Julian Assange’s mother slams ‘untrustworthy’ Sweden | Asia News – Politics, Media, Education | Asian Correspondent

On extradition to Sweden…

“I’m against that, because I wouldn’t trust the Swedish government as far as you can throw them. They’ve given assurances before, and broken them. The Swedish government are not to be trusted, under any circumstances….

“The Swedish prosecutor has shown absolutely no bona fides in this case. The original prosecutor has had no basis for this whatsoever. The Swedish prosecutor has continued to refuse every reasonable legal way to interview Julian, from day one, including even at the Swedish Embassy in London, or Scotland Yard. So the motivations are, that if she has to interview him, then she either has to drop the case, or charge him. If she charges him, she has to give evidence. And she’s got no evidence.

via asiancorrespondent.com

Expressen: Swedish prosecution planned to attend #Assange’s proceedings undercover, while refusing to question him in the UK.

[Google translation]

Two representatives of the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office was invited to attend the extradition proceedings conducted against Wikileaksgrundaren Assange in London under the guise of law students, reports TV4.

It’s an email conversation between the British prosecutor and the Swedish prosecutor who reveal the intended guise.

Marianne Ny is the prosecutor in charge of the Swedish investigation against Assange. She did not participate in the extradition negotiations, as this could be perceived that she was trying to influence a decision.

Karin Rosander, the Authority’s communications director wanted to go, however, and wondered if she could travel for educational purposes, without any thought that she went on behalf of the Swedish prosecutor.

E-mail Conversation

A strange image conjured up in conversation between the two authorities. The British side offered the two women to go to England because they could be presented as two young law students passing through. On the way the press would not be able to ask them questions, reports TV4.

- I was a little surprised. I was definitely not planning on going in any guise.However, I was anxious not to be afflicted by the media, says Karin Rosander told TV4.

After discussion with colleagues, they came to the conclusion that she still could be recognized and therefore chose not to go.

ARTICLE HERE

OpEdNews - Article: A Story…The Last Whistleblower

Possibly,” Darin replied, ” but Washington might be content with discrediting him. Washington would try him in Alexandria, Virginia, which has a high density of military contractors. If Washington concludes that the jury wouldn’t convict Assange, then Assange will be “suicided’ in prison.
via opednews.com

Sweden vs. Assange

“If a country like Sweden — I respect Sweden a great deal. It has a long history, tradition and reputation for human rights. Now, if they start to ‘shake’ on these kinds of issues — to accommodate, to make concessions — what can we expect from other countries?”
U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, Theo van Boven
via swedenversusassange.com

Wikileaks: Kristinn Hrafnsson on Guardian, New York Times and Julian Assange | Crikey

Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson has savaged The Guardian and New York Times for attempting to rush the publication of WikiLeaks material, suggesting the issue contributed to the falling-out between the online whistleblower site and the doyens of the progressive mainstream media.

The Guardian and The New York Times were the key English-language vehicles for the release of both the Iraq and Afghanistan “war logs” and the initial tranche of diplomatic cables WikiLeaks continues to release via over 50 outlets around the world. However, relations between the newspapers and WikiLeaks soured and both outlets and their senior staff have since launched stories highly critical of Julian Assange. The New York Times has also been revealed to have allowed the State Department to veto and censor WikiLeaks material.

Hrafnsson told Crikey the relationship between WikiLeaks and the newspapers had been going sour from before the release of the Iraq War logs in October 2010. “[The Guardian] said they’d been promised exclusivity; Julian said, ‘no — that was only for the print media.’”

According to Hrafnsson, who is currently in Sydney to participate in tonight’s IQ2 debate, “Is Wikileaks a force for good?”, WikiLeaks had wanted to put back the release of Iraq material for a couple of weeks to finalise the redacting of documents. “We needed to postpone the release. That was met with great resistance and attempts to politically manoeuvre us. The Guardian was trying to claim that the New York Times would break ranks and go early and would not accept the postponement. It wasn’t true. We called their bluff.”

This is a significant revelation, because a standard criticism of WikiLeaks from its enemies within governments and the foreign policy establishment, and indeed from the mainstream media itself, is that the site was too eager to release material that may have placed people identified in the documents in danger.

The contrast has regularly been made with more “responsible” mainstream media, which would have vetted and redacted the material more carefully. The claim has been specifically disproven in relation to a cable that was alleged to have placed Morgan Tsvangirai in danger, but which was revealed to have been released by The Guardian before Wikileaks.

Nonetheless, Hrafnsson says, “no one has been harmed as a result of our releases as far as we know. That has been confirmed by the Pentagon and NATO officials in Afghanistan…Almost a year has passed and we’ve heard of no repercussions. It’s easily forgotten that we withheld one in five field reports from Afghanistan to minimise any harm.”

Hrafnsson noted that the New York Times’s willingness to allow the Obama Administration to control its release of material also applied to the Iraq war logs. “The Times was a little bit too willing to appease the administration with its release of the war logs.” WikiLeaks now does not promise exclusivity to anyone, but still has a “professional and positive” relationship with its German mainstream media partner Der Spiegel, its other original media partner.

“I was never expecting [The Guardian and NYT] to be grateful but they could have been more honourable,” Hrafnsson said. “It was clear to me last fall [that The Guardian] saw themselves as the central unit in all of this and in full control. When they realised we wanted some control over how things were carried out, we saw rising animosity from them, which is rather strange. We considered them media partners on an equal footing. The Guardian and the New York Times decided to see us as a source, primarily, and I’ve always thought that was odd because, in my opinion as a journalist, you have a duty to your sources and you have to respect and protect your source. They certainly weren’t doing that.”

The book by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding, WikiLeaks, was “most interesting in what it leaves out about the saga,” according to Hrafnsson.

Hrafnsson admitted the decision by Paypal, Mastercard and Visa to refuse to process donations for WL “has affected our ability to grow and expand”, and the Bank of America has also banned direct transfers to WL (not surprisingly, as it has long been rumoured Wikileaks holds a cache of damaging Bank of America documents, although this now seems unlikely).

“We are a small robust organisation so we’ve been able to keep going but possibly at a slower pace than we would have wanted. We are not going to allow these powerful financial giants to stop us. We will ask volunteers to go into the street with buckets and collect change if necessary…We are surviving. We have some funds to work from.”

Hrafnsson also rejects claims — usually aired by the foreign policy establishment — that diplomatic cable releases have made governments more secretive. “The sky hasn’t fallen in. People are still interacting — perhaps on a more open and honest basis than before.” He notes Robert Gates’s recent condemnation of European NATO partners for not playing a big enough role in Afghanistan and other conflicts.

Hrafnsson feels it is more rewarding working for WikiLeaks than the mainstream media. “It has changed the way I perceive journalism. I think it’s a terribly important addition to the world of journalism and will strengthen journalism in the long run. The aim of journalism is to unearth a fact and, of course, to have an impact. WikiLeaks has certainly had an impact.”

via crikey.com.au
mauroo: Julian Assange claims FBI tried to bribe Wikileaks staff. Julian Assange appeared at The Telegraph Hay Festival to defend Wikileaks’ “enviable record” and claimed that the FBI had tried to bribe the organisation’s staff. The founder of the whistle-blowing website disclosed his group would publish more leaked documents in the future. He also threatened to break controversial super-injunctions if the details were leaked to him. During an hour-long appearance, Mr Assange insisted that “the internet does not give you free speech”. He said that those revealing secrets online were “hounded from one end of the earth to the other”. His speech was watched by a series of well-known personalities including Vanessa Redgrave and Ralph Fiennes. Mr Assange added that his group had faced numerous recent challenges, including attempts by the FBI to try and bribe employees. Read more here.
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mauroo:

Julian Assange claims FBI tried to bribe Wikileaks staff.

Julian Assange appeared at The Telegraph Hay Festival to defend Wikileaks’ “enviable record” and claimed that the FBI had tried to bribe the organisation’s staff.

The founder of the whistle-blowing website disclosed his group would publish more leaked documents in the future. He also threatened to break controversial super-injunctions if the details were leaked to him.

During an hour-long appearance, Mr Assange insisted that “the internet does not give you free speech”.

He said that those revealing secrets online were “hounded from one end of the earth to the other”. His speech was watched by a series of well-known personalities including Vanessa Redgrave and Ralph Fiennes.

Mr Assange added that his group had faced numerous recent challenges, including attempts by the FBI to try and bribe employees.

Read more here.

(via fuchhhhhh-deactivated20111207)

The WikiLeaks Grand Jury and the still escalating War on Whistleblowing - Glenn Greenwald

The WikiLeaks Grand Jury and the still escalating War on Whistleblowing
AP
Julian Assange, President Obama and Bradley Manning

The contrast between these two headlines from this morning tells a significant story: From The Guardian (click image to enlarge):

From NPR:

___________

As Julian Assange wins the Sydney Peace Prize for “exceptional courage in pursuit of human rights,” NPR reports that “a federal grand jury in Virginia is scheduled to hear testimony on Wednesday from witnesses” in the criminal investigation of his whistle-blowing group, as “prosecutors are trying to build a case against [the] WikiLeaks founder [] whose website has embarrassed the U.S. government by disclosing sensitive diplomatic and military information.”  The NPR story — based in part on my reporting of a Grand Jury Subpoena served two weeks ago in Cambridge — explains what has long been clear: that “the WikiLeaks case is part of a much broader campaign by the Obama administration to crack down on leakers.”

Specifically, NPR accurately reports, the effort to turn Assange and WikiLeaks into criminals for doing nothing more than what newspapers, Bob Woodward, and administration officials frequently do — disclose government secrets to the public without authorization — is merely one prong in the Obama administration’s unprecedented war against whistleblowing:

A Worrisome Development

National security experts say they can’t remember a time when the Justice Department has pursued so many criminal cases based on leaks of government secrets.

Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists has been following five separate prosecutions, part of what he calls a tremendous surge by the Obama administration.

For people who are concerned about freedom of the press, access to national security information, it’s a worrisome development,” says Aftergood, who writes for the blog Secrecy News [ed: and is a vocal WikiLeaks critic]. 

Aftergood says some of the most important disclosures of the past decade, including abuses by the U.S. military at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, came out because people concerned about overreach blew the whistle on the government.

 ”Leaks serve a very valuable function as a kind of safety valve,” he adds. “They help us to get out the information that otherwise would be stuck.”

 The Obama Justice Department doesn’t agree.

The vast majority of publicly disclosed high-level government corruption and lawbreaking over the last decade has come from unauthorized leaks, with the majority of it over the last year from WikiLeaks. Thus, it’s hardly surprising that high-level government officials — even those who ran on a platform of protecting and venerating whistle-blowing — want to destroy it through a mix of persecution and intimidation.  To its credit, the DOJ recently announced that it would not prosecute Thomas Tamm, the mid-level DOJ officials who informed the New York Times about the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program.  But that has been a rare exception, as the DOJ is actively prosecuting an array of whistleblowers who exposed similar levels of corruption and wrongdoing — in blatant violation of Obama’s decree to “Look Forward, not Backward” when it comes to protecting powerful Bush-era political officials who committed serious crimes.  Indeed, the prosecution of WikiLeaks — which, unlike government employees, has no duty to safeguard government secrets — would be the greatest blow to press freedoms and whistleblowing in the last several decades at least.

Assange was awarded this peace prize yesterday because — unlike other Peace Prize recipients — his work has been relentlessly devoted to impeding wars (not escalating them) by exposing the truth about the destruction and suffering they spawn. Beyond that, even the most vehement WikiLeaks critics, such as NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller, admit that the disclosures from WikiLeaks (and allegedly Bradley Manning) played at least some role in sparking the democratic rebellions in the Middle East, as those documents highlighted in new detail the breadth of the corruption of many of those despots:

And that does not count the impact of these revelations on the people most touched by them. WikiLeaks cables in which American diplomats recount the extravagant corruption of Tunisia’s rulers helped fuel a popular uprising that has overthrown the government.

And yet, many of the very same people who cheer for those democratic uprisings continue simultaneously to cheer for the administration that (a) steadfastly supported those dictators (and in some cases still supports them in exchange for doing America’s bidding) while (b) persecuting with Grand Jury investigations, imprisonment, and crushing solitary confinement those who seem to have helped spawn those rebellions.  That the U.S. Government is obsessed with crushing one of the few remaining avenues for learning what it does (whistleblowing) — and forever imprisoning those who have brought more transparency to its wrongdoing and deceit than all media outlets combined (WikiLeaks, Assange and, if the accusations are true, Manning) — underscores just how central a role secrecy plays in maximizing government power and the ability of officials to abuse it.  This secrecy regime is the heart and soul of the National Security State.

But to really see the true purposes served by secrecy, just consider this truly amazing ACLU report from yesterday.  In 2009, the ACLU filed a FOIA request seeking information about how the Government has interpreted and applied the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 — the bipartisan legislation which vested lawbreaking telecoms with retroactive immunity and drastically expanded the Government’s domestic eavesdropping powers (in order to legalize the crux of the once-controversial Bush NSA program).  Unsurprisingly, the Most Transparent Administration Ever refused to provide anything other than the most heavily redacted documents in response to that FOIA request, though it was enough, explained the ACLU, to “confirm that the government had interpreted the statute as broadly as we had feared and even that the government had repeatedly violated the few limitations that the statute actually imposed.”

But since then, the ACLU has been aggressively pursuing more documents, including attempting to find out which specific private industry telecoms are cooperating in these eavesdropping programs.   Two weeks ago, the DOJ provided its explanations as to why it refuses to produce that information.  Among those documents was what the ACLU calls ” this unexpectedly honest explanation from the FBI” about the real reason it insists on concealing this information.  Just behold the noble purposes fulfilled by the secrecy regime (click on image to enlarge):

As the ACLU succinctly put it:

There you have it. The government doesn’t want you to know whether your internet or phone company is cooperating with its dragnet surveillance program because you might get upset and file lawsuits asserting your constitutional rights. Would it be such a bad thing if a court were to consider the constitutionality of the most sweeping surveillance program ever enacted by Congress?

This is the real purpose of the Government’s devotion to the secrecy regime:  it prevents any meaningful accountability on the part of those in power.  Preventing the public from knowing what they’re doing (and what their “private partners” are doing) ensures no backlash ensues and there is no accountability possible.  That, manifestly, is the Obama administration’s overarching goal in adopting the Bush/Cheney version of the “state secrets” privilege and thus shielding even presidential crimes from judicial review: by keeping everyone, including courts, in the dark about what they do, they shield themselves (the public/private consortium that runs the National Security and Surveillance States) from the rule of law.  And by keeping the public in the dark about what they do, they maintain exclusive control over information and thus shield and enable their own propaganda.

Whistleblowers in general — and WikiLeaks and Assange in particular — are one of the very, very few genuine threats to that scheme.  And that — and that alone — is why they are being targeted with such fervor and force.  And it’s why those who believe in greater transparency and in subverting that secrecy regime should do everything possible to defend whistleblowers from this assault.

* * * * *

Philosophy Professor Jonathan Lear has a very interesting article in The New Republic on what motivated P.J. Crowley to speak out against Bradley Manning’s detention conditions and the important public values fulfilled by that type of (exceedingly rare) candor from public officials.

And for those in Boston: on May 26, I’ll be speaking to the annual meeting of the ACLU in Massachusetts.  Ticket information is here.  In advance of that event, I was interviewed by them on multiple civil liberties issues; those short video segments can be viewed here.

via salon.com

FBI serves Grand Jury subpoena likely relating to WikiLeaks - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

In the wake of a massive disclosure of Guantanamo files by WikiLeaks, the FBI yesterday served a Grand Jury subpoena in Boston on a Cambridge resident, compelling his appearance to testify in Alexandria, Virgina.  Alexandria is where a Grand Jury has been convened to criminally investigate WikiLeaks and Julian Assange and determine whether an indictment against them is warranted.  The individual served has been publicly linked to the WikiLeaks case, and it is highly likely that the Subpoena was issued in connection with that investigation.

Notably, the Subopena explicitly indicates that the Grand Jury is investigating possible violations of the Espionage Act (18 U.S.C. 793), a draconian 1917 law under which no non-government-employee has ever been convicted for disclosing classified information.  The most strident anti-WikiLeaks politicians — such as Dianne Feinstein and Newt Gingrich — have called for the prosecution of the whistle-blowing group under this law, and it appears that the Obama DOJ is at least strongly considering that possibility.  

The investigation appears also to focus on Manning, as the Subpoena indicates the Grand Jury is investigating parties for “knowingly accessing a computer without authorization” — something that seems to refer to Manning — though it also cites the conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. 371, as well as the conspiracy provision of the Espionage Act (subsection (g)), suggesting that they are investigating those who may have helped Manning obtain access.  The New York Times previously reported that the DOJ hoped to build a criminal case against WikiLeaks and Assange by proving they conspired with Manning ahead of time (rather than merely passively received his leaked documents).  Also cited is 18 U.S.C. 641, which makes it a crime to “embezzle, steal, purloin, or knowingly convert . .  any record, voucher, money, or thing of value of the United States.”

The serving of this Subpoena strongly suggests that the DOJ criminal investigation into WikiLeaks and Assange continues in a serious way; perhaps it was accelerated as a result of this latest leak, though that’s just speculation.  It also appears clear that the DOJ is strongly considering an indictment under the Espionage Act — an act that would be radical indeed for non-government-employees doing nothing other than what American newspapers do on a daily basis (and have repeatedly done in partnership with WikiLeaks). The Subpoena is here; the two page letter accompanying the Subpoena are below (click on images to enlarge):

via salon.com