Julian Assange - WikiLeaks (28 page)

A leak revealing the campaign data of Republican Senator Norm Coleman has been said to be largely beneficial to his adversary Democrat Senator Al Franken, supported by Soros.

In May 2009, a member of the OSI participated at the European conference on media and new communication services together with the Icelandic Minister of Education, Science and Culture. It's only after this conference that the idea of the IMMI (Icelandic Modern Media Initiative) came to Julian Assange.

The list of allegations is long: in January 2008, WikiLeaks published the bank statements of 1,600 clients of the Julius Baer Group, the biggest Swiss securities management bank. These clients had accounts in a branch on the Cayman Islands. The bank took legal action to retract its claim faced with the impossibility of suppressing the information spread via mirror sites. This bad situation at the Julius Baer Group was apparently an opportunity for a takeover bid from the Goldman Sachs bank, which is linked to the Quantum Fund of George Soros.

Even if the shortcuts seem quick, Julian's sole defense would be to say of Wayne Madsen: “He seems to be another case [the first being John Young, author's note] of someone who was fantastic a few years ago, but recently has started to see conspiracies everywhere. Both cases probably age related.” John Young is seventy-four, while Wayne Madsen is fifty-seven. It's surprising to hear this from someone who has built a system of truth to fight the conspiracies that he sees everywhere.

Julian Assange hates being contradicted and prefers brushing his opponents aside. He also hates justifying himself. Psychoanalyst Coline Covington noticed, “while asserting his innocence, Assange accuses others around him of abusing [their] power. He refers to an ‘espionage indictment made secretly against me' and a ‘smear campaign' launched against him. His accusations show a paranoia, which only confirms his anxiety that his own attacks are being turned against him. […] He can then become the martyr son who was abused by his father – a hero and a victim at the same time.”

This range of paranoia can be detected in Julian's interviews. He told the motherjones.com investigation site in June 2010 details about how six men broke into the residence he was staying at in Nairobi, Kenya and threw him to the ground. The residence's security heard him cry out and came to chase away the attackers. He told the journalist that they had come for him without explaining why.

Several times he reported the case of an ambush carried out in 2009 against one of his associates in Luxembourg. In a covered parking lot, a man with an English accent dressed like ‘James Bond'– and therefore supposed to be British secret services – had apparently asked questions on the organization and pressed his associate to divulge more ‘over coffee.' There again, Julian kept mysterious. Just like the time when he sensed two agents were following him on a flight to Iceland or when he disguised himself in London as an old lady to escape from ‘other agents.'

The problem with all these stories is that they can rarely be verified and are sometimes muddy or contradictory once other statements are made. By ensuring the communication of a business as innovative and controversial as WikiLeaks on his own, Julian has unfortunately not been a stranger to contradiction.

Even in his choice of alliances, the leader of WikiLeaks surprised people.

First, on his advisory board, most of the names mentioned have had some sort of relations with U.S. government institutions (NED, Radio Free Asia, etc.). Finally, these relations turned out to be null and void following the vague declarations of the main interested parties. So why boast these alliances at all?

The main goal of the advisory board was to boost the respectability of the organization, but to attract whose benevolence? Who is reassured by these kinds of relations?

Then there are the WikiLeaks members. A rumor, confirmed afterward in an interview with Kristinn Hrafnsson in December 2010, justified the involvement of Israel Shamir with WikiLeaks a propos relations with the Russian press.

On numerous occasions, this freelance journalist was called on his negativistic and anti-Semitic remarks. How can Julian allow such an alliance? This is the same man who, during his speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum 2010, denounced the United States and touched lightly on the Nazis by comparing the slogans at Auschwitz ‘
Arbeit macht frei'
(‘Work will make you free') to Guantanamo Bay ‘Honor Bound To Defend Freedom.'

According to a survey by Swedish public radio, Israel Shamir was responsible for selecting the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables and distributing them to his contacts in the Russian press. How could one uphold neutrality when entrusting the intermediation to such controversial people?

Furthermore, Julian's choice of press partners has often been criticized by a certain opinion that regretted the Western orientation of these major press groups and by the partners themselves who have had a tough time understanding his changes in orientation,
personal agreements with new partners, stormy responses and a need to control everything.

The task wasn't easy, Daniel Domscheit-Berg said when leaving the organization: “It is too much work, too much responsibility and ultimately too much power. It's very hard to argue against the notion that WikiLeaks has a certain measure of political power at the moment.”

The foundations of WikiLeaks have indeed evolved in three years' time. In 2006, the founding idea was based on a technological initiative, whose functioning relied on the foundations of Wikipedia and this famous ‘wisdom of crowds,' described by James Surowiecki in his eponymous best-selling book. Knowledge that was totally decentralized, open, independent, with a shared ethic and didn't rely on any institution. The difficulties, pressure and ambition very quickly lead to a centralization of decisions that was more and more personalized, a unilateral review of the content with an editorialized broadcast. Even though the base remains the same, the core of WikiLeaks was to broadcast information from sources as best as possible and to the greatest possible number.

But who were these infamous sources?

Julian contacted whistleblowers. When he fought alongside his mother for the custody of his son Daniel, he campaigned within the management to find informers. Later, he rubbed shoulders with a whistleblowers' association, Whistleblowers Australia. Assange knew people who, just like Ellsberg, realize one day that his professional daily life, which fascinated him for so long, was turning into an increasingly unbearable situation. He created WikiLeaks for them, for a Rudolf Elmer at the brink of
incomprehension at work who decided to denounce the fiscal frauds orchestrated by his bank, the Julius Baer Group.

The system wanted to be open to all these informers by guaranteeing them security and anonymity. And it has been on these two points that WikiLeaks is subjected to the most attacks.

Open to all without any guarantees of where it came from. Just like that, information could be rejected for objective or subjective reasons. And information could even be submitted to WikiLeaks with hidden motives. An interview on November 29 2010, on the American television station PBS with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, revealed his expert point of view. By analyzing the content of the leaks and the orientation of possible impacts, Brzezinski, who is still one of the best informed men in the United States, declared: “I have no doubt that WikiLeaks is getting a lot of the stuff from sort of relatively unimportant sources, like the one that perhaps is identified on the air. But it may be getting stuff at the same time from interested intelligence parties who want to manipulate the process and achieve certain very specific objectives.”

Moreover, this idea can be traced back in history. Former U.S. Air Force colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty, known for his CIA activities (he inspired the character Mr. X in the Oliver Stone film,
JFK
), said about Daniel Ellsberg:

“There is another category of writers and self-proclaimed authority on the subjects of secrecy, intelligence, and containment. This man is the suave, professional parasite who gains a reputation as a real reporter by disseminating the scraps and ‘Golden Apples' thrown to him by the great men who use him. His writer seldom knows and rarely cares that many of the scraps from which he draws his material have been planted, that they are controlled
leaks, and that he is being used, and glorified as he is being used, by the inside secret intelligence community.”

By ensuring the security and anonymity of sources, John Young defended the idea that there was no security on the Internet, and Wayne Madsen went so far as saying that Tor, the anonymity system used by WikiLeaks, had some flaws that did in fact reveal personal information. However, government forces have not identified the only sources revealed from the site's leaks. Rudolf Elmer made himself known in 2005 by handing over his files to the Swiss press before contacting WikiLeaks in 2008, while Bradley Manning was denounced by an Internet forum correspondent.

The only real thing Julian could be accused of was having taken the reins of WikiLeaks' destiny to satisfy his personal ambition of managing his business, something many people agreed on: his partners, his first supporters like John Young, some associates like Daniel Domscheit-Berg and maybe others like the mysterious WikiLeaks insider who denounced the internal actions of WikiLeaks with e-mails sent to Cryptome.

His goal was to move up higher and faster by any means, a man who blogged about a poem by the brothers Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (executed on July 19, 1953 for espionage against the United States):

“Even so, we did what we believed in:
Treason, yes, perhaps, but with good cause.
History will judge by its own laws.”

“I've been so isolated so long… I just wanted to be nice, and live a normal life… but events keep forcing me to figure out ways to survive… smart enough to know what's going on, but helpless to do anything… no one took any notice of me…”

These are the first words Bradley Manning wrote on May 22, 2010 to a hacker who became his confidant. It was Adrian Lamo who went from confidant to denunciator by delivering Manning to the authorities a few days later. When they talked, Manning was very uncomfortable, tired, anxious and revolted. By then WikiLeaks had already released the film,
Collateral Murder
, on April 5, to the world.

Bradley Manning was born in 1987, and it was noticed early on that he was peculiar. His father was in the Navy, a very strict man, often away from home. His mother was Welsh and had difficulty adjusting to life in the United States. After his parents' divorce in 2001, his mother left with him to the United Kingdom, where Bradley continued his schooling at Tasker Milward in Wales. Tom Dyer, one of his school friends said: “He's always had this sense that ‘I'm going to right a big wrong.' He was like that at school. If something went wrong, he would speak about it. If he
didn't agree with something, he said so. He would even have altercations with teachers if he thought something was not right.”

After high school, his mother sent him to his father in the United States, who, when he found out he was gay, threw him out of the house. Out on the street, he lived in his car, doing odd jobs where he was always getting into fights. At one point, he had a short stint at a software company. His boss remembers this young man with round cheeks and bright look being very good at programming, but with “the personality of a bull in a china shop.”

Following the advice of a friend, Bradley joined the army in 2007, hoping to find somewhere he would fit in. He was recognized for his IT skills, and was posted in Iraq as an agent for the Intel section. Manning had a hard time hiding his homosexuality while expected to adhere to the ‘
don't ask, don't tell
' policy. This law was enforced as of 1993, but was repealed by President Barack Obama in December 2010, allowing gay personnel to serve their country regardless of their sexual orientation. Before then, legislation stopped anyone serving in the army from disclosing their homosexuality, bisexuality or from even talking about marriage between two people of the same sex or gay parenting. As for the army, it wasn't authorized to do any research into the private lives of its recruits, knowing that the law continued to refuse anyone who “demonstrated a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts” from serving in the armed forces of the United States, because their presence would “create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.”

At the barracks, Manning was the object of innuendo, mockery and bullying. In April 2010, he was dismissed due to a brawl with another soldier and was discharged from his duties with the Intel
department. From that moment on, he felt very bad and wrote to Adrian Lamo, saying:

After releasing the video
Collateral Murder
online and after the shockwave it caused, two former American soldiers of the Bravo Company 2-16 wrote an open letter to the Iraqi people.

Ethan McCord was the soldier who got the children out of the van. In April 2010, he spoke about what he had witnessed in Iraq many times back in July 2007, following the helicopter attack: “Myself and the team I was with were the first dismounted soldiers to arrive on the scene. I saw what appeared to have been three men in a corner. It was an extreme shock to my system. They didn't look human, I know they had to be at one time but the destroyed carnage that I was looking at didn't appear to be. Then there was the smell. The smell was unlike anything I've smelled before, a mixture of feces, urine, blood, smoke, and something else indescribable. I saw an RPG next to the men and an AK-47. Crying! I hear crying. Not cries of pain, but that of a small child who had woken up from a horrible nightmare. I saw that there was a minivan and the cries appeared to be coming from it. Myself and another soldier, a twenty-year-old private, walked up to the passenger side of the van. We looked inside, the private I was with reeled back, began to vomit, and quickly ran away.