half dozen major websites belonging to Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, the Swiss bank Postfinance and others that withdrew services to WikiLeaks.

"This is probably the largest attack of its kind," Derek Manky, an Internet security expert at Fortinet, a Sunnyvale, Calif., computer security company. "It's not just one specific audience trying to launch an attack. It's a much more global audience – a global group – and these targets that they're taking down are not small."

Large they may be, but DDoS attacks like those that hit Mastercard, Visa, Paypal and other corporate websites by flooding them with data and Internet requests are nothing new, or advanced, technically speaking. Such attacks involve creating or enlisting the support of botnets – many thousands of computers coopted to work in tandem – and getting several of them to focus on particular Internet sites to clog them by making virtual information requests simultaneously. A sort of cyber blockade.
Use of social media is key

But it is the use of social media and the novel way old digital attack weapons are being organized that experts say is at the heart of what's happening, say experts who have studied the group. Anonymous members have essentially posted virtual handbills across the Internet on websites and Internet relay chat forums to rally new participants.

paypal releases wikileak's funds

Video - Back in Black - Angus Angle

AFP | PayPal is releasing all of the remaining funds in an account set up to raise money for WikiLeaks, but it will no longer accept donations for the site.

John Muller, PayPal's general counsel, announced the move in a blog post late Wednesday in which he said PayPal's decision to restrict the WikiLeaks account was not the result of any pressure from the US government.

Besides PayPal, Mastercard and Visa have also suspended WikiLeaks accounts, choking off donations to the website that has been releasing confidential and embarrassing US diplomatic cables.

The move has triggered cyber attacks in recent days on the websites of the Internet payment and credit card companies by supporters of WikiLeaks.

Muller said "media reports" had "created confusion about PayPal's decision to permanently restrict the account that was raising funds for WikiLeaks."

full open government scenario

How OPEN is it possible for a government to be? What if full disclosure (live but also recorded) of "any and all discussions, etc. involving the people's business" were required by law? Imagine:

-- All government personnel (i.e. any elected official and anyone who is an employee or contractor of the government) must wear a POV cam with audio whenever awake. Any non-government personnel must wear one any time they are involved in any aspect of government business. Streaming and recording off by default while e.g. at home, but TBD minutes retroactive recording on detection of certain keywords or activities which can only be unsealed by order of a court after showing cause, etc. Instant transition to public live stream/recorded should any related party (lobbyist, coworker, superior, other government entity, etc.) make contact by any means. Shouldn't be too tough to do; they're all wearing one too.

-- All text-based electronic discussions of government business must be held in a public chat/discussion board-type environment where only the parties involved are allowed to post (except during public comment period, etc.).

-- Telephone conversations among e.g. any two or more such entities conducting government business will be streamed and recorded.

-- Must be deployed at all levels of government (including quasi-gonvermental boards, etc.) in order for a state to receive federal funds. After all, it involves/affects interstate commerce somehow. It always does.

-- By default, all is made public; only a court of competent jurisdiction can make an event private or secret a priori/posteriori, (though backwards-egg construction remains a thorny problem) and must specify the earliest reasonable date by which the information must be revealed.

-- Severe penalties ($$ and time) for evading or attempting to evade disclosure or to conceal anything related to the program (and there's always the good ol' "conspiracy to" charge to fall back on...)

-- Information available only to citizens of the US, who must verify their identity and status at the time. etc.

Technology framework to be provided, developed, and paid for entirely within the US, by US citizens. Open source. You think we can't do it? Got iPhone or Android?

It's not like we're going to run out of hard disk space or bandwidth or anything and, once everyone expects it and becomes accustomed to it, what will happen? What will a meeting be like between your Senator and a lobbyist when both are required by law to stream and record the event? What happens now? Talk about "Reality TV." w00t!

Nobody would like it, but they'd get used to it soon enough. After all, isn't it our trusted authorities who are always the first to fall back on that old "If you're not doing anything wrong, then you don't have anything to worry about" canard?

Would I like my life streamed? No, but we're already heading down a no-more-privacy hole, and besides, I'd go along while involved in any discussions of government business. Are there privacy issues? Yep, but then there are transparency ones to be considered as well. Our government wants to get intrusive with us? "OK," we say, "let's start with you." I listened to the pre-Turkey Day Biden-committee TSA hearings and, just when anything was about to get remotely informative, the answer was always "Well, Senator, again, we're going to have to cover that behind closed doors."

I'm just sayin.' Play the FULL OPEN GOVERNMENT scenario around in your head for a while. Nobody's gonna be able to watch all of it, but you never know who might be watching any one something.

As usual, when we/they look back at this period, the dominating factors will have been consequences unintended or unforseen at the time. Fist tap Arnach.

constant conflict: a military celebration of dopamine hegemony

Video - Bob Marley Them Belly Full But We Hungry.

ICH | It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry "American culture," with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites--figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians--human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people's culture. It stresses comfort and convenience--ease--and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx's dream, and his nightmare.

Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can't wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather "Baywatch." America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no "peer competitor" in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted--men and women everywhere--clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.

American culture is criticized for its impermanence, its "disposable" products. But therein lies its strength. All previous cultures sought ideal achievement which, once reached, might endure in static perfection. American culture is not about the end, but the means, the dynamic process that creates, destroys, and creates anew. If our works are transient, then so are life's greatest gifts--passion, beauty, the quality of light on a winter afternoon, even life itself. American culture is alive.

This vividness, this vitality, is reflected in our military; we do not expect to achieve ultimate solutions, only constant improvement. All previous cultures, general and military, have sought to achieve an ideal form of life and then fix it in cement. Americans, in and out of uniform, have always embraced change (though many individuals have not, and their conservatism has acted as a healthy brake on our national excesses). American culture is the culture of the unafraid.

Ours is also the first culture that aims to include rather than exclude. The films most despised by the intellectual elite--those that feature extreme violence and to-the-victors-the-spoils sex--are our most popular cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged nearly everywhere. American action films, often in dreadful copies, are available from the Upper Amazon to Mandalay. They are even more popular than our music, because they are easier to understand. The action films of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris rely on visual narratives that do not require dialog for a basic understanding. They deal at the level of universal myth, of pre-text, celebrating the most fundamental impulses (although we have yet to produce a film as violent and cruel as the Iliad). They feature a hero, a villain, a woman to be defended or won--and violence and sex. Complain until doomsday; it sells. The enduring popularity abroad of the shopworn Rambo series tells us far more about humanity than does a library full of scholarly analysis.

When we speak of a global information revolution, the effect of video images is more immediate and intense than that of computers. Image trumps text in the mass psyche, and computers remain a textual outgrowth, demanding high-order skills: computers demarcate the domain of the privileged. We use technology to expand our wealth, power, and opportunities. The rest get high on pop culture. If religion is the opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine. When we and they collide, they shock us with violence, but, statistically, we win. Fist tap Dale.

the big payback

Video - The Godfather of Soul - The Big Payback

The Raw Story | Operation Payback raised the stakes in the battle over WikiLeaks' Julian Assange when it began attacking credit card providers Visa and MasterCard over their freezing of WikiLeaks accounts,, causing parts of the companies' online operations to go dark.But the disappearance of the group from Twitter is expected to be short-lived, as setting up a new account is relatively easy.

One such account, Anon Operationn, already appears to be operational.

For its part, WikiLeaks appeared to be in a charitable mood today, perhaps in an attempt to dampen anger in some corners over the leaked State Department cables and cyber-attacks on anti-WikiLeaks groups.

"We are replacing operation #payback with operation #payitforward," WikiLeaks announced on Twitter. "Hackers, please perform random acts of kindness."

UPDATE IV: Sarah Palin is the latest target of "Operation Payback," the group of hacktivists who have been launching cyber-attacks against organizations and people working against WikiLeaks.

Palin drew attention last week when she said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be "pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders."

ABC News reports:

The website and personal credit card information of former Gov. Sarah Palin were cyber-attacked today by Wikileaks supporters, the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate tells ABC News in an email.

Hackers in London apparently affiliated with “Operation Payback” – a group of supporters of Julian Assange and Wikileaks – have tried to shut down SarahPac and have disrupted Sarah and Todd Palin’s personal credit card accounts.

According to ABC's Jake Tapper, the website associated with Operation Payback -- anonops.net -- had listed Palin's website as a potential target.

“This is what happens when you exercise the First Amendment and speak against his sick, un-American espionage efforts,” Palin said in an email.

mass mirroring - isn't it kewl...,

wikileaks.ch | In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, we need your help.

if you have a unix-based server which is hosting a website on the Internet and you want to give wikileaks some of your hosting resources, you can help!

Please follow the following instructions:

* Setup an account where we can upload files using RSYNC+SSH (preferred) or FTP
* Put our SSH key in this server or create an FTP account
* Create a virtual host in your web server, which, for example, can be wikileaks.yourdomain.com
* send the IP address of your server to us, and the path where we should upload the content. (just fill the form below)

We will take care of all the rest: Sending pages to your server, updating them each time data is released, maintaining a list of such mirrors. If your server is down or if the account don't work anymore, we will automatically remove your server from the list.

Our content is only html/css/javascript/png static files, so we don't require much resource to host it.

The complete website should not take more than a couple of GB at the moment (with base website and cablegate data)

In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, you will find below a list of mirrors of Wikileaks website and CableGate pages.

If you want to add your mirror to the list, see our Mass Mirroring Wikileaks page
Mirror List

Wikileaks is currently mirrored on 1334 sites (updated 2010-12-08 22:43 GMT)

wikileaks a warground: people vs. empire

Video - X-Clan Heed the Words of the Brother

Counterpunch | The leaks have been hailed as a blow to US criminal activity by people around the world, including staunchly American US Congressman Ron Paul, and condemned by lovers of US empire such as former US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who called for Assange to be "pursued with the same urgency we pursue Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders". Former UK Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind said WikiLeaks' actions were "active assistance to terrorist organisations", neglecting to reflect on the UK's own long history of worldwide terrorist activities.

The 39-year-old Assange is an Australian citizen, though his Prime Minister Julia Gillard has threatened to cancel his passport. He is described by colleagues as charismatic, driven and highly intelligent, with an exceptional ability to crack computer codes. To his critics, he is just a publicity-seeker and womaniser.

In 1995 he was accused with a friend of dozens of hacking activities and fined, promising to be a good boy. He quietly co-authored Underground with Suelette Dreyfus, dealing with the subversive side of the Internet. Dreyfus described Assange as "quite interested in the concept of ethics, concepts of justice, what governments should and shouldn't do".

He began Wikileaks in 2006 as a "dead-letterbox" for would-be leakers — the real heroes of this saga, the unknown soldiers disgusted with their role as hired killers. His collective developed a Robin Hood guerrilla lifestyle, moving communications and people from country to country to make use of laws protecting freedom of speech. Co-founder Daniel Schmitt describes Assange as "one of the few people who really care about positive reform in this world to a level where you're willing to do something radical".

Wikileaks was forced this year to switch to a Swiss host server after several US Internet service providers shut him down, claiming he was endangering lives, though he made clear he was careful to vet the military cables from Afghanistan and Iraq precisely to avoid this. His site also came under cyber attack and PayPal cut off his ability to raise funds.

There is no doubt that Gillard, the Swedish prosecutor, PayPal, etc are all being pressured by the US government to help snuff out this ray of light exposing its many crimes. Only French Internet service provider OVH said it had no plans to end the service it provides to Wikileaks, and a judge threw out Industry Minister Eric Besson's case to force it to.

Hackivist admirers of Mr Quixote have set up mirror sites faster than traditional servers can shut Wikileaks down and are launching denial-of-service attacks targetting its Internet enemies. Coldblood, a member of the computer group Anonymous, told BBC, "Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets. We feel that Wikileaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs the government."

western civilization has shed its values...,

Video - Bob Marley chasing those crazy baldheads.

Globalresearch | Western Civilization no longer upholds the values it proclaims, so what is the basis for its claim to virtue?

For example, the US print and TV media and the US government have made it completely clear that they have no regard for the First Amendment. Consider CNN's Wolf Blitzer's reaction to the leaked diplomatic cables that reveal how the US government uses deceptions, bribes, and threats to control other governments and to deceive the American and other publics. Blitzer is outraged that information revealing the US government's improprieties reached the people, or some of them. As Alexander Cockburn wrote, Blitzer demanded that the US government take the necessary steps to make certain that journalists and the American people never again find out what their government is up to.

The disregard for the First Amendment is well established in the US media, which functions as a propaganda ministry for the government. Remember the NSA leak given to the New York Times that the George W. Bush regime was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spying on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court? The New York Times spiked the story for one year and did not release it until after Bush's reelection. By then, the Bush regime had fabricated a legal doctrine that "authorized" Bush to violate US law.

Glenn Greenwald writing in Salon has exposed the absence of moral standards among WikiLeaks' critics. A number of American politicians have called for the US government to murder Julian Assange, as have journalists such as neoconservative propagandist Jonah Goldberg, who wrote: "Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?"

WikiLeaks' critics could not make it clearer that they do not believe in accountable government. And to make certain that the government is not held accountable, WikiLeaks' critics are calling for every possible police state measure, including extra-judicial murder, to stamp out anyone who makes information available that enables the citizenry to hold government accountable.

The US government definitely does not believe in accountable government. Among the first things the Obama regime did was to make certain that there would be no investigation into the Bush regime's use of lies, fabricated "intelligence," and deception of the American public and the United Nations in order to further its agenda of conquering the independent Muslim states in the Middle East and turning them into US puppets. The Obama regime also made certain that no member of the Bush regime would be held accountable for violating US and international laws, for torturing detainees, for war crimes, for privacy violations or for any of the other criminal acts of the Bush regime.

As the cables leaked by a patriotic American to WikiLeaks reveal, the US government was even able to prevent accountable government in the UK by having British prime minister Brown "fix" the official Chilcot Inquiry into the deceptions used by former prime minister Tony Blair to lead the British into serving as mercenaries in America's wars. The US was able to do this, because the British prime minister does not believe in accountable government either.

The leaked documents show that the last thing the US government wants anywhere is a government that is accountable to its own citizens instead of to the US government.

truth in chains

Video - Don't forget about Pfc Bradley Manning.

Counterpunch | It has been, by any standard, an extraordinary campaign of vilification and persecution, wholly comparable to the kind of treatment doled out to dissidents in China or Burma. Lest we forget, WikiLeaks is a journalistic outlet – just like The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, all of whom are even now publishing the very same material – leaked classified documents -- available on WikiLeaks. The website is also a journalistic outlet just like CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox and other mainstream media venues, where we have seen an endless parade of officials – and journalists! – calling for Assange to be prosecuted or killed outright. Every argument being made for shutting down WikiLeaks can – and doubtless will – be used against any journalistic enterprise that publishes material that powerful people do not like.

And the leading role in this persecution of truth-telling is being played by the administration of the great progressive agent of hope and change, the self-proclaimed heir of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama. His attorney general, Eric Holder, is now making fierce noises about the “steps” he has already taken to bring down WikiLeaks and criminalize the leaking of embarrassing information. And listen to the ferocious reaction of that liberal lioness, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who took to the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal to call for Assange to be put in prison – for 2,500,000 years:

“When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released his latest document trove—more than 250,000 secret State Department cables—he intentionally harmed the U.S. government. The release of these documents damages our national interests and puts innocent lives at risk. He should be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.

“The law Mr. Assange continues to violate is the Espionage Act of 1917. That law makes it a felony for an unauthorized person to possess or transmit "information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation." ... Importantly, the courts have held that "information relating to the national defense" applies to both classified and unclassified material. Each violation is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.”

So there you have it. Ten years for each offense; 250,000 separate offenses; thus a prison term of 2.5 million years. Naturally, tomorrow the same newspaper will denounce Feinstein for being such a namby-pamby terrorist-coddling pinko: “Why didn’t she call for Assange to be torn from limb to limb by wild dogs, as any right-thinking red-blooded American would do!?”

Meanwhile, corporate America and its international allies continue to do their bit. Joining PayPal and Amazon, who had already cut off their services to WikiLeaks, most of the remaining venues through which the internet journal is funded are also freezing out the organization -- MasterCard, Visa, and a Swiss bank that WikiLeaks used to process donations. All of these organizations are obviously responding to government pressure.

What is perhaps most remarkable is that this joint action by the world elite to shut down WikiLeaks – which has been operating for four years – comes after the release of diplomatic cables, not in response to earlier leaks which provided detailed evidence of crimes and atrocities committed by the perpetrators and continuers of Washington’s Terror War. I suppose this is because the diplomatic cables have upset the smooth running of the corrupt and cynical backroom operations that actually govern our world, behind the ludicrous lies and self-righteous posturing that our great and good lay on for the public. They didn’t mind being unmasked as accomplices in mass murder and fomenters of suffering and hatred; in fact, they were rather proud of it. And they certainly knew that their fellow corruptocrats in foreign governments – not to mention the perpetually stunned and supine American people – wouldn’t give a toss about a bunch of worthless peons in Iraq and Afghanistan getting killed. But the diplomatic cables have caused an embarrassing stink among the closed little clique of the movers and shakers. And that is a crime deserving of vast eons in stir – or death.

two one-night stands - one world-wide manhunt

DailyMail | A winter morning in backwoods Scandinavia and the chime of a church bell drifts across the snowbound town of Enkoping. Does it also toll for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange?

Today, this small industrial centre, 40 miles west of Stockholm, remains best-known — if known at all — as the birthplace of the ­adjustable spanner.

But if extradition proceedings involving ­Britain are successful, it could soon be rather more celebrated — by the U.S. government at least — as the place where Mr Assange made a ­catastrophic error.

Here, in a first-floor flat in a dreary apartment block, the mastermind behind the leak of more than 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables this month slept with a female admirer whom he had just met at a seminar. She subsequently made a complaint to police.

The Stockholm police want to question him regarding the possible rape of a woman and separate allegations from another Swedish admirer, with whom he was having a concurrent fling. But there remains a huge question mark over the evidence. Many people believe that the 39-year-old ­Australian-born whistleblower is the victim of a U.S. government dirty tricks campaign.

They argue that the whole squalid affair is a sexfalla, which translates loosely from the Swedish as a ‘honeytrap’.

One thing is clear, though: Sweden’s complex rape laws are central to the story.

Using a number of sources including leaked police interviews, we can begin to piece together the sequence of events which led to Assange’s liberty being threatened by Stockholm police rather than Washington, where already one U.S. politician has called on him to executed for ‘spying’.

The story began on August 11 this year, when Assange arrived in Stockholm.

the second accuser...,

The second accuser, Sofia Wilen, 26, is Anna's friend. Here is a video of an Assange press conference where one can see the girls together.


Video - Assange press conference where both accusers were present.

Those present at the conference marveled at her groupie-like behavior. Though rock stars are used to girls dying to have sex with them, it is much less common in the harsh field of political journalism. Sofia worked hard to bed Assange, according to her own confession; she was also the first to complain to police. She is little known and her motives are vague. Why might a young woman (who shares her life with American artist Seth Benson) pursue such a sordid political adventure?

assange beseiged

Counterpunch | The plot thickens as our favorite hero of the Matrix; our own “Captain Neo” Julian Assange, faces danger yet again. When we last parted company with the legendary founder of WikiLeaks, he was breathing a sigh of relief after dodging spurious double-rape charges. The complaints were dropped, and our hero was free to roam the globe once again. But soap opera plots are repetitive; the story was quickly recycled and now our brave captain is again under threat of being castrated on Stockholm’s Stora Torget, or whatever the latest craven penalty is for molesting sacred Nordic virgins in a land where Vikings once ruled.

In other words, the farcical rape charges have once again been leveled against the Pentagon’s Public Enemy Number One. Julian Assange now stands accused of: (1) not calling a young woman the day after he had enjoyed a night with her, (2) asking her to pay for his bus ticket, (3) having unsafe sex, and (4) participating in two brief affairs in the course of one week. These four minor charges, worthy of Leopold Bloom’s mock trial in the Nightown chapter in Ulysses, have been shaken and fermented until they were able to cook up a half-baked rape case! Step down Iran; Sweden takes the cake! While Iran is notorious for unyielding conservative sentences against adulterers, Sweden shows us what the liberal side of the coin looks like as she invents criminal charges for failing to telephone and for careless use of preservatives in consensual acts of affection. Worse, they are purposely conflating consensual sex with rape for political purposes. In this, Sweden makes a mockery of the very real crime of violent rape.

The Swedes have a practical reason behind their deceptively slapstick police-work. The WikiLeaks founder, pursued by malevolent forces around the world, sought momentary relief beneath Sweden’s reputation as a bastion of free speech. But the moment Julian sought the protection of Swedish media law, the CIA immediately threatened to discontinue intelligence sharing with SEPO, the Swedish Secret Service. That got the present right-wing government out of its chair, as it does everything it can to bury the Prime Minister Olof Palme’s legacy of careful neutrality. The suspicion of whether the rape farce is an orchestrated campaign, might be illuminated by these facts: (1) Sweden sent troops to Afghanistan, (2) Assange’s WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Diary which exposed this cruel and needless neo-colonial campaign. Furthermore, the expected release of new secret materials by WikiLeaks might just influence the general elections on September 19. Perhaps that explains the sudden police raid on a WikiLeaks server.

An American Tea Party website the RightwingNews.com suggested that “a CIA agent with a sniper rifle rattle a bullet around [Assange’s] skull the next time he appears in public as a warning”. Rest assured that the CIA is wiser than the Tea Party. They at least have learned the lesson of Che Guevara. Nowadays they ruin a rebel’s reputation instead of wasting a bullet. They won’t raise Assange up to become a martyr, they simply use his own erstwhile allies to reduce him to a laughing stock. They stain him with opprobrium. It is much more certain and final than the marksman’s shot. History is witness to their growing efficiency in using this tactic. In the 70’s, they could only bring themselves to say that Philip Agee was a womanizer and a drunkard. Nowadays they do not stint at charges of pedophilia, for example to humiliate Scott Ritter for failing to go along with George W Bush’s charade of Iraqi WMD. As you might expect, the rape campaign against Assange might be just an initial volley. Perhaps they will decide he is a pedophile too. The unspoken threat is enough to send some faint-hearted supporters of WikiLeaks scurrying for cover.

assange arrested in london..,

Video - BBC News report of the arrest of Assange at 9:30 this morning.

BBCNews | The founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, Julian Assange, has been arrested by the Metropolitan Police.

Scotland Yard said Mr Assange was arrested on a European arrest warrant by appointment at a London police station at 0930 GMT.

He is due to appear at City of Westminster Magistrates' Court later.

Mr Assange is accused by the Swedish authorities of one count of rape, one of unlawful coercion and two counts of sexual molestation, alleged to have been committed in August 2010.

Police contacted his lawyer, Mark Stephens, on Monday night after receiving an European arrest warrant from the Swedish authorities.

An earlier warrant, issued last month, had not been filled in correctly.

human resources

Video - Human Resources: Social Engineering in the 20th Century. Fist tap Dale.

how america will collapse by 2025

TomDispatch | Trying to play down the significance of an ongoing Wikileaks dump of more than 250,000 State Department documents, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently offered the following bit of Washington wisdom: “The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it's in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets... [S]ome governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation.”

Now, wisdom like that certainly sounds sober; it’s definitely what passes for hardheaded geopolitical realism in our nation’s capital; and it's true, Gates is not the first top American official to call the U.S. “the indispensable nation”; nor do I doubt that he and many other inside-the-Beltway players are convinced of our global indispensability. The problem is that the news has almost weekly been undermining his version of realism, making it look ever more phantasmagorical. The ability of Wikileaks, a tiny organization of activists, to thumb its cyber-nose at the global superpower, repeatedly shining a blaze of illumination on the penumbra of secrecy under which its political and military elite like to conduct their affairs, hasn’t helped one bit either. If our indispensability is, as yet, hardly questioned in Washington, elsewhere on the planet it’s another matter.

The once shiny badge of the “global sheriff” has lost its gleam and, in Dodge City, ever fewer are paying the sort of attention that Washington believes is its due. To my mind, the single most intelligent comment on the latest Wikileaks uproar comes from Simon Jenkins of the British Guardian who, on making his way through the various revelations (not to speak of the mounds of global gossip), summed matters up this way: “The money-wasting is staggering. [U.S.] Aid payments are never followed, never audited, never evaluated. The impression is of the world's superpower roaming helpless in a world in which nobody behaves as bidden. Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, the United Nations, are all perpetually off script. Washington reacts like a wounded bear, its instincts imperial but its power projection unproductive.”

Sometimes, to understand just where you are in the present, it helps to peer into the past -- in this case, into what happened to previous “indispensable” imperial powers; sometimes, it’s no less useful to peer into the future. In his latest TomDispatch post, Alfred W. McCoy, author most recently of Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, does both. Having convened a global working group of 140 historians to consider the fate of the U.S. as an imperial power, he offers us a glimpse of four possible American (near-)futures. They add up to a monumental, even indispensable look at just how fast our indispensability is likely to unravel in the years to come.