[…]
Britain has
rejected an Ecuadorean request that Assange be granted safe passage to an
airport. He is in limbo. It is, he said, like living in a “space station.”
“The status
quo, for them, is a loss,” Assange said of the U.S.-led campaign against him as
we sat in his small workroom, cluttered with cables and computer equipment. He
had a full head of gray hair and gray stubble on his face and was wearing a
traditional white embroidered Ecuadorean shirt. “The Pentagon threatened
WikiLeaks and me personally, threatened us before the whole world, demanded
that we destroy everything we had published, demanded we cease ‘soliciting’ new
information from U.S. government whistle-blowers, demanded, in other words, the
total annihilation of a publisher. It stated that if we did not self-destruct
in this way that we would be ‘compelled’ to do so.”
“But they
have failed,” he went on. “They set the rules about what a win was. They lost
in every battle they defined. Their loss is total. We’ve won the big stuff. The
loss of face is hard to overstate. The Pentagon reissued its threats on Sept.
28 last year. This time we laughed. Threats inflate quickly. Now the Pentagon,
the White House and the State Department intend to show the world what
vindictive losers they are through the persecution of Bradley Manning,
myself and the organization more generally.”
Assange,
Manning and WikiLeaks, by making public in 2010 half a million internal
documents from the Pentagon and the State Department, along with the 2007 video
of U.S. helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down Iraqi civilians, including
children, and two Reuters journalists, effectively exposed the empire’s
hypocrisy, indiscriminate violence and its use of torture, lies, bribery and
crude tactics of intimidation. WikiLeaks shone a spotlight into the inner
workings of empire—the most important role of a press—and for this it has
become empire’s prey. Those around the globe with the computer skills to search
out the secrets of empire are now those whom empire fears most. If we lose this
battle, if these rebels are defeated, it means the dark night of corporate
totalitarianism. If we win, if the corporate state is unmasked, it can be
destroyed.
U.S.
government officials quoted in Australian diplomatic cables obtained by The
Saturday Age described the campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks as
“unprecedented both in its scale and nature.” The scope of the operation has
also been gleaned from statements made during Manning’s pretrial hearing. The
U.S. Department of Justice will apparently pay the contractor ManTech of
Fairfax, Va., more than $2 million this year alone for a computer system that,
from the tender, appears designed to handle the prosecution documents. The
government line item refers only to “WikiLeaks Software and Hardware
Maintenance.”
The lead
government prosecutor in the Manning case, Maj. Ashden Fein, has told the court
that the FBI file that deals with the leak of government documents through
WikiLeaks has “42,135 pages or 3,475 documents.” This does not include a huge
volume of material accumulated by a grand jury investigation. Manning, Fein has
said, represents only 8,741 pages or 636 different documents in that classified
FBI file.
There are no
divisions among government departments or the two major political parties over
what should be Assange’s fate. “I think we should be clear here. WikiLeaks and
people that disseminate information to people like this are criminals, first
and foremost. And I think that needs to be clear,” then-press secretary Robert
Gibbs, speaking for the Obama administration, said during a
2010 press briefing.
Sen. Dianne
Feinstein, a Democrat, and then-Sen. Christopher S. Bond, a Republican, said in a
joint letter to the U.S. attorney general calling for Assange’s
prosecution: “If Mr. Assange and his possible accomplices cannot be charged
under the Espionage Act (or any other applicable statute), please know that we
stand ready and willing to support your efforts to ‘close those gaps’ in the
law, as you also mentioned. …”
Republican
Candice S. Miller, a U.S. representative from Michigan, said
in the House: “It is time that the Obama administration treats WikiLeaks
for what it is—a terrorist organization, whose continued operation threatens
our security. Shut it down. Shut it down. It is time to shut down this
terrorist, this terrorist Web site, WikiLeaks. Shut it down, Attorney General
[Eric] Holder.”
At least a
dozen American governmental agencies, including the Pentagon, the FBI, the
Army’s Criminal Investigative Department, the Department of Justice, the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Diplomatic Security Service,
are assigned to the WikiLeaks case, while the CIA and the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence are assigned to track down WikiLeaks’
supposed breaches of security. The global assault—which saw Australia threaten to
revoke Assange’s passport—is part of the terrifying metamorphosis of the “war
on terror” into a wider war on civil liberties. It has become a hunt not for
actual terrorists but a hunt for all those with the ability to expose the
mounting crimes of the power elite.
[…]
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