http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11937110 'Mr Assange's supporters have written an open letter to Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, asking her to protect him.
Mr Pilger, who appeared in court to support Mr Assange, said Ms Gillard's threat to remove his passport smacked of "totalitarianism".'
...
The third charge claimed Assange "deliberately molested" Miss A on 18 August "in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity". The fourth charge accused Assange of having sex with a second woman, Miss W, on 17 August without a condom while she was asleep at her Stockholm home.
...
as opposed to accidently molested, cause we all know how often that happens. :roll: .... and in a way to violate her sexual integrity??? what the hell does that mean...cause ive got some ideas and theyre none id charge someone with. oh and does it really matter if he used a condom or not if he had sex with someone while she was asleep?? seems a bit superfluous really.
The law as it pertains to sex is such a joke anyway that they can pretty much concoct anything they want and twist the facts to suit them. The law regarding sexual matters is completely arbitrary and absurd, hence the perfect method with which to stitch someone up and silence them.
...
The third charge claimed Assange "deliberately molested" Miss A on 18 August "in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity". The fourth charge accused Assange of having sex with a second woman, Miss W, on 17 August without a condom while she was asleep at her Stockholm home.
...
as opposed to accidently molested, cause we all know how often that happens. :roll: .... and in a way to violate her sexual integrity??? what the hell does that mean...cause ive got some ideas and theyre none id charge someone with. oh and does it really matter if he used a condom or not if he had sex with someone while she was asleep?? seems a bit superfluous really.
The law as it pertains to sex is such a joke anyway that they can pretty much concoct anything they want and twist the facts to suit them. The law regarding sexual matters is completely arbitrary and absurd, hence the perfect method with which to stitch someone up and silence them.
well you know im not julian assange...obviously... but if i were in his position(no pun intended) this wouldnt silence me. my mind has been working overtime on this whole sex by surprise. my imagination has been having a gay old time with it. and i wish for once the australian govt would grow some friggin backbone and stand behind one of their citizens without umming and aahhing and trying to distance themselves. surely there are those in the govt that can see these charges for the bullshit they are.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Another thing, the judge refused bail because he feared Assange may attempt to flee the country...BUT...didn't Assange just VOLUNTARILY turn himself into the police??
Yeah but another criminal ( lifer) wouldnt have the oppertunity to knife him if he went home. and have the americans set his family up
As we are not privvy to the details, we don't know for sure. What I know is that whatever charges against him were dismissed by the prosecutors ages ago and, by miracle, they reappear at this time? Makes me wonder....
It's difficult because one doesn't want to turn these women into criminals (and do a huge disservice to all those who have been victims of sex crimes), but the way this has come about and is handled can make one doubt.
Hackers are uniting and are attacking all those who are trying bring down WikiLeaks! Paypal and Master Card have been attacked! Twitter is on their hit list!
I wouldn't want to get in the way of these guys! I have enough trouble dealing with the trojan horse viruse.... :?
Hackers are uniting and are attacking all those who are trying bring down WikiLeaks! Paypal and Master Card have been attacked! Twitter is on their hit list!
I wouldn't want to get in the way of these guys! I have enough trouble dealing with the trojan horse viruse.... :?
I heard this on our evening news. It seems Mastercard have been well hit and there's not much they can do about it.
"Security experts said the sites had been targeted by a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), which swamp a site with so many page requests that it becomes overwhelmed and drops offline.
Paul Mutton of security firm Netcraft said that 1,600 computers were involved in flooding the site with spoof requests."
Apparently you just need to download a bit of software and you can cause chaos. So much for IT security etc.
currently 1334 strong. good luck shutting them all down.
Paypal withholds 60,000 pounds headed to Assange. His bank closes his bank account, citing false residency on his forms.
Anonymous, a group of hackers, decide to take action in the name of free speech.
Visa.com is shut down. Mastercard is attacked as well, many users unable to perform actions online. His swiss bank was attacked as well, as was Paypal, with reports the site was down for many hours.
A cyber war has broken out. and the US government has lost.
The information in the cables is currently available to download via bit torrent, over 20,000 files, and is now available to anyone with a computer, here....http://213.251.145.96/
currently 1334 strong. good luck shutting them all down.
Paypal withholds 60,000 pounds headed to Assange. His bank closes his bank account, citing false residency on his forms.
Anonymous, a group of hackers, decide to take action in the name of free speech.
Visa.com is shut down. Mastercard is attacked as well, many users unable to perform actions online. His swiss bank was attacked as well, as was Paypal, with reports the site was down for many hours.
A cyber war has broken out. and the US government has lost.
The information in the cables is currently available to download via bit torrent, over 20,000 files, and is now available to anyone with a computer, here....http://213.251.145.96/
Excellent post!
We need that Bank info released already! I think the last thing I heard was that Assange is holding the info with various sources- And his people are threatening to release it! This info should be good! And is really going to stir shit up!
currently 1334 strong. good luck shutting them all down.
Paypal withholds 60,000 pounds headed to Assange. His bank closes his bank account, citing false residency on his forms.
Anonymous, a group of hackers, decide to take action in the name of free speech.
Visa.com is shut down. Mastercard is attacked as well, many users unable to perform actions online. His swiss bank was attacked as well, as was Paypal, with reports the site was down for many hours.
A cyber war has broken out. and the US government has lost.
The information in the cables is currently available to download via bit torrent, over 20,000 files, and is now available to anyone with a computer, here....http://213.251.145.96/
Excellent post!
We need that Bank info released already! I think the last thing I heard was that Assange is holding the info with various sources- And his people are threatening to release it! This info should be good! And is really going to stir shit up!
free speech advocate "Anonymous" defends wikileaks and goes on the offensive, attacking companies that have hindered wikileaks' realease of information. takes on mastercard and visa, releases info via twitter....
currently 1334 strong. good luck shutting them all down.
Paypal withholds 60,000 pounds headed to Assange. His bank closes his bank account, citing false residency on his forms.
Anonymous, a group of hackers, decide to take action in the name of free speech.
Visa.com is shut down. Mastercard is attacked as well, many users unable to perform actions online. His swiss bank was attacked as well, as was Paypal, with reports the site was down for many hours.
A cyber war has broken out. and the US government has lost.
The information in the cables is currently available to download via bit torrent, over 20,000 files, and is now available to anyone with a computer, here....http://213.251.145.96/
Johann Hari: This case must not obscure what WikiLeaks has told us
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
'We will never unlearn or unknow the great truths that Julian Assange has brought to the world'
Every one of us owes a debt to Julian Assange. Thanks to him, we now know that our governments are pursuing policies that place you and your family in considerably greater danger. Wikileaks has informed us they have secretly launched war on yet another Muslim country, sanctioned torture, kidnapped innocent people from the streets of free countries and intimidated the police into hushing it up, and covered up the killing of 15,000 civilians – five times the number killed on 9/11. Each one of these acts has increased the number of jihadis. We can only change these policies if we know about them – and Assange has given us the black-and-white proof.
Each of the wikileaks revelations has been carefully weighed to ensure there is a public interest in disclosing it. Of the more than 250,000 documents they hold, they have released fewer than 1000 – and each of those has had the names of informants, or any information that could place anyone at risk, removed. The information they have released covers areas where our governments are defying the will of their own citizens, and hiding the proof from them.
Here’s some examples. The Obama administration has been denying that it has expanded the current “war” to yet another country, Yemen. Now we know that is a lie. Ali Abdulah Saleh, the Yemeni dictator, brags in these cables to a US diplomat: “We’ll continue to say the bombs are ours, not yours.” The counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen, who until recently was a senior advisor to General Petreaus in Iraq, estimates that for every one jihadi killed in these bombings, they kill fifty innocent people. How would we react if this was happening in Britain? How many of us would become deranged by grief and resolve to fight back, even against the other side’s women and children? Bombing to end jihadism is like smoking to end lung cancer – a cure that worsens the disease.
The US and British governments told us they invaded Iraq, in part, because they were appalled that the Iraqi government tortured its own citizens. Tony Blair often mentioned “Saddam’s torture chambers” in making his case for the war. Yet these leaked documents show that as soon as our governments were in charge, the policy of burning, electrocuting and raping people started again – and they consciously chose a policy of not objecting and not investigating. Modern jihadism was born in the torture chambers of Egypt in the 1950s. A lot more will have been made in the torture chambers of Baghdad since 2003. Some of it has already exploded onto our streets – the attempted Glasgow airport bombing was by Iraqis who said they were “resisting” the use of torture in their country. There will be more.
The cables reveal how this grief and murderous rage is being spread across the Muslim world, while we lie about it. Here’s just one example. US troops blew up an Afghan village called Azizabad, and killed 95 people, 50 of them children. None were al Qaeda, or even Taliban. They knew what they’d done – yet in public they kept insisting they’d killed “militants”, and even accused the local Afghan villagers of “fabricat[ing] such evidence as grave sites.”
Wikileaks has exposed a terrifying casualness in our governments about ramping up the risk against us. Indeed, they show that the US government knows Saudi Arabia is “the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups world-wide”, but our leaders continue to (literally) hold hands with them, because their oil pipelines run our way. They show a startling contempt for democracy too: when the Honduran President, Manuel Zelaya, was kidnapped by a far right clique because he had increased the minimum wage and redistributed wealth to the poor, the US embassy confirmed privately that it was “clearly illegal”. Yet the US administration refused to say this publicly, instead urging “reconciliation” with the junta their own diplomats were calling “totally illegitimate.”
For Britain’s politicians, the documents offer a long-needed slap in the face. Successive governments, of all parties, support these destructive US policies because they believe we have influence with the Americans. But these cables show the Americans literally laugh at them and their sycophancy, describing their servility in mocking tones in cables back home, saying “it would be humorous if it were not so corrosive.”
Most people in the US and Britain oppose these policies. We are better than our politicians. But we can only stop them – and the risk they pose to innocent people across the world, including us – if we know about them. Assange has made that possible, at great risk to his liberty and his life. So this is a move that enhances our national security. Of course, there are people who claim he has “blood on his hands” – but where is there evidence? It is months now since the first cables were leaked, and they have found not a single person who has been even threatened as a result of the leaks – except Assange, whose death is being incited by many of America’s leading politicians.
There is a squalid little irony when you see people who are literally bombing innocent civilians every day feverishly accuse a man who has never touched a weapon in his life of being “covered in blood.” Wikileaks have hurt nobody. They redacted sensitive names. They held back any cables that could expose anyone to risk. They asked the Pentagon to help them by privately explaining where they believed there could be a danger – only to be rebuffed.
Of course, it is possible Julian Assange did this good, noble thing, and is also a rapist. I do not believe in reflexively dismissing rape claims by any woman, in any circumstances. Bill Clinton was the victim of a right-wing smear campaign and many of us dismissed the allegations of sexual assault against him – but now, years later, one of the women who came forward, Kathleen Willey, has earned nothing from her allegations, remains a left-wing Democrat, and seems to have a very plausible case.
Here’s what we know. There is a long history of the CIA viciously smearing people who dare to cross the US state machinery. There is a strong chance the claims against Assange is another case of it. But there is also a long history of otherwise admirable men turning out to be rapists, and there’s a chance this is another case of it. This should be tested in a court of law – and the trial should be watched very careful to make sure it’s not being rigged by bribes or threats.
Whatever that judgment turns out to be, we will never unlearn or unknow the great truths Julian Assange has brought us. The hysterical state-power hacks saying he is “a terrorist” should go tell it to all the tortured Iraqis, all the terrorized Honduran democrats, and all the bombed Yemenis whose story he has – at last – brought out from the sealed-away world of Top Secret cables.
Johann Hari: This case must not obscure what WikiLeaks has told us
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
'We will never unlearn or unknow the great truths that Julian Assange has brought to the world'
Every one of us owes a debt to Julian Assange. Thanks to him, we now know that our governments are pursuing policies that place you and your family in considerably greater danger. Wikileaks has informed us they have secretly launched war on yet another Muslim country, sanctioned torture, kidnapped innocent people from the streets of free countries and intimidated the police into hushing it up, and covered up the killing of 15,000 civilians – five times the number killed on 9/11. Each one of these acts has increased the number of jihadis. We can only change these policies if we know about them – and Assange has given us the black-and-white proof.
Each of the wikileaks revelations has been carefully weighed to ensure there is a public interest in disclosing it. Of the more than 250,000 documents they hold, they have released fewer than 1000 – and each of those has had the names of informants, or any information that could place anyone at risk, removed. The information they have released covers areas where our governments are defying the will of their own citizens, and hiding the proof from them.
Here’s some examples. The Obama administration has been denying that it has expanded the current “war” to yet another country, Yemen. Now we know that is a lie. Ali Abdulah Saleh, the Yemeni dictator, brags in these cables to a US diplomat: “We’ll continue to say the bombs are ours, not yours.” The counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen, who until recently was a senior advisor to General Petreaus in Iraq, estimates that for every one jihadi killed in these bombings, they kill fifty innocent people. How would we react if this was happening in Britain? How many of us would become deranged by grief and resolve to fight back, even against the other side’s women and children? Bombing to end jihadism is like smoking to end lung cancer – a cure that worsens the disease.
The US and British governments told us they invaded Iraq, in part, because they were appalled that the Iraqi government tortured its own citizens. Tony Blair often mentioned “Saddam’s torture chambers” in making his case for the war. Yet these leaked documents show that as soon as our governments were in charge, the policy of burning, electrocuting and raping people started again – and they consciously chose a policy of not objecting and not investigating. Modern jihadism was born in the torture chambers of Egypt in the 1950s. A lot more will have been made in the torture chambers of Baghdad since 2003. Some of it has already exploded onto our streets – the attempted Glasgow airport bombing was by Iraqis who said they were “resisting” the use of torture in their country. There will be more.
The cables reveal how this grief and murderous rage is being spread across the Muslim world, while we lie about it. Here’s just one example. US troops blew up an Afghan village called Azizabad, and killed 95 people, 50 of them children. None were al Qaeda, or even Taliban. They knew what they’d done – yet in public they kept insisting they’d killed “militants”, and even accused the local Afghan villagers of “fabricat[ing] such evidence as grave sites.”
Wikileaks has exposed a terrifying casualness in our governments about ramping up the risk against us. Indeed, they show that the US government knows Saudi Arabia is “the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups world-wide”, but our leaders continue to (literally) hold hands with them, because their oil pipelines run our way. They show a startling contempt for democracy too: when the Honduran President, Manuel Zelaya, was kidnapped by a far right clique because he had increased the minimum wage and redistributed wealth to the poor, the US embassy confirmed privately that it was “clearly illegal”. Yet the US administration refused to say this publicly, instead urging “reconciliation” with the junta their own diplomats were calling “totally illegitimate.”
For Britain’s politicians, the documents offer a long-needed slap in the face. Successive governments, of all parties, support these destructive US policies because they believe we have influence with the Americans. But these cables show the Americans literally laugh at them and their sycophancy, describing their servility in mocking tones in cables back home, saying “it would be humorous if it were not so corrosive.”
Most people in the US and Britain oppose these policies. We are better than our politicians. But we can only stop them – and the risk they pose to innocent people across the world, including us – if we know about them. Assange has made that possible, at great risk to his liberty and his life. So this is a move that enhances our national security. Of course, there are people who claim he has “blood on his hands” – but where is there evidence? It is months now since the first cables were leaked, and they have found not a single person who has been even threatened as a result of the leaks – except Assange, whose death is being incited by many of America’s leading politicians.
There is a squalid little irony when you see people who are literally bombing innocent civilians every day feverishly accuse a man who has never touched a weapon in his life of being “covered in blood.” Wikileaks have hurt nobody. They redacted sensitive names. They held back any cables that could expose anyone to risk. They asked the Pentagon to help them by privately explaining where they believed there could be a danger – only to be rebuffed.
Of course, it is possible Julian Assange did this good, noble thing, and is also a rapist. I do not believe in reflexively dismissing rape claims by any woman, in any circumstances. Bill Clinton was the victim of a right-wing smear campaign and many of us dismissed the allegations of sexual assault against him – but now, years later, one of the women who came forward, Kathleen Willey, has earned nothing from her allegations, remains a left-wing Democrat, and seems to have a very plausible case.
Here’s what we know. There is a long history of the CIA viciously smearing people who dare to cross the US state machinery. There is a strong chance the claims against Assange is another case of it. But there is also a long history of otherwise admirable men turning out to be rapists, and there’s a chance this is another case of it. This should be tested in a court of law – and the trial should be watched very careful to make sure it’s not being rigged by bribes or threats.
Whatever that judgment turns out to be, we will never unlearn or unknow the great truths Julian Assange has brought us. The hysterical state-power hacks saying he is “a terrorist” should go tell it to all the tortured Iraqis, all the terrorized Honduran democrats, and all the bombed Yemenis whose story he has – at last – brought out from the sealed-away world of Top Secret cables.
In a nutshell it shows democracy means nothing to our politicians. We are the mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed shit. Great post.
This is also a perfect example of how those in power use sex as a weapon with which to intimidate and control the population.
It really goes to show just what a bunch of desperate, self-interested control-freaks they are.
It's amazing to me how so many people can have any respect for these fucking jackals.
Anna Ardin, Julian Assange Rape Accuser, May Have Ceased Pursuing Claims
Anna Ardin, one of two women behind the rape charges against the WIkiLeaks founder, may no longer be cooperating with prosecutors, the Australian website Crikey reports.
Julian Assange has been fighting sex charges from Sweden and is now in British custody. According to Crikey:
Ardin, who also goes by the name Bernardin, has moved to the West Bank in the Palestinian Territories, as part of a Christian outreach group, aimed at bringing reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis. She has moved to the small town of Yanoun, which sits close to Israel's security/sequestration wall. Yanoun is constantly besieged by fundamentalist Jewish settlers, and international groups have frequently stationed themselves there.
Attempts by Crikey to contact Ardin by phone, fax, email and twitter were unsuccessful today.
Business Insider is reporting that you can follow Anna Ardin on Twitter, @annaardin. Crikey says that her last tweet translates as:
"CIA agent, rabid feminist / Muslim lover, a Christian fundamentalist, frigid & fatally in love with a man, can you be all that at the same time ..."
The "sex crimes" at the heart of the Assange case are reportedly related to unprotected sex under a Swedish law.
She also tweeted against Visa, mastercard, and paypal
WikiLeaks release of classified information has generated a lot of attention in the past few weeks. The hysterical reaction makes one wonder if this is not an example of killing the messenger for the bad news. Despite what is claimed, the information that has been so far released, though classified, has caused no known harm to any individual, but it has caused plenty of embarrassment to our government. Losing our grip on our empire is not welcomed by the neoconservatives in charge.
There is now more information confirming that Saudi Arabia is a principal supporter and financier of al Qaeda, and that this should set off alarm bells since we guarantee its Sharia-run government. This emphasizes even more the fact that no al Qaeda existed in Iraq before 9/11, and yet we went to war against Iraq based on the lie that it did. It has been charged by experts that Julian Assange, the internet publisher of this information, has committed a heinous crime, deserving prosecution for treason and execution, or even assassination.
But should we not at least ask how the U.S. government should prosecute an Australian citizen for treason for publishing U.S. secret information that he did not steal? And if WikiLeaks is to be prosecuted for publishing classified documents, why shouldn't the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others also published these documents be prosecuted? Actually, some in Congress are threatening this as well.
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The New York Times, as a results of a Supreme Court ruling, was not found guilty in 1971 for the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg never served a day in prison for his role in obtaining these secret documents. The Pentagon Papers were also inserted into the Congressional record by Senator Mike Gravel, with no charges of any kind being made of breaking any national security laws. Yet the release of this classified information was considered illegal by many, and those who lied us into the Vietnam war, and argued for its prolongation were outraged. But the truth gained from the Pentagon Papers revealed that lies were told about the Gulf of Tonkin attack. which perpetuated a sad and tragic episode in our history.
Just as with the Vietnam War, the Iraq War was based on lies. We were never threatened by weapons of mass destruction or al Qaeda in Iraq, though the attack on Iraq was based on this false information. Any information which challenges the official propaganda for the war in the Middle East is unwelcome by the administration and the supporters of these unnecessary wars. Few are interested in understanding the relationship of our foreign policy and our presence in the Middle East to the threat of terrorism. Revealing the real nature and goal of our presence in so many Muslim countries is a threat to our empire, and any revelation of this truth is highly resented by those in charge.
Questions to consider:
Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
Number 3: Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?
Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised 'Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed.' I yield back the balance of my time.
it is obvious that this isn't about sexual assault at all. he is in custody so he can face charges for the leaks in the US and this was the way that the US could go about getting their man into custody without looking like they directly had their hands in it....i think most of us have been saying that since the beginning.
i think this is the same thing as the case with the pentagon papers and Assange is acting as the new york times in that case. he did not leak the cables, they were given to him and he published them, just like the new york times did with the pentagon papers.
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who angered Washington by releasing secret cables, said in a documentary on Sunday he faced prosecution by the United States and was disappointed with how Swedish justice had been abused.
Assange has been remanded in custody in Britain after a European arrest warrant was issued by Sweden, which wants to question Assange about allegations made by two women of sexual crimes. He has denied the allegations.
"I came to Sweden as a refugee publisher involved with an extraordinary publishing fight with the Pentagon, where people were being detained and there is an attempt to prosecute me for espionage," Assange said in an interview in the documentary, aired on Swedish public television.
"So I am unhappy and disappointed with how the Swedish justice system has been abused," the 39-year-old Australian added in the documentary, which was made before his arrest.
Assange faces a fresh British hearing on December 14. His Swedish lawyer has said he will fight extradition to Sweden.
One of his British lawyers, Jennifer Robinson, told ABC News in London on Friday that a U.S. indictment of Assange was imminent, but the report offered no further details or comment by Robinson why she believed charges were likely to be filed.
The U.S. Justice Department has been looking into a range of criminal charges, including violations of the 1917 Espionage Act, that could be filed in the WikiLeaks case involving the release of hundreds of confidential and classified U.S. diplomatic cables.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
i think assange completely overestimated the engagement of the majority of people in the world.
i believe that he turned himself in on these sex charges thinking that the way he has been treated would spark worldwide outrage and that people would stand up to large governments and stand up for due process in hopes of preventing extradition for prosecution for the leaks in the states. instead all the support he got was some rogue hackers temporarily hacking some big sites, and some support from people boycotting things like amazon and paypal among others. i do not think he was banking on things like people and politicians in the states calling for his execution as a traitor. i am thinking he got some bad legal advice. one would think that leaking these documents would have blown the lid off of some of these things and that those involved in leaked cables would be exposed, or even prosecuted. instead we are going after the publisher instead of the guilty.
how sad is that?
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Robert Fisk: Now we know. America really doesn't care about injustice in the Middle East
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
I came to the latest uproarious US diplomatic history with the deepest cynicism. And yesterday, in the dust of post-election Cairo – the Egyptian parliamentary poll was as usual a mixture of farce and fraud, which is at least better than shock and awe – I ploughed through so many thousands of American diplomatic reports with something approaching utter hopelessness. After all, they do quote President Hosni Mubarak as saying that "you can forget about democracy," don't they?
It's not that US diplomats don't understand the Middle East; it's just that they've lost all sight of injustice. Vast amounts of diplomatic literature prove that the mainstay of Washington's Middle East policy is alignment with Israel, that its principal aim is to encourage the Arabs to join the American-Israeli alliance against Iran, that the compass point of US policy over years and years is the need to tame/bully/crush/oppress/ ultimately destroy the power of Iran.
There is virtually no talk (so far, at least) of illegal Jewish colonial settlements on the West Bank, of Israeli "outposts", of extremist Israeli "settlers" whose homes now smallpox the occupied Palestinian West Bank – of the vast illegal system of land theft which lies at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian war. And incredibly, all kinds of worthy US diplomats grovel and kneel before Israel's demands – many of them apparently fervent supporters of Israel – as Mossad bosses and Israel military intelligence agents read their wish-list to their benefactors.
There's a wonderful moment in the cables when the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, explains to a US congressional delegation on 28 April last year that "a Palestinian state must be demilitarised, without control of its airspace and electro-magnetic field [sic], and without the power to enter into treaties or control its border". Well goodbye, then, to the "viable" (ergo Lord Blair of Isfahan) Palestinian state we all supposedly want. And the US Congress lads and ladies appear to have said nothing.
Instead, in The New York Times, we read through the Wikileaks files for the best quote. Here is Saudi King Abdullah, via his ambassador in Washington (a dab hand with the press), sayingthat Abdullah believes America must "cut of the head of this snake" – the snake being Iran or Ahmadinejad or Iranian nuclear facilities, or whatever.
But the Saudis are always threatening to cut off the head of their latest snakes. In 1982, Yasser Arafat said he would cut off Israel's left arm after its invasion of Lebanon, and then the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin said he would cut off Arafat's right arm. And I suppose that when it is revealed to us – as, alas, it is in these Wikileaks papers – that unsuitable applicants for US visas are called by American diplomats "visa vipers", we can only conclude that snakes are much in demand.
The problem is that for decades, Middle East potentates have been threatening to chop off the heads of snakes, serpents, rats and Iranian insects – the latter a favourite of Saddam Hussein who used US-supplied "insecticide" to destroy them, as we all know – while Israeli leaders have called Palestinians "cockroaches" (Rafael Eitan), "crocodiles" (Ehud Barak) and "three-legged beasts" (Begin).
Tears of laughter, I have to admit, began to run down my face when I read the po-faced US diplomatic report from Bahrain that King Hamad – or "His Supreme Highness King Hamad" as he insists on being called, in his Sunni dictatorship with a Shia majority and a kingdom slightly larger than the Isle of Wight – had announced that the danger of letting the Iranian nuclear programme go on was "greater than the danger of stopping it".
That wonderful Palestinian journalist Marwan Bishara was right when he said at the weekend that these US diplomatic papers were of more interest to anthropologists than political scientists; for they are a record of a deviant way of thinking about the Middle East. If King Abdullah (the crumbling Saudi version, as opposed to the Plucky Little Jordanian King version) really called Ahmadinejad Hitler and Sarkozy's adviser called Iran "a fascist state", it shows only that the US State Department is still obsessed with the Second World War.
I loved the stunning report of a visitor to the US embassy in Ankara who told diplomats that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was dying of leukemia. Not because the poor old boy is a cancer victim – he is not – but because this is the same old nonsense we've been peddled about the Middle East's recalcitrant leaders for so many years. I remember the days when American or British "diplomatic sources" insisted that Gaddafi was dying of cancer, that Khomeini was dying of cancer (long before he died), that Khomeini was already dead of cancer – again, long before he died – that the Palestinian contract killer Abu Nidal was dying of cancer, 20 years before he was murdered by Saddam. Even in Northern Ireland, Britain's half-baked spooks told us that the Protestant Vanguard leader William Craig was dying of cancer. And of course, he lived on, like the awful Gaddafi, whose Ukrainian nurse is described by the Americans as "voluptuous". Of course she is. Aren't all blonde dames "voluptuous" in such descriptions?
One of the most interesting reflections – dutifully ignored by most of the pro-Wikileaks papers yesterday – came in a cable on a meeting between a US Senate delegation and President Bashar Assad of Syria earlier this year. America, Assad told his guests, possessed "a huge information apparatus" but lacked the ability to analyse this information successfully. "While we lack your intelligence abilities," he says in rather sinister fashion, "we succeed in fighting extremists because we have better analysts ... in the US you like to shoot [terrorists]. Suffocating their networks is far more effective." Iran, he concluded, was the most important country in the region, followed by Turkey and – number three – Syria itself. Poor old Israel didn't get a look in.
Of course President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is "driven by paranoia" – so is everyone in that land, including most of Nato and especially theUnited States – and naturally the President of Yemen pretends to his own people that he is killing al-Qa'ida representatives when we all know it's General David Petraeus's warriors who are the culprits. Muslim leaders have constantly been claiming American military prowess against other Muslims as their own work.
Of course, we must not be too cynical. I loved the American diplomatic report (from Cairo, of course, not from Tel Aviv) which said that Netanyahu was "elegant and charming ... but never keeps his promises". But doesn't that apply to half the Arab leaders as well?
And then we come to the dank and frightening reporting of a meeting between Andrew Shapiro, "Assistant Secretary of State for the US Political-Military Bureau", meeting with Israel's spooks almost exactly a year ago. Israel was unable to protect its Cessna Caravan and Raven unmanned pilotless drones over southern Lebanon, admits Mossad. (Hezbollah will be obliged for this nugget.) An Israeli "J5" Colonel Shimon Arad waffles on upon the dangers of "Hezbollahstan" and Hamastan" and the "internal political deadlock" in Lebanon – there wasn't then, but there is now – and about Lebanon as a "volatile military arena" and the country's "susceptibility to outside influences, including Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia".
And, of course – though Colonel Arad doesn't mention this – American influence and Israeli influence and French influence and British influence and Turkish influence. Shapiro "cited the need to provide an alternative to Hezbollah" – the Costa Rican police force, perhaps? – and suggested that the Lebanese army would come to the defence of Hezbollah (unlikely, in the circumstances).
There's a priceless denial of the UN Goldstone report on the Gaza atrocities of 2008-09 by reserve Major General Amos Gilad, who says that the document's criticisms of Israel are "baseless" because the Israeli military made 300,000 phone calls to houses in Gaza ahead of strikes ... to prevent civilian casualties". Poor old Shapiro seems to have reacted in silence. That would be a phone call to a fifth of the entire Palestinian population of Gaza, kids, babies and all. And even then they killed 1,300 Palestinians, most of them civilians. Of course the Palestinian Authority of the bland Mahmoud Abbas didn't want to take over this killing field after the Israelis had won – another offer made by Israel with US knowledge – because Israel didn't win. It didn't even find its missing soldier in the tunnels of Gaza.
There's a symbolic moment when Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi – not to be compared to the "distant and uncharismatic personage" of his brother Khalifa – worries about Iran in front of the US ambassador Richard Olsen who then suggests that he has "a strategic view of the region that is curiously close to the Israeli one". But of course he does. Line them up. They will pray in their golden mosques, these kings and emirs and generals, buying more and more American weapons to protect themselves from the "Hitler" of Tehran – better, I suppose, than the 2003 Hitler of the Tigris or the 1956 Mussolini of the Nile – and entreat God that they will be saved by the might of America and Israel. I can't wait for the next episode in this fantasy.
Comments
'Mr Assange's supporters have written an open letter to Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, asking her to protect him.
Mr Pilger, who appeared in court to support Mr Assange, said Ms Gillard's threat to remove his passport smacked of "totalitarianism".'
The law as it pertains to sex is such a joke anyway that they can pretty much concoct anything they want and twist the facts to suit them. The law regarding sexual matters is completely arbitrary and absurd, hence the perfect method with which to stitch someone up and silence them.
well you know im not julian assange...obviously... but if i were in his position(no pun intended) this wouldnt silence me. my mind has been working overtime on this whole sex by surprise. my imagination has been having a gay old time with it. and i wish for once the australian govt would grow some friggin backbone and stand behind one of their citizens without umming and aahhing and trying to distance themselves. surely there are those in the govt that can see these charges for the bullshit they are.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Yeah but another criminal ( lifer) wouldnt have the oppertunity to knife him if he went home. and have the americans set his family up
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
It's difficult because one doesn't want to turn these women into criminals (and do a huge disservice to all those who have been victims of sex crimes), but the way this has come about and is handled can make one doubt.
I wouldn't want to get in the way of these guys! I have enough trouble dealing with the trojan horse viruse.... :?
former Labor minister Bob McMullan
federal MP Michael Danby
politics really is a mugs game. thanks guys. :thumbup:
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
"Security experts said the sites had been targeted by a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), which swamp a site with so many page requests that it becomes overwhelmed and drops offline.
Paul Mutton of security firm Netcraft said that 1,600 computers were involved in flooding the site with spoof requests."
Apparently you just need to download a bit of software and you can cause chaos. So much for IT security etc.
Assange and wikileaks release hundreds of thousands of cables between US officials and foreign diplomats.
the US gov't tells amazon, the server wikileaks is using, to stop hosting wikileaks. they do.
hours later wikileaks is up and running on a european server.
according to the BBC they are now running on 14 servers in 14 different countries. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11928899
The US gov't, unable to keep them offline, commenced cyber attacks, trying to overload the site and crash it.
wikileaks appealed for outside help. here is a list of mirror sites. http://213.251.145.96/mirrors.html
currently 1334 strong. good luck shutting them all down.
Paypal withholds 60,000 pounds headed to Assange. His bank closes his bank account, citing false residency on his forms.
Anonymous, a group of hackers, decide to take action in the name of free speech.
Visa.com is shut down. Mastercard is attacked as well, many users unable to perform actions online. His swiss bank was attacked as well, as was Paypal, with reports the site was down for many hours.
A cyber war has broken out. and the US government has lost.
The information in the cables is currently available to download via bit torrent, over 20,000 files, and is now available to anyone with a computer, here....http://213.251.145.96/
Excellent post!
We need that Bank info released already! I think the last thing I heard was that Assange is holding the info with various sources- And his people are threatening to release it! This info should be good! And is really going to stir shit up!
go morpheus.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11935539
Not aasange going to jail.
But the americans losing the online battle.
power to the people
apparently Paypal has since released all funds.
It has shown what clowns we have in parliament (Rudd & Arbib)
Edit: Now the Swedish government website has been attacked.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... -site.html
thank fuck for that cause i rely heavily on paypal and i hated to think id have to cut them loose.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Johann Hari: This case must not obscure what WikiLeaks has told us
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
'We will never unlearn or unknow the great truths that Julian Assange has brought to the world'
Every one of us owes a debt to Julian Assange. Thanks to him, we now know that our governments are pursuing policies that place you and your family in considerably greater danger. Wikileaks has informed us they have secretly launched war on yet another Muslim country, sanctioned torture, kidnapped innocent people from the streets of free countries and intimidated the police into hushing it up, and covered up the killing of 15,000 civilians – five times the number killed on 9/11. Each one of these acts has increased the number of jihadis. We can only change these policies if we know about them – and Assange has given us the black-and-white proof.
Each of the wikileaks revelations has been carefully weighed to ensure there is a public interest in disclosing it. Of the more than 250,000 documents they hold, they have released fewer than 1000 – and each of those has had the names of informants, or any information that could place anyone at risk, removed. The information they have released covers areas where our governments are defying the will of their own citizens, and hiding the proof from them.
Here’s some examples. The Obama administration has been denying that it has expanded the current “war” to yet another country, Yemen. Now we know that is a lie. Ali Abdulah Saleh, the Yemeni dictator, brags in these cables to a US diplomat: “We’ll continue to say the bombs are ours, not yours.” The counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen, who until recently was a senior advisor to General Petreaus in Iraq, estimates that for every one jihadi killed in these bombings, they kill fifty innocent people. How would we react if this was happening in Britain? How many of us would become deranged by grief and resolve to fight back, even against the other side’s women and children? Bombing to end jihadism is like smoking to end lung cancer – a cure that worsens the disease.
The US and British governments told us they invaded Iraq, in part, because they were appalled that the Iraqi government tortured its own citizens. Tony Blair often mentioned “Saddam’s torture chambers” in making his case for the war. Yet these leaked documents show that as soon as our governments were in charge, the policy of burning, electrocuting and raping people started again – and they consciously chose a policy of not objecting and not investigating. Modern jihadism was born in the torture chambers of Egypt in the 1950s. A lot more will have been made in the torture chambers of Baghdad since 2003. Some of it has already exploded onto our streets – the attempted Glasgow airport bombing was by Iraqis who said they were “resisting” the use of torture in their country. There will be more.
The cables reveal how this grief and murderous rage is being spread across the Muslim world, while we lie about it. Here’s just one example. US troops blew up an Afghan village called Azizabad, and killed 95 people, 50 of them children. None were al Qaeda, or even Taliban. They knew what they’d done – yet in public they kept insisting they’d killed “militants”, and even accused the local Afghan villagers of “fabricat[ing] such evidence as grave sites.”
Wikileaks has exposed a terrifying casualness in our governments about ramping up the risk against us. Indeed, they show that the US government knows Saudi Arabia is “the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups world-wide”, but our leaders continue to (literally) hold hands with them, because their oil pipelines run our way. They show a startling contempt for democracy too: when the Honduran President, Manuel Zelaya, was kidnapped by a far right clique because he had increased the minimum wage and redistributed wealth to the poor, the US embassy confirmed privately that it was “clearly illegal”. Yet the US administration refused to say this publicly, instead urging “reconciliation” with the junta their own diplomats were calling “totally illegitimate.”
For Britain’s politicians, the documents offer a long-needed slap in the face. Successive governments, of all parties, support these destructive US policies because they believe we have influence with the Americans. But these cables show the Americans literally laugh at them and their sycophancy, describing their servility in mocking tones in cables back home, saying “it would be humorous if it were not so corrosive.”
Most people in the US and Britain oppose these policies. We are better than our politicians. But we can only stop them – and the risk they pose to innocent people across the world, including us – if we know about them. Assange has made that possible, at great risk to his liberty and his life. So this is a move that enhances our national security. Of course, there are people who claim he has “blood on his hands” – but where is there evidence? It is months now since the first cables were leaked, and they have found not a single person who has been even threatened as a result of the leaks – except Assange, whose death is being incited by many of America’s leading politicians.
There is a squalid little irony when you see people who are literally bombing innocent civilians every day feverishly accuse a man who has never touched a weapon in his life of being “covered in blood.” Wikileaks have hurt nobody. They redacted sensitive names. They held back any cables that could expose anyone to risk. They asked the Pentagon to help them by privately explaining where they believed there could be a danger – only to be rebuffed.
Of course, it is possible Julian Assange did this good, noble thing, and is also a rapist. I do not believe in reflexively dismissing rape claims by any woman, in any circumstances. Bill Clinton was the victim of a right-wing smear campaign and many of us dismissed the allegations of sexual assault against him – but now, years later, one of the women who came forward, Kathleen Willey, has earned nothing from her allegations, remains a left-wing Democrat, and seems to have a very plausible case.
Here’s what we know. There is a long history of the CIA viciously smearing people who dare to cross the US state machinery. There is a strong chance the claims against Assange is another case of it. But there is also a long history of otherwise admirable men turning out to be rapists, and there’s a chance this is another case of it. This should be tested in a court of law – and the trial should be watched very careful to make sure it’s not being rigged by bribes or threats.
Whatever that judgment turns out to be, we will never unlearn or unknow the great truths Julian Assange has brought us. The hysterical state-power hacks saying he is “a terrorist” should go tell it to all the tortured Iraqis, all the terrorized Honduran democrats, and all the bombed Yemenis whose story he has – at last – brought out from the sealed-away world of Top Secret cables.
It really goes to show just what a bunch of desperate, self-interested control-freaks they are.
It's amazing to me how so many people can have any respect for these fucking jackals.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/0 ... 94285.html
Anna Ardin, Julian Assange Rape Accuser, May Have Ceased Pursuing Claims
Anna Ardin, one of two women behind the rape charges against the WIkiLeaks founder, may no longer be cooperating with prosecutors, the Australian website Crikey reports.
Julian Assange has been fighting sex charges from Sweden and is now in British custody. According to Crikey:
Ardin, who also goes by the name Bernardin, has moved to the West Bank in the Palestinian Territories, as part of a Christian outreach group, aimed at bringing reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis. She has moved to the small town of Yanoun, which sits close to Israel's security/sequestration wall. Yanoun is constantly besieged by fundamentalist Jewish settlers, and international groups have frequently stationed themselves there.
Attempts by Crikey to contact Ardin by phone, fax, email and twitter were unsuccessful today.
Business Insider is reporting that you can follow Anna Ardin on Twitter, @annaardin. Crikey says that her last tweet translates as:
"CIA agent, rabid feminist / Muslim lover, a Christian fundamentalist, frigid & fatally in love with a man, can you be all that at the same time ..."
The "sex crimes" at the heart of the Assange case are reportedly related to unprotected sex under a Swedish law.
She also tweeted against Visa, mastercard, and paypal
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/10/ron-paul-wikileaks-defense_n_795014.html
TRANSCRIPT:
WikiLeaks release of classified information has generated a lot of attention in the past few weeks. The hysterical reaction makes one wonder if this is not an example of killing the messenger for the bad news. Despite what is claimed, the information that has been so far released, though classified, has caused no known harm to any individual, but it has caused plenty of embarrassment to our government. Losing our grip on our empire is not welcomed by the neoconservatives in charge.
There is now more information confirming that Saudi Arabia is a principal supporter and financier of al Qaeda, and that this should set off alarm bells since we guarantee its Sharia-run government. This emphasizes even more the fact that no al Qaeda existed in Iraq before 9/11, and yet we went to war against Iraq based on the lie that it did. It has been charged by experts that Julian Assange, the internet publisher of this information, has committed a heinous crime, deserving prosecution for treason and execution, or even assassination.
But should we not at least ask how the U.S. government should prosecute an Australian citizen for treason for publishing U.S. secret information that he did not steal? And if WikiLeaks is to be prosecuted for publishing classified documents, why shouldn't the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others also published these documents be prosecuted? Actually, some in Congress are threatening this as well.
Story continues below
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The New York Times, as a results of a Supreme Court ruling, was not found guilty in 1971 for the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg never served a day in prison for his role in obtaining these secret documents. The Pentagon Papers were also inserted into the Congressional record by Senator Mike Gravel, with no charges of any kind being made of breaking any national security laws. Yet the release of this classified information was considered illegal by many, and those who lied us into the Vietnam war, and argued for its prolongation were outraged. But the truth gained from the Pentagon Papers revealed that lies were told about the Gulf of Tonkin attack. which perpetuated a sad and tragic episode in our history.
Just as with the Vietnam War, the Iraq War was based on lies. We were never threatened by weapons of mass destruction or al Qaeda in Iraq, though the attack on Iraq was based on this false information. Any information which challenges the official propaganda for the war in the Middle East is unwelcome by the administration and the supporters of these unnecessary wars. Few are interested in understanding the relationship of our foreign policy and our presence in the Middle East to the threat of terrorism. Revealing the real nature and goal of our presence in so many Muslim countries is a threat to our empire, and any revelation of this truth is highly resented by those in charge.
Questions to consider:
Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
Number 3: Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?
Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised 'Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed.' I yield back the balance of my time.
i think this is the same thing as the case with the pentagon papers and Assange is acting as the new york times in that case. he did not leak the cables, they were given to him and he published them, just like the new york times did with the pentagon papers.
WikiLeaks founder Assange says Pentagon plans prosecution
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_wikileaks_assange
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who angered Washington by releasing secret cables, said in a documentary on Sunday he faced prosecution by the United States and was disappointed with how Swedish justice had been abused.
Assange has been remanded in custody in Britain after a European arrest warrant was issued by Sweden, which wants to question Assange about allegations made by two women of sexual crimes. He has denied the allegations.
"I came to Sweden as a refugee publisher involved with an extraordinary publishing fight with the Pentagon, where people were being detained and there is an attempt to prosecute me for espionage," Assange said in an interview in the documentary, aired on Swedish public television.
"So I am unhappy and disappointed with how the Swedish justice system has been abused," the 39-year-old Australian added in the documentary, which was made before his arrest.
Assange faces a fresh British hearing on December 14. His Swedish lawyer has said he will fight extradition to Sweden.
One of his British lawyers, Jennifer Robinson, told ABC News in London on Friday that a U.S. indictment of Assange was imminent, but the report offered no further details or comment by Robinson why she believed charges were likely to be filed.
The U.S. Justice Department has been looking into a range of criminal charges, including violations of the 1917 Espionage Act, that could be filed in the WikiLeaks case involving the release of hundreds of confidential and classified U.S. diplomatic cables.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
he has only relayed information.
Amazon.com shut down for almost an hour during peak shopping season, december 12.
but what's being overlooked in all of this is the information itself.,
news outlets are talking about everything but the released info.
Assange is in jail because of this information, the least we can do is read it.
http://213.251.145.96/
i believe that he turned himself in on these sex charges thinking that the way he has been treated would spark worldwide outrage and that people would stand up to large governments and stand up for due process in hopes of preventing extradition for prosecution for the leaks in the states. instead all the support he got was some rogue hackers temporarily hacking some big sites, and some support from people boycotting things like amazon and paypal among others. i do not think he was banking on things like people and politicians in the states calling for his execution as a traitor. i am thinking he got some bad legal advice. one would think that leaking these documents would have blown the lid off of some of these things and that those involved in leaked cables would be exposed, or even prosecuted. instead we are going after the publisher instead of the guilty.
how sad is that?
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Robert Fisk: Now we know. America really doesn't care about injustice in the Middle East
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
I came to the latest uproarious US diplomatic history with the deepest cynicism. And yesterday, in the dust of post-election Cairo – the Egyptian parliamentary poll was as usual a mixture of farce and fraud, which is at least better than shock and awe – I ploughed through so many thousands of American diplomatic reports with something approaching utter hopelessness. After all, they do quote President Hosni Mubarak as saying that "you can forget about democracy," don't they?
It's not that US diplomats don't understand the Middle East; it's just that they've lost all sight of injustice. Vast amounts of diplomatic literature prove that the mainstay of Washington's Middle East policy is alignment with Israel, that its principal aim is to encourage the Arabs to join the American-Israeli alliance against Iran, that the compass point of US policy over years and years is the need to tame/bully/crush/oppress/ ultimately destroy the power of Iran.
There is virtually no talk (so far, at least) of illegal Jewish colonial settlements on the West Bank, of Israeli "outposts", of extremist Israeli "settlers" whose homes now smallpox the occupied Palestinian West Bank – of the vast illegal system of land theft which lies at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian war. And incredibly, all kinds of worthy US diplomats grovel and kneel before Israel's demands – many of them apparently fervent supporters of Israel – as Mossad bosses and Israel military intelligence agents read their wish-list to their benefactors.
There's a wonderful moment in the cables when the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, explains to a US congressional delegation on 28 April last year that "a Palestinian state must be demilitarised, without control of its airspace and electro-magnetic field [sic], and without the power to enter into treaties or control its border". Well goodbye, then, to the "viable" (ergo Lord Blair of Isfahan) Palestinian state we all supposedly want. And the US Congress lads and ladies appear to have said nothing.
Instead, in The New York Times, we read through the Wikileaks files for the best quote. Here is Saudi King Abdullah, via his ambassador in Washington (a dab hand with the press), sayingthat Abdullah believes America must "cut of the head of this snake" – the snake being Iran or Ahmadinejad or Iranian nuclear facilities, or whatever.
But the Saudis are always threatening to cut off the head of their latest snakes. In 1982, Yasser Arafat said he would cut off Israel's left arm after its invasion of Lebanon, and then the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin said he would cut off Arafat's right arm. And I suppose that when it is revealed to us – as, alas, it is in these Wikileaks papers – that unsuitable applicants for US visas are called by American diplomats "visa vipers", we can only conclude that snakes are much in demand.
The problem is that for decades, Middle East potentates have been threatening to chop off the heads of snakes, serpents, rats and Iranian insects – the latter a favourite of Saddam Hussein who used US-supplied "insecticide" to destroy them, as we all know – while Israeli leaders have called Palestinians "cockroaches" (Rafael Eitan), "crocodiles" (Ehud Barak) and "three-legged beasts" (Begin).
Tears of laughter, I have to admit, began to run down my face when I read the po-faced US diplomatic report from Bahrain that King Hamad – or "His Supreme Highness King Hamad" as he insists on being called, in his Sunni dictatorship with a Shia majority and a kingdom slightly larger than the Isle of Wight – had announced that the danger of letting the Iranian nuclear programme go on was "greater than the danger of stopping it".
That wonderful Palestinian journalist Marwan Bishara was right when he said at the weekend that these US diplomatic papers were of more interest to anthropologists than political scientists; for they are a record of a deviant way of thinking about the Middle East. If King Abdullah (the crumbling Saudi version, as opposed to the Plucky Little Jordanian King version) really called Ahmadinejad Hitler and Sarkozy's adviser called Iran "a fascist state", it shows only that the US State Department is still obsessed with the Second World War.
I loved the stunning report of a visitor to the US embassy in Ankara who told diplomats that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was dying of leukemia. Not because the poor old boy is a cancer victim – he is not – but because this is the same old nonsense we've been peddled about the Middle East's recalcitrant leaders for so many years. I remember the days when American or British "diplomatic sources" insisted that Gaddafi was dying of cancer, that Khomeini was dying of cancer (long before he died), that Khomeini was already dead of cancer – again, long before he died – that the Palestinian contract killer Abu Nidal was dying of cancer, 20 years before he was murdered by Saddam. Even in Northern Ireland, Britain's half-baked spooks told us that the Protestant Vanguard leader William Craig was dying of cancer. And of course, he lived on, like the awful Gaddafi, whose Ukrainian nurse is described by the Americans as "voluptuous". Of course she is. Aren't all blonde dames "voluptuous" in such descriptions?
One of the most interesting reflections – dutifully ignored by most of the pro-Wikileaks papers yesterday – came in a cable on a meeting between a US Senate delegation and President Bashar Assad of Syria earlier this year. America, Assad told his guests, possessed "a huge information apparatus" but lacked the ability to analyse this information successfully. "While we lack your intelligence abilities," he says in rather sinister fashion, "we succeed in fighting extremists because we have better analysts ... in the US you like to shoot [terrorists]. Suffocating their networks is far more effective." Iran, he concluded, was the most important country in the region, followed by Turkey and – number three – Syria itself. Poor old Israel didn't get a look in.
Of course President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is "driven by paranoia" – so is everyone in that land, including most of Nato and especially theUnited States – and naturally the President of Yemen pretends to his own people that he is killing al-Qa'ida representatives when we all know it's General David Petraeus's warriors who are the culprits. Muslim leaders have constantly been claiming American military prowess against other Muslims as their own work.
Of course, we must not be too cynical. I loved the American diplomatic report (from Cairo, of course, not from Tel Aviv) which said that Netanyahu was "elegant and charming ... but never keeps his promises". But doesn't that apply to half the Arab leaders as well?
And then we come to the dank and frightening reporting of a meeting between Andrew Shapiro, "Assistant Secretary of State for the US Political-Military Bureau", meeting with Israel's spooks almost exactly a year ago. Israel was unable to protect its Cessna Caravan and Raven unmanned pilotless drones over southern Lebanon, admits Mossad. (Hezbollah will be obliged for this nugget.) An Israeli "J5" Colonel Shimon Arad waffles on upon the dangers of "Hezbollahstan" and Hamastan" and the "internal political deadlock" in Lebanon – there wasn't then, but there is now – and about Lebanon as a "volatile military arena" and the country's "susceptibility to outside influences, including Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia".
And, of course – though Colonel Arad doesn't mention this – American influence and Israeli influence and French influence and British influence and Turkish influence. Shapiro "cited the need to provide an alternative to Hezbollah" – the Costa Rican police force, perhaps? – and suggested that the Lebanese army would come to the defence of Hezbollah (unlikely, in the circumstances).
There's a priceless denial of the UN Goldstone report on the Gaza atrocities of 2008-09 by reserve Major General Amos Gilad, who says that the document's criticisms of Israel are "baseless" because the Israeli military made 300,000 phone calls to houses in Gaza ahead of strikes ... to prevent civilian casualties". Poor old Shapiro seems to have reacted in silence. That would be a phone call to a fifth of the entire Palestinian population of Gaza, kids, babies and all. And even then they killed 1,300 Palestinians, most of them civilians. Of course the Palestinian Authority of the bland Mahmoud Abbas didn't want to take over this killing field after the Israelis had won – another offer made by Israel with US knowledge – because Israel didn't win. It didn't even find its missing soldier in the tunnels of Gaza.
There's a symbolic moment when Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi – not to be compared to the "distant and uncharismatic personage" of his brother Khalifa – worries about Iran in front of the US ambassador Richard Olsen who then suggests that he has "a strategic view of the region that is curiously close to the Israeli one". But of course he does. Line them up. They will pray in their golden mosques, these kings and emirs and generals, buying more and more American weapons to protect themselves from the "Hitler" of Tehran – better, I suppose, than the 2003 Hitler of the Tigris or the 1956 Mussolini of the Nile – and entreat God that they will be saved by the might of America and Israel. I can't wait for the next episode in this fantasy.