May 21, 2013

Report on CIA rendition reveals massive scale of European assistance

Open Society research assembles long roster of nations willing to help the Bush administration with extra-legal program
Tom McCarthy
Tuesday 5 February 2013 14.24 EST

The Open Society Initiatives report lists the two known cases (Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery ) in Sweden, rendered in December 2001. These cases provoked public outcry in Sweden. According to the report



The UK has been less forthcoming regarding its apparently longer term and more substantial involvement. The report indicates there is evidence implicating the UK in the renditions of a number of people, including Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna (2002), Binyam Mohamed (2002), Omar Deghayes (2002), Sami al-Saadi (2004), Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq and his wife Fatima Bouchar (2004), and in several of these cases the UK also seems to have been involved in the torture. According to the report:

May 17, 2013

Wikileaks Greatest Hits: the UFO Cables

Wikileaks has done so many great things by now -- such as reporting that Steve Jobs died of AIDS, attempting to extort cash from anyone who might have exchanged emails with Freddy Balzan, feeding the rightwing's phony Climategate scandal with East Anglia emails, faking a NYT column, or helping the dictator of Belarus identify his domestic enemies -- that it's getting hard for Assange fans to remember it all!

So let's refresh our memories about the UFO cables!

WikiLeaks: new diplomatic cables contain UFO details, Julian Assange says
New leaked diplomatic cables set to be published by Wikileaks will contain fresh details on UFOs, according to the website's founder Julian Assange
By Andrew Hough
11:00PM GMT 03 Dec 2010
The 39 year-old Australian, who is wanted by Interpol over a charge of rape and sexual assault in Sweden, said there were some references to extraterrestrial life in yet-to-be-published confidential files obtained from the American government ...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8180528/Wikileaks-new-diplomatic-cables-contain-UFO-details-says-Julian-Assange.html

Julian Assange: UFO details found in WikiLeaks cables\
Saturday 4 Dec 2010 8:55 am
... ‘It is worth noting that in yet-to-be-published parts of the cablegate archive there are indeed references to UFOs,’ he said. Assange also took the opportunity to praise the person who leaked the documents to the website, stating that he should be viewed as an ‘unparalleled hero’ for his actions ...
http://metro.co.uk/2010/12/04/julian-assange-has-spoken-about-diplomatic-discussions-regarding-ufos-598503/

WikiLeaks' UFO Cables: More About Raelian Cult Than Alien Life
Andy Greenberg, Forbes Staff
2/07/2011 @ 2:20PM
If WikiLeaks didn’t already have the attention of the world’s conspiracy theorists, its founder Julian Assange grabbed the X-files crowd by their tin-foil helmet antennae in December, when he mentioned that the site plans to publish leaked cables that reference UFOs ...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/07/wikileaks-ufo-cables-more-about-raelian-cult-than-alien-life/

Julian Assange Talks About WikiLeaks UFO Disclosure Cables
WikiLeaks May Offer No New UFO Files or Evidence of Disclosure in Cables
The Portland Journal
Feb 9, 2011
... Even when questioned by Pierre Brunet in the WikiLeaks Roundtable video, Julian Assange seemed very coy with his answer regarding UFO files and any cable leaks ...
http://voices.yahoo.com/julian-assange-talks-wikileaks-ufo-disclosure-7815578.html?cat=15

WikiLeaks’ UFO Cables: Assange Admits Hype, Cover up?
Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, admitted today his previous claims about secret UFO cables were largely exaggerated. Two months after he stirred the hopes of UFO researchers worldwide, he is now stating the cables contain only “small passing references” to UFOs ...
http://www.theblackvault.com/m/news/view/WikiLeaks-UFO-Cables-Assange-Admits-Hype-Cover-up

What a guy!

May 7, 2013

There are differences between your views and mine, but I suspect you and I do not even agree

on exactly what the differences between our views are

First, we do not use the term "religion" in exactly the same way.

I think you wish to make general claims about "religion" without having any really good definition of it. I find "religion" as a sociological category to be a vague and ill-defined concept: having trained as a mathematician, I do not believe meaningful generalizations can be derived from vague ideas, so when "religion" is used in a sociological sense, I am often inclined to look sociological descriptions that seem to be more useful.

When I use "religion" as a theological category, I am referring to something rather like "the foundations of a person's being," and in that sense I expect everyone has a "religion" of some sort -- and I am sure you dislike any comments I make in that sense. "Religion" in this sense is not necessarily harmless in my view: people often behave rather badly for various reasons, springing from their choices of what will be important to them, and they are often quite good at providing high-minded-sounding rationalizations for their bad behavior, but their actual "religion" (even if they describe themselves as "religious&quot may not involve any traditional "gods" and their rationalizations do not necessarily involve any "god talk" -- the actual "gods" they worship (for example) may be themselves, and their actual "religious practice" may be their self-interested greed or it may be their own self-righteousness. In other words, I use the theological category "religion" to include a number of ways of being, many of which I regard as idolatrous and harmful, but in that case the conceptual overlap between your use of the word and my use of the word is rather slight

Second, we do not approach the sociological category "religion" from the same perspective. My development here was influenced by Marx, who is currently unpopular, despite his having had some rather profound insights:

Perhaps you have little interest in Marx, but this passage shines as a brilliant landmark in atheistic humanism. Marx is not content with the observation that religion is man-made, and he is not content simply to strip away religious belief: he wants to understand the actual source of religious belief, without losing his ethical stance and without losing his scientific perspective. His idea is to regard religious belief as a psychological projection, that allows people to discuss their hopes and disappointments in a fantastic language that represents both their current suffering and their protest against that suffering. Thus Marx maintains his sympathy with the oppressed in part by decoding their discussion of their oppression. He is not interested so much to destroy their illusions but rather to eliminate the conditions that necessarily produced the illusions

This provides an established atheistic-humanistic approach to the study of problems posed by various "religious" manifestations -- namely, one asks: What is really going on here? What are the underlying conditions that spawned this? That approach has the advantage of focusing attention on genuine material problems that real humans need solved

Third, I think I see interesting problems where you see none. When (for example) communities with a long history of religious tolerance splinter into violent competing factions, I think you feel everything important has been said once you have blame "religion" for the strife -- but since such "solution" seems glib and uninformative to me, I still want to know what has happened

May 6, 2013

Listen: Chris Hedges Interviews Julian Assange

Posted on May 5, 2013
... audio excerpts from their extended conversation in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London ...
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/listen_chris_hedges_interviews_julian_assange_20130505/

Assange, here, as we should expect by now, rather carelessly misrepresents a number of matters:

Lindskog's 3 April 2013 talk at the University of Adelaide actually ranged over various legal issues surrounding Assange and Sweden, including the problems Swedish transparency law creates with respect to keeping current police investigation documents out of the newspapers and the issue of Assange's possible extradition to the US from Sweden, which Lindskog regards as more or less impossible. Lindskog's comment "It's a mess" occurs a bit after the 0:46 mark in the video, and when he makes it, he has been talking extradition, not about the Swedish criminal case. (If you decide to follow the link to the videotape, you'll want to skip the first 14 minutes which mostly show audience wandering into the auditorium)

Assange -- who (of course) had earlier condemned Lindskog's talk as “absolutely outrageous” (see http://www.news.com.au/national-news/julian-assange-safe-from-extradition-to-us-says-justice-stefan-lindskog/story-fncynjr2-1226612062993) -- has by now had ample time to learn what Lindskog actually said, if he were interested in what Lindskog actually said



US ambassador to the UK Louis Susman was on the 20 February 2011 Andrew Marr Show, and he said no such thing. Watch it yourself: the clip is only a bit over one minute

May 1, 2013

Partial list of Assange's lawyers

Australia
Julian Burnside
Graeme Orr
Jennifer Robinson
Robert Stary

Spain
Baltasar Garzon

Sweden
Bjorn Hurtig
Thomas Olsson
Per Samuelson

UK
Susan Benn
Ben Emmerson
Gareth Peirce
Geoffrey Robertson
Dinah Rose
Mark Stephens

USA
Alan Dershowitz
Michael Ratner

February 21, 2013

WikiLeaks discover ties between Nigerian scammers and Straftor. Sort of. (Murphy | CSM)

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / February 20, 2013

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backchannels/2013/0220/WikiLeaks-discover-ties-between-Nigerian-scammers-and-Straftor

February 15, 2013

No exception for Assange: Rape apologetics and the left

Matt Fodor
Michael Laxer
February 13, 2013

... It is difficult, to put it mildly, to take the claims that Assange would simply be handed over to the U.S. seriously. Espionage is considered a political crime in Sweden and Swedish law as well as its extradition treaty with the U.S. prohibits extradition for political crimes.

Consider the case of Edward Lee Howard, a CIA agent who sold secrets to the Soviet Union, devastating U.S. operations in Moscow, and who was arrested for overstaying his visa in Sweden. The U.S. government requested Howard’s extradition, which Sweden refused. The prime minister of Sweden at the time was Carl Bildt, the current Foreign Affairs Minister who Assange supporters claim is a U.S. ‘lapdog’ who would immediately extradite Assange after “a single phone call” from the White House.

One final question that is never answered by Assange supporters: wouldn’t it have been far easier to extradite Assange to the U.S. from the U.K., which is much more of a ‘lapdog’ than Sweden? The U.K., unlike Sweden, does have an extradition treaty with the U.S. for espionage. Indeed, it would be much more difficult to extradite Assange from Sweden, as it would require the support of the governments of both Sweden and the U.K. Both are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights which forbids the extradition to countries where the accused could face the death penalty. He cannot just simply be handed over to the US ...

http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/michael-laxer/2013/02/no-exception-assange-rape-apologetics-and-left

February 6, 2013

Jemima Khan: The inside story of how Julian Assange alienated his allies

WikiLeaks – whose mission statement was “to produce a more just society based upon truth” – has been guilty of the same obfuscation and misinformation as those it sought to expose, while its supporters are expected to follow, unquestioningly, in blinkered, cultish devotion.
By Jemima Khan
Published 06 February 2013 12:15

... I supported Assange before I ever met him. I knew of his work when he was arrested on allegations of sexual assault in late 2010 and held in solitary confinement and I decided to stand bail for him because I believed that through WikiLeaks he was speaking truth to power and had made many enemies. Although I had concerns about what was rumoured to be a nonchalant attitude towards redactions in the documents he leaked, as well as some doubts about the release of certain cables – for example, the list of infrastructure sites vital to US national security – I felt more passionately that democracy needs strong, free media ...

The list of alienated and disaffected allies is long: some say they fell out over redactions, some over broken deals, some over money, some over ownership and control. The roll-call includes Assange’s earliest WikiLeaks collaborators, Daniel Domscheit-Berg and “The Architect”, the anonymous technical whizz behind much of the WikiLeaks platform. It also features the journalists with whom he worked on the leaked cables: Nick Davies, David Leigh and Luke Harding of the Guardian; the New York Times team; James Ball; and the Freedom of Information campaigner Heather Brooke. Then there are his former lawyer Mark Stephens; Jamie Byng of Canongate Books, who paid him a reported £500,000 advance for a ghostwritten autobiography for which Assange withdrew his co-operation before publication; the Channel 4 team that made a documentary about him which resulted in his unsuccessful complaint to Ofcom that it was unfair and had invaded his privacy; and his former WikiLeaks team in Iceland ...

It may well be that the serious allegations of sexual assault and rape are not substantiated in court, but I have come to the conclusion that these are all matters for Swedish due process and that Assange is undermining both himself and his own transparency agenda – as well as doing the US department of justice a favour – by making his refusal to answer questions in Sweden into a human rights issue. There have been three rounds in the UK courts and the UK courts have upheld the European Arrest Warrant in his name three times. The women in question have human rights, too, and need resolution. Assange’s noble cause and his wish to avoid a US court does not trump their right to be heard in a Swedish court ...

We all want a hero. After WikiLeaks released the infamous Collateral Murder video in 2010, showing US troops gunning down a dozen civilians in Iraq, I jokingly asked if Assange was the new Jason Bourne, on the run and persecuted by the state. It would be a tragedy if a man who has done so much good were to end up tolerating only disciples and unwavering devotion, more like an Australian L Ron Hubbard.

http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/02/jemima-khan-inside-story-how-julian-assange-alienated-his-allies

January 31, 2013

Assange to run for Australian senate: WikiLeaks (AFP)

... WikiLeaks unveiled the plan with a tweet that read "Australia: Julian Assange has confirmed he will run in the 2013 national election for the Australian Senate", just hours after Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the nation would go to the polls on September 14.

The 41-year-old's mother, Christine Assange, was delighted. "He will be awesome. In the House of Representatives we get to choose between US lackey party number one and US lackey party number two -- between the major parties ...

A later WikiLeaks tweet said Queensland-born Assange would "run on WikiLeaks party ticket" ...

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jk_OLqtC1wB-234yuata434tctFQ?docId=CNG.1f64df9458b0d5a6427c0b4be9aa4693.4d1


... Shortly after asking his son to join WikiLeaks in 2007, Assange left Australia permanently. Since then, the two have had no contact ...
Daniel Assange: I never thought WikiLeaks would succeed
by Crikey intern Nick Johns-Wickberg | Sep 17, 2010 1:17P
http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/09/17/daniel-assange-i-never-thought-wikileaks-would-succeed/


... extradition shall be granted .. in respect of the following offences ...
(vii) Rape.
(viii) Unlawful sexual intercourse with a female.
(ix) Indecent assault ...
Treaty between Australia and Sweden concerning extradition
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_reg/er322/sch1.html


... there appeared to be little room for maneuver, with Mr. Hague saying “no one should be in any doubt” of Britain’s determination to fulfill its obligations to Sweden under Europe’s extradition law ...
Assange Faces Long Stay in Ecuador’s London Embassy
By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: August 16, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/17/world/europe/assange-faces-long-stay-in-ecuadors-embassy.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


... "It is time for the United States to cease its persecution of WikiLeaks, to cease its persecution of our people and to cease its persecution of our alleged sources," Julian Assange, speaking via satellite from London, told a packed conference room at the United Nations ...
Assange speaks via satellite from London, calls for end to 'persecution'
By Ashley Fantz, CNN
updated 1:15 AM EDT, Thu September 27, 2012
http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/26/world/assange-un-address/index.html


WOMEN in Australia have joined forces to call for the sacking of a judge who told a jury that it was acceptable for men to use 'rough handling' on their wives to persuade them to have sexual intercourse. The remarks by Judge Derek Bollen in the Supreme Court of South Australia have caused a nationwide furore, uniting women of all political hues in their demands that judges undergo training courses in male-female relationships and that they be vetted before they are allowed to preside over cases involving rape ...
Judge's rape tales infuriate Australian women
From ROBERT MILLIKEN in Sydney
Thursday 14 January 1993
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/judges-rape-tales-infuriate-australian-women-1478386.html


... Mr Assange's lawyer Judge Baltasar Garzón Real ... attacked the Australian Government for not providing proper consular assistance to the former computer programmer. His comments prompted an immediate rebuttal from Australia's Foreign Affairs Minister, Bob Carr, who said Assange had been contacted 62 times by Australian consular officials ... Mr Garzón said the Australian Government's response to requests for assistance had been "entirely negative" ... "Whilst he's been in the Ecuadorian embassy we have made contact with the embassy on eight occassions either in person or by phone to check on his welfare and to offer consular assistance," Mr Carr's spokesman said ...
Carr hits back at Assange attacks as lawyer hints at 'surprise' in store
August 24, 2012
Rory Callinan, Dan Harrison


... Members of the Australian Parliament do not have legal immunity: they can be arrested and tried for any offence ...
Parliament of Australia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Australia


... The Constitution, section 42, requires senators to make and subscribe (sign) before the Governor-General, or some person authorised by the Governor-General, an oath or affirmation of allegiance in the form set out in the Constitution. Senators make and sign the oath or affirmation at the first sitting of the Senate which they attend after the commencement of their terms as senators ... Section 42 requires that a senator make and subscribe the oath or affirmation before taking the senator’s seat in the Senate ...
Odgers' Australian Senate Practice Thirteenth Edition
Chapter 6 - Senators
http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Powers_practice_n_procedures/odgers13?file=chapter06§ion=05


... Twomey is doubtful that Assange can convince the electoral commission that he wants to return to Australia, given that he has lived almost abroad for almost six years. And if Assange can't qualify as an eligible overseas voter, he can't run at all ...
Can Assange Really Become an Australian Senator?
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
Dec 13, 2012
http://mashable.com/2012/12/13/assange-australian-senate/