Prosecutors withdraw warrant for WikiLeaks founder Assange
breitbart.com
breitbart.com
If this were a conspiracy someone at a high level would have agreed to it and the whole point of it would be to get media coverage. What happened instead is just the opposite. As soon as the case started getting media coverage the high level people went into over drive to investigate the claim and determined it was unfounded.
Even if the conspiracy was just to get the claim out there briefly the Swedish government wouldn't have withdrawn it by saying the charge was unfounded. If it was a conspiracy they wouldn't give a reason or they'd say it's still under investigation. That way people who were inclined not to trust Assange could continue to believe it.
EDIT: clearing up what I'm trying to say ;p
Because if the CIA (or whoever in the US government) is trying to use another country's legal system to frame someone that would be considered the conducting operations on foreign soil. That's very much against International Law without getting the permission of the Swedish State Department.
So if they did that without the very highest levels of government being involved they'd be risking a very public international incident plus they'd be cutting themselves off from ever being able to impeach Assange's credibility in the future (because once you have a verified attempt to discredit him in such a manner no one's ever going to believe a claim against him again).
Again I'm sure it's possible but it just seems too reckless to be plausible to me.
This happened at the height of the US/Middle East conflict (before major combat started in Iraq). Abu Omar was a prominent member of Jamaat Islamiya, a peer organization of Egyption Islamic Jihad, a group publicly affiliated with "al Qaeda" (probably more for PR purposes, though) and a group led in part by Omar Abdel-Rahman, the guy who coordinated the first bombing of the WTC.
Julian Assange is not a leader of a violent Islamist movement. We are not at war with Julian Assange. No foreign policy objective is accomplished by kidnapping him off the streets of Sweden or Iceland or wherever he is now.
I don't want to sound (too much) like I'm advocating for the capture of alleged terrorists off western city streets. That's not my point. My point is this: do I believe that the CIA might try to kidnap or kill someone they believe to be a key figure in a bona fide "terrorist" (ie: organized, violent, competently armed, transnational militant Islamist) organization? Absolutely.
Does that mean kidnapping is S.O.P. for the CIA any time anybody antagonizes the US? Ralph Nader better watch his ass, then; third-party left-wing candidates pose a greater danger to the current administration.
Interestingly enough, it seems that neither is Abu Omar. After rendering him to Egypt where the secret police tortured him for a few years (electric shocks to the genitals, rape, beatings, the usual), an Egyptian court finally freed him declaring that there was no evidence against him. So, to recap: the CIA kidnapped a guy and delivered him to the Egyptian secret police for torture. But even in an insanely corrupt dictatorship like Egypt, where prosecutors have, um, very wide discretion let us say, they couldn't get any charges to stick. Including association with a terrorist organization, which is a serious crime under Egyptian law. So as far as we know, there's no reason to believe this guy has ever done anything wrong.
I mean, if a police state like Egypt can't manage to find (or concoct) something, anything with which to convict him, how dangerous can he be? And if he's not actually dangerous, then sending 20-odd CIA agents to kidnap him and render him for torture seems kind of crazy....My point is: the CIA sometimes acts in ways that make very little sense on the outside.
Would it make sense for them to kill Assange? No, it would be insane. But this isn't an organization that has historically demonstrated an overabundance of sanity. I doubt they're trying to kill him, but arguments premised on CIA sanity seem...rather weak.
Should the CIA have kidnapped him? No. We can see one strong argument against extrajudicial detention and exfiltration right here: it puts us on a slippery slope, where we have to take pains to argue about why we might kidnap a "terrorist" ("ah, but what's a terrorist! it's whatever you say it is, righ!"... sigh), but wouldn't kidnap a free-speech activist.
You can present no evidence that the "CIA" or any other agency in the US government is plotting the kidnap, murder, or even the propaganda-based discrediting of Julian Assange. All you can do is posit that something like that might happen, and sit back waiting for everyone else on the message board to try to prove the negative. Isn't that fun?
I do not see how it could be rational. Based on years of torture, we apparently have learned nothing that could justify a conviction in even a kangaroo court.
Look, I know that many people believe that everyone who any government anywhere ever declares to be a terrorist is automatically guilty. But really now: he hasn't been convicted of anything. Even though he was tortured for years. Even though was under the control of a police state that has a long reputation of convicting innocent people the state doesn't care for. And despite all that: no convictions. Which means he never should have been kidnapped and tortured. When you kidnap and torture innocent people, you are doing something wrong.
All you can do is posit that something like that might happen, and sit back waiting for everyone else on the message board to try to prove the negative. Isn't that fun?
Again, you seem very confused. I'm not trying to disprove your larger assertion. I'm calling into question subsidiary arguments that you've made. Those subsidiary arguments are not proving a negative, so you need not weep any more on that score. Now, since you've made many many subsidiary arguments, I don't think that calling a handful of them into question seriously damages your larger claim, but if you believe otherwise....
I'm doing my best to foresee all the various ways this discussion can turn into an HN referendum on the "war on terror", and I'm obviously failing, because I'm reading things about genital electrocution and discussing the 2003 kidnapping of a Jamaat Islamiya recruiter instead of what has actually happened with Julian Assange, someone who's newsworthy exclusively for having posted files to the Internet.
The US doesn't care much about foreign law; the kidnapping in Italy is just one example. Carrying out covert actions on foreign soil is in the CIA's mission statement: "Conducting covert action at the direction of the President to preempt threats or achieve US policy objectives."
Do I think the CIA had anything to do with this? I have no idea. But I don't think the CIA can be ruled out based on the US's respect for foreign governments and international law.
CIA has been doing that and worse for many years. Look at South America for example. "Using another country's legal system" is just child's play compared to training assassins, installing brutal dictators, and overthrowing democratically elected governments.
> they'd be risking a very public international incident
Rendition flights in Europe, the rape of South America, torture, and assassinations, training terrorists didn't phase them. Do you really think they'll back down in front of the Swedish press. They can launch their own PR campaign in the US media to protect their image, they certainly have the funds for that.
> CIA would have to be pretty reckless
Sometimes that would be appropriate as well. Some campaigns are designed to intimidate and make it circumstantially obvious what it is, while still officially maintaining their distance from the case.
But Julian Assange is not Salvador Allende.
The US can't even figure out how to assassinate key military adversaries based on Baluchistan, one of the most violent and contentious areas in the world.
The idea that they'd be scheming to kill someone simply out of spite (for nothing they do at this point to Assange is going to keep the machinery he's put in motion from publishing every document disclosed to him) is an insult to our intelligence.
I reply to comments like this not because I'm a great believer in US intelligence and foreign policy (I'm not) and not because I'm a philosophical opponent to Wikileaks (though I am). I reply because my nerdy brain just can't accept notions as wrongheaded as the idea that Assange is important enough to merit "executive action".
I'd be shocked and offended --- not on moral grounds but on practical grounds --- if there had been a single executive order with Assange's name on it.
I'm not sure this is relevant. Life in Baluchistan is not nearly as amenable to government surveillance as life in Sweden. And besides, I'd say that the US government is pretty skillful at killing people with drones by the point. Not always the people they meant to kill....
The idea that they'd be scheming to kill someone simply out of spite (for nothing they do at this point to Assange is going to keep the machinery he's put in motion from publishing every document disclosed to him) is an insult to our intelligence.
One thing that has surprised me is the degree to which people in the US national security community believe that organizations can be stopped by killing the right leader. It seems like a case of "if all you have is a hammer, then every problem starts to look like a nail" -- we're good at killing individuals but pretty clueless when it comes to understanding mass movements let alone engaging with them or changing their incentives. For example, there was a lot of internal resistance behind backing the Anwar Awakening in Iraq as opposed to continuing the status quo of killing insurgency leaders.
So I agree with you: killing Assange would do nothing to stop WikiLeaks. But I'm not sure that understanding is commonly held in the national security bureaucracy.
It is, on the other hand, very easy for me to accept that the US would try to recruit any one of the tens of thousands of well-armed, morally ambiguous bandits carousing around the western tribal provinces of Pakistan. After all, tens of thousands of well-armed American and NATO fighters are waiting just on the other side of an invisible border between Afghanistan and Pakistan to shoot at those same bandits.
There is simply a world of difference between the Assange scenario and the AfPak scenario; an avalanche of incentive exists in AfPak, and yet we're still bound by a kabuki dance of "rules of engagement" and "surgical" airstrikes.
There's no way I can win an argument about this with you, because it demands that I prove a negative: that nobody in the US government, no matter how ineffectual or mentally incompetant, would, given the chance, seek to neutralize Julian Assange (by PR, by arrest, or by murder). But suffice it to say: you're talking to someone who believes that if agents from the FBI, CIA, and AFOSI were standing right in front of Julian Assange in an unlit alley blocked on either end with vans ready to spirit him away, they'd try to get him to answer a few (or many) questions... and then leave him to walk away.
Um...I'm not claiming that anyone is planning on killing Assange. Please reread my comment. I'm only disputing some factual claims that you made. Just because I think portions of your argument are weak and unsupported (or irrelevant) doesn't mean that I agree with the people you're arguing with.
There is simply a world of difference between the Assange scenario and the AfPak scenario; an avalanche of incentive exists in AfPak, and yet we're still bound by a kabuki dance of "rules of engagement" and "surgical" airstrikes.
When you say "we", are you referring to the US military or the civilian contractors that are running their own airstrikes in AfPak totally apart from the military and military rules?
My point here is that talking about government killings in Baluchistan is irrelevant. Baluchistan is a very different place than Sweden. The fact that government has great difficulty finding and then killing people in a remote tribal region doesn't tell us anything about their ability to find and kill people in a place like Sweden.
"I'm surprised by the degree to which people in the national security community believe that organizations can be stopped by killing the right leader"
My point here is that your mental model for how people in the national security bureaucracy seems incomplete. I think your belief that WikiLeaks can't be stopped by killing its leaders is correct -- I just don't think we have any basis for assuming this belief is shared inside the intel/defense establishment, especially given its recent history of being unable/unwilling to consider the futility of campaigns based on leadership strikes.
when you say these things, it sure sounds like you agree with the conspiracy theorists.
Not at all. I disagree with ignorant and poorly reasoned arguments. You are bringing some to the table.
Those are my premises. From them, I derive the argument that the evidence available suggests that we don't intend to harm Assange. We simply suck at picking people out and killing them, even when we have straightforward military objectives served by doing so.
From all your comments, I can tell that you have straightforward and valid objections to the way the US has persecuted its "war on terror". You and I probably agree on most of them. I understand how those objections might bleed into the Assange story, but I think that's all it is: an unrelated objection bleeding into this narrative. The world is not a spy movie, even though the US has sometimes acted in ways that might make it look like it is.
[The US government is poorly equipped kill people]
=>
[The US government does not wish to kill Julian Assange] ????
... while the nature of a world of multiple actors, motives and methods hardly cannot be fully pieced together with syllogisms, if you are going to try, at least use some are plausible.
As for Julian. Well, I think the best way to deal with him is to smear his moral stance. You see Wikileaks is presented to the world as standing on a high moral ground, fighting a warmongering and murderous giant empire. It is the classic "good little guy" vs "big bad guy" battle. So far the little guy is doing very well.
So the best way to deal with Wikileaks "problem" is to pop its moral balloon. Implicate them in child porn, rape, molestation -- anything that would completely discredit them. And it just looks like Julian has actually been accused of rape in Sweden, a country he just happened to set up some of his servers and where he planned on staying a while. Maybe it's a coincidence and not connected to the CIA at all -- but somehow I doubt it.
On another point. I think if any of the adversary intelligence agencies managed to actually assassinate him and made it look like a CIA job -- it might turn into a major win for them by making CIA look bad.
It still is under investigation, though. Whatever happened is not serious enough for a rape charge with the current evidence, but as I mention below, molestation or just general asshattery is still on the table.
There is however no conspiracy here. A national government, the most mighty power in any nation, seeks to arrest a man and makes such intention known to the entire world. A man this is about who we have read only recently by certain people asked to be arrested in defiance of international law and without having committed a crime, a man who was accused by the US government for having blood on his hands for leaking information which apparently has nothing new to say, a man of whom people are speculating as to how the government will be ridden of, the preferred choice of the speculators being to kill him.
A conspiracy is something which has no base in reality. This is beyond that. In this instance there is no base to not believe in the "conspiracy".
Also, it is telling that only hours after an article was submitted here which did not make the front page of HN, an article by CNN on a blog on CNN, asked whether this is a smear campaign that the Associated Press reports that the warrant is withdrawn.
I for one have no reasonable doubt. I wish not to engage in any games of thought. I would rather see this for what it is, an absolute disgrace by a democratic government who is conspiring against its people and their will.
When you build a narrative on a premise like that, you're already heading off into tinfoil hat country. People routinely assert --- far more credibly --- that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have blood on their hands.
Note also that the current headline on CNN is "Rape ccusation dropped against WikiLeaks founder", and the first story under that is "Is Assange target of smear campaign". Of course, this is neither here nor there; the CNN home page is engineered to maximize page views, not enlightenment.
Would you like a screenshot?
"we have read only recently by certain people asked to be arrested in defiance of international law"
Why would I want a screenshot? This was written at 8:30 US time
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/21/smear-campaign-suspecte...
That might be irrelevant. My point was that a conspiracy theory is something which has no base in reason. The entirety of these events however cries out for an explanation.
Possible crimes he could be charged with?
No idea but I'm sure that the word 'interstate wirefraud' will pop up in there somewhere ;)
If you're not going to constrain yourself to actual evidence, you can make any claim and then force anyone who'd dispute that claim to prove a negative. Those suppositions aren't informative. They're boring. And they're epsilon from forum trolling.
- A trial balloon is information sent out to the media in order to observe the reaction of an audience.
- http://www.aei.org/home, The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) is a conservative think tank founded in 1943
To your first paragraph: I didn't realize the AEI raised the point. To your second paragraph: I thought by clearly stating that I was positing the position, that it was up for discussion, in a friendly manner. I certainly wasn't trying to troll. Sometimes creative exploration of an idea without debating first can lead to interesting places. In fact, Edward De'Bono has written reams on the matter. So thanks for enlightening me on those terms, peace.
The reality is, as upset as the US no doubt is about the gravity of the information they managed to lose, Assange has almost certainly committed no actual crime (not being a citizen of the US or in any way obligated to safeguard military secrets), and probably faces reprisals no more fearsome than the rejection of any future US visa.
Oh, but it is fun to spin conjecture about his "enemy of the state" status, and the swarm of secret stealth drones that is no doubt speeding to his current undisclosed location as we speak!
Assange is an annoyance to the US Government. We don't know how big or small an annoyance he is. There was rumor of some very embarrassing diplomatic cables which have not yet been released, which might or might not constitue Assange qualifying as a very big annoyance.
Sorry, try as hard as you can, you're not going to elevate Proff to the level of "enemy of the state". He's a guy with a bunch of files that the US no doubt wishes he didn't have. It is a complete certainty that every one of those files is going to be public sometime within the next couple years. Nobody with a functioning adult mind and more than a years exposure to any part of the problem space could believe otherwise.
(Bradley Manning is, if credible allegations are to be believed, an entirely different story).
Note also that to make this case, the government would have to claim "evil intent": either an intent to harm the United States, or an attempt to aid a foreign nation, or a reason to believe his actions would result in either. Assange may be no friend to the US national security apparatus, but he clearly seems to believe he's acting for the benefit of everyone, including the US. Check out US vs. Truong Dinh Hung (and the recent APAC case) for more detail; search for "scienter", the technical term for the requirement.
"Pentagon lawyers believe that online whistleblower group WikiLeaks acted illegally in disclosing thousands of classified Afghanistan war reports and other material, and federal prosecutors are exploring possible criminal charges, officials familiar with the matter said."
They haven't said what law WikiLeaks has broken, but it will be interesting to see what they come up with. The Espionage Act was the first thing that came to mind, but you may be right that it would be a difficult -- if not unconstitutional -- case.
It is not that uncommon to conduct those. They basically rely on the media to just publish verbatim the release. I would be very foolish of them not to use that capability to conduct disinformation campaigns and public response testing before a major operation for example.
As for assassination. I doubt they want to go that far in this case. Shaming and publicly discrediting him would be just as effective. They figured Wikileaks is riding a morality-based popularity at the moment. They are the righteous Robin-Hood type guys fighting a big, mean, empire. If they could just make them look "immoral" in any way they could deflate Julian's popularity balloon.
Not saying CIA is above assassinations. They have a track record to prove it. But I think in this case they not are ready to take it that far yet.
It seems like the worst result of the many nutty conspiracy theories out there is a kind of duality.
Either you believe the nuts or you believe that officials would never collude or bend the rules to suit their purposes.
Balderdash. Officials have always been quicker to pin blame on those they dislike than on, say, those who they are in the same social clubs with. It's, uh, human nature. Likes like, dislikes get blamed for more than their share. You don't need big conspiracy theories for this. The rule of law aims to avoid this stuff but it's never absolute, always relative.
Of course, with US division of wealth getting more and more skewed, the division between officials and average people are bigger, each group becomes more quick to ascribe problems to a conspiracy...
So how do you have a rape allegation by two separate women (as I understand it?) that is baseless? I understand how the charges could be baseless, but the prosecution's job should be to determine if the allegations have merit, not try the case. So why do the charges have merit one day and not the next?
Look, if there is a charge, investigate it. If not, don't. But charging him one day and withdrawing the next just leads to even more conspiracy theory madness.
What this sounds like is "Well if he was just Joe Blow, we would have arrested him, but given the nature of his stature..."
I'm sure that's not the case, however. Would like to hear more on this. Must have been some information that we were not privy to.
They probably asked 2 women to cry "rape" to see 1) how media and people would react and 2) to discredit him. It doesn't matter if charges never stick -- it discredits him by creating doubt. It is the basic "OJ trial" situation -- "just because we couldn't convict doesn't mean he is not guilty" -- so just convicting someone and having all the media report it, is enough to tarnish Julian's morality image.
And it just so happens that Julian and Wikileaks is on a higher moral ground and that is what keeps them popular. They are the modern day information Robin-Hoods. If they can be made to look immoral their image and credibility will forever be destroyed. No matter if charges don't sick.
As for the warning. I think some operations that CIA engages are intentionally not kept too secret as to serve as a warning and intimidation without actually putting in a press release. It is basically the same tactics that FSB (ex KGB) used when they assassinated Litvinenko. They could have probably arranged an armed robbery or freak car accident, but by using radioactive polonium with traces all the way to the Sheremetovo, they issued a loud and clear threat to anyone willing to criticize or betray the FSB in the future.
But I've never heard of a case that was filed on Friday evening, hits the news big time on Saturday morning and has the main charges dropped after an arrest warrant has been issued on Saturday afternoon.
Either there was cause to issue a warrant or there wasn't.
Weirdest thing.
But tens of millions of people have seen the name of Julian Assange next to the word 'rape' in sensational headlines all over the world, so in that sense the damage has been done.
They're not trying to destroying him at this point, just ramp up the pressure.
They have to be a little bit careful because he does, apparently, have that encrypted and distributed information bomb.
> The status of the profession has gradually increased, and becoming a prosecutor is today a very attractive proposition for young lawyers.
They are probably hinting to a noob mistake.
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&i...
It’s based on this article, but Google won’t translate it:
In the case of the former, flaunting rape allegations only to withdraw them makes people susceptible to taking the insidious "asshat" argument at face value without wondering too much because it seems that everyone is acting responsibly and rationally in contrast to earlier.
In the latter, having filed charges whether successful or not (and with the same "asshat" implication) legitimises selling the story to gossip magazines.
In both cases, there is some tarnish to the reputation unless completely debunked. Or of course the allegations are true.
As an interesting aside. KGB back in the 40-50 used sometimes use their female agents to set up honey pot operations. They would entrap foreign diplomats or nationals, then under threat of blowing their cover, try to get them to collaborate.
+ the warrant was issued by an on duty prosecutor and dropped by the chief prosecutor. So could just be the case of someone trying to make a name for himself...only to get smacked down by his boss who had to deal with the controversy on their day off.
They've now tarred his name with no evidence and generated a massive media buzz and FUD around the fictional rape charges.
It certainly seems like wikileaks have made enemies that are very happy to play dirty.
I'm sure Julian is going nuts about all of this craziness, and my thoughts are with him - but seriously, he's now attained "International Man of Mystery" status.
How better to protect yourself from one, than to vaccinate the entire public? Find two accolytes to report the alleged rape and molestation on just barely credible terms, and then either have them withdraw them or bring to light certain facts that mean that the charges HAVE to be dropped (factual inconsistencies, for example, or a previous record of crying wolf; etc).
Do this quickly on a saturday morning when newsrooms are too understaffed to do much reporting and will probably not have much time between the issuing of the charges and the withdrawal to actually spread the uncorrected, daaging rumours; just the retraction.
Result? CNN runs a front page headline next to not-negative press about you (charges withdrawn) suggesting to all its viewers that you might well be the target of a smear campaign. Future journalists AND readers will be immunised and healthily sceptical the next time something like this is attempted.
If this was a wikileaks taskforce's test balloon, wouldn't they have done it in a normal newsday?