A Swedish prosecutor’s decision reopen the rape case against Julian Assange gives new life to the ongoing debates about WikiLeaks. Assange, the site’s founder, has not only denied ever having had “nonconsensual sex” with the two women who have accused him, but has also insinuated that the American government could be behind the accusations, driving a Pentagon smear campaign designed to neutralize Assange and his troublesome organization.
Is this likely? And what, if anything, does this bizarre chapter in the WikiLeaks story say about its founder–or the Swedish legal system, for that matter?
What This Says About Assange He is a “megalomaniacal prick,” declares Gawker’s Adrian Chen. “His Twitter-based conspiracy theories were–and always have been–a disingenuous ploy to drum up sympathy and dollars for Wikileaks.” Furthermore, says Chen, his “whining about the Swedish prosecutor making public his name” is hypocritical, and hardly fits the Wikileaks “ethos of radical transparency.” He notes, as another indicator of Assange’s character, that “when Amnesty International sent Wikileaks a letter asking them to take more care in future leaks to protect Afghan informants, Assange reportedly responded: ‘I’m very busy and have no time to deal with people who prefer to do nothing but cover their asses.’”
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Common Purpose marxist front group Demos says state needs to “fight back” against people who question the authorities to “increase trust in government”
Government Think Tank Calls For Infiltrating Conspiracy Websites 300810top
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, August 30, 2010
Furious that state involvement in major terror attacks is being exposed to a wider audience than ever before via the Internet, a UK think tank closely affiliated with the Downing Street has called for authorities to infiltrate conspiracy websites in an effort to “increase trust in the government”.
“A Demos report published today, The Power of Unreason, argues that secrecy surrounding the investigation of events such as the 9/11 New York attacks and the 7/7 bombings in London merely adds weight to unsubstantiated claims that they were “inside jobs,” reports the London Independent.
In other words, the fact that the overwhelming amount of evidence indicates that both 7/7 and 9/11 were “inside jobs” of one form or another, and that huge numbers of people are now aware of this via the increasing influence of the Internet, is hampering efforts to commit more acts of terror, therefore the government needs to change its strategy.
In the report, Demos, “Recommends the Government fight back by infiltrating internet sites to dispute these theories.” One of the tools Demos already employs to “fight back” against conspiracy theories is by labeling anyone who challenges the government’s official story as an extremist or a terrorist recruiter.
The strategy mirrors that advocated by White House information czar Cass Sunstein, who in a 2008 white paper similarly called for conspiracy websites to be infiltrated and undermined in order to dilute their influence. In the same report, Sunstein also called for taxing conspiracy theories (any viewpoint that differs with the official version) and outright banning free speech that the authorities disapproved of.
What Demos and Sunstein are essentially calling for is classic “provocateur” style infiltration, updated for the 21st century, that came to the fore during the Cointelpro years, an FBI program from 1956-1971 that was focused around disrupting, marginalizing and neutralizing political dissidents, often using illegal methods.
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Just last week (8/28/2010), Glenn Beck’s big event in D.C. that he called “Restoring Honor” rally came off, apparently without a hitch. Reports of thousands, to a million attendee’s have surfaced on different websites. From the photographs taken from aircraft, it would appear that there were hundreds of thousands in attendance.
But, there is something going on with Glenn Beck that has raised the attention of many listeners to Beck’s famous TV and Radio programs. Today’s rally just made their suspicions even stronger.
For weeks now, Beck told listeners on his Talk Radio program that the rally was not political, but never really came out and said it’s about faith! However, while watching the rally and listening to the speakers, there were overtones that seemed to be repetitive. Those overtones are faith (religion), and politics.
Lets take religion first. Nearly every speaker mentioned something about faith, God, divine authority, and/or alluded to God given freedoms. That is wonderful that these folks understand that America has strayed away from God and taken the easy way out on many occasions, politically and socially speaking. The question that begs asking is; why was so much of the event centered around God, religion, faith?
The other half of the mix is politics! Beck said it’s not about politics, but it really was. The whole event was political in some way. Lets face it, the event wouldn’t have garnered the large crowd it did if there was not some political motive behind it; OR, in the backs of the minds of the attendee’s was the consideration of politics.
What is Beck up to?
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One of the defining features of Patriot/militia subculture is an obsession with firearms. Patriot groups stockpile them, train using them, and, perhaps most of all, worry about losing them. Any attempt to restrain their gun rights is viewed as the thin-edge-wedge of a New World Order crackdown. Patriots believe it inevitable that NWO forces in black masks and jackboots — and possibly UN blue helmets — will one day be sent door to door to take away their weapons by force. This fear is also stoked by mainstream figures within the conservative movement. Wayne LaPierre, the president of the National Rifle Association, a major player in the Republican Party coalition, is the author of a book entitled, The Global War on Your Guns: Inside the UN Plan To Destroy the Bill of Rights. In 2006, Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter attached an amendment to a domestic-security spending bill that prohibited the confiscation of legally owned guns during an emergency. The measure passed by a vote of 84-16.
But it has already happened. It was in New Orleans, during Hurricane Katrina. Is it worrying? Watch the Video below and this is what happens when Barney Fife law enforcement gets a free pass to act like the Kings Guard of the New World Order. This is your Constitutional right to own a Gun, do not ever let them come into your house and take your fire arms.
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Although Swedish prosecutors have yet to complete their review of sexual abuse accusations that two Stockholm women made last week against Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks Web site, those who say they have detailed knowledge of the case discount conspiracy theories linking it to efforts to discredit WikiLeaks.
Mr. Assange had suggested over the weekend that the tortured sequence of events at the Stockholm prosecutor’s office had been prompted by the Pentagon as part of what he called a program of “dirty tricks to ruin us.” The prosecutors had issued a warrant for Mr. Assange’s arrest on suspicion of rape on Friday night, which was followed within 24 hours by the cancellation of the warrant and a formal retraction of the implication that a rape had occurred.
But the conspiratorial view has found no backing from the prosecutor’s office, where the senior prosecutor in charge of the case, Eva Finne, said Monday that nothing she knew of the case suggested that there had been any outside involvement in the events that led the two women to make their accusations against Mr. Assange.
“I have no indication at all in that direction,” Ms. Finne said in a telephone interview in which she confirmed that a lesser charge mentioned in the original prosecutor’s statement — molestation of the two women — remained under investigation.
She said she hoped to decide by the end of the week whether to proceed with a molestation charge against Mr. Assange, which carries a maximum penalty under Swedish law of a year in prison.
The developments over the weekend set off a new flurry of the interest that has focused on WikiLeaks and its founder after the organization posted 77,000 secret Pentagon documents on the Afghan war on the Internet in late July.
The Defense Department’s general counsel, Jeh Charles Johnson, said last week that WikiLeaks had acted illegally in obtaining the secret documents and thousands of others that it has not yet posted on the Web, and Justice Department lawyers have been exploring the possibility of criminal charges against WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange.
Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, left Britain for Sweden this month as the long-distance confrontation with United States authorities intensified, saying he intended to establish a more secure base for himself and WikiLeaks under the wide protections afforded to whistle-blowers by Swedish law. The organization already had a strong base of support here, and it uses Sweden as a base for some of the multiple Web servers it uses to store and disseminate its caches of secret documents.
Mr. Assange and one of the two women, an activist in her early30s who is associated with a group that works with WikiLeaks in Sweden, did not respond to requests for interviews on Sunday and Monday. Efforts to contact the second woman, an artist who is in her mid-20s, were also unsuccessful.
Around the time the rape accusation was made, Mr. Assange traveled to northern Sweden, where he remains, according to an account he gave on Sunday to the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet. The newspaper announced recently that it planned to establish a formal relationship with Mr. Assange as a contributing columnist, an arrangement that friends said would enable him to acquire a work permit to stay in Sweden.
In the interview, he declined to answer questions about his relationships with the two women.
“I don’t want to drag anybody’s private life into the dirt without first understanding the whole situation clearly,” he said. “Why are they going to the police? What’s behind it? What I can say is that I have never, in Sweden or any other country, had sex with someone in a way that did not build on total consent from both sides.”
He contended in the interview, as he has in Twitter feeds and e-mails, that the accusations of sexual impropriety involved “dirty tricks.”
“I don’t know what’s behind this,” he said. “But we have been warned that the Pentagon, for example, is thinking of deploying dirty tricks to ruin us. And I have also been warned about sex traps.”
He added that he thought WikiLeaks had suffered “major damage” from the allegations. “There have been headlines all across the world that I am suspected of rape,” he said. “They do not disappear. And I know from experience that WikiLeaks’ enemies continue to trumpet things even after they have been retracted.”
But one of Mr. Assange’s close friends in Sweden, who said he had discussed the case in detail with Mr. Assange and one of the women, said he was “absolutely sure” that what was involved were personal animosities and grievances that flowed out of brief relationships Mr. Assange had with the women.
The man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issues, said that the volatile mix that led to the two women’s seeking criminal charges against Mr. Assange involved his celebrity in Sweden and the ill feelings that erupted when the two women discovered they had been competing for his attentions.
“This wasn’t anything to do with the Pentagon,” he said. “It was just a personal matter between three people that got out of hand.”
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Republicans can set off political dynamite this fall.
But one prominent Dallas Republican just added her own stink bomb.
In a year when Republicans can win by emphasizing jobs and the economy, former state party Chairwoman Cathie Adams instead is promoting fringe conspiracy theory: “Is Obama a Muslim?”
“You read my Twitter!” she said Friday.
“I think that his behavior is very interesting.”
Adams, 60, promoted a video accusing President Barack Obama of conspiring with Saudi Arabia to “plant” a “Saudi-sponsored Muslim” in office — and (gasp!) without a “legitimate” birth certificate.
According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, nearly 1 in 5 Americans doubts Obama’s 1988 Christian baptism.
That’s no surprise. One in 5 folks around here probably believes flying saucers visited Stephenville or chupacabras came to Cresson.
But it’s more surprising to hear conspiracy fairy tales from a Republican who helped write the party’s national platform.
State party spokesman Bryan Preston laughed.
“She’s not the chairwoman anymore,” he said.
“We’re going to talk about jobs and the trillion dollars we just spent on a stimulus package,” he said. Obama’s birthplace and religion are “not part of our message at all.”
New Chairman Steve Munisteri, a Houston lawyer, ousted Adams in June.
“When somebody says he is a Christian, I accept that,” Munisteri said.
He added something else that makes sense:
“Elections are decided by swing voters. The people who follow those issues already vote Republican.”
Presidential historian Paul Boller, retired from Texas Christian University, said he’s amazed that conspiracy talk has lingered.
Read more: http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/08/21/2417368/obama-conspiracy-theories-cloud.html#ixzz0xRm7EUxa
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A compilation of the 10 most popular conspiracy theories currently circulating on the radical right and, increasingly, on points of the political spectrum …current.com/…/92611173_top-10-right-wing-conspiracy-theor…
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News that Russia will load nuclear fuel rods into an Iranian reactor has touched off a countdown to a point of no return, a deadline by which Israel would have to launch an attack on Iran’s Bushehr reactor before it becomes effectively “immune” to any assault, says former Bush administration U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton.
Once the fuel rods are loaded, Bolton told Fox News on Friday afternoon, “it makes it essentially immune from attack by Israel. Because once the rods are in the reactor an attack on the reactor risks spreading radiation in the air, and perhaps into the water of the Persian Gulf.”
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin declared in March that Russia would start the Bushehr reactor this summer. But the announcement from a spokesman for Russia’s state atomic agency to Reuters Friday sent international diplomats scrambling to head off a crisis.
The story immediately became front-page news in Israel, which has laid precise plans to carry out an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities while going along with President Obama’s plans to use international sanctions and diplomatic persuasion to convince Iran’s clerics not to go nuclear.
Bolton made it clear that it is widely assumed that any Israeli attack on the Bushehr reactor must take place before the reactor is loaded with fuel rods.
“If they’re going to do it that’s the window that they have,” Bolton declared. “Otherwise as I said before, once the rods are in the reactor, if you attack the reactor you’re going to open it up and radiation will escape at least into the atmosphere and possibly into the waters of the Persian Gulf.
“So most people think that neither Israel nor the United States, come to that, would attack the reactor after it’s been fueled.”
Bolton cited the 1981 Israeli attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor outside Baghdad and the September 2007 Israeli attack on a North Korean reactor being built in Syria. Both of those strikes came before fuel rods were loaded into those reactors.
“So if it’s going to happen in Bushehr it has to happen before the fuel rods go in,” Bolton said.
The conversation that touched off the de facto deadline for Israeli military action was a telephone conversation with wire services involving Sergei Novikov, a spokesman for Rosatom, the Russian Energy State Nuclear Corp.
Novikov said: “The fuel will be loaded on Aug 21. This is the start of the physical launch” of the reactor.
“From that moment the Bushehr plant will be officially considered a nuclear-energy installation,” Novikov said, adding that the head of Rosatom, Sergei Kiriyenko, will visit Bushehr Aug. 21 to conduct a ceremony for the event.
According to Bolton, once the reactor is operational, it is only a matter of time before it begins producing plutonium that could be used in a nuclear weapon.
“And in the normal operation of this reactor, in just a fairly short period of time, you could get substantial amounts of plutonium to use as nuclear weapons,” Bolton told Fox.
Russia, which is operating under a $1 billion contract with Iran, has spent more than a decade building the reactor. If Russia moves forward with its plan to fuel the reactor, it could be seen as a major setback to the Obama administration’s strategy of engaging Russian leaders in order to win their cooperation.
“The U.S. urged them not to send the Iranian’s fuel rods,” Bolton said. “They did that. The Obama administration has urged them not to insert the fuel rods in the reactors, but as they’ve just announced that will begin next week. What that does over time is help Iran get another route to nuclear weapons through the plutonium they could reprocess out of the spent fuel rods.”
The developments mean Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu soon may face a stark choice: Attack the Bushehr reactor in the next 8 days, or allow it to become operational despite the certainty it would greatly enhance Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons.
Russian leaders have said the Bushehr reactor project is being closely monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog group. According to Iran’s ISNA news agency, IAEA inspectors will be on hand to observe the fuel-rod loading process that is now scheduled to begin Aug. 21.
According to Russian officials, Iran has promised in writing to send all spent fuel rods from Bushehr back to Russia for reprocessing, to ensure they cannot be used for nuclear weapons.
Bolton said the reactor has been “a hole” in American foreign policy for over a decade.
The failure to demand it be shut down began in the Bush years, he said, and continues with the Obama administration “under what I believe is the mistaken theory that Iran is entitled to the peaceful use of nuclear energy.”
“I don’t think Iran is entitled to that, or I don’t think we ought to allow it to happen, because they’re manifestly violating any number of obligations under the non-proliferation treaty not to seek nuclear weapons. But this has been a hole in American policy for some number of years, and Iran and Russia are obviously exploiting it,” Bolton said.
Russia’s move would put Iran “in a much better position overall,” he said, adding, “I think this is a very delicate point, as I say, it closes off to the Israelis one possible target for pre-emptive military action.
U.N. sanctions against Iran, he said, “have not had and will not have any material effect on Iran’s push to have deliverable nuclear weapons.”
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Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik has blamed the banned terror group Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) for the assassination of MQM Member of Provincial Assembly (MPA) Raza Haider following which massive violence erupted in Karachi resulting in death of 35 people.
Buzz up!
Haider was gunned down in the financial capital along with his security guard by unidentified gunmen inside Jamia Masjid on Monday.
Talking to reporters at the Parliament House here, Malik said that concerned police officials were already informed regarding threat to Haider’s life, and that his assassination was part of a larger conspiracy to destabilise the country.
“I’m going to tell you that a bigger formula has been framed against Pakistan. It is part of a larger scheme to destabilise Pakistan,” Malik said.
He assured the MQM that the government would soon nab the culprits.
“We will definitely apprehend the killers,” The Daily Times quoted Malik, as saying.
He said that the killing was part of larger conspiracy to destabilise Pakistan.
Meanwhile, normal life was crippled in Karachi following Haider’s murder as the city witnessed violent protests resulting in death of at least 35 persons.
More than 125 people are reported to have been injured in the violent protests across the Karachi.
Dozens of vehicles and several shops were set ablaze, while massive traffic jams were witnessed at all major intersections of the city.
MQM chief Altaf Hussain has called for a high-level probe into Haider’s murder.
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Let’s establish the facts about the WikiLeaks expose of 75,000 U.S. military documents detailing Obama’s war in Afghanistan.
First, the total number of documents released is 75,000. Another roughly 15,000 have been held back by the WikiLeaks people “as part of a harm minimisation process demanded” by the sources that provided these files in the first place. This means that there may be really damaging and shocking stories embedded in the remaining documents, because thus far, the documents contain nothing more than what we already know.
Second, the time period covered by the expose is January 2004-December 2009. This means it does not cover President Barack Obama’s post-Afghan surge work, but it does cover both President Pervez Musharraf and President Asif Ali Zardari’s time in office. It also covers Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani’s time as both head of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (the spy service) and chief of army staff. This means that when we derive broad themes from the documents about Pakistan, we are saying something about the present Pakistani government, the past Pakistani government, and everything in between. But when we take broad messages about the US from these documents, we are saying something only about whatever preceded the current counterinsurgency strategy.
Third, WikiLeaks’ purpose in releasing these files has nothing to do with Pakistan, or India, or Afghanistan. Its purpose is to expose the incompetence, myopia and failure of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. WikiLeaks is an anti-war organisation. This means that the expose is not a part of any kind of campaign against Pakistan. If Pakistan looks bad in the crossfire of domestic American politics surrounding the Afghan war, that’s Pakistan’s bad. Contrary to the insatiable appetite for negativity about this country among some media outlets, Pakistan is in fact a bit player in the WikiLeaks drama. The release of these documents is designed to influence U.S. public opinion about the war in Afghanistan.
These facts are important. On Day One of its release, the Afghan War Diary 2004-2010 (as the documents have been branded by WikiLeaks) discussing the conduct of the U.S. government and military in their prosecution of the Afghan war seemed to be secondary. Instead, questions and conversations about Pakistan’s ISI dominated the initial analysis.
The ISI is not a new villain in the global conversation about “Af-Pak”. For more than three decades, as the collective intelligence organisation of the Pakistani military, it has planned and prosecuted Pakistan’s secret wars. Pakistanis don’t need any help in understanding the ways in which the ISI has influenced both internal and external political events for the last three decades. The most penetrating, articulate and meaningful criticism of the ISI also happens to come from the work of Pakistanis, from Kamran Shafi’s bold and fearless columns, to human rights activists demanding accountability for missing persons, to Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S. Husain Haqqani’s devastating critique in his book “Pakistan: From Mosque to Military”.
Virtually no serious commentator or analyst anywhere, even those embedded deep in the armpit of the Pakistani establishment, claims that the Pakistani state was not instrumental in the creation, training and sustenance of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. Given the nature of the relationship between the Pakistani state and the Afghan Taliban, one that goes right to the genetic core of the Taliban, it is hard to imagine that all ties can ever be severed. Again, for serious people, this is an issue that is done and dusted. Pakistan’s state, and indeed, its society, had, has and will continue to have linkages with the Afghan Taliban. Moral judgments about these linkages are external to this fact.
These linkages do, however, deserve the scrutiny of the Pakistani parliament. If somehow, Pakistanis are involved in supporting any kind of violence against anyone, that kind of support had better be couched in a clear national security framework that articulates why it is okay for Pakistanis to underwrite such violence. Absent such a framework, the violence is illegal, and the space for speculation and innuendo about Pakistan is virtually infinite. It is that space that Pakistan’s fiercest critics exploit when they generate massive headlines out of small nuggets of insignificant and stale information that implicates Pakistan in anti-U.S. violence in Afghanistan (among other things).
Over time, the space provided by an ineffective Pakistani state has helped the ISI occupy in western minds, what the Mossad and CIA represent in the Muslim world: a convenient red-herring to explain the complexities, difficulties and unpleasantness of war and diplomacy in a post-9/11 world.
Western conspiracy theories about Pakistan’s evil double-cross in Afghanistan don’t need to be rooted in absolute truth, just a scant kernel of the truth will often do. In that way, it is once again eminently clear that talk of a “clash of civilisations” is garbage. It turns out that human beings are the same everywhere.
Pakistan’s obsession with conspiracy theories is well-documented by the western media. This small sampling, for example, took less than five minutes to compile: August 24, 2005, “Pakistan: In the Land of Conspiracy Theories” PBS Frontline. May 12, 2009, “A Grand Conspiracy Theory From Pakistan” NY Times The Lede. November 17, 2009, “Pakistan’s conspiracy theories” Reuters Blog. November 27, 2009, “Pakistan conspiracy theories stifle debate” BBC News. December 24, 2009, “Conspiracy Theories ‘Stamped In DNA’ Of Pakistanis” NPR. February 12, 2010, “Blackwater Conspiracy Theory Thrives in Pakistan” AOL News. February 16, 2010, “Pakistanis See a Vast U.S. Conspiracy Against Them” Time Magazine. April 28, 2010, “Pakistanis just love conspiracy theories” PRI’s The World. May 25, 2010, “U.S. Is a Top Villain in Pakistan’s Conspiracy Talk” NY Times. May 26, 2010, “Times Square bombing conspiracy theory takes hold in Pakistani media” Yahoo News.
This kind of coverage of Pakistan irks some within the Islamic Republic. But it really shouldn’t. It is absolutely true that the current conflict between terrorists and ordinary Pakistanis has been made worse by our national and collective dependence on invisible and indefensible theories about the harm wished on us by other countries. Most of all, conspiracy theories, which tend to be based on small kernels of truth, help us avoid uncomfortable realities. Pakistan has a massive national security problem that is rooted in the violent extremism it once invested in as a strategy in Afghanistan. That is an uncomfortable reality.
The recent ISI and Pakistan obsession of war analysts and correspondents is not some other-worldly phenomenon. It is rooted in the very human need for comfort. There is much comfort in finding Pakistan and the ISI under every rock and IED in Afghanistan. The small kernels of truth that enable ISI conspiracy theories are a matter for Pakistanis to take seriously and address. But they also help the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan avoid the uncomfortable reality of Obama’s Afghan war. This is a war that does not have a happy ending for anyone. This is a war that has made America, Pakistan, India, Iran and Afghanistan less safe. This is a war that needs to end. That is an uncomfortable reality.
Focusing on the adverse role of the ISI — real and imagined — in Afghanistan is a distraction. Ending Obama’s Afghan war is the true purpose behind the WikiLeaks expose. For that it should be celebrated. Not mourned.
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