The great virtue of In Defense is that it collects all the controversial bits and pieces of Assange's situation into one volume and mounts a fierce support for his personal and professional crises. A cogent introduction summarizes key segments of his current entrapment in a web of intrigue. There's an impressive chronology of Wikileaks' publications, from "Collateral Murder" to the Vault 7 CIA hacking tools. You wonder aloud if he's more courageous than nuts, given the likely repercussions. The book is broken up into four parts: Expulsion; Confinement; the Internet, Censorship, and Scientific Journalism; and the Legacy of Wikileaks and Assange. A helpful point-by-point defense to Assange's critics by Caitlin Johnstone lends focus. An appendix contains the superseding indictment for which he faces extradition to America.
Out of all that, In Defense attempts to answer three main questions: One, is Assange a terrorist or a journalist? Two, Is he a rapist? Three, What happens next? In Defense is unusual in that it transparently addresses all the questions Assange is likely to face in a courtroom, and summons forth the kinds of witnesses and evidence that will manifest in the proceedings. We hear from lawyers, technologists, whistleblowers, ex-spooks, radical feminists, government officials, and Assange himself -- in a kind Open Source trialling of 'discovery' materials. The gambit in play appears to be that Assange is hoping to win people over to create a swelling base of support/protest once the secretive political trial begins in the US.
Is Assange a terrorist or a journalist? As Tariq Ali notes in the introduction, "Assange and his colleagues made no secret of the fact that their principal subject of publication was the American Empire and its global operations." Through his Wikileaks publishing, Assange has demonstrably established his intention to 'document' the dark agenda of Empire -- and to oppose it. In this sense, he is an activist publisher, no different than, say, Ramparts, CounterPunch or Harper's. But the material to support his opposition is primary documentation, procured through hacks and leaks. Like Socrates the "gadfly," he wants people to make up their own minds. He sees himself as an Ethical Hacker, and an ethical leaker.
While he may not be able to use it as a defense tactic, WikiLeaks reminds me of the "necessity defense" that Abbie Hoffman and Amy Carter successfully argued in 1987 at their trial for criminal trespassing that followed their disruption of CIA recruiting efforts on the campus of the UMass-Amherst. They were able to convince the court that their ostensibly 'illegal' actions were to stop bigger crimes from happening on foreign soil, in the name of Americans, who were never consulted. Thus, when a Kissinger can advise a Nixon that he doesn't see why America should sit by while a Chile elects an Allende, when there's a Duane Clarridge ready to fix the problem, people needn't accept it as the American Way. Wikileaks is necessary.
Because they control the narrative arc of "The Global War on Terror," the US government can characterize its antagonists any way it pleases. The Americans, deeply learning from the tactics of the Viet Cong who gave them the shits in 'Nam, labelled al Qaeda (who they'd helped set up to give the Russians a taste of their own 'Nam quagmire in Afghanistan), after 9/11, "unlawful non-state enemy combatants." They didn't wear pajamas, had no central command, and, thank Christ, were a wonderful reason to slap boots down in multiple countries in search of naked sleeper cells who might wake from their dogmatic slumbers and hate on America for her Human Freedom Projectà "ž .
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described Julian Assange and Wikileaks, as "a hostile non-state intelligence service." This clown's description of Wikileaks could include almost any left-wing publication. Curiously, even the New York Times, a publication that has in the past spinached up its circulation by featuring stories based on Wikileaks documents, has turned on him. In April, the editorial board called him "a "foreign agent seeking to undermine the security of the United States through theft." Pompeo would like to see Assange as akin to al Qaeda, then maybe honeypot him to some remote location, and, as Bobby Dylan would say, he could be caught without a ticket to the dance "and be discovered beneath a truck." What, you think Empire is joking?
In a column for the volume, "The Naivete' of Julian Assange," Margaret Kimberly, a senior writer for Black Agenda Report, chides Assange for his ignorance of American domestic issues. Australia, while still dealing with aboriginal issues, has no legacy of slavery, and no Bill of Rights, and these deficits mean Assange lacks depth when it comes to American domestic political passions. She takes issue with a Tweet exchange he had during which "he questioned the need to fight the American Civil War" and seemed "unaware that the Confederacy started the war and steadfastly refused to end slavery."
Nevertheless, she conceded, "His willingness to show us what war looks like or how trade agreements deprive millions of people of their rights make him an ally not just as a person but an ally of the principles Americans claim to care about."
Her observations are a reminder that a lot of what's going on is a bunch of white people fighting over power, with no sign that minorities are included in the conversation or will benefit from the process.
Is Assange a rapist? In Defense recounts the investigatory details that keep Assange tied to the Swedish justice system. The even reference a helpful YouTube animation that brings a viewer through the specious semi-allegations. The fact is that Assange would not be regarded as a potential rapist for 'what happened' in any other part of the world but Sweden, as the sex was consensual. He was investigated because a woman he slept with feared an alleged faulty condom might have allowed the transmission of an STD. As Caitlin Johnstone writes in one of her mythbuster segments, "[One of the women] admitted she had been 'railroaded by police and others around her'" to pursue Assange. She reminds: He hadn't actually been charged with anything in Sweden and eventually they dropped their pursuit of him.
The breach of the servers at the DNC during the 2016 presidential campaign changed everything about how Assange has been perceived in the US. The Obama intelligence community successfully sold Americans -- through a compliant MSM -- on the still-unsubstantiated claim that the Russians interfered in the 2016 presidential election, foisting Trump on us, effectively paying us back, clown for clown, for giving them Yeltsin in 1991. Obama then wanted to connect Assange to the Russian mischief by claiming he either worked directly with them to hack the DNC, or else worked indirectly by posting to Wikileaks emails received from Russians. Nobody seems to have followed up on Assange's PBS Newshour "revelation" that DNC insiders gave him the emails - and he named then on air.
But understated is how irate Obama was in 2013 when Assange sent an emissary to Hong Kong to help Edward Snowden avoid being taken by the CIA, after he was outed by the mainstream media as the greatest top secrets leaker of all time. Recall that Obama's unprecedented forcing of the plane of a head of state to land in Austria when he thought Snowden was aboard. Virtually an act of war, and something that should have been condemned by the paper tiger United Nations, who exist to keep nation-states from crossing the line with each other.
As Kevin Gosztola points out in the book, "[T]he Obama administration realized in 2013 that it "could not prosecute Assange without exposing journalists at the Times or Washington Post to potential prosecutions for publishing classified information." But all of that changes if Assange can be re-classified as an agent of foreign powers, a kind of enemy combatant, rather than a journalist. Thus, as Gosztola suggests, Democratic leaders started referring to him as an enemy. Joe Biden called him a "high-tech terrorist" and Diane Feinstein referred to him as "an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt." Oh, those condomnations.
The Russian-DNC-Guccifer thing has all the hallmarks of a set-up. Tariq Ali points out in the intro, "The finding that the DNC documents were hacked from seven separate accounts by agents of the Russian state rests on the assertions of private cybersecurity companies, CrowdStrike, Fidelis, and Mandiant, rather than of the FBI, which was denied access to the DNC server." And as Craig Murray adds, "[The Mueller Report's] identification of 'DC Leaks' and 'Guccifer 2.0' as Russian security services is something Mueller attempts to carry off by simple assertion." You gudda pwobwem wid dat?
It is still an open question whether emails taken from the DNC servers were the result of a hack or an insider thumb drive. Former NSA techie and whistleblower William Binney says it was a thumb. Craig Murray reminds the reader of In Defense that he personally met the thumb. Assange has named DNC insiders as sources for his cache. (see embedded video above) None of them were sought out by Mueller.
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