A few years ago I speculated that one day some unenthused young contract worker at an Intelligence agency would decide to do a Snowden and release details of the backdoors that have been built into our electronic devices - Gen Y's Revenge - Opening The Back Door ?.

After thinking about this for a while I eventually concluded that the next big scandal could be one that could have far more real world impact than the current round of revelations (which are going to have a lasting effect on American technology providers over the next decade as foreign and multinational entities start trying to attain some level of information privacy that they don't enjoy today).

My thinking goes like this - if all our technology platforms now have backdoors built into them, what happens if some whistleblower decides to make public the mechanisms for accessing these backdoors ? Is there some procedure on the shelf that will allow a (relatively) rapid rollout of fixes to close the backdoors (and the cynic in me assumes, install new ones) ? Or is this just a hacker's wet dream waiting to come true...

So I wasn't all that surprised by Wikileaks' latest release, the much hyped "Vault 7" - Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed.

Like the Podesta emails, the timing for this one was dodgy at best, with Trump doing some paranoid tweeting about his phones being tapped by Obama a couple of days before the document dump. By and large I still like Assange, but the entire neocon and Democratic establishment seem to determined to paint him as yet another tool of Vladimir Putin - and some of Wikileaks' tweets and the way they seem to be co-ordinating with the Trumpists don't do much to contradict this.

Fingers crossed they start releasing some dirt on the Trump administration before too long to restore some balance to the force.

There are a few other conspiracy theories about this latest release floating around that don't come from the Washington establishment. One of these is that this is part of a turf war between the NSA and CIA, with the NSA perhaps deciding that the CIA are encroaching too much on their area of expertise (mirroring some theories around the time of the Snowden revelations that the CIA wanted to discredit the NSA).

Bruce Schneier has a good roundup of articles on the topic - WikiLeaks Releases CIA Hacking Tools.

Somewhat weirdly, while browsing Facebook outside yesterday (off my home network) I emailed the link to this Intercept story to myself with the subject line "Vault 7" yesterday. A minute or so later I had an aborted call from a number in The Seychelles then my phone popped up a dialog box asking me what wifi network I wanted to connect to (something I can't recall it ever spontaneously asking me to do before). It did make me wonder just how active / automated the surveillance systems are these days when it comes to grabbing all the information off your phone...

FORMER CIA DIRECTOR Michael Hayden told the BBC this week that he blames millennials for the government’s secrets being leaked to the public.

“In order to do this kind of stuff, we have to recruit from a certain demographic,” he said, referring to government surveillance. “And I don’t mean to judge them at all, but this group of millennials and related groups simply have different understandings of the words loyalty, secrecy, and transparency than certainly my generation did.”

Bruce Sterling has popped up at Medium with a great essay (following up on an older one called "The Blast Shack") on Manning, Assange and Snowden - The Ecuadorian Library.

First let’s consider Bradley Manning, who is not at all close to the NSA. Bradley was a bored and upset minor military technician who burned a zillion US documents onto a DVD, and labeled that “Lady Gaga.”

The authorities finally got around to convicting Bradley this week, of some randomized set of largely irrelevant charges. But the damage there is already done; some to Bradley himself, but mostly grave, lasting damage to the authorities. By maltreating Bradley as their Guantanamo voodoo creature, their mystic hacker terror beast from AlQaedaville, Oklahoma, they made Bradley Manning fifty feet high.

At least they didn’t manage to kill him. Bradley’s visibly still on his feet, and was not so maddened by the torment of his solitary confinement that he’s reduced to paste. So he’s going to jail as an anti-war martyr, but time will pass. Someday, some new entity, someone in power who’s not directly embarrassed by Cablegate, can pardon him.

Some future Administration can amnesty him, once they get around to admitting that Bradley’s War on Terror is history. The War on Terror has failed as conclusively as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed. There’s terror all over the sands now, terror from Mali to Xinjiang, and a billion tender-hearted Bradleys couldn’t stop that bleeding, no matter how much they leak.

Thanks to the modern miracle of fracking, though, the mayhem in the oil patch means a lot less to K Street. Someday, Bradley Manning will be as forgotten to them as Monica Lewinsky is. Then they’ll yield to the hornet-like, persistent buzz of the leftie peaceniks, and let Bradley go. He’s not dangerous. Bradley Manning will never do anything of similar consequence again. He’s not a power player. He’s a prisoner of conscience.

However, unlike poor Monica Lewinsky, Bradley Manning will never lack for passionate adherents who admire him and love him. Before Bradley went into his ugly maelstrom, he didn’t have that. Nowadays, he does. Maybe it’s worth it.

Then there’s Julian Assange. Yeah, him, the silver-haired devil, the Mycroft Holmes of the Ecuadorian Embassy. Bradley Manning’s not at all NSA material, he’s just a leaky clerk with a thumb-drive. But Julian’s quite a lot closer to the NSA — because he’s a career cypherpunk.

If you’re a typical NSA geek, and you stare in all due horror at Julian, it’s impossible not to recognize him as one of your own breed. He’s got the math fixation, the stilted speech, the thousand-yard-stare, and even the private idiolect that somehow allows NSA guys to make up their own vocabulary whenever addressing Congress (who don’t matter) and haranguing black-hat hacker security conventions (who obviously do).

Julian has turned out to be a Tim Leary at the NSA’s psychiatric convention. He’s a lasting embarrassment who also spiked their Kool-Aid. Crushing Julian, cutting his funding, that stuff didn’t help one bit. He’s still got a roof and a keyboard. That’s all he ever seems to need.

There’s nothing quite like a besieged embassy from which to mock the empty machinations of the vengeful yet hapless State Department. House arrest has also helped Julian with this obscure struggle he has, not to fling himself headlong onto Swedish feminists. The ruthless confinement has calmed him; it’s helped him to focus. He’s grown and matured through ardent political struggle.

Julian Assange is still a cranky extremist with a wacky digital ideology, but he doesn’t have to talk raw craziness any more, because the authorities are busy doing that for him. They can’t begin to discuss PRISM and XKeyScore without admitting that their alleged democratic process is a neon façade from LaLaLand. Instead, they’re forced to wander into a dizzying area of discourse where Julian staked out all the high points ten years ago.

More astonishing yet: this guy Assange, and his tiny corps of hacker myrmidons, actually managed to keep Edward Snowden out of US custody. Not only did Assange find an effective bolthole for himself, he also faked one up on the fly for this younger guy.

Assange liberated Snowden, who really is NSA, or rather a civilian outsourced contractor for the NSA, like there’s any practical difference.

It’s incredible to me that, among the eight zillion civil society groups on the planet that hate and fear spooks and police spies, not one of them could offer Snowden one shred of practical help, except for Wikileaks. This valiant service came from Julian Assange, a dude who can’t even pack his own suitcase without having a fit. ...

While Julian Assange, to do him credit, has the street smarts to behave as if he’s in a situation of feral realpolitik. Because he is. And how.

However, Assange now knows that. He’s a hardened veteran of it. And he’s gonna stay imperiled for the immediate future, because the upshot of this is pretty easy to see.

The inconvenient truth about the NSA is lying there on a table in the Ecuadorian Embassy, as stark as a poisoned crow. But it’ll join our planet’s many other inconvenient truths.

Snowden told the truth to the public — but then again, so did Solzhenitsyn, and even Al Gore lets on sometimes. The truth doesn’t do the trick for anybody, the truth is just a complicating factor. The present geopolitical situation is absolutely cluttered with amazing lies that didn’t work out for their owners.

The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction never existed. Climate change does exist, and could drown Wall Street any day now. The abject state of global finance is obvious, yet it makes no difference to the ongoing depredations. Drones are stark assassination machines, and they don’t stay classified. Anyone could go on.

And, yeah, by the way, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Google et al, they are all the blood brothers of Huawei in China — because they are intelligence assets posing as commercial operations. They are surveillance marketers. They give you free stuff in order to spy on you and pass that info along the value chain. Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock.

James Fallows at The Atlantic has a look back at the Iraq war - As We Near the 10th Anniversary of the Iraq War.

Here is something other than The Sequester to think about at the beginning of March:

This month marks ten years since the U.S. launched its invasion of Iraq. In my view this was the biggest strategic error by the United States since at least the end of World War II and perhaps over a much longer period. Vietnam was costlier and more damaging, but also more understandable. As many people have chronicled, the decision to fight in Vietnam was a years-long accretion of step-by-step choices, each of which could be rationalized at the time. Invading Iraq was an unforced, unnecessary decision to risk everything on a "war of choice" whose costs we are still paying.

My reasons for bringing this up:

1) Reckoning. Anyone now age 30 or above should probably reflect on what he or she got right and wrong ten years ago.

I feel I was right in arguing, six months before the war in "The Fifty-First State," that invading Iraq would bring on a slew of complications and ramifications that would take at least a decade to unwind.

I feel not "wrong" but regretful for having resigned myself even by that point to the certainty that war was coming. We know, now, that within a few days of the 9/11 attacks many members of the Bush Administration had resolved to "go to the source," in Iraq. Here at the magazine, it was because of our resigned certainty about the war that Cullen Murphy, then serving as editor, encouraged me in early 2002 to begin an examination of what invading and occupying Iraq would mean. The resulting article was in our November, 2002 issue; we put it on line in late August in hopes of influencing the debate.

My article didn't come out and say as bluntly as it could have: we are about to make a terrible mistake we will regret and should avoid. Instead I couched the argument as cautionary advice. We know this is coming, and when it does, the results are going to be costly, damaging, and self-defeating. So we should prepare and try to diminish the worst effects (for Iraq and for us). This form of argument reflected my conclusion that the wheels were turning and that there was no way to stop them. Analytically, that was correct: Tony Blair or Colin Powell might conceivably have slowed the momentum, if either of them had turned anti-war in time, but few other people could have. Still, I'd feel better now if I had pushed the argument even harder at the time.

Crikey reports that after 1000 days of harsh treatment, Bradley Manning has admitted to leaking vast swathes of data to Wikileaks - Bradley Manning, succumbing to human frailty, pleads guilty.

Bradley Manning has pleaded guilty to the illegal possession and communication of government documents, and he is facing a sentence of 20 years. New revelations paint a sadder picture.

Bradley Manning, the US soldier long supposed to be the source of Wikileaks “collateral murder’ video and massive document drops, has pleaded guilty in a military court to the illegal possession and communication of government documents — some of the lesser charges against him.

The charges were a series of “sample” charges relating to documents within each of the main WikiLeaks releases — the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, the Guantanamo prisoner files, the “collateral murder” video itself and other isolated documents. That added up to 10 counts, at two years per count, for a maximum sentence of 20 years. But that’s only on the charges Manning has pleaded guilty to.

There’s also a range of more serious charges of espionage and aiding the enemy, which potentially carry life in military prison without parole. Manning has pleaded not guilty to these, and the full court martial for that will begin in early June. Originally slated to run for several months, the trial could be somewhat shorter now that Manning has admitted handling the documents in question. Despite that, the government has lined up more than 140 potential witnesses for the prosecution.

Manning and his team have elected not to go with a military jury, presenting their case to a judge only and placing a great deal of emphasis on the draconian treatment that Manning has suffered during three years of incarceration, including four months of “suicide watch”, when he was stripped naked and subject to sleep deprivation.

Making a guilty plea gave Manning a chance to make an extended statement to the court, and it was this 35-page document that really set things on their ear. Acknowledging that he had leaked the documents — an admission of an open secret, since his confession of such to fellow hacker Adrian Lamo is what had got him arrested in the first place — Manning made a bold defense of his won autonomy, saying that he did not believe himself to be communicating with the enemy, simply presenting the American people with the things that were being done in their name.

He noted his horror at the obvious dehumanisation of the US soldiers responsible for the massacre of Iraqi civilians in the “collateral murder” video and of the various massacres featured in the Afghanistan documents. He said that he had leaked the documents of his own volition after logging onto the WikiLeaks chat site and communicating with someone who presented himself as “XO” — someone he assumed was Julian Assange (Assange has neither confirmed nor denied).

Manning says there was no enticement, coercion or gaming of him by “XO” — he uploaded the files of his own volition. Most spectacularly, he revealed that WikiLeaks had not been his first port of call — he had previously tried The New York Times, The Washington Post and the website Politico. Manning says he called the tips line at the NYT and got a recorded message. More indicatively, he spoke to a Washington Post junior reporter, who gave him the brush off (and lost a Pulitzer in the process). ...

Some have tried to turn this moment of personal crisis into a purely psychological explanation of his actions; others have tried to ignore it altogether. The truth, most likely, is that such personal crises will sometimes compel us to higher ethical action, and that what Manning did was, in the final analysis, an act of love: love of truth, love of the people he had been asked to defend through the transmission of lies, and an ultimate finding of self-respect in rising out of the ruins and the loss. His statement today confirms that he is, and was, lucid and purposeful.

He was the originator of a process whose ultimate result, I believe, was the decisive and final discrediting of the decade of war and projected imperial power that began in the wake of 9/11. He is that most overapplied of adjectives, heroic. We are in his debt, and we must hope that he lands as gently as possible on the hard earth in the days and years to come.

Guy Rundle at Crikey has an update on the Julian Assange saga, following Ecuador's decision to grant him asylum and his recent press conference - Rundle: Assange as Poppins meets HR Pufnstuff. It was interesting to see that Wikileaks' recent publishing of an email archive from Stratfor prompted a concerted denial of service attack on the site (along with a flurry of articles about a surveillance system called Trapwire) - which probably just gave the release more publicity.

Thus began the return of Julian Assange to public appearance, after a two-month enforced absence, hunkered down in the embassy — and by agreement with the Ecuadorians, refraining from overt political statements and appearances. It had been announced late last week, when it was suggested that Assange would appear “in front” of the embassy, a few hours after it had been announced that he had been granted diplomatic asylum. This led to renewed speculation as to his possible arrest, etc — the topic of feverish debate around town. Would he allow himself to be arrested, having made his point? Would a fast motorbike etc? Or, by contrast, would he address everyone by video link, having already escaped to Quito?

We waited to see, but first there were the warm-up acts — Assange’s international lawyer Baltasar Garzon, who spoke mostly in Spanish, venerable street-fighting man Tariq Ali, and then Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who gave a roaring denunciation of large sections of the UK diplomatic apparatus, while also pointing out that he had used the UK embassy to harbour Uzbek dissidents, so the UK’s huffing and puffing about “no diplomatic asylum” came and went a bit.

Then there was a bit of faffing around with a microphone on the small corner balcony, and through the crowd, distributing red, yellow and blue (colours of Ecuador) helium balloons, “to be released when Julian finishes speaking”. It’s stuff like this that makes you cringe a little in matters Assange, although it was quickly defeated by the balloons clumping together and people losing hold of them anyway. Then there was a highly engineered roar, and Assange appeared, in clipped white hair, blue shirt, a maroon tie and a sheaf of papers, all the world like he was about to process your home loan.

His speech was brief and circumspect — apparently there were still agreements with Ecuador that he wouldn’t call for the overthrow of all governments. He referred to the solidarity of South American nations, in resisting the UK government’s blundering threat of invading an embassy, expressed gratitude to his supporters, and most importantly called on President Obama to “end the witch-hunt against WikiLeaks” and persecution of all whistleblowers. He gave a shout-out to Pussy Riot, the recently convicted Russian punk band, defying those who thought that his alliance with the state-controlled Russia Today channel would preclude any sort of mention. There was no account of the Swedish accusations, his view of them or the rationale for taking asylum.

It was a dignified speech, and he avoided the inevitable Evita comparisons with the whole Italianate balcony thing, but it was a close run.

Assange’s getting of asylum has coincided with a further backlash against Assange — one curiously, which did not emerge when he spent two years fighting extradition through the courts. Centre-left figures have always lined themselves up against Assange and the WikiLeaks project, which they find to be a disruption to business as usual. ...

Assange’s genius, from WikiLeaks to here, has been to use small interruptions in power processes to create major conflicts, which expose power relations, and alter them. Given that he set all this out in a couple of short papers at the beginning of the WikiLeaks project — that by releasing secret information in large amounts, one causes states and suprastates to lose their advantage and unity as conspiracies — it is surprising that people are surprised at every new twist.

His response to the extradition request has seen the European Arrest Warrant — the linchpin of a post-democratic EU, more so than the euro — subject to its most fundamental challenge in the UK courts to date, the case itself has shattered the easy “cultural left” refusal to examine the politics of sex, and sexual coercion. Now, his asylum request has done the same thing. It was inevitable that the UK would make secret threats to a smaller, “Third World” nation, and that Ecuador, in the WikiLeaks spirit, would release the memo, thus exposing implicit power relations and assumptions.

Now, that process is in play. Ecuador has appealed to leftist South America — through the OAS, and the smaller UNASUR (a South American nations group, which thus excludes Canada and the US) — to condemn the UK’s implicitly colonialist mindset.

The OAS will be meeting on August 24, in DC of all places, to consider a motion to censure the UK’s blatant disregard of diplomatic principles, and UNASUR agreed one today, with the foreign ministers of the continent linking hands as the resolution was met with cheers. In a sense, Assange’s initiative and British blundering has put the facade of international political equality right up front.

Whether that helps Assange get out of 3 Hans Crescent, remains to be seen. We await the next move. To add to my previous suggestions, the balcony speech gave me another idea. Helicopters can fly to 152 metres (500 feet) in London, with a general authorisation. Diplomatic vehicles are exempt under the Vienna Convention, and nothing in it says they can’t fly. So — a helicopter, a winch, and then a flight outside the 12-mile coastal waters limit. By the time it had happened, Assange would be on a yacht in the Channel.

Crikey's Guy Rundle has a report on the Assange extradition case - Court upholds Assange
extradition.

WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange has lost his appeal against extradition to Sweden for further questioning on four allegations of sexual misconduct and third degree rape.

Sitting at the royal courts of justice the appeals court dismissed all four separate arguments made by Assange’s legal team, thus committing him to extradition to Sweden, should the Supreme Court refuse to review the appeal.

Assange’s team has fourteen days to request a review. Assange’s bail conditions requiring him to live at Ellingham hall, home of Captain Vaughn Smith, owner of the Front Line Club, has been continued.

Assange’s team argued that the law that triggered the extradition process was not issued by a competent authority in Sweden, that three of the four accusations were not crimes in the UK, hence not subject to double criminality, and that the fourth, third degree rape/indecent assault was not a ‘framework’ offence, that the law (ie a European arrest warrant) was being used as a fishing expedition without a crime, and that the issuing of the law was disproportionate when questioning could have occurred by phone or in the UK. ...

By the end of November, Assange will have spent a year either in remand or bailed to house curfew, with an electronic tag – the maximum amount of time he could have been jailed were he to be charged and convicted on the accusations made.

I wish Glenn Greenwald would read some old Billmon posts and learn the value of brevity - however, you work with what you can get, so here’s his latest missive on Wikileaks - Orwell, 9/11, Emmanuel Goldstein and WikiLeaks.

A strikingly good piece of investigative journalism from Associated Press finds that accusations about the damage done by WikiLeaks' latest release are -- yet again -- wildly overstated and without any factual basis. These most recent warnings have centered on WikiLeaks' exposure of diplomatic sources whom the released cables indicated should be "strictly protected." While unable to examine all of the names in the cables, AP focused on the ones "the State Department seemed to categorize as most risky." It found that many of them are "comfortable with their names in the open and no one fearing death."

In particular, many of these super-secret sources were "already dead, their names cited as sensitive in the context of long-resolved conflicts or situations" while "some have publicly written or testified at hearings about the supposedly confidential information they provided the U.S. government." Like the Pentagon before them, even the State Department -- which has "been scouring the documents since last year to find examples where sources are exposed and inform them that they may be 'outed'" -- is unable to provide any substantiation for its shrill, public denunciations of WikiLeaks and its "dire" warnings about the "grave danger" caused by publication of these cables:

The total damage appears limited and the State Department has steadfastly refused to describe any situation in which they've felt a source's life was in danger. They say a handful of people had to be relocated away from danger but won't provide any details on those few cases.

… The point here is that, yet again, the fear-mongering frenzy issued by the U.S. Government against one of its Enemies Du Jour was blindly ingested and then disseminated by the standard cadre of government-loyal "journalists" and the authority-revering pundits who listen to them. No matter how many times that happens, the lesson is never learned, because there is no desire to learn it.

For three reasons, AP's findings are anything but surprising. First, that the U.S. Government declares something Very Secret hardly means it is; this is a secrecy-obsessed government that reflexively declares even the most banal matters to be "sensitive" and off-limits to the public, as proven by the release of hundreds of thousands of "secret" documents that reveal nothing.

Second, there is an established history of extremely exaggerated government and media claims about the harm done by WikiLeaks releases; that's why, when examining the events last week that prompted the release of the unredacted cables, I wrote: "Serious caution is warranted in making claims about the damage caused by publication of these cables."

Third, and most important for present purposes, this is what the U.S. government and its media-servants do; it's their modus operandi. Whomever the government wants to demonize at any given moment is subjected to this same process. On a moment's notice, the full propaganda system is activated against the New Enemy, indiscriminate accusations are unleashed, personal foibles are exposed, collective hatred among all Decent People is mandated, and it then instantly becomes heretical to question the caricature of evil that has been manufactured.

That's how dictators and other assorted miscreants with whom the U.S. was tightly allied for years or even decades are overnight converted into The Root of All Evil, The Supreme Villain who Must be Vanquished (Saddam, Osama bin Laden, Gadaffi, Mubarak). Americans who were perfectly content to have their government in bed with these individuals suddenly stand up and demand, on cue, that no expense be spared to eradicate them. Often, the demonization campaign contains some truth -- the nation's long-time-friends-converted-overnight-into-Enemies really have committed atrocious acts or, as a new innovation of Nixonian tactics aimed at Daniel Ellsberg, even harbored some creepy porn (!) -- but the ritual of collective hatred renders any facts a mere accident. Once everyone's contempt is successfully directed toward the Chosen Enemy, it matters little what they actually did or did not do: such a profound menace are they to all that is Good that exaggerations or even lies about their bad acts are ennobled, in service of a Good Cause; conversely, to question the demonization or object to what is done to them is, by definition, to side with Evil.

Directing all this passionate hatred toward the state's identified Enemy and their Evil Acts has an added benefit: the resulting mass contempt, by design, distracts all attention away from of the evil committed by those stirring that passion. Thus do we all stomp our feet in righteous fury over the potential, speculative harm caused by WikiLeaks while steadfastly ignoring the actual, massive death and destruction on the part of our own leaders which WikiLeaks reveals (just as dramatic tales and anniversary rituals about bin Laden's act a full decade ago still cause us to overlook and acquiesce to the massive amount of violence, aggression and bloodshed our own leaders continue to bring to the world). Just yell Saddam's rape rooms or display the iconic photograph of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or claim that WikiLeaks has endangered hundreds of innocents and made "diplomacy" impossible or suddenly feign outrage over Mubarak's internal repression and everything -- the past, our own actions, facts -- all fade away in a cloud of righteous collective hatred, directed outward, away from ourselves and our government.

This is nothing more than a slightly less raucous rendition of Orwell's Emmanuel Goldstein/Two-Minute-Hate ritual. In Orwell's 1984, Goldstein is the shadowy, possibly-fictitious-but-possibly-real former Party official whose betrayals of the State, ongoing treason, and array of other incomprehensibly evil acts make him, in the lore of State propaganda, the Prime Villain, the Root of all Evil, whom Good Citizens blame for all societal evils and on whom they exclusively focus their rage. His image is regularly paraded before the citizenry during a Two Minute Hate Session, accompanied by an authoritative narration of his evil, and mass, inebriating rage results (see the video version here). The ultimate benefit of this ritual is it enables the citizenry to ignore their own plight and the violence and oppression of their own government (political parties use a similar process -- endless focus on marginal, hated figures in the other party -- to keep fear levels high and party loyalty strong). Thus can the debate over whether Julian Assange should be executed or merely imprisoned for life resume among all good people.

Speaking of Emmanuel Goldstein, he was the putative "author" of the Party manual published at length in 1984 that describes the Party's means of control and manipulation, entitled "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism." In the chapter entitled "War Is Peace," one finds what is easily the best essay for the 10-year-anniversary religious observance of 9/11 upon which we are about to embark:

In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. . . .

This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.

But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. . . .

To understand the nature of the present war -- for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war -- one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. . . . The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.

What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.

The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world. . . .

War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. . .

The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. . . .

In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

Crikey has some thoughts on Wikileaks’ latest dump of US diplomatic cables in this editorial - A wizard of Oz moment.

One of the regular criticisms of WikiLeaks when it and its media partners began releasing US diplomatic cables was of the "chilling effect" the release would have not merely on the willingness of people across the world to speak frankly with US diplomats, but on the very art of diplomacy itself. Foreign policy, we were told, is special, and different, and the practice of such a high art couldn't be done transparently. Stopping wars, brokering treaties and handling the fine nuances of interstate relations needs to be done behind closed doors.

What WikiLeaks has done, however, is reveal foreign policy as no different to any other kind of bureaucratic game playing, and driven by the same tawdry commercial imperatives that drive so much domestic policy.

It is clear, for example, that the prosecution of the interests of American pharmaceutical companies was a key priority for the State Department. One analyst, James Love, has found literally hundreds of cables devoted to the issue of ensuring exclusivity for US drug company products, even when US diplomats themselves acknowledged that lower prices for pharamceuticals were important for access to life-saving medicine in developing countries. The lives and health of citizens in developing countries was clearly a lower priority than the commercial interests of US companies.

It is clear, too, that the State Department aggressively pushed the interests of the GM crops industry, particularly in developing countries, where "biotechnology outreach programs" were established to influence decision-makers in favour of US companies such as Monsanto. And in developed countries, particularly in Europe, diplomats aggressively responded to any perceived threats to GM crop companies, calling for "retaliation" to ensure the Europeans understood there were "real costs" in refusing to do things the Monsanto way.

The WikiLeaks material also confirms what was already apparent from the conduct of the US in trying to negotiate international treaties relating to copyright: it aggressively pushes the interests of the US copyright industry in trying to convince other countries to impose draconian restrictions on any perceived threats to the movie and music industries. The cables, for example, reveal that litigation against Australian ISP iiNet by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft was actually the beginning of a concerted campaign by the American copyright industry's chief lobbying body, the MPAA (which wanted its involvement in the issue to be kept quiet). The campaign was to use a successful attack on iiNet to attack ISPs in a number of Commonwealth countries, with iiNet selected because the MPAA was intimidated by the size and legal resources of Telstra.

All three industries, it it known from other contexts, have strong links with the US government, with lobbyists and executives engaged in a revolving door between US government positions and industry positions.

WikiLeaks has in effect provided a Wizard of Oz moment, showing much diplomacy is anything but high-minded statecraft, ostensibly so delicate it can only be undertaken in private. Instead, it has demonstrated, in closely-written detail, the extent to which foreign policy is merely the grubbiest domestic policy given the gloss of international diplomacy.

Rixstep points to a Ron Paul speech on the subject matter of one of the cables - But why should we so fear the truth?. Not really news but interesting to see it confirmed again.

'How did the 20 year war get started?' asks the Texan. Turns out US gave Saddam the green light to invade Kuwait in 1990 - then turned on him when he did with a massive propaganda campaign. No longer hearsay or rumour: Ron Paul dug it up in a WikiLeaks Cablegate release. The US government lied to the citizenry.

Glenn Greenwald has a look at progress in the war in Libya - In a pure coincidence, Gaddafi impeded U.S. oil interests before the war.

When the war in Libya began, the U.S. government convinced a large number of war supporters that we were there to achieve the very limited goal of creating a no-fly zone in Benghazi to protect civilians from air attacks, while President Obama specifically vowed that "broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake." This no-fly zone was created in the first week, yet now, almost three months later, the war drags on without any end in sight, and NATO is no longer even hiding what has long been obvious: that its real goal is exactly the one Obama vowed would not be pursued -- regime change through the use of military force. We're in Libya to forcibly remove Gaddafi from power and replace him with a regime that we like better, i.e., one that is more accommodating to the interests of the West. That's not even a debatable proposition at this point.

What I suppose is debatable, in the most generous sense of that term, is our motive in doing this. Why -- at a time when American political leaders feel compelled to advocate politically radioactive budget cuts to reduce the deficit and when polls show Americans solidly and increasingly opposed to the war -- would the U.S. Government continue to spend huge sums of money to fight this war? Why is President Obama willing to endure self-evidently valid accusations -- even from his own Party -- that he's fighting an illegal war by brazenly flouting the requirements for Congressional approval? Why would Defense Secretary Gates risk fissures by so angrily and publicly chiding NATO allies for failing to build more Freedom Bombs to devote to the war? And why would we, to use the President's phrase, "stand idly by" while numerous other regimes -- including our close allies in Bahrain and Yemen and the one in Syria -- engage in attacks on their own people at least as heinous as those threatened by Gaddafi, yet be so devoted to targeting the Libyan leader?

Whatever the answers to those mysteries, no responsible or Serious person, by definition, would suggest that any of this -- from today's Washington Post -- has anything to do with it:

The relationship between Gaddafi and the U.S. oil industry as a whole was odd. In 2004, President George W. Bush unexpectedly lifted economic sanctions on Libya in return for its renunciation of nuclear weapons and terrorism. There was a burst of optimism among American oil executives eager to return to the Libyan oil fields they had been forced to abandon two decades earlier. . . .

Yet even before armed conflict drove the U.S. companies out of Libya this year, their relations with Gaddafi had soured. The Libyan leader demanded tough contract terms. He sought big bonus payments up front. Moreover, upset that he was not getting more U.S. government respect and recognition for his earlier concessions, he pressured the oil companies to influence U.S. policies. . . .

When Gaddafi made his deal with Bush in 2004, he had hoped that returning foreign oil companies would help boost Libya’s output . . . The U.S. government also encouraged American oil companies to go back to Libya. . . .

The companies needed little encouragement. Libya has some of the biggest and most proven oil reserves -- 43.6 billion barrels -- outside Saudi Arabia, and some of the best drilling prospects. . . . Throughout this time, oil prices kept rising, whetting the appetite for greater supplies of Libya's unusually "sweet" and "light," or high-quality, crude oil.

By the time Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited in 2008, U.S. joint ventures accounted for 510,000 of Libya's 1.7 million barrels a day of production, a State Department cable said. . . .

But all was not well. By November 2007, a State Department cable noted "growing evidence of Libyan resource nationalism." It noted that in his 2006 speech marking the founding of his regime, Gaddafi said: "Oil companies are controlled by foreigners who have made millions from them. Now, Libyans must take their place to profit from this money." His son made similar remarks in 2007.

Oil companies had been forced to give their local subsidiaries Libyan names, the cable said. . . .

The entire article is worth reading, as it details how Gaddafi has progressively impeded the interests of U.S. and Western oil companies by demanding a greater share of profits and other concessions, to the point where some of those corporations were deciding that it may no longer be profitable or worthwhile to drill for oil there. But now, in a pure coincidence, there is hope on the horizon for these Western oil companies, thanks to the war profoundly humanitarian action being waged by the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner and his nation's closest Western allies ...

I have two points to make about all this:

(1) The reason -- the only reason -- we know about any of this is because WikiLeaks (and, allegedly, Bradley Manning) disclosed to the world the diplomatic cables which detail these conflicts. Virtually the entirety of the Post article -- like most significant revelations over the last 12 months, especially in the Middle East and North Africa -- are based exclusively on WikiLeaks disclosures. That's why we know about Gaddafi's increasingly strident demands for the "Libyanization" of his country's resource exploitation. That's how we know about most of the things we've learned about the world's most powerful political and corporate factions over the last 12 months. Is there anything easier to understand than why U.S. Government officials are so eager to punish WikiLeaks and deter future transparency projects of this sort?

(2) Is there anyone -- anywhere -- who actually believes that these aren't the driving considerations in why we're waging this war in Libya? After almost three months of fighting and bombing -- when we're so far from the original justifications and commitments that they're barely a distant memory -- is there anyone who still believes that humanitarian concerns are what brought us and other Western powers to the war in Libya? Is there anything more obvious -- as the world's oil supplies rapidly diminish -- than the fact that our prime objective is to remove Gaddafi and install a regime that is a far more reliable servant to Western oil interests, and that protecting civilians was the justifying pretext for this war, not the purpose? If (as is quite possible) the new regime turns out to be as oppressive as Gaddafi but far more subservient to Western corporations (like, say, our good Saudi friends), does anyone think we're going to care in the slightest or (at most) do anything other than pay occasional lip service to protesting it? Does anyone think we're going to care about The Libyan People if they're being oppressed or brutalized by a reliably pro-Western successor to Gaddafi?

In 2006, George Bush instructed us that there was a "responsible" and an "irresponsible" way for citizens to debate the Iraq War: the "responsible" way was to suggest that there may be better tactics for waging the war more effectively, while the "irresponsible" way was to outrageously insinuate that perhaps oil or Israel or deceit played a role in the invasion. ...

It's certainly possible to contend reasonably that (as was true for Iraq) removing a heinous dictator and other humanitarian outcomes will be the incidental by-product of our war in Libya even if not its purpose (although, as was also true in Iraq, one would need to see the regime that replaces Gaddafi to know if that's true). And it's fine -- or at least candid -- to argue, as Ann Coulter often does, that "of course we should go to war for oil. . . .We need oil. That's a good reason to go to war." But to believe that humanitarianism (protection of Libya civilians) was why we went to war in Libya requires a blindness so willful and complete that it's genuinely difficult to describe.

Osama Bin Laden's recent reported demise had one definite downside - my TV screen was infested with the ghosts of the evil undead from the past decade (John Howard and Tony Blair prominent among them) for several days, though an exorcism seems to have been successfully performed now as they have once again faded from view.

The NY Daily News notes that May 1 seems to be a popular date for big events - obscuring the traditional May Day celebrations by the left - Osama Bin Laden, Adolf Hitler both declared dead on May 1.

Osama Bin Laden and Adolf Hitler share a towering reputation for evil - and also an anniversary. Both were declared dead on May 1. ...

In some cultures May 1 is the official beginning of summer. In many places, May Day is also Labor Day, a celebration of the working man.

May 1 is also the anniversary of President Bush's ill-conceived 2003 Mission Accomplished speech, prematurely announcing an end to combat in Iraq.

While Bin Laden's reported demise makes it unlikely he'll be resurrected again for his traditional pre-US presidential election media announcement supporting the Democrats, apparently he still has one last video recording "working its way through Al Qaeda's media pipleine" (!) - One Last Osama Bin Laden Video Is Going To Come Out.

Bin Laden is dead, but we haven't heard the last from him. According to the AP, one last Bin Laden video was recorded right before he died.

The government expects it to come out shortly. It's said to be already working its way through the Al-Qaeda media pipeline.

The story of Osama's last minutes has been getting murkier as the week has worn on, with the official story changing shape a number of times now.

News Corp has a good example of some of the more tedious propaganda that has been floated during the week (Terrorist's last moments: Osama bin Laden used wife as human shield) which has been softened as time passed to "The Young Wife Who Defended Osama Bin Laden". The aforesaid wife was originally supposed to have perished during Bin Laden's killing but apparently she's now alive again.

Moon Of Alabama has some comments about the evolving media story- Open Questions On The Alleged Bin Laden Kill.

There are a lot of open questions about the recent U.S. operation in Pakistan.

Politico notes that the administration is already changing significant parts on the story for example about the involvement of women as "human shields" (a phrase which is usually a hint to propaganda nonsense): White House modifies Osama bin Laden account.

At least four involved helicopters starting in the official account from Jalalabad in Afghanistan to fly to Abbottabad in Pakistan with at least the two backups hovering for 40 minutes and then to fly back does not fit the fuel capacity of any known helicopters. It is more likely, as The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder claims, that those helos started the operation from Pakistani ground.

The extraordinary electricity outage in Abbottabad just during the operation also points to significant Pakistani involvement. The Pakistani government would of course like to keep any involvement secret as cooperation with the U.S. in such an operation would diminish its domestic standing.

Those pictured parts of a downed helicopter do not fit any known helicopter type. What is it? How was it downed? Some reports said "mechanical failure", others claimed "shot down".

The administration's counterterrorism adviser John Brennan claimed that they would have captured Bin Laden alive it that would have been possible. That does not fit to what Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress just six weeks ago:

"Let's deal with reality," Holder said. Bin Laden "will never appear in an American courtroom."

Pressed further on that point, Holder said: "The possibility of catching him alive is infinitesimal. He will be killed by us or he will be killed by his own people so he can't be captured by us."

It also doesn't fit to what an anonymous U.S. national security official told Reuters:

"This was a kill operation," the official said, making clear there was no desire to try to capture bin Laden alive in Pakistan.

If this operation killed Osama Bin Laden it was an extrajudicial killing in breach of public international law.

There is also a lot of administration fed right wing chatter on how some Guantanamo torture confessions led to the necessary hints to find Bin Laden. That is likely just an attempt to justify such torture. The capture of the alleged Bali bomber Umar Patek in the same city, Abbottabad, in early April is much more likely to have given a lead to some hideout.

Then of course there is not even the slightest tiny bit of proof, not even an attempt to produce pictures, that Bin Laden was actually captured or killed in this operation, or was converted to crab food. Looking at the distances and the time needed to verify that the alleged dead person has been Bin Laden, how did the alleged burying at sea happen so fast?

This whole operation seems to be more designed to create conspiracy theories than to reveal what really happened.

While I do not agree with Malooga's comment here, I concur that this was likely an operation to retire the "Bin Laden" marketing campaign which has helped to promote divisive U.S. war of terror policies over the last decade.

That does not mean that the "product" that encompasses those policies is now finished. Why should it be when it is still very profitable? A new theme will be found for a new campaign to promote exactly the same product and policy program.

Conspiracy theorists are also bandying about a recent Wikileaks release about what would happen if Bin Laden was come to grief - WikiLeaks docs: Nuclear reprisals if bin Laden killed.

Recently-released WikiLeaks documents show that detained al Qaeda members have predicted nuclear reprisals if Osama bin Laden were captured or killed.

The classified Defense Department files, obtained from detainee interviews at the Guantanamo Bay prison, were released by the document-sharing Web site a week before the raid in Pakistan that resulted in bin Laden's demise. (See list of related CNET stories.)

Abu al-Libi, al Qaeda's third in command and "operational chief" before he was captured in 2005, reportedly said the nuclear device was "located in Europe" and would be used in retaliation over bin Laden's death, according to the leaked files. The phrase "nuclear hellstorm" appears in the Defense Department's dossier on Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, who allegedly confessed to masterminding the September 11 attacks and will be tried by a military tribunal.

Another detainee, Sharif al-Masri, reportedly said that if al Qaeda was able to move the bomb to the United States, they would be able to find operatives of Europeans of Arab or Asian descent to use it. He said, the records show, if bin Laden "were to be captured or killed, the bomb would be detonated in the US" and that al-Libi "would be one of those able to give the order."

The claims--which could, of course, be false--add more detail to suspicions in Washington about possible reprisals following Sunday's special forces raid in Pakistan. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Homeland Security committee, told Fox Business yesterday that "we have to assume that al Qaeda is going to try to retaliate as quickly, as lethally as possible."

CounterPunch has a different Wikileaks angle to the story - US Knew Where Osama Was Since 2005.

The unredacted Guantanamo files show clearly that the trail to Abbottabad was known to the US intelligence services at least since 2005, when al-Libi, another Abbottabad dweller, was captured.

Timing is everything. The US President announced killing of Osama bin Laden just as Wikileaks completed its publication of Guantanamo files. Was it coincidence? If not, what was the connection?

An answer to this question is directly connected with the cross and double cross accusations exchanged in the murky world where the intelligence services meet mainstream media. ...

However the most important redactions by Leigh and Keller were directly dictated by the US intelligence services. The name of Nashwan Abd Al Razzaq Abd Al Baqi, or by another name, Abd al Hadi al Iraqi or by his number IZ-10026 was edited away from the file of Abu al-Libi (US9LY-010017DP) and elsewhere. This file is available in a redacted version of the Guardian and in the uncut version of Wikileaks. Comparison shows to what extent all the traces of al Iraqi were removed. It was not connected to “caring about informers”, for al Libi was dead, having allegedly committed suicide in a Libyan jail just before the arrival of the US Ambassador in Tripoli. The file of al Iraqi is missing in all databases; he was captured in 2005 and kept in various secret prisons, until transferred to Guantanamo where he is detained now.

Careful reading of the file shows that al-Libi was connected with al Iraqi since October 2002. In 2003, OBL stated al Libi would be the official messenger between OBL and others in Pakistan. In mid-2003, al Libi moved his family to Abbottabad, Pakistan and worked between Abbottabad and Peshawar. He maintained contact with al Iraqi.

And we know that OBL was found and killed in Abbottabad – just as this publication hit the pages of the newspapers. So the trail to Abbottabad was known to the American services at least since 2005, when al-Libi, another Abbottabad dweller, was captured.

What we do not know is the nature of the contacts between the US authorities and OBL. What we do know is that David Leigh and Bill Keller tried to hid it from their readers. Their redacting of the Guantanamo files, like their redacting of the Cablegate, had nothing to do with “saving informers”.

David Leigh claimed that Assange "double-crossed" the paper by distributing the Gitmo files to various "right-wing" news organisations, meaning the conservative Daily Telegraph. This is rich. “Left” and “right” has very little meaning nowadays, after Blair and Clinton. What is important is the position on wars and overseas interventions, susceptibility to Secret Service meddling, subservience to the priorities of the state.

In France, right-wing Marine Le Pen stands against foreign interventions in Libya and Côte d'Ivoire , against payments to bankers, against the president, while left-wing Bernard Henri Levy supports wars and interventions, loves bankers, is a friend of the right-wing president Sarkozy.

In England, the Guardian is the leading newspaper for calls to war. Libya, Syria – the Guardian wants them bombed. Afghanistan, Serbia, Iraq, - the Guardian wanted them to be invaded. It is just the package is different: instead of right-wing jingoism, the Guardian served the neo-colonialist adventurism under delicate sauce of humanitarian intervention. The Guardian leads on hypocrisy. The Guardian is not the newspaper of the left; it is the problem of the left. The case of Guantanamo files proves that the Guardian redacted the most vital information as told by the CIA.

And Osama? What about Osama bin Laden? Now we know that the US knew of his whereabouts; they knew of the trail, they asked Leigh and Keller to remove relevant references. Why didn’t they capture him or kill him earlier?

The Wikileaks Twitter feed notes that their latest set of cables is being interpreted rather differently by CNN than it is by other, more impartial, media outlets. The CNN spin - WikiLeaks reveals details about Guantanamo detainees.

The documents shed light on the way detainees behaved while at Guantanamo, and on how they were assessed in terms of their danger to the United States. They are intelligence assessments of nearly every one of the 779 individuals who have been held at Guantanamo since 2002, according to the Post.

The classified files described some of the detainees as being compliant while others threatened violence against guards. One stated he would fly planes into houses. They also paint in great detail a portrait of al Qaeda as it grew stronger in Afghanistan in the 1990s, prepared for the 9/11 attacks and scattered in their aftermath.

Versus the BBC's - Wikileaks: Many at Guantanamo 'not dangerous'.

Files obtained by the website Wikileaks have revealed that the US believed many of those held at Guantanamo Bay were innocent or only low-level operatives.

The files, published in US and European newspapers, are assessments of all 780 people ever held at the facility. They show that about 220 were classed as dangerous terrorists, but 150 were innocent Afghans and Pakistanis.

Glenn Greenwald has a post noting Obama has already decided the supposed source of the Wikileaks cables is guilty, before he even goes in front of a military court - What Obama's Reckless Treatment of Bradley Manning Reveals About Our "Nation of Laws".

Protesters Thursday interrupted President's Obama speech at a $5,000/ticket San Francisco fundraiser to demand improved treatment for Bradley Manning. After the speech, one of the protesters, Logan Price, approached Obama and questioned him. Obama's responses are revealing on multiple levels. First, Obama said this when justifying Manning's treatment (video and transcript are here):

We're a nation of laws. We don't let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law.

The impropriety of Obama's public pre-trial declaration of Manning's guilt ("He broke the law") is both gross and manifest. How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt? Numerous commentators have noted how egregiously wrong was Obama's condemnation. Michael Whitney wrote: "the President of the United States of America and a self-described Constitutional scholar does not care that Manning has yet to be tried or convicted for any crime." BoingBoing's Rob Beschizza interpreted Obama's declaration of guilt this way: "Just so you know, subordinate judging officers!" And Politico quoted legal experts explaining why Obama's remarks are so obviously inappropriate. ....

But even more fascinating is Obama's invocation of America's status as a "nation of laws" to justify why Manning must be punished. That would be a very moving homage to the sanctity of the rule of law -- if not for the fact that the person invoking it is the same one who has repeatedly engaged in the most extraordinary efforts to shield Bush officials from judicial scrutiny, investigation, and prosecution of every kind for their war crimes and surveillance felonies. Indeed, the Orwellian platitude used by Obama to justify that immunity -- Look Forward, Not Backward -- is one of the greatest expressions of presidential lawlessness since Richard Nixon told David Frost that "it's not illegal if the President does it."

But it's long been clear that this is Obama's understanding of "a nation of laws": the most powerful political and financial elites who commit the most egregious crimes are to be shielded from the consequences of their lawbreaking -- see his vote in favor of retroactive telecom immunity, his protection of Bush war criminals, and the way in which Wall Street executives were permitted to plunder with impunity -- while the most powerless figures (such as a 23-year-old Army Private and a slew of other low-level whistleblowers) who expose the corruption and criminality of those elites are to be mercilessly punished. And, of course, our nation's lowest persona non grata group -- accused Muslim Terrorists -- are simply to be encaged for life without any charges. Merciless, due-process-free punishment is for the powerless; full-scale immunity is for the powerful. "Nation of laws" indeed.

The latest Wikileaks energy related revelation (US embassy cables: Saudi oil company oversold ability to increase production, embassy told) has prompted some slightly exaggerated reports about the views of ex-Aramco exploration head Sadad al-Husseini, most of which should have been familiar to peak oil observers for some time - Saudi oil reserves may be overstated by up to 40%, US cables reveal.

The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.

The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300 billion barrels - nearly 40 per cent.

The price of oil has soared in recent weeks to more than $US100 a barrel due to global demand and tensions in the Middle East. Many analysts expect the Saudis and others in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries would pump more oil if rising prices threatened to choke off demand.

However, Sadad al-Husseini, a geologist and former head of exploration at the Saudi oil monopoly Aramco, told the US consul-general in Riyadh in November 2007 that Aramco's 12.5 million barrel-a-day capacity, needed to keep a lid on prices, could not be reached.

According to the cables, which date between 2007 and 2009, Mr Husseini said Saudi Arabia might reach an output of 12 million barrels a day in 10 years but before then, possibly as early as 2012, global oil production would have hit its highest point. This crunch point is known as ''peak oil''.

Mr Husseini said at that point Aramco would not be able to stop the rise of global oil prices because the Saudi energy industry had overstated its recoverable reserves to spur foreign investment. He argued that Aramco had badly underestimated the time needed to bring new oil on tap.

One cable said: ''According to al-Husseini, the crux of the issue is twofold. First, it is possible that Saudi reserves are not as bountiful as sometimes described, and the timeline for their production not as unrestrained as Aramco and energy optimists would like to portray.'' It went on: ''Abdallah al-Saif, current Aramco senior vice-president for exploration, reported that Aramco has 716 billion barrels of total reserves, of which 51 per cent are recoverable, and that in 20 years Aramco will have 900 billion barrels.

''Al-Husseini disagrees with this analysis, believing Aramco's reserves are overstated by as much as 300 billion barrels. In his view once 50 per cent of original proven reserves has been reached … a steady output in decline will ensue and no amount of effort will be able to stop it. He believes that what will result is a plateau in total output that will last approximately 15 years followed by decreasing output.''

Joules Burns at Satellite O'er The Desert thinks the fuss is largely unfounded - Much Ado About Wikileaks.

It seems some Saudi diplomatic missives have turned up in the trove of documents that is Wikileaks, and there are claims that Sadad al-Husseini, a former Vice President of Saudi Aramco, was heard dissing the prospects of his former employer. But if you actually read the relevant wikileak, it becomes clear that the Guardian journalist misinterpreted the wikileaked cable -- which perhaps misquoted Al-Husseini. ...

It's clear to me that he is just disputing the notion that Saudi has 700+ billion barrels of "reserves" claimed by the other SA talking head:

Abdallah al-Saif, current Aramco Senior Vice President for Exploration and Production, reported that Aramco has 716 billion barrels (bbls) of total reserves, of which 51 percent are recoverable.

The only thing of real interest here is that Al-Husseini distanced himself from "peak oil" while seeming to agree with it. But is was only a matter of time before someone would ask al-Husseini to confirm his views on this, and he indeed claims that he was misinterpreted. ...

There is still much to be skeptical about with regards to the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia, and I am one of many who have questioned the claims of Saudi Aramco in light of their actions. For example, they always magically seem to "discover" as much oil as they produce each year such that their reserves never decrease. However, there is no bombshell in this particular wikileak in terms of how much oil they have left.

Crikey has an update on the Wikileaks saga - WikiLeaks, hackers and conspiracy
theories.

On Sunday in the United States, David House, who has been a regular visitor of Bradley Manning, the US Army PFC accused of providing material to WikiLeaks, was prevented from seeing Manning and placed under temporary arrest, along with Jane Hamsher, at Quantico Marine Corps Base, then barred from seeing Manning.

Manning, who is yet to be tried, is being held at the base under almost ludicrously oppressive conditions that have drawn widespread criticism, including from a former commander of the facility.

At the time, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, a staunch supporter of WikiLeaks, tweeted “the point of the Quantico episode was to deny Manning his only real visitor: more likely solitary will crack him & induce anti-WL testimony.”

Greenwald’s claim — for which of course there’s no evidence, only the logic that that’s exactly how law enforcement frequently operates — echoes Julian Assange’s comments about Manning. He recently told John Pilger “cracking Bradley Manning is the first step. The aim clearly is to break him and force a confession that he somehow conspired with me to harm the national security of the United States.”

But while there’s more than a touch of the conspiracy theorist about these claims, it’s hard to avoid seeing a pattern in a number of recent events around WikiLeaks and its supporters.

First there was the claim, advanced with virtually no evidence, that WikiLeaks might have obtained information by hacking, rather than receiving material from whistleblowers. Last week, Bloomberg ran a piece on claims made by the Pennsylvania company Tiversa that “it discovered that computers in Sweden were trolling through hard drives accessed from popular peer-to-peer networks such as LimeWire and Kazaa. The same information obtained in those searches later appeared on WikiLeaks.”

One assumes Bloomberg meant “trawling”, but anyway. “Trolling” sounds worse.

Within hours the claims — such as they were — were undermined. A blogger for business publication Forbes.com, Andy Greenberg, investigated the claims and the company behind them. In an interview with Greenberg, a Tiversa executive backpedalled from the claims in the Bloomberg piece and admitted there was no evidence relating to WikiLeaks.

Tiversa has extensive links to the US government and has undertaken spying and surveillance work for the US Government agencies. Indeed, the Bloomberg article unwittingly raised the question of exactly what Tiversa was doing, and who it was doing it for, when it undertook the surveillance of Swedish servers it says served up evidence of “trolling.”

Needless to say, the Bloomberg article got an extensive mainstream media run despite the problems identified by Greenberg and Tiversa’s close relationship with the US Government. Two days after the original publication, Fairfax inexplicably ran the original Bloomberg copy here without any reference to material that had emerged afterward — although Fairfax lately has had a habit of running wire copy without checking online to see whether it has been discredited by bloggers.

Then came claims from a conservative Iceland newspaper that WikiLeaks might have installed a PC in the Icelandic Parliament near the office of prominent WikiLeaks supporter Birgitta Jonsdottir — despite there being no evidence Wikileaks had anything to do with it. Icelandic WikiLeaks supporters immediately noted the link with US efforts to link WikiLeaks to hacking emerging in the media.

You can see why linking WikiLeaks to hacking (although, as Greenberg noted, who “hacks” with a PC, rather than installing software?) would be a boon for the US Government in its attempt to prosecute WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. Media outlets don’t hack parliamentary networks or “troll” servers for information — most likely because hacking voicemail is as complicated as they can manage.

The claims follow a strange anti-WikiLeaks campaign by Wired.com, which has links to Adrian Lamo, the hacker who turned Manning in, via senior editor and former hacker Kevin Poulsen. In a huge online spat between Christmas and New Year, Wired and Poulsen was accused by Greenwald of selectively leaking parts of the Lamo-Manning chatlogs and not being fully transparent. The chatlogs may — or given Poulsen’s later statements on Twitter, may not — serve the case that Julian Assange somehow facilitated Manning’s leaking of documents, rather than merely received them, which would bolster efforts to prosecute Assange without egregiously offending the mainstream media in the US.

At the same time, the US Government has continued to serially harass WikiLeaks associate and computer security researcher Jacob Applebaum, stopping him whenever he enters the US to confiscate and search — or try to search — his electronic equipment. Each encounter is now tweeted in detail by Applebaum, as officials get upset he has no equipment with him, or try to fruitlessly de-crypt the copy of the Bill of Rights he has put on a USB stick.

There may be no conspiracy at work, but all these events leave a strong impression of a persistent effort to portray WikiLeaks not as a media organization revealing material released to it by a disaffected government employee, but as a shady organization engaged in unethical or illegal activities to obtain information.

If successful, it will be a key step not merely in damaging WikiLeaks’ credibility, but in bulking up the currently tissue-thin case for prosecution of Julian Assange in the United States.

Problem is, as Al Jazeera has just demonstrated, destroying WikiLeaks won’t solve anything or prevent governments from being further embarrassed by high-volume leaks. Just ask Condoleezza “send the Palestinians to South America” Rice.

Update: In a major development this morning Australian time, US military sources have admitted to NBC that they were unable to establish any connection between Bradley Manning - the alleged source of much of the Wikileaks material released in 2010 - and Julian Assange. This has major implications for the US Government’s attempts to conjure any sort of case against Assange, which a secretly impaneled grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia is said to be considering. Military sources also confirmed that the officer in charge of the facility where Manning is being detained, Brig Commander James Averhart, had exceeded his authority in determining some of the conditions under which Manning is being held.

The SMh reports the media has finally woken up and realised Wikileaks is just a media outlet, and that they need to protect it to protect themselves - Media says government's reaction to WikiLeaks 'troubling' .

Australia's main media players say the federal government's reaction to the release of diplomatic correspondence by the WikiLeaks website is "deeply troubling".

The country's newspaper editors, along with television and radio directors, have written an open letter to Prime Minister Julia Gillard in support of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. The letter is supported by the editor-in-chief of The Sydney Morning Herald and Sun Herald, Peter Fray, whose newspapers have reported on the secret US embassy cables provided exclusively to Fairfax newspapers.

"The volume of the leaks is unprecedented, yet the leaking and publication of diplomatic correspondence is not new," the letter, initiated by the Walkley Foundation, states. "We ... believe the reaction of the US and Australian governments to date has been deeply troubling. We will strongly resist any attempts to make the publication of these or similar documents illegal."

The editors and directors say any attempt to shut down WikiLeaks, prosecute those who publish official leaks, or pressure companies to cease working with the whistle-blower website "is a serious threat to democracy which relies on a free and fearless press".

Ms Gillard has declared the actions of WikiLeaks and Mr Assange "illegal".

Attorney-General Robert McClelland has said the initial leaking of classified documents and their subsequent distribution by WikiLeaks are likely to be illegal.

But the media's open letter notes that so far the government "has been able to point to no Australian law that has been breached".

The editors and directors state that WikiLeaks is simply doing what the media has always done - expose official secrets that governments would prefer to keep in the dark. "WikiLeaks, just four years old, is part of the media and deserves our support."

Almost 600,000 people have signed a separate online petition in support of WikiLeaks ahead of a second appearance in court in London by Mr Assange.

The petition on campaigning website Avaaz calls on the US and other nations to "stop the crackdown on WikiLeaks and its partners immediately" and to respect "the laws of freedom of expression and freedom of the press".

Crikey's Guy Rundle has another meandering, but interesting, update on the Julian Assange case - Assange’s defence team losing the PR war by winning it. If you read between the lines this is the left wing intellectual version of right wing NWO conspiracy theory (and much easier to make sense of as a result - are beureacratic superstates with no democratic oversight a good idea ?).

With the appeal hearing against the bailing of WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange scheduled for 11.30 tomorrow morning, his ever-expanding legal team are no doubt hard at it, trying to anticipate what the Swedes will come up with. Not much, appears the likely answer. The Swedish Prosecutor’s Office has declined the opportunity to present evidence supporting the case in court twice now, leaving the Crown Prosecution Service hung out to dry.

They are not required to produce any evidence in an extradition hearing, but as Assange’s lawyer Geoffrey Robertson pointed out, the question of bail depends in part on the seriousness of the evidence against you. If there is no case you may be far less likely to abscond.

The appeal case will turn on questions of law of course — in effect it will be a taster of what this extradition will become, less a trial of Assange than of the European Arrest warrant, and the weird mix of bureaucratic-Hegelian logic driving the European Union project, in which every innovation is judged not on its merits, but on whether it furthers the cause of a united post-democratic Europe.

The Swedes are either convinced Assange will abscond, or vindictive, depending on whom you believe, but it’s fair to say their relentlessness surprised everyone on this score — including the CPS, who sources close to Assange’s legal team say advised the Swedish prosecutors not to appeal.

There are some very strange things going on here. In the case yesterday, the prosecutor apologised for the Swedish prosecutor’s failure to make a response to certain written defence arguments, saying that the person handling them “doesn’t have very good English.” Really? In Sweden in 2010? Where English has been a compulsory school subject since the late 1950s? Half the subjects in a law course are taught in English. It’s odd and very unconvincing — a small detail that suggest a larger pattern.

So Assange’s team are winning the war for public sentiment, with a great degree of incredulity across the world as to what he’s been charged with, and a greater willingness to call the thing an outright stitch-up, designed to secure him for American extradition.

But that victory may well set them up for a later loss, if the Swedish prosecutors do eventually produce some evidence, for the actual official public campaign coming from the Assange camp is non-existent, and in the vacuum where it should be, a huge amount of counter-productive misinformation is breeding. For a cause that can command a great number of dedicated followers and supporters, the team has shown no interest in the sort of thing any such campaign would usually do — have a supporter website, pump out briefing documents and explainers, get their line straight, and get the line out to their high-profile supporters.

This particularly turns on the difficult question of how you talk about these domestic criminal charges as possibly forming part of a stitch-up — either as a honeytrap, with a little vinegar in the mix (a very unlikely scenario), or a series of events being used opportunistically. Had Assange been charged with financial fraud, everyone would be happily dissecting the evidence left right and centre. Now that he’s charged with r-pe, a portcullis falls in the gap, and there is a sudden great reluctance to discuss the strength of the case.

To some degree that comes from the good intention of not drawing in questions of character or behaviour. But some appear to have taken that further and suggested that any notion of examining the evidence, the handling of such and the overall process of the prosecution is out of bounds, which is ridiculous. Assange has been through months of accusation, suspicion and finally remand, far from a process without life cost. If there are serious holes in the process and evidence they deserve to be examined.

I don’t propose to go over the arguments again in detail; they’re elsewhere. The brief version is that potential evidence has unquestionably been tampered with, that there is evidence that undermines the motive of making the complaint, that the most serious charge of r-pe — the only one likely to warrant extradition of itself — has swapped from one complainant to the other, that this occurred after the Stockholm prosecutor declined to prosecute the initial charge as r-pe, that the complainant initially presented as the lead one is now alleging only one charge of a sexual assault (s-x while sleeping) that may well not attract a custodial sentence, and that a “pro-complainant” version of events that nevertheless contradicts the new array of charges was removed from a feminist collective blog run by one of the complainants around the time the charges shifted. Oh yes, nothing to see here.

The key outrage here is process and evidence, not some off-the-cuff assessment of what happened. It’s inevitable that there would be a lot of that stuff around the fringes. What’s troubling is that Assange’s defenders are repeating the same shopworn stories about the case, and getting it wrong. Thus Michael Moore, appearing on Newsnight last night, said that “the charge was only that some condom had broken or something”; various grandees giving vox-pops at Tuesday’s hearing asserted that what he was charged with “wasn’t even a crime”; Naomi Wolf wrote a satirical article asking Interpol to arrest every narcissistic jerk she’d been on a date with.

None of these interventions seemed to credit that there was no mention of withdrawn or cancelled consent, no broken condom and that one of the charges was one of rape with physical force. The problem is not that a charge of that nature is absent; it is that its process has been shoddy and contradictory, and it has the strong suggestion of being retroactively engineered from various parts, holus-bolus. Should that prove not to be the case, and the Swedish prosecutors have other evidence, the shoddiness and possible political complicity would stand, but there may well be some nasty evidence coming out of the woodshed, and those prejudging the prosecution case as being total stitch up will be left looking silly indeed.

Two weeks ago I noted that this case was proving to be the crucial point for the final dissolution and recomposition of second-wave feminism. So it has proved. People have judged Assange’s life and works so significant, so powerful that they have thrown over the usual niceties to simply denounce the trial as hysteria if not honeytrap. That this has been women as well as men — Pilger and Naomi Klein, Human Rights Watch and Women Against R-pe – shows that, for all its crudity, this is not a restaging of old ideas of nothing other than jealous females. Klein and others are talking about the way in which the social process has been plugged into the domestic state, which has then been plugged into the (inter)national security and military apparatus. Thus the EAW and the US-UK extradition fast-track combine to create the extension of rendition across the spectrum, from bag-over-the-head abduction to the intersection of domestic criminal charges, with far greater movements.

Significant in that respect are the cables revealed in recent WikiLeaks releases as coming out of Stockholm, and talking of the desire to continue informal arrangements of information sharing between SAPO (the Swedish domestic secret service) and US agencies, lest the actual scrutiny of a working parliament make further progress difficult.

In particular, the cable cites the huge social protest over the recent “surveillance” law, an unnecessary wiretapping act that generated a vast protest movement — and helped kick off the Swedish pirate party, the libertarian group that would eventually offer to host WikiLeaks in Sweden. There is a persistent rumour — from multiple directions but not yet sourced — that the US threatened to withdraw security co-operation from SAPO if Assange was granted residency and WikiLeaks based itself there. Assange’s residency was later rejected because of course he was accused of r-pe.

These matters have come to a head, just as another political storm has developed, about the US conducting extensive spying missions in Sweden – not on other spies, but on everyday Swedes. According to a former employee at the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm: “there have been a so-called SDU-group, whose task was to monitor and record people on behalf of U.S. authorities.

“They were interested in all sorts of information. Everything that could be of value. There was everything from color, to clothing, to hair color, hair length, hair type and age. What language they spoke, everything…

Among other things, [Swedes] worked with the group to monitor demonstrations in Stockholm in order to report potential threats to the embassy, said the source.”

There would of course be nothing to the fact that Sweden got its first domestic terrorist act for quite a while three days ago when a suicide bomber blew himself up in the city streets. I can’t imagine that security services let a known crazy slip through the net to blow himself and no-one else up, to focus the mind a little.

Just as I can’t of course believe that a process of domestic private criminal law could become a part of surveillance and control, if it increasingly divides up every smaller level of fluid human behaviour, until it becomes in some way, very difficult for a living breathing human being not to break the law — at which point the very interface between the state, the law and the public is itself a trap. Not insignificant is the outfit you’re trying to nobble is trying to transform that relationship altogether.

Assange’s defenders will need to talk about that more and better — about a process of control, exception and rendition that is using not abnormal state processes, but normal ones to achieve their ends, turning the world into one huge airport security scanner.

And yes, we will need to talk about r-pe, and how we think about the accusations of it, and whether we can talk about character, deceit, jealousy and much more, in the open, rather than as we now all do, in a manner of sealed evidence.

The American Conservative has always had a soft spot in my heart since their indignant denunciation of George Bush and all he stood for before the 2004 presidential election in the US. They've now come up with an article outlining why right thinking people should be supporting Wikileaks as well (admittedly it contains some climate skeptic lunacy, but that's par for the course in the bizarre alternate universe of conservative ideology nowadays) - The Conservative Case for WikiLeaks.

Lovers necessarily keep or share secrets. Being in a healthy relationship means achieving a certain level of intimacy, where shared knowledge of each others’ weaknesses and insecurities is protected by a bond of mutual trust. Sometimes lovers might do devilish things that outsiders wouldn’t understand, or shouldn’t be privy to, and this is fine. But by and large, what they do is simply no one else’s business.

But imagine that the man in the relationship kept it a secret that he had other women on the side, kids, a criminal record, venereal disease, and basically betrayed his lover in every way imaginable, unbeknownst to her?

Now imagine a third party felt it was their moral duty to reveal it?

No one questions that governments must maintain a certain level of secrecy, including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who told Time that “Secrecy is important for many things … [but it] shouldn’t be used to cover up abuses.” The entire premise of Assange’s whistleblower organization is this: To what degree is government secrecy justified? And when particular secrets could be damaging to the other partner in the United States government’s relationship — the American people — should these secrets be revealed in the name of protecting the public?

How often does our government use “national security” simply as an excuse to cover up questionable dealings? Reports Time: “in the past few years, governments have designated so much information secret that you wonder whether they intend the time of day to be classified. The number of new secrets designated as such by the U.S. government has risen 75% … . At the same time, the number of documents and other communications created using those secrets has skyrocketed nearly 10 times…” ...

Decentralizing government power, limiting it, and challenging it was the Founders’ intent and these have always been core conservative principles. Conservatives should prefer an explosion of whistleblower groups like WikiLeaks to a federal government powerful enough to take them down. Government officials who now attack WikLleaks don’t fear national endangerment, they fear personal embarrassment. And while scores of conservatives have long promised to undermine or challenge the current monstrosity in Washington, D.C., it is now an organization not recognizably conservative that best undermines the political establishment and challenges its very foundations.

Wikileaks has been dominating the media over the past week - Crikey and the Sydney Morning Herald have good roundups of coverage, and I'll do a little link dump in this post as well.

I'll note Australian PM Julia Gillard and Attorney General Robert McClelland have covered themselves in shame during the week, inaccurately accusing Assange of having committed a crime and then pathetically pandering to the Americans instead of standing up for an Australian citizen.

The Brisbane Times reports on one interesting leak about the influence of Shell on the Nigerian government (or maybe Shell simply is the Nigerian government) - Shell's grip on Nigeria revealed: WikiLeaks.

The oil giant Shell claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to politicians' every move in the oil-rich Niger Delta, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable.

The company's top executive in Nigeria told US diplomats that Shell had seconded employees to every relevant department and so knew "everything that was being done in those ministries". She boasted that the Nigerian government had "forgotten" about the extent of Shell's infiltration and was unaware of how much the company knew about its deliberations.

The cache of secret dispatches from Washington's embassies in Africa also revealed that the Anglo-Dutch oil firm swapped intelligence with the US, in one case providing US diplomats with the names of Nigerian politicians it suspected of supporting militant activity, and requesting information from the US on whether the militants had acquired anti-aircraft missiles.

Campaigners said the revelation about Shell in Nigeria demonstrated the tangled links between the oil firm and politicians in the country where, despite billions of dollars in oil revenue, 70 per cent of people live below the poverty line.

Cables from Nigeria show how Ann Pickard, then Shell's vice-president for sub-Saharan Africa and now chairwoman of Shell in Australia, sought to share intelligence with the US government on militant activity and business competition in the contested Niger Delta – and how, with some prescience, she seemed reluctant to open up because of a suspicion the US government was "leaky".

Crikey's Guy Rundle has a report on Assange's court appearance in London (veering off into some leftist analysis of the global implications of it all - "imperial feminism" ???) - Ringside for Assange’s court appearance, in all its gory detail.

The European arrest warrant was served on the basis of a Swedish warrant, which is now for prosecution, rather than merely as part of an investigation. There are four charges, combining allegations of r-pe, s-xual assault and “ofredande”, the distinctive Swedish charge of misconduct/annoyance.

Three charges are based on the allegations of “complainant A”, in whose apartment Assange was staying in mid-August. The first is one of r-pe — that Assange used his body weight to lie on her, pushed her legs open and forced s-x.

The second charge is that Assange “assaulted her s-xual integrity” by “having s-x without a condom despite complainant’s earlier expressed unwillingness to do so”. Another s-xual integrity assault is that Assange “pushed his erect p-nis into her back without permission, while sharing a bed”. The fourth charge is by the second complainant, “complainant W” which alleges “having s-x with the complainant while she was asleep, without a condom”.

Outside court, Assange’s solicitor Mark Stephens sounded a feisty note, telling 150 or so of the world’s journalists that “this is going to go viral … Many people believe Mr Assange to be innocent, myself included. Many people believe that this prosecution is politically motivated”. Pilger gave a rolling presser lasting about half an hour as TV crews followed him around, assailing the Swedish charges as “absurd” and suggesting that r-pe charges had been reinstated for political reasons.

The decision to remand Assange was greeted with little surprise by many — the Serious Crime detectives lingering in the court foyer dismissed any suggestions of a line-ball call, saying that “there was never any doubt” that bail would be denied, due to the possibility of absconding. However, Jennifer Robinson, part of Assange’s legal team, told an author covering the event that she was “shocked” at the result.

Assange’s legal team immediately announced that it may appeal the bail decision, and will certainly fight the extradition charge, possibly all the way to the British High Court. The case will certainly prove a test of the discretion that national courts have over the serving of a European arrest warrant.

WikiLeaks has confirmed that it will keep running, and will return to the business of cable release almost immediately.

The reading of the Swedish charges against Assange has been the first full airing of accusations that have been surrounded by rumour since they were first made in mid-August. Crikey readers got the full story a lot earlier than most, but even your correspondent decided to minimise the more explicit details because of simply, well, yurrrgghhh.

For better or worse, better and worse, Swedish s-x crime law has taken on the values and attitudes of Macquarie University c.1989, in which myriad acts between bodies are constructed as a series of legal permissions. That separates Sweden from the mass of other countries as behaviour that other cultures would see as private exchange becomes public law.

Even taking that into account, the situation has entered bizarre territory. Can anyone really say that the resources of two states and an international police force should be directed to investigating the provenance of a wayward morning glory?

A case to answer?

This charge, number three, is obviously farcical to 90% of the planet, male and female. What about the other charges? Charge two, unsafe s-x, does not allege non-consent. It alleges earlier notice of an unwillingness to engage in unsafe s-x, quite a different thing — and presumably the reason why it is being charged as an offence against “s-xual integrity”.

S-x while sleeping? What? Through the whole thing? Either this bends the truth, or Assange went to a Steiner school. How on earth do Swedish prosecutors propose to establish this to a standard of proof? That question is further complicated by documents suggesting collusion and false reports, and a blog by one of the complainants including a how to guide to “revenge on lovers”, which includes a section on “lying to get the law involved”.

That leaves the first charge, a charge of explicit and deliberate r-pe. It would be wise here to remember what is being objected to by Assange’s supporters — not the charge itself but the chaotic process by which it has been brought. Not everyone is observing this line. Bjorn Hurtig, Assange’s Swedish lawyer, has been on the media arguing that his client “isn’t the sort of person who could do these things”. Well, that’s no real argument. John Pilger has charged in foursquare, rejecting the r-pe arguments as “crap” and politically motivated — and also mangling the whole sequence in the telling, telling the world’s media that the “chief prosecutor” threw out an earlier r-pe charge, and that this was then reinstated by political pressure.

That’s completely arse backwards and fails to understand what is going on here. The initial charge was made by a junior duty prosecutor on a summer Friday in Stockholm, based on the “inquiries” by the two complainants to the police. This was rescinded a day later by the regular prosecutor, Eva Finne, who was so concerned by the events (which had been placed in Expressen newspaper by the police) that she had the documents couriered to her summer cottage, and promptly rescinded the order.

The next week, the two complainants hired as their lawyer Claes Bergstrom — former minister in the Social Democratic Party, big wheel. Whether they sought him out, or he volunteered remains to be seen, but he managed to convince Marianne Ny to take the case.

Ny is not the chief prosecutor either — she runs (or ran, until recently) a “crime development unit” out of Gothenburg, two hundred clicks from Stockholm. The unit lives effectively, by finding new types of crime — and especially s-x crime, which is Ny’s field. Like much of the Swedish state it has to be entrepreneurial within the framework of public funding, to maintain its existence.

Crayfishgate, and the crisis of feminism

This is crucial to understand, because simple stories of political interference won’t cut it — though they play a part. The core process that has Assange in trouble is the autonomous process of a (once) socialist, feminist state. This has been difficult for many people to interpret, because it is so rare. Sweden (and maybe one or two other Nordic countries) is the only state where feminism has achieved state power, actually won the long march through the institutions. As such it is now exposed to the full contradictions of that role, including running wars, armies and police forces.

This effectively brings to the surface contradictions inherent right at the start of second-wave feminism in the early ’70s — between the idea that existing power structures could be taken over (which ultimately became liberal feminism) and arguments that the very character of power — and the state — had to be transformed.

Imperial feminism?

One of the truly bizarre things about this event is that Assange has made history even when he didn’t intend to — this moment is when the contradictions of second wave feminism are played out to endgame, because feminists will have to choose which side they cleave to — a state prosecuting possible s-x crimes (whose possibility I do not deny), laced into a global power structure, or a radical force holding states to account, and unleashing new forms of social energy and flow that challenge inherited patriarchal structures?

We’ve seen this before of course — in the period of imperial feminism of the mid 2000s, when numerous liberal feminist commentators took the next step, and committed themselves to imperial wars that they hoped would advance the cause of gender liberation in patriarchal societies.

In Sweden this is given institutional form, because a feminist state is laced into a military one — Sweden’s once-prized neutrality has long been forfeited to a de facto NATO alliance. Central to this is the Nordic battle group, the naval force run as a joint NATO/Swedish exercise, and a key part of the new more aggressive forward strategy of NATO in relation to Russia — as recently revealed by WikiLeaks. This is part and parcel of a gradual surrender of neutrality to US dominance — as recently revealed by WikiLeaks.

This circle closes with news tonight that Swedish and American authorities are already in discussion about co-operation to begin extradition proceedings against Assange once he is in Sweden. It comes as WikiLeaks releases a new series of cables that show that Scotland was effectively bribed by Libya to release Al-Megrahi, the man convicted (possibly wrongly) of the Lockerbie bombing.

In other words, the hits just keep on coming. And it is faintly possible that Assange decided, once s-x crime allegations were made against him, that his project would best be served by a series of trials that convulsed the world.

Rundle also reports on Assange's accuser seems to have bailed on the legal proceedings and headed off to Palestine - Assange accuser may have ceased co-operating.

nna Ardin, one of the two complainants in the rape and sexual assault case against WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, has left Sweden, and may have ceased actively co-operating with the Swedish prosecution service and her own lawyer, sources in Sweden told Crikey today.

The move comes amid a growing campaign by leading Western feminists to question the investigation, and renewed confusion as to whether Sweden has actually issued charges against Assange. Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, and the European group Women Against Rape, have all made statements questioning the nature and purpose of the prosecution.

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.

Ardin’s blog has restarted after a fortnight hiatus, and her twitter feed has restarted after a two-month break. The twitter feed appears to be commenting on her ongoing profile in the media with the latest entry reading: “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 previous tweet appears to extend support to WikiLeaks, after financial agencies withdrew their services, reading “Mastercard, Visa and Paypal — hit it, now!”*

One source from Ardin’s old university of Uppsala reported rumours that she had stopped co-operating with the prosecution service several weeks ago, and that this was part of the reason for the long delay in proceeding with charges — and what still appears to be an absence of charges.

News of Ardin/Bernardin’s departure comes as reports circulate of Ardin’s connection to the right-wing Cuban exile community in Miami, something that Crikey readers learnt of months ago. The reports have helped fuel wilder conspiracy theories about the nature of Ardin’s involvement with WikiLeaks and Assange.

A former politics student who had done internships at Sweden’s DC embassy, Ardin completed her thesis on Cuban political opposition groups, many of whom have involvement — and funding — from the US interests section, the only US diplomatic representation in Cuba. Ardin initially began her research in Havana and left after being advised that her position was no longer safe. She completed the research in Miami.

However, it seems more likely that the Cuban episode is part of the same political nomadism that led her to WikiLeaks. An office holder with the Social Democratic party’s Christian “brotherhood” faction, Ardin is active in a range of causes from Latin America to animal liberation.

Ardin’s move and confusion over her involvement and the real status of the charges against Assange come as the campaign questioning the charges against him has come to include a number of leading feminist activists. Naomi Klein tweeted that:

“R-pe is being used in the #Assange prosecution in the same way that women’s freedom was used to invade Afghanistan. Wake up! #wikilieaks”

While in The Huffington Post, Naomi Wolf posted a (quite funny) article asking Interpol to apprehend every date she’s had who turned out to be a narcissistic jerk.

In The Guardian Karin Axelsson of Women Against R-pe questioned why Assange’s case was being pursued more assiduously than cases of r-pe judged more serious (Sweden has three degrees of severity for r-pe charges).

These moves are evidence of the situation your correspondent suggested in Crikey yesterday — that the Assange case is proving to be the final process by which the second-wave feminist coalition formed in the late 1960s splits substantially, with feminists with differing attitude to Western state power finding themselves on different sides of the debate.

Indeed, it puts one in the unusual position of saying that commentators such as Wolf are being too anti-complainant in their construction of the charges as nothing other than a couple of bad dates. It’s a strange world, and getting stranger.

The lawyer for Ardin and Wilen, the two complainants, has hit back at attacks and criticism of his clients, saying that they had been put on trial and effectively assaulted twice. He claimed to be in daily contact with the women, which suggests that he has a better reception to Yanoun than many of its inhabitants have to the outside world.

Even if the case comes to trial, the prospects of conviction look slim. Crikey asked Flinders University s-x crime law expert Dr Mary Heath to go over the charges (which may still be accusations at this stage) as they were relayed in Assange’s extradition bail hearing, and she made the following comments:

“Practically speaking, I would not like the chances of the prosecutor on charge 3 — pressing his erect p-nis into the complainant’s back … legally speaking I would have to suggest the chances of conviction would be slim for any Australian offence where both accused were adults. Proving non consent might be difficult but proving awareness of non consent would be even harder.

“Charges 1 and 2 (holding partner down, and unsafe s-x despite earlier expressed opposition to such) involve contexts where there would be room for defence argument about consent. On charge 1, when is one person ‘holding down’ another person lying beneath them, and when are they simply having consensual s-x in a position involving one person being on top of the other person? Is this force or just rough but consensual (compared to cases I’ve read, the allegation would hardly count as rough).

“On charge 2, prior unwillingness is not enough, the complainant must not be consenting and the accused must be aware of this ‘at the time of int-rcourse’. Did complainant one change her mind? Did Assange believe she changed her mind, and perhaps on reasonable grounds the charge does not disclose?

“On charge 4 (s-x while complainant was sleeping), recent experience in South Australia suggests this also could be difficult to prove if there was any kind of s-xual interaction prior to the complainant falling asleep, which might give the defence a plausible argument that belief in consent was present. I was deeply unimpressed by the level of protection the courts (let alone public attitudes) offered to people who are asleep or unconscious due to drugs/alcohol.

“… The one thing that is clearer, perhaps, is that the charges may turn on withdrawal of consent once a s-xual act had commenced. The law of almost every jurisdiction in Australia would recognise withdrawal of consent after a s-xual act commenced as rendering that s-xual act non consensual (and therefore r-pe). As for proving it … I reiterate what I said about proof previously.”

The Guardian reports that former Crown Prosecution Service extradition expert Raj Joshi said that extradition was unlikely:

“On what we know so far, it is going to be very difficult to extradite. The judge has to be satisfied that the conduct equals an extraditable offence and that there are no legal bars to extradition.

“Assange’s team will argue, how can the conduct equal an extraditable offence if the [Swedish] prosecutor doesn’t think there is enough evidence to charge, and still has not charged.”

This has added to speculation that the Swedish moves, which have coincided with the release of the Cablegate stories, are politically motivated as stalling tactics, allowing Assange to be detained while the US “prepares an extradition/rendition request”, according to Assange’s UK lawyer Mark Stephens.

The SMH has a profile of Assange by a journalist who knew him in his hacker days - The geek who shook the world.

The world's most mysterious and famous publisher of verboten secrets is sitting in a jail cell in Britain awaiting extradition to a place with a very alien legal system, Sweden, to face questioning about criminal charges he does not understand. He has said publicly that he is at a loss to know how he could be accused of sexual offences against two women with whom he had sex when they have admitted it was consensual.

Assange has always been an avid reader of books. I know this because we worked together for almost three years to create Underground, a book published in Australia in 1997 and again in an electronic version in 2001. Underground is the true story of hackers in Australia and around the globe. Assange, the former hacker, contributed exceptional technical skills and analysis, and I brought years of experience as a journalist and writer. The book has become something of a classic among computer enthusiasts and has been translated into Czech, Chinese and Russian. Books were the basis of Assange's self-education. He attended school off and on during his childhood, but he was continually frustrated by teachers who were at a loss about what to do with him.

A geek friend of his once described Assange as having an IQ "in excess of 170". I suspect this could be true. I can only imagine how hard it must have been for a teacher in 1970s Australia to teach her class of normal children while also dealing with one small blond-haired boy who was off the charts.

So Assange largely gave up on school, finding it more efficient to educate himself by reading books. He learned to tune out if people didn't feed him information fast enough.

I've watched Assange do this many times. It's not meant to be rude, though it can make him seem aloof. It is, I suspect, a habit learned from these early years. It can give him the air of an absent-minded professor. He's not really absent; it's just that his brain is running several processors in parallel, like a high-powered desktop computer.

If some information is of more interest, more processing power will be diverted to that to optimise the running of the machine. Sometimes he thinks he has told you something when he hasn't. This is probably because his brain moves so much faster than his voice; by the time he opens his mouth to speak, his thoughts have zoomed a million light years down the next thought path.

The computer geek in him always gravitated towards optimisation of everything. Some people are born engineers and the desire to optimise is a good test of this.

Once, when Assange was packing boxes to move house, he complained at how long it took. Most people just throw things in boxes and tape them up. Not Assange. He approached putting his books in boxes as though he was solving a puzzle aimed at using all the space in the box most efficiently. If there was dead space in the box, the packing had not been optimal and was a failure. He would empty the box and restart the packing again.

This desire for optimisation might be dismissed as the quirky trait of a geek, but it is far more important. It is part of the larger puzzle of how WikiLeaks has come to exist today.

The need for optimisation and the deep desire for justice, reflected by his choice of books, came together with a few other convictions.

One of these can be found in another favourite piece of writing, this time by the World War II pilot and author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The quote, used by Assange to sign many of his emails, was this: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the seas."

The quote suggests that if you can show people why something is important, they will work to achieve that goal far more effectively than if you just tell them to tick off items on a banal to-do list. Large corporations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year trying to drum that message into their executives in high-end training courses. Assange knew it instinctively.

The final piece in the puzzle was curiosity. Like all good journalists, Assange has it in abundance. It is part of his clay. He understood that most people are curious and he spoke to me about the immense power of information to change the world for the better.

WikiLeaks is the picture that emerges when you lay the last puzzle piece in place.

If you want to improve the lot of the poorest, most oppressed people in the world, you can go to a destitute, corrupt African country and work in a community-aid program. It is a noble and self-sacrificing choice. But it only saves one village. Therefore, although it works towards greater justice (in this case economic justice) it is not optimal. A computer geek would consider it sub-optimal. To be optimal, it must be on a much larger scale. Larger than one village, larger than one country, even than one continent. The only way to do that is to use information which can be replicated endlessly – and cheaply – to promote change for the better. But it must be good information, not trashy information or PR spin. It must be the kind of information that plucks at those little threads of curiousity we all have in one measure or another.

It must be the kind of information news media organisations would publish for their readers.

Not everyone wants change, however. Tin-pot dictators like to steal money from their countries.

Average people may think they are happy in their ordinary lives: they don't want change. Yet imagine if there was a secret world these average people did not know about. What could be in that world? It could be a world of classified logs from the front line of a war. It could also be a world of secret diplomatic cables that tell the truth about what really happens behind the mahogany doors of power. The average people might actually want that information – if someone revealed it to them.

WikiLeaks has taught people to "long for the endless immensity of the seas". Who wants to go back to their cramped dog-box apartment now that they have tasted the salty air and seen the ocean's infinite horizon?

Yet Assange still sits in prison, waiting for answers and explanations, like Rubashov. It is more than likely the US will try to extradite him from Sweden if he is forced to leave Britain. Hints in the American media suggest that a secret grand jury investigation is under way or is even completed – without Assange even being in the country.

American politicians propose that Assange be assassinated. Forget a trial or jury. They are judge, jury and executioner, like the thuggish interrogator in Darkness at Noon.

The office of US senator Joseph Lieberman tried to gag WikiLeaks this week by making a phone call that forced Amazon to stop hosting the publisher. The New York Times has also released the diplomatic cables. Lieberman's office has called for an investigation but has not tried to order the paper to stop its presses. As if it could. There would be rioting in the streets of Manhattan.

In person, Assange is remarkably calm. He is sometimes dedicated to the cause of free speech in a pointed way that that affronts Americans, which is surprising, really, given their dedication to the right of free speech.

What matters is that WikiLeaks is changing the balance of power between average citizens and their governments like nothing else has this century. For the past decade the pendulum has swung towards government. WikiLeaks is pulling the pendulum back towards towards the citizens.

Crikey reports that one of the halfwit American politicians calling for Assange's assassination was a supporter of a terrorist organisation - Congressman who called for killing of Assange an IRA supporter. Maybe the British should be calling for his head if we are going to return to the law of the jungle, as per Republican party policy ?

Peter King, the Republican Congressman from New York, who recently called for the assassination of WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange as a “terrorist”, is a long-time supporter of the Provisional IRA, and met members of the group in the 1980s.

An energetic fund-raiser with NORAID, the US group that channelled millions of dollars to the IRA* during the 30 years of conflict, paying for its supplies of guns and Semtex, King was defending the group British well after the Good Friday agreement, denying that there was any IRA involvement in the murder of Robert McCartney, and its cover-up in 2005.

King had broken with support for Sinn Fein and the IRA in 2004, not because of any events in Ireland, but because the party/group had come out against the Iraq War.

King will be the new chair of the Homeland Security Committee when the 112th Congress begins sitting in January. He has earlier remarked that Assange should be treated the way the US treats any enemy combatant with “drones and Gitmo” — i.e. piloted bombs and torture in Guantanamo prison camps.

He has modified his stance since, to using “legal” measures, suggesting that WikiLeaks be designated a terrorist outfit, saying that he wants to seize their funds and go after anyone who provides them with any help or contributions or assistance whatsoever.

That, of course, includes newspapers such as the New York Times and The Guardian. It also now includes News Ltd, after The Australian published — and will presumably pay for — an op-ed by Julian Assange. ...

So with a US hysterical about terrorism, how is it that King is permitted to be the chair of the Homeland Security Committee, while labelling Assange as a terrorist? Simple. The supine, epic fail of the US media means that those who alight on the point never stay on it for more than three minutes and the Right don’t bring it up at all.

And further out, in the more distant satraps, there is no concern. A US congressman once sponsored political murder on British soil. Now he’s at it again, this time with an Australian citizen in the sights. And the government, in the form of shambling owlish doofus Bob McClelland, offers itself up in service, as Senator Mark Arbib trots through the embassy gates every fortnight. God bless whoever the hell we are.

AntiWar.com has a post by Daniel Ellsberg suggesting customers boycott Amazon in response for Amazon turning off hosting for Wikileaks - Daniel Ellsberg Says Boycott Amazon.

I’m disgusted by Amazon’s cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating today its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China’s control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.

For the last several years, I’ve been spending over $100 a month on new and used books from Amazon. That’s over. I ask Amazon to terminate immediately my membership in Amazon Prime and my Amazon credit card and account, to delete my contact and credit information from their files and to send me no more notices.

I understand that many other regular customers feel as I do and are responding the same way. Good: the broader and more immediate the boycott, the better. I hope that these others encourage their contact lists to do likewise and to let Amazon know exactly why they’re shifting their business. I’ve asked friends today to suggest alternatives, and I’ll be exploring service from Powell’s Books, Half-Price Books, Biblio and others.

So far Amazon has spared itself the further embarrassment of trying to explain its action openly. This would be a good time for Amazon insiders who know and perhaps can document the political pressures that were brought to bear–and the details of the hasty kowtowing by their bosses–to leak that information. They can send it to Wikileaks (now on servers outside the US), to mainstream journalists or bloggers, or perhaps to sites like antiwar.com that have now appropriately ended their book-purchasing association with Amazon.

The Age has an editorial mentioning Ellsberg and supporting Assange, saying "the federal government's response to WikiLeaks is deeply troubling" - Julian Assange and the public's right to know

DURING the Vietnam War, Daniel Ellsberg released government documents now known as the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. In response, the American government tried him for theft and conspiracy under the Espionage Act. The authorities also tried to steal Ellsberg's medical files in order to discredit him.

The Pentagon Papers exposed lies told by the US government to justify the war and their publication helped fuel opposition to the conflict. The charges against Ellsberg were eventually dismissed, the covert operations against him condemned. Ellsberg sees parallels between his case and the treatment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. ''People … don't want to admit that they oppose any and all exposure of even the most misguided, secretive foreign policy,'' Ellsberg said recently. ''The truth is that every attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.''

Men such as Ellsberg and Assange, who are prepared to face the consequences of revealing information authorities would prefer to hide, help keep our system of government healthy and strong. Unfortunately, those in power tend to take a different view. The 250,000 confidential American diplomatic cables are the latest documents published by WikiLeaks. Previous documents on WikiLeaks have exposed how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been fought. These leaks have been embarrassing to the governments involved - particularly the US government.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has condemned the actions of WikiLeaks as illegal - a short-sighted response. The Australian government is investigating whether Mr Assange has committed an offence, but has so far got nowhere. ..

WikiLeaks, acting with newspapers around the world including The Age and The Sunday Age, is publishing information that makes governments uncomfortable. This action affirms the role of the media, which have a duty to expose the secret machinations of those who wield power. In the US, the chairman of the Senate homeland security committee, Joe Lieberman, has suggested that because it published some of the leaked information The New York Times might be subject to criminal investigation. This would breach the First Amendment protecting freedom of the press.

The Australian government's condemnation of WikiLeaks is also deeply troubling. Attempts to silence Mr Assange and those who work with him threaten the free flow of information that makes democracy possible. Such attempts are dangerous and must be resisted.

Crikey's Bernard Keane has a look at the controversy swirling around Visa, Mastercard and Paypal as they complied with requests to block contributions to Wikileaks - Welcome to the internet wars.

Whoever christened the WikiLeaks saga the first major war over the internet was right. Quite apart from what you’re seeing in the mainstream media, the internet equivalent of a shooting war has broken out and shows no signs of dying down.

The online group Anonymous – usually, but somewhat erroneously christened “hacker activists” by the mainstream media – have launched a series of attacks on the websites of those associated with the campaign against Wikileaks and Julian Assange. Targets under “Operation Payback”, coordinated via an IRC channel and Twitter, have included Joe Lieberman’s website, Sarah Palin’s website and the website of the Swedish prosecution service responsible for handling the s-xual assault case against Assange.

In the last 24 hours, however, it’s stopped being quite so symbolic. Yesterday Anonymous coordinated a distributed denial of service attack on Mastercard’s corporate website, www.mastercard.com, and took it offline for several hours. More to the point, the attacks took Mastercard’s Securecode service offline as well, preventing transactions from being processed. The website has since got back online.

This morning it was Visa’s turn. Anonymous gave a full hour’s notice via its Twitter account @Anon-Operation that it was going to target Visa. At 8am, the tweet went out:

“TARGET: WWW.VISA.COM: FIRE FIRE FIRE!!! WEAPONS.”

They didn’t miss. The Visa site went down almost instantly, and stayed down for nearly three hours.

Twitter had by this stage woken up to the fact that its service was being used to coordinate DDOS attacks and suspended @anon_operation (Facebook had removed another Anonymous-related page earlier in the day). Anonymous was already using multiple accounts and immediately created another one, @anonops. Twitter’s action prompted participants to turn their attention to the service itself, and Twitter itself came under fire.

At that point, Anonymous appeared to secure a significant victory. Twitter was said to have advised that the deletion was “accidental” and restored the suspended account (minus previous tweets), although another ANonymous-related account remained suspended. The new account, @anonops, continued to operate. The attack on Twitter was then called off, and www.visa.com briefly went down again as the attack as redirected back at Visa.

A short while later the group declared via @anonops “IRC is not secure do not use unauthorized channels for operation #payback. We will announce next target here!! http://bit.ly/1hSngD #anonops”. Presumably law enforcement agencies had by this stage accessed the channel (it’s accessible if you know whom to ask and are happy to have the Federal Police start paying attention to you).

Meantime, in an unrelated development, PayPal had succumbed to criticism and released donations to Wikileaks.

Throughout, the mainstream media desperately tried to keep up. “Do you know more? email us” implored Fairfax, whose journalists took to haunting the birthplace of Anonymous, the 4chan site (warning – DEFINITELY NSFW) to find out what was going on. The coverage looked all a bit redundant, though, given much of what was going on was being played out under the Twitter hashtag #anonops.

This may look like a bunch of kids fooling around on the internet (one tweeter compared it to a “geek action movie”) but it’s altogether more serious than that. In the space of 24 hours two of the world’s key transactional sites have been taken offline. In the case of Visa, the company was actually given warning that it would be attacked, and yet it was still taken down for several hours. If we’re talking “critical infrastructure”, as per the WikiLeaks cables of earlier this week, we’ve had a clear demonstration of where it is on the internet.

This is the flipside of war against WikiLeaks being waged by the US Government and its proxies. Taking away its access to servers and taking away its financial conduits has undoubtedly harmed the organization – probably more so than arresting Julian Assange. It shows that, for all the decentralization of the internet, you can exploit the corporate control of key elements of the internet, particularly of financial transactions, to inconvenience or disrupt the operations of even an online entity. The further the balance tips toward private, corporate control of key online systems, the easier it becomes for governments - and other forces of centralised control, like large companies - to strike back at online opponents.

But it cuts both ways. The fragility of those transactional systems is suddenly on display with the successful attacks on Visa and Mastercard. Private control of key systems can be a vulnerability as well as a strength. And what’s been happening to key transactional systems in Australia in recent days? No one targeted NAB’s website – it managed to take itself offline without any help from “hacktivists”, causing massive financial disruption to its customers.

We’ve become dependent on online systems that are assumed to be both secure and resilient. Suddenly they look fragile, capable of disruption not just at the hands of Anonymous, but because of under-investment, or incompetence, or a single corrupted file.

There’ll doubtless be a lot of rubbish written about the Anonymous attacks, from both sides, in coming hours and days. There’ll be a strong sense of “the internet has fought back” from supporters, and law enforcement-flavoured outrage from opponents, governments and the mainstream media.

But at least one lesson is already clear – on the internet, the “critical infrastructure” may not be as resilient and stable as we all assume it is.

GOOD has a post on the increase in traffic for Wikileaks' partners in releasing the cables - Cablegate Is Great for Web Traffic at The Guardian.

I'm sure the editorial powers that be at The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, El Monde, and El Pais have a very well developed, public-interest-based justification for publishing the WikiLeaks material, but the business people in those institutions have to be happy too. It looks like Cablegate is responsible for a doubling of traffic at The Guardian.

And, as Visual Journalism notes, because the documents are being released gradually, the media outlets that are getting prior access are going to be leading on this story for quite a long time.

Crikey's Bernard Keane has an interesting comparison of the impact of technology on the music industry to the impact of technology on government transparency - Missing the point on WikiLeaks.

This rolling series of releases — and WikiLeaks has barely begun to release the amount of material it has — is raising fundamental issues not merely about statecraft and diplomacy but information, power and the role of the media. Guy Rundle spotted this immediately, and while I would say that, wouldn’t I, his analysis has been the best you’ll see in an Australian publication. This is about far more than a simple matter of leaking sensitive cables, or newspaper coverage of those leaks.

Instead we’re given an uncomprehending coverage by the Australian media, as if it simply can’t process what’s happening, and needs to keep trying different narratives to see if they fit what’s being observed, sticking with whatever seems to temporarily do the trick. Given personalities are always easier to discuss than even the simplest policy issues, most of this has focussed on what ambassadors said about political leaders, and Assange himself — Assange as Bond-style supervillain; Assange as alleged rapist-wanted man; Assange as net libertarian (“information yearns to be free!”). None of that comes remotely near explaining what Assange is trying to do, which — regardless of how you feel about it — you have to go beyond the mainstream media to start to understand.

It’s not entirely fair to blame the media, though, because the Australian government is doing exactly the same thing. The response of the federal government has been… I was going to say “instructive”, but it’s more accurately, and sadly, affirmative of what you suspected, that politicians and bureaucrats can’t see this through any other than a rather 20th century, Cold War-style lens.

Accordingly, the whole business is being treated like an espionage case: Robert McClelland has made vague threats about arresting Assange and providing “every assistance” to the United States on “law enforcement action” and a “taskforce” has been assembled to consider the implications of the material being released. More seriously, McClelland has spoken of criminal offences in relation to publishing WikiLeaks-related material and said that the media may be asked to refrain from publishing certain material on national security grounds.

It barely needs to be said that McClelland’s suggestion that media outlets might either be asked to not publish material, or might find themselves charged if they do, appears to entirely miss that this is no longer 1985 and media executives are no longer the information gatekeepers they once were, even if they were inclined to cooperate.

The Cold War analog doesn’t work because, even if they weren’t moral equivalents, the two Cold War players were mirrors in their goals and apparati and had a dense, mutually-agreed set of rules to play by. WikiLeaks, however, is actively subverting any rules, far more asymmetric and nebulous even than the Islamofascist terrorism threat used so successfully to maintain the national security state in the absence of our Cold War enemies.

Dorothy, we’re not in West Berlin anymore.

The prime minister has gone further than McClelland, declaring the release of cables by WikiLeaks “illegal”, the sort of issue that, thankfully, courts still decide rather than politicians, and which in any event is hardly as clear as Julia Gillard seems to suggest, given she didn’t even say where exactly WikiLeaks’ publication would be considered illegal.

More to the point, she appears to have forgotten that Assange is an Australian citizen, and as such is entitled to a basic level of concern for his treatment from the government of his country — a level of concern that is entirely absent from the remarks of either the Attorney-General or the prime minister. We’ve been down this road before with David Hicks, and that didn’t end well for the government concerned. And Assange is no David Hicks (although, some evidently regard him as far more dangerous).

I’ll finish on a complete digression: when the music industry first switched from vinyl to CD, one particularly prescient musician — can’t recall the name, too vague to Google — suggested that once songs were reduced to a series of 0s and 1s, they were implicitly devalued, and that eventually the music industry would come to rue undermining its basic product in this way.

It took another decade and filesharing software to do it, but he or she was exactly right. The digitisation of information implicitly devalues it, makes it vastly, world-changingly easier to share. And that process doesn’t just change relationships within existing systems, it changes the systems themselves, fundamentally. Relatively trivial industries like entertainment have spent a decade discovering that horrible fact.

You can’t help but wonder how long it will take governments to work out that they are now in exactly the same situation as the music and movie execs who’ve spent so long trying to prop up by force the old system even as it collapses around them.

Keane links to this (long) post from ZunguZungu, which defies quoting - best to go and read the whole thing - Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government”.

“To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.”

Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies”

The piece of writing (via) which that quote introduces is intellectually substantial, but not all that difficult to read, so you might as well take a look at it yourself. Most of the news media seems to be losing their minds over Wikileaks without actually reading these essays, even though he describes the function and aims of an organization like Wikileaks in pretty straightforward terms. But, to summarize, he begins by describing a state like the US as essentially an authoritarian conspiracy, and then reasons that the practical strategy for combating that conspiracy is to degrade its ability to conspire, to hinder its ability to “think” as a conspiratorial mind. The metaphor of a computing network is mostly implicit, but utterly crucial: he seeks to oppose the power of the state by treating it like a computer and tossing sand in its diodes.

He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself — to the extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known — it can only continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?) from being generally known. It inevitably becomes, he argues, a conspiracy:

Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial.

The problem this creates for the government conspiracy then becomes the organizational problem it must solve: if the conspiracy must operate in secrecy, how is it to communicate, plan, make decisions, discipline itself, and transform itself to meet new challenges? The answer is: by controlling information flows. After all, if the organization has goals that can be articulated, articulating them openly exposes them to resistance. But at the same time, failing to articulate those goals to itself deprives the organization of its ability to process and advance them. Somewhere in the middle, for the authoritarian conspiracy, is the right balance of authority and conspiracy.

His model for imagining the conspiracy, then, is not at all the cliché that people mean when they sneer at someone for being a “conspiracy theorist.” After all, most the “conspiracies” we’re familiar with are pure fantasies, and because the “Elders of Zion” or James Bond’s SPECTRE have never existed, their nonexistence becomes a cudgel for beating on people that would ever use the term or the concept. For Assange, by contrast, a conspiracy is something fairly banal, simply any network of associates who act in concert by hiding their concerted association from outsiders, an authority that proceeds by preventing its activities from being visible enough to provoke counter-reaction. It might be something as dramatic as a loose coalition of conspirators working to start a war with Iraq, or it might simply be the banal, everyday deceptions and conspiracies of normal diplomatic procedure.

The SMH has an article on a demonstration in support of Assange in Melbourne - Legal fury at 'war on free speech' . Plus one in Australia as well - Hundreds rally in support of Assange.

A MELBOURNE lawyer and former boss of Prime Minister Julia Gillard has criticised her government for its handling of WikiLeaks and its Australian founder, Julian Assange.

Peter Gordon, whose legal firm made Ms Gillard the first female partner of Slater and Gordon, said her comment that Mr Assange had broken the law was baseless.

He said the fact that people such as Ms Gillard and Attorney-General Robert McClelland - both of whom he knew to be good lawyers and decent people - could be driven to behave in this way was a sobering reminder of ''the seductive and compulsive draw of power''.

Mr Gordon was speaking on Thursday night at a WikiLeaks forum attended by 250 lawyers and civil libertarians at the Law Institute of Victoria.

In today's Age opinion page, he writes: ''If the Wikileaks disclosures tell us anything, it is that no government, whatever its political colours, is going to hesitate for a nanosecond to conflate the notion of 'national security' with 'my own career security'.''

He calls for a challenge to the ''war on information … call it what it is - a growing and insidious attack on free speech''.

Mr Gordon's stance was backed by several top barristers, who said neither official secrets nor terror laws provided any offences under which Mr Assange could be charged in Australia.

Mr Assange also received support from more than 500 people who attended a rally outside the State Library in Melbourne. The rally was one of several held around the country, with backers calling for a ban on WikiLeaks censorship and for Mr Assange to be freed.

Julian Burnside, QC, said of the government: ''I think they are trying to defend the indefensible.''

He said the state had an obligation to protect citizens who got into trouble in a foreign country. ''They ignored that obligation and instead sided with the Americans. They even went so far as to threaten to cancel his passport. That's exactly the opposite of what any self-respecting country ought to do.''

The SMH has an article on worldwide demonstrations in support of Assange - Worldwide demos called in support Assange.

Spanish online supporters of Assange called on Saturday for worldwide demonstrations to press for his release from a London jail, where he is awaiting possible extradition to Sweden to face rape allegations.

The Spanish website Free Wikileaks urged rallies at 6pm on Sunday (0400 AEDT Monday) in eight Spanish cities, including Madrid and Barcelona. Similar demonstrations were planned in Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Bogota and Lima.

In a manifesto entitled "For freedom, Say No to State Terrorism," it demanded Assange's release and "restoration of the WikiLeaks domain."

"Given that no one has proved that Assange is guilty of the offences he is accused of and that Wikileaks is not implicated in any of those," the website also urged that credit card giants Visa and Mastercard rescind their decisions to cut off payments from the website's supporters.

The Business Spectator has an article on worries by the US banking sector about the next round of Wikileaks revelations - Why banks are worried about WikiLeaks

An Australian assisting Julian Assange’s legal team has raised the possibility that WikiLeaks’ next document dump relates to the politics of bank bailouts and ill-gotten bonuses.

Scott Burchill, senior lecturer in international relations at Deakin University in Melbourne, is working alongside the lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC and the journalist and author John Pilger on Assange’s legal defence.

As speculation intensifies that the next phase of the WikiLeaks saga will involve the release of documents of significance to the global banking market, it has been reported Bank of America has set up a ‘war room’ to defend its reputation.

In recent days, WikiLeaks has increasingly drawn attention to corporate behaviour, with oil and gas giant Shell accused of infiltrating the Nigerian government and the market expecting a massive document-dump on troubled UK energy giant BP.

But the prime suspect of the expected bank leak is Bank of America; its share price fell 3 per cent in a recent trading session when it was pinpointed as a target for the document-leaking site led by Assange, who is currently under arrest.

In the US, Fox Business Network’s Charlie Gasparino detailed Bank of America's ‘war room’ after outlining concerns the bank’s mortgage creation and purchases of investment bank Merrill Lynch and Countrywide Financial Corporation during the global financial crisis would come under the spotlight.

Dr Burchill, a former political officer at the Department of Foreign Affairs, defines his role as holding the Gillard government to account. As part of his duties to date he has hunted down Swedish translators for Assange’s UK lawyers.

He says the information – to be released this month or in early 2011, and described by Assange as giving “a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level” – could be highly revealing.

He says: “Maybe there are a few people who’ve diverted funds to pay themselves a bonus they’re not entitled to, or there’s a link between politicians on various Senate committees and the way these banks have got a handout."

ABC News is speculating the US may be about to take legal action against Assange (but not against any of the other media publishing the material from Wikileaks it would seem, yet) - Is the U.S. About to Indict Julian Assange?.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the man behind the publication of more than a 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables, could soon be facing spying charges in the U.S. related to the Espionage Act, Assange’s lawyer said today.

“Our position of course is that we don’t believe it applies to Mr. Assange and that in any event he’s entitled to First Amendment protection as publisher of Wikileaks and any prosecution under the Espionage Act would in my view be unconstitutional and puts at risk all media organizations in the U.S.,” Assange’s attorney Jennifer Robinson told ABC News.

Robinson said a U.S. indictment of Assange was expected soon. ...

Justice Department officials declined to comment on the possible coming charges, but earlier this week, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said the release of the documents had put the United States at risk and said he authorized a criminal investigation into Assange.

Salon has a column noting the chilling effect on press freedom in the US these moves could imply - Assange prosecution would be "extremely dangerous".

The Obama administration is exploring the possibility of prosecuting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the century-old Espionage Act, according to a front-page Washington Post story this morning. But legal experts tell Salon that such a prosecution would not only face myriad legal and practical hurdles, it would also set what one analyst calls "an extremely dangerous precedent."

"This is novel legal territory. Every step involves uncertainty and virgin territory, and ideally it will be left that way," says Steven Aftergood, a secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. Aftergood, who has been a critic of WikiLeaks in the past, argues that "a prosecution of WikiLeaks would be a horrible precedent that in time would almost certainly be applied to other publishers of controversial information."

At issue here is the Espionage Act of 1917, which was passed by Congress during World War I and makes it a crime to, among other things, disclose national defense information to someone not authorized to receive it or retain national defense information after the government has demanded it back. While there have been many successful prosecutions of leakers under this law, there have been extremely few prosecutions of those on the receiving end of leaks.

Many have argued that the law is unconstitutional, and, if it was actually applied broadly, would lead to the prosecution of journalists and newspapers that routinely obtain and publish classified national defense information. ...

The Alexandria U.S. attorney's office a few years ago charged two civilian pro-Israel lobbyists under the Espionage Act for receiving and transmitting classified information, but the case was dropped after rulings that made it harder for prosecutors to obtain a conviction. The same U.S. attorney's office is looking at the WikiLeaks case, according to the Post.

Aftergood, the secrecy expert, tells Salon that another potential theory by the government would be that Assange and WikiLeaks conspired to violate the Espionage Act by actively soliciting the diplomatic cables from the leaker.

"If a case could be made that WikiLeaks did not simply publish the material as a passive recipient, but that they actually solicited the release of the information, then they would be vulnerable," he says. But it's not clear how solicitation would be defined, and it's also not at all clear if the facts of the case would bear this theory out. And, again, if this theory of the law were applied, it's hard to see how it wouldn't ensnare a journalist like Bob Woodward, who asks government officials about classified matters and then publishes the information.

Crikey's Bernard Keane also has some thoughts about the implications of recent events for the media - WikiLeaks and the price of partnership.

One of the more interesting battles opened up by the WikiLeaks cables has been over what WikiLeaks actually is. This is more than just a debate about what to call the site — witness the unsubtle campaign to remove its appellation “whistleblower site”. As Julian Assange notes in his rambling self-defence today, the famous mastheads running some of the cables have so far been relatively free from the kinds of attacks WikiLeaks has endured. No politician or columnist has called for the editor of the New York Times to be assassinated. Financial institutions or web hosts have not been pressured to block The Guardian. No one has demanded that Der Speigel journalists be prosecuted under the United States’s Espionage Act (which makes as much sense as prosecuting an Australian).

Nor is it likely that Julia Gillard would launched her clumsy, petulant charge of “illegality” if this material had emerged in an established publication.

Nonetheless, however little politicians, officials and some conservatives like it, WikiLeaks is a media organisation. It did not steal the cables. Assange is no Daniel Ellsberg. The leaker — allegedly — is in custody in the United States, unlikely to be taste freedom for decades. Regardless of his motivations, Assange merely does what journalists and editors have done for centuries, provide a public platform for material the powerful want to keep hidden, for reasons good or ill. Moreover, like traditional media, WikiLeaks releases material subject to assessment as to what impacts it will have on individuals and the public interest.

However, as Assange noted, it’s a new and small media outlet. It relies on the internet for its broadcast infrastructure, and social media for its self-promotion. It lacks the branding that traditional, high-profile mastheads still retain even in the face of precipitately declining revenues. It also lacks the analytical capacity to explain the material it provides. That’s why it has partnered up with traditional mastheads such as the Times or the Guardian. This partnership is an extremely close one, to the extent that the outlets themselves are essentially dictating what WikiLeaks releases.

That partnership — like most partnerships, really, has its problems. In order to obtain some commercially appealing exclusivity, the mastheads are drip-feeding new material before the relevant cables are available. This prevents us from doing exactly what Assange says is the benefit of WikiLeaks. “Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?” In most cases we can’t know, at least for a few hours or days.

That’s the main problem with Fairfax’s coverage of cables about Kevin Rudd, said to be among “hundreds of US State Department documents relevant to Australia released by the WikiLeaks website” to Fairfax. Not merely has Fairfax not linked to the cables, it hasn’t even linked to a working WikiLeaks site, instead offering the URL www.wikileaks.org, which was shut down under US government pressure days ago. We all know that Kevin Rudd was a control freak with a high opinion of himself. Did the cables say anything else? What was the context for the remarks? As of this point, we can make no judgement about that, we cannot, as Assange says, “judge for ourselves”, because Fairfax won’t let us. We’ll have to wait until this afternoon, or tomorrow, or next week, to verify the account and see the full context, by which time the media cycle will have long since moved on.

That’s another price to be paid by WikiLeaks for hooking up with mainstream media outlets — particularly ones such as Fairfax where heavy-duty analytical expertise has long since fallen victim to cost-cutting. Examining the cables containing comments about political leaders elsewhere, it quickly becomes clear that strident comments, or one-liners, taken out of context and put into headlines, form part of a more nuanced picture provided by State Department officials in the relevant documents.

Fairfax isn’t alone in skipping that nuance — an emphasis on the personal and the gossipy has been a prominent feature of the mainstream media coverage. Individuals are easier to focus on than issues, and none more so than Assange himself, whose skirmishing with the Swedish legal system have been elevated by one asinine NBC journalist into an “international manhunt” and garnered as much attention as the cables themselves. There’s a similar kind of partnership at work here, however, given Assange has assiduously and cleverly used the media and his own image to promote WikiLeaks (not to forget that Assange’s own ego benefits similarly).

This is all the price WikiLeaks is willingly paying to more effectively reach its audience, just like any media organisation.

As Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald has noted, the penny might now be starting to drop among journalists and editors that if WikiLeaks can be attacked, so too can the mainstream media. Self-appointed Witchfinder-General in the whole business, US Senator Joe Lieberman, has already gone in this direction by suggesting the New York Times may have committed a crime by publishing the material — comments that at least have the virtue of being targeted at an entity that is actually within the United States. Attorney-General Robert McClelland here has been talking about voluntary “arrangements” that might see mainstream media outlets — the only ones invited to participate in the development of the arrangements — self-censor national security-related material. Which gives rise to the obvious question — what happens if editors decline to participate, and ignore any such “arrangements”?

The mainstream media must eventually accept its interests are aligned with those of WikiLeaks. If WikiLeaks has to pay a price for its partnership with mainstream media, so does the media itself.

Cryptogon points out that if you have a US controlled domain name, you can be taken down at any time at the whims of people with no respect for free speech whatsoever, such as Senator Lieberman, so maybe it would be a good idea to either move elsewhere or have a backup - cryptogon.ch (noting file sharers are copping it too, not just Wikileaks).

I’ve registered cryptogon.ch with the Swiss registrar Switchplus.

I don’t know how well .ch will hold up going forward, but it seemed prudent to at least have an alternative if I should lose control of the cryptogon.com domain for any reason. At a minimum, .ch appears to be far, far more desirable than the U.S. controlled top level domains, where arbitrary takedowns and DNS hijackings are now occurring.

Cryptogon.ch currently points to a BlueHost box (inside the U.S.). If the shit hits the fan (the American fascist regime hijacks my domain name, for example, or the U.S. imposes some kind of Chinese-style firewall or something, who knows?), I can redirect cryptogon.ch to a host in a more free country.

I don’t anticipate any particular action against Cryptogon, but the fact is that it has already happened to some site operators. No due process. Arbitrary, fascist whims. That’s it. And if it can happen to _______ (fill in the blank) it can happen to me or you, or anyone who uses .com, .net or .org.

Anyway, this is just a quick announcement, cryptogon.ch, let’s hope we never have to use it.