Monday, December 13, 2010

Wiki bin Laden

Julian Assange, founder and commander in chief of Wikileaks, appears to have replaced Iran, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the rest of the world’s wily evildoers as the number-one threat to U.S. security.  In fact, we seem to be at war with Assange and his network of allies, a network that seems to be growing faster than the roster terrorists we’re creating with our ham-fisted war on terrorism.

According to the Pentarchy-pliant New York Times, we’re witnessing the start of a “cyberwar” against “hundreds of Internet activists” who have “mounted retaliatory attacks” on Web sites that they deem “hostile” to Wikileaks and Assange.  From the sound and fury the war mongrels are channeling through the media, you’d think Assange had supplanted Osama bin Laden as American’s most-wanted boogey man.  

What's all this, then?
The national security noise generators would have us think that the only real difference between Assange and bin Laden is that we have Assange in custody.  Well, our British lapdogs have him in custody.  If you could call Assange’s arrest a capture.  He turned himself in.  But you can safely bet a shiny decimal tuppence that half of Scotland Yard put itself in for the George Cross the second Assange walked through the front door of his local bobby shop.  

According to the U.K.’s Guardian, British District Judge Howard Riddle refused Assange bail on the grounds that he “might fail to surrender.”  Um.  Riddle me this, Judge: why are you worried Assange won’t surrender when he just, like, did?

Assange’s incarceration supposedly has nothing to do with Wikileaks’ recent dump of embarrassing State Department documents.  It’s all about a Swedish warrant for his arrest on charges by two women of sexual misconduct.  One might wonder how any sort of sexual behavior could be viewed as “misconduct” in Sweden, but fortunately we have Swedish attorney Gemma Lindfield, an “experienced extradition practicioner,” to explain things for us. 

The first complainant, “Miss A,” accused Assange of “using his body weight to hold her down in a sexual manner.”  I hadn’t heard that Sweden outlawed the missionary position, but I guess the Swedes can’t have it getting out that anyone in their country is having plain old vanilla envelope sex. 

Defending their integrity

Miss A also alleges that Assange "sexually molested" her without a condom when it was her "express wish" one should be used.  How often does something like that happen in Sweden?  Just about never, huh?  Wouldn’t that be your guess?  And I bet when something like that does happen, the Swedish Bikini Team threatens to go on strike until the Swedish justice system sets things right. 

Miss A also charged that Assange “deliberately molested” her "in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity."  Jesus in a hoop skirt.  This is starting to remind me of a joke I heard in the Navy about the blind Buddhist monk the Siamese geishas.  It sounds to me like Miss A got her watertight integrity violated and she’s mad as a herd of homeless hornets because she’d been saving it for Mr. Right.  


The other complainant, “Miss W,” charges that Assange had sex with her without wearing a condom while she was asleep at her Stockholm home.  Hm.  Now, if she was asleep, how did she know…  And how did Assange get into her Stockholm home while she was asleep if he didn’t have his own…

And hey, do you suppose Miss A and Miss W filed charges against Assange before or after they found out about each other? 


Oh, never mind.  I shouldn’t make light of this.  Judge Riddle says these are “serious allegations.”  I guess he’s never heard of this kind of behavior happening in England.  It’s probably never come before his bench in all the time he’s been sleeping on it. 

Assange told City of Westminster magistrates that he intends to fight extradition to Sweden, setting the stage for what promises to be a long legal battle.  Maybe long enough for some Pentagon or Justice Department legal beagle to cook up something of substance to charge Assange with.  Every high-profile war mongrel in Congress and the executive branch is howling about how Assange’s release of thousands of “classified” documents “jeopardizes U.S. national security.”  But the truth is that nothing Assange has revealed or ever will reveal could violate the integrity of our national security the way our government’s senior leadership has ravaged it.

Assange didn’t cook the intelligence on Iraq like Big Dick Cheney and His Beltway Destroyers did, and Assange didn’t funnel pro-war propaganda into the public ear the way the New York Times did, and he didn’t stand in front of the United Nations with cameras rolling and present “hard” intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction that he knew damn good and well was used dog lunch the way Colin Powell did.  Assange didn’t sucker us into going along with extending the war in Iraq the way David Petraeus did, and he didn’t roll over like a slut-puppy for his generals and escalate the unwinnable war in Afghanistan the way Barack Obama did.


The people putting our troops in danger are the same yahooligans who are crying a river of crocodile tears because they look like fools in the Wiki-leaked documents Assange released.  Our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (aka Suzy Strident) says Assange’s leaks are an “attack of U.S. foreign policy interests,” yet few people in the history of our country have done more harm to our foreign policy interests than Hillary.  Hillary makes Condi Rice seem marginally competent in comparison, and to make Condi seem even that good, man, you have to totally suck to the point where it’s unfathomable how bad you totally suck.  
  
Twenty years ago, or maybe even ten, whoever is feeding Assange his material would have taken it to the New York Times or the Washington Post.  Alas, those outlets, as well as the vast majority of the rest of our “pink” press, have taken a nose dive on the job and they’ll never get back up.

So here’s to the information warriors who have engaged in cyber-combat with Amazon and the credit card companies and the rest of the deep-pocketed slobs who have used their clout to try to stifle the closest remaining thing we have to a fourth estate.

What a shame that the only journalistic watchdog America has left resides in stodgy old sexually repressed Sweden.  

THIS JUST IN: HE'S FREE!

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is the author of the critically applauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a satire on America’s rise to global dominance.     

17 comments:

  1. Thank you for another excellent article.
    Good news, Mr. Assange is out on bail. We will see how this plays out now. Will the CIA "render" him off to some dark place?

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  2. I don't know, Charlie. My research tells me none of the legal beagles in defense or the Pentagon think they have a real case against Assange. Whether that means the CIA will lay off him or go after him I can't say either.

    Odd situation.

    J

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  3. Don't want to rain on the parade, but he's only free in the technical sense. The Times article says he's actually under house arrest until January 11th. Meanwhile, every spook and would-be Jason Bourne in the world will know right where to find him (information the Times helpfully provides).

    A bit of good news, though. One of his accusers, one Anna Ardin, has apparently quit cooperating with the Assange prosecution and bugged out for Palestine. Could be she had an attack of conscience (or maybe she just felt silly).

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  4. Heh. I wonder if she's "Miss A."

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  5. Splendid article, Jeff. The Swedish Bikini Team and John Cleese introduced into an account of the outcome of a British court. Creative writing at its best!

    I am a little puzzled by "Judge Riddle says these are “serious allegations.” My understanding is that having unprotected sex is an offence in Sweden but not in the UK. It has not been an issue in this nanny state of a country that has needed to be proscribed by statute. Dear Judge Riddle can be expressing only a personal rather than judicial view that they are "serious allegations".

    Not that I am any expert on such matters, you'll understand. In any case, I reach my seventy years on this puzzling earth in two weeks time so must admit I regard becoming better acquainted with the laws in this area of human activity as something of an irrelevancy. Which is not to say that your bikini gals didn't hold my attention.

    An update on events. Confusion reigned during the afternoon, with Assange's defence team misreading the signals from those representing the Swedish government. Very close to the end of the two hours allowed, the Swedish team announced that they were going to appeal the decision to allow Assange bail. A hearing on this will be held "within 48 hours".

    So back to prison went Mr Assange to await this further outcome and to contemplate how to raise the £200k up front bail money demanded by the court.

    It is strange to see a country like Sweden behaving in this way, given the respect that they have won world-wide. I remember seeing an interview with Henning Mankell, the creator of best selling crime novels involving Inspector Wallender, in which he said that in the disillusionment of his fictional detective was his own disillusionment with what had begun as a hopeful experiment in creating an enviable Scandanavian society.

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  6. Actually, you used to know me as Welshman when I used to, a long time ago, comment anywhere. Which on ePluribus was often to applaud your work.

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  7. Good job as always, Jeff.

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  8. Good to see you, Keith, er, Welshman. One wonders if a wife can have a husband arrested if she has consentual unprotected sex in the missionary position with him.

    Thanks, TS.

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  9. Um, consensual sex in the missionary position shouldn't involve the man using his body weight to literally HOLD DOWN the woman, especially not after she said "Oh shit, your condom broke, then you need to stop." A broken condom is absolutely grounds for revoking consent. You don't stop to take it off and put on a new condom, or just stop, period, and instead keep going, that is rape, especially when you hold the other person down so they have a harder time resisting. Why is this so goddam hard to grasp?
    As for sex while the other person's sleeping? Are you kidding me? It doesn't matter that the person has hot, passionate, consensual sex with you before, you have sex with them after they've fallen asleep they literally CANNOT consent. Therefore, rape.

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  10. I wasn't aware that a "broken condom" was the specific issue here, Evita. Thanks for clarifying. How did you come by this information, if you don't mind my asking?

    As for the woman being asleep during sex, does that include if she dozes off in the middle of the act?

    The point here is that these charges against Assange would never have surfaced if he weren't CinC of Wikileaks.

    J

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  11. If the woman was asleep when the sex COMMENCED then yes it is rape. When you're asleep you give no indication of wishing to engage in any activity expect sleeping.

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  12. This Salon article explains a lot.

    It's pretty clear that Assange is being pursued so vigorously for political reasons, but that doesn't make the charges against him less serious, it just shows how screwed up society is - it takes this kind of dramatic character to get rape charges pursued.

    As to why the judge refused him bail, a big part of that was Assange refusing to provide an address he actually lived at.

    Nice work with the rape-apologism, misogyny and victim-blaming, by the way. That's classy.

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  13. Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com has written the state of the art analysis of the charges against Assange. The charges are fully as silly as they sound.

    Furthermore actually no formal charge was brought, it is better described as an inquiry (I don't recall the formal term) by whatever government authority is executing the capture/detention of Assange.

    Silly charges indicate to me at least that capture was the purpose and it succeeded. The cart (capture) was put before the horse (charges) most likely. The goal was chosen first, and the means to achieve that goal was filled in later as best they could.

    Their best was damned poor, so he walked... for now.

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  14. So what if it's politically motivated? It's perfectly possible to point that out WITHOUT spewing misogynist vitriol about the two accusers. One of the accusers consented to sex WITH A CONDOM, then she realized JA wasn't wearing one so told him to stop but he ignored her when she told him to stop. The other one was asleep when JA started putting his penis inside her. Anyway, if the authorities wanted to get JA, they'd find a charge that gets taken much more seriously than rape. No one takes rape seriously, all that follows is lots of slutshaming and victim-blaming. This fucking blog bears witness to that.

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  15. Think what you like about these charges against Assange, but it probably isn’t wise to make a feminist cause de guerre out of these two, ah, adventuresses.

    Tere’s a pretty good blurb from The Blob (Mike Moore) on the subject at HuffPo that says:

    “(W)hy has Amnesty International, in a special report (described in detail here by Naomi Wolf), declared that Sweden refuses to deal with the very real tragedy of rape? In fact, they say that all over Scandinavia, including in your country, rapists "enjoy impunity." And the United Nations, the EU and Swedish human rights groups have come to the same conclusion: Sweden just doesn't take sexual assault against women seriously.”

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/dear-government-of-sweden_b_798061.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=121710&utm_medium=email&utm_content=BlogEntry&utm_term=Daily+Brief

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  16. So.... did anybody ever say "no"????

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  17. Great article, thanks :)

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