WikiLeaks May Shut Down

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of cyber-terrorists.

At Forbes, "Wikileaks to Close Over Funding Blockade?"

WikiLeaks: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed Says He Beheaded Daniel Pearl Against Warnings

A nice background report on the WikiLeaks Guantanamo files, at Los Angeles Times:

The documents are part of thousands of pages of Pentagon dossiers that describe how the detainees were captured, the nature of their alleged crimes and what they had told interrogators — often under duress — in interviews between 2002 and 2008. In all, there are 779 total documents that are in the process of being released. The files are officially titled Detainee Assessment Briefs.

In the Daniel Pearl slaying, according to the newly released material, Sayf al-Adl, a former top Al Qaeda military commander, was outspoken in cautioning Mohammed against killing the reporter. But Mohammed turned for guidance to another Al Qaeda leader, identified as Sharif al-Masri, the group's chief financial officer, and the two of them "disagreed with Adl on this point." Next, "Pearl was taken to the house of Al Qaeda's finance chief in Pakistan, Saud Memon, and murdered" there.

Mohammed boasted in the documents that the "planes operation" of Sept. 11 was his "dream and life's work." A Pakistani raised in Kuwait, he was captured in March 2003, totally disheveled but wearing a ring and a Casio wristwatch, and later was forced to undergo 183 separate water-boarding treatments to get him to talk.

He described a plan to build remote-controlled firing devices disguised as Sega video game cartridges. He began preparations for bombing "the tallest building in California" — presumably the Library Tower (now the U.S. Bank tower) in Los Angeles, "using at least two separate shoe bombs to gain access to the cockpit."

He wanted to hit CIA and FBI headquarters and nuclear power plants, hack into U.S. bank computers and hijack U.S. cargo planes. He discussed a series of natural gas explosions he wanted to perpetrate in Chicago and researched "the feasibility of an operation to set fire to a hotel or gas station" there.

More at the link above.

RELATED: At Telegraph UK, "WikiLeaks: Guantánamo Bay terrorists radicalised in London to attack Western target," and "WikiLeaks: leaked files accuse BBC of being part of a 'possible propaganda media network." No surprise there. Next we'll see files showing NYT as part of a propaganda media network, etc.

Julian Assange's Prosecutor Accused of Anti-Men Bias

The surprise of the century, no doubt. At Time, "Courtroom Conflict":

The extradition hearings in London Monday of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange drips with intrigue: a mysterious Australian hacker accused of sex crimes by two Swedish women. Now add this to the mix: Monday, a retired female judge accused the female Swedish prosecutor attempting to extradite Assange of having a "biased view" against men.

As part of the two-day hearing to determine whether Assange should be taken to Sweden to face sex-crimes charges, retired Swedish appeal court judge Brita Sundberg-Weitman launched an outspoken attack on Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny. Sundberg-Weitman was flown to London by Assange's legal team to give evidence supporting their argument that Assange's extradition would be a "flagrant denial of justice".

They got their money's worth, as Sundberg-Weitman a published academic and associate professor at Stockholm University, accused Ny of having a "rather biased view against men," according to an account by Britain's Press Assocation.

More at the link above, and at Telegraph UK, "Julian Assange extradition hearing: Swedish prosecutor 'is biased against men': Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks website, is the victim of a "malicious" attempt to extradite him by a Swedish prosecutor who is "biased against men", a court has been told."

I've been meaning to update my reporting on this, but once Phyllis Chesler weighed in I paused a bit to think it through. See, "NewsReal Faux Feminist Naomi Wolf Joins Assange in Crusade to Bring Down America."

I still might have some commentary, perhaps reconciling the dual strands of feminism animating the case.

The Extreme Anti-Americanism of Julian Assange

It's an obvious point.

I've stressed Julian Assange's extreme hostility to the United States over and over again. But because WikiLeaks is so romanticized --- Time's readers wanted him as Person of the Year --- that the point gets lost sometimes.

But Jonathan Foreman places the WikiLeaks founder's anti-Americanism front-and-center in an analysis of what motivates the former computer hacker. And this essay is one of the best I've seen, "The WikiLeaks War on America":

Assange is so much an auto-didact and self-creation that one hesitates to place him in any particular political school. However, his conviction that the United States, especially its military, is a priori evil is very much in accord with a current on the Australian left associated with John Pilger, a celebrated journalist and filmmaker, and the late Wilfred Burchett, a star journalist and likely KGB agent who championed the cause of North Korea. For Pilger, who writes a column for the New Statesman and produces documentaries that make Michael Moore look like Glenn Beck, all American interventions are imperialistic and carried out at the behest of sinister corporations and plutocrats, and even Communist crimes like those of the Khmer Rouge are really the fault of the United States. This brand of virulent anti-Americanism, common in Australian academic circles, seems to have curdled during the Vietnam War (in which Australian troops fought). But when probing Assange’s writings for his politics, it is also worth noting that Australian leftism has long had a strong anarchist current, awash in nostalgic sympathy for the rebels and bandits who had been transported to the continent when it was a prison colony of the British Empire.

Assange seems to suffer from a more extreme version of a phenomenon common in anti-war circles in Britain and America: the absolute unquestioned certainty that American forces have been and are continuing to be guilty of terrible crimes because of their very nature. It is a form of knowledge that requires no evidence or certainly no confirmation by a court of law. And in Assange’s case, it apparently means that the Americans are now and always have been the bad guys.

Certainly, when Assange told Der Spiegel in the course of an interview about the War Logs that “I enjoy crushing bastards,” the bastards to whom he referred were not the Taliban, which kills women for learning to read; the Sunni insurgents who blow up packed Iraqi marketplaces and mosques; or the Shia militants who do Iran’s murderous dirty work in Iraq and Lebanon.

Assange was also revealing more than mere cold-bloodedness in his responses to criticism for revealing in the War Logs the names of Afghans cited as informants or employees of U.S. troops. First he said that if something happened to them as a result, it was certainly unfortunate, but it was collateral damage from his campaign for truth. But he also told the Times of London that Afghan informers for the coalition had behaved “in a criminal way.” They were, in other words, on the wrong side, mere collaborators who had put themselves in danger of reprisal. It would seem that, in Assange’s worldview, the Taliban is the legitimate government of Afghanistan, resisting imperialist invaders.

Until his arrest in December in London on the rape charges that had so concerned his Wiki-Leaks colleagues, Assanche himself was lving a cloak-and-dagger, semi-fugitive existence, sleeping on floors and communicating only through disposable mobile phones or online. It may therefore be no surprise that WikiLeaks itself functions like a private version of the intelligence organizations he hates and fears. And while he may see himself as a kind of cyber Robin Hood, and enjoyed being called a “James Bond of journalism” in Sweden, he more closely resembles one of those James Bond villains who runs a secret international criminal organization and has the desire if not the power to destroy a sovereign state he considers his enemy.

It is telling that, for all the talk of Assange’s courage in taking on the American goliath, the truth is that his assault on the U.S. government has not put him at great risk. Assange has long liked to talk in what seems like a self-dramatizing way about his persecution by the authorities, complaining of “covert following and hidden photography” by police and intelligence agencies. The truth is that both the Bush and Obama administrations have proved remarkably feckless and feeble in their response to the War Logs and, worse, in the latter’s failure to prevent the publication of the State Department cables it knew was coming. Indeed, the very fact that, despite the revelations before the April 2010 video, Assange remained alive and at liberty to continue and do even greater damage gives the lie to his paranoid fears of ruthless, hyper-powerful Western states capable of wiping out all truth and justice unless their actions are exposed by people like him.

It would be interesting to see if Assange ever dares to take on the Russian FSB, the Chinese government, or even the French security services—all of which would have far fewer scruples about lethally punishing him than the American state he believes is so dangerous.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir

I saw this on Twitter last night, and no denying her updates are fascinating (here, for example). So is her homepage. She's a political radical and former WikiLeaks activist who co-produced the "Collateral Damage" propaganda video, and a Member of the Icelandic Parliament now in the spotlight during the latest turn in the ongoing WikiLeaks investigation See NYT, "U.S. Subpoenas Twitter Over WikiLeaks Supporters" (and Memeorandum):

The move to get the information from five prominent figures tied to the group was revealed late Friday when Birgitta Jonsdottir, a former WikiLeaks activist who is also a member of Iceland’s Parliament, said she had received a notification of the subpoena from the social networking site Twitter.



The United States government, she said in a subsequent message, “wants to know about all my tweets and more since November 1st 2009. Do they realize I am a member of parliament in Iceland?”



The subpoena, obtained by the Web site Salon.com, was issued by the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia on Dec. 14 and asks for the complete account information of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the United States Army intelligence specialist awaiting a military court martial under suspicion of leaking materials to WikiLeaks, as well as Ms. Jonsdottir, Mr. Assange, and two computer programmers, Rop Gonggrijp and Jacob Appelbaum. That information includes addresses, screen names, telephone numbers, and credit card and bank account numbers. But the subpoena does not ask for the content of private messages sent using Twitter.



It was unsealed, allowing Twitter to inform those concerned, on Jan. 5.

RELATED: From Jónsdóttir last January, " A Call to the People of the World to Support Iceland Against the Financial Blackmail of the British and Dutch Governments and the IMF."

April Glaspie Memo Leaked

By Wikileaks, and leftist historian Juan Cole was all over it: "Glaspie Memo Vindicates Her, Shows Saddam’s Thinking."

She wasn't "vindicated," actually.

And Cole takes heat in the comments, and this one's representative:

I generally enjoy your blog posts, and read your blog regularly, however every once in a while you’ll write something that I just can’t understand coming from you. Usually it’s something supportive about Obama (which really from your position on middle eastern affairs makes absolutely no sense whatsoever – think Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel/Palestine, etc…).

Now, though, you write this. As another has said, this information has been out in the open for years. You write an article claiming that this old information purportedly “exonerates [Glaspie] from the charges by her political enemies in the US Congress that she inadvertently gave Saddam a green light to invade Kuwait.”

Yet the case against Glaspie has NEVER been that she gave an EXPLICIT “green light” to Saddam to invade Kuwait, but rather that her indifference on the matter was interpreted by Saddam as “good enough”. Nobody has accused Glaspie of giving Saddam “permission” to invade Kuwait. This entire article, based on years old information, is completely misguided.

I’m no defender of Saddam, but I am a defender of accurate and factual reporting on historical events. Your assertion that Saddam was “paranoid and desperate” and your implication that Iraq WASN’T in financial crisis is absurd. It is a fact that at the conclusion of the war Iraq had around $130 billion in international debt excluding interest. To portray that as simply an assertion of Saddam’s is dishonest.

I’m so sick of people painting this as such a black-and-white issue, and you should know better, Juan. The disputes between Iraq and Kuwait were not solely the fault of Iraq, even less so the fault of Saddam’s “paranoia”.

At the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq WAS in serious financial trouble. Kuwait WAS exploiting the situation by over-producing oil in order to hold down Iraq’s economy. There WAS a legitimate border dispute between Iraq and Kuwait regarding slant drilling to be investigated. These disputes between the two states were exploited by the Ba’ath administration as a pretext for invasion, probably due to the economic pressure it was under (NOT “Saddam’s paranoia”). This was done following consultation with Glaspie, who never offered a concrete position on the matter. BOTH states are responsible for exploiting the situation to their benefit, which culminated in the invasion of Kuwait.

Kuwait isn’t simply the helpless victim as it was portrayed when the US exploited the situation in the exact same way, leading to the Gulf War. Its actions towards Iraq contributed to the lead up to the invasion.

A responsible historian would portray this event in its totality, including the actions of both sides which led up to the invasion. A responsible historian would identify where both legitimate grievences lie and where states are exploiting the situation to further their own interests. A responsible historian wouldn’t paint this in such a storybook manner, as you have here, with Saddam being the evil, “paranoid” mustache-twirling villain and Kuwait the helpless damsel in distress.

I would obviously be interested in hearing your response, or your justification for either this article or for your portrayal of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in general. I’m not trying to attack you but it’s just really disappointing when someone I hold in such high regard writes something as inaccurate and low quality as this. As I said before, I just can’t understand it.

Naomi Wolf Feminist Concern Troll — 'If One Makes a Serious Criminal Accusation, One Must Be Treated As a Moral Adult'

I'm getting that partial title off this awful hate-Naomi Twitter feed.

Turn's out there's a huge uproar on the extreme gender-left over Naomi Wolf's latest piece at The Guardian, "Julian Assange's Sex-Crime Accusers Deserve to Be Named" (at Memeorandum).

And in an unusual twist, Ms. Naomi enters the comments section to defend herself, for example:

Well, I have now read all comments. Obviously and understandably very strong feelings and opinions stirred by my piece. To my fellow feminists, I wish to be completely clear about my experience that led me to this position: it derives from working WITH rape and sexual abuse victims IN the United Kingdom. Again and again I saw how the secrecy that surrounds this issue and their identities was used by police, defendants, and society in general -- and especially the media -- to inflame rape stereotypes and most of all to ensure that women who were raped or sexually assaulted had an ice cube's chance in hell of getting any serious justice. I also reported on my own experience with sexual harassment at Yale and reported out two decades of serious sex crime at Yale that was similarly swept under the rug -- to the point that an accused rapist (professor) had gotten several other positions where similar accusations arose -- and the practice of dealing with these accusations anonymously guaranteed that there was NO accountability institutionally and that future victims could not be protected. I also do believe strongly that rape should be treated, as we used to say in the second wave, like any other crime and that if we really want to communicate to our daughters that it is not a woman's stigma (if she is the victim) or a woman's fault then shielding her identity conveys the opposite. If it is his crime why should she have to hide? Of course rape is terribly traumatic. My mother was raped when she was twelve and she agrees with my position on this and gave me her permission to say so and to disclose her experience. The practice of secrecy is presented as a support for victims but in practice simply serves impunity for rapists and impunity for organizations in which rape and sexual assault are endemic. I am sorry it seems that many readers cast this position as anti-feminist and assume I have no familiarity with this issue; had I not seen rapists treated with impunity in your nation's system, and seen so many victims vilified in the media and denied justice systematically, I too would have believed the canard that anonymity serves women. I say again, it serves rapists.

And here's Ian B.'s take:

Naomi Wolf is an icon of feminism. In making this argument she has broken ranks with other feminists. Schadenfreude at the the sight of them rending each other is never far away, but schadenfreude does not actually give me an answer as to whether anonymity in rape cases is a good or a bad thing. I have bitterly criticised feminists and anti-rape activists in the past for their wilful denial of the possibility of false accusations of rape. I sneer at Naomi Wolf's late discovery of this type of possible injustice. Yet she makes a strong argument:

"Though children's identities should, of course, be shielded, women are not children. If one makes a serious criminal accusation, one must be treated as a moral adult."

Against that is a more nebulous pressure, but one with deep roots in the human psyche: rape is different from other forms of assault. The trauma of a rape victim, male or female, does not arise only from the physical injuries received. Harm is done to them by having the fact that they have suffered such a violation made public. Some victims would feel unable to come forward if it were to be made public.

Yet other rape victims argue that this reluctance merely reinforces the barbaric idea that there is something shameful in being raped. We use the word shame to mean too many things.

Christian Caryl, Contributing Editor at Foreign Policy and Newsweek, Slams Julian Assange and WikiLeaks

And Caryl's currently a Senior Fellow at MIT's Center for International Studies (CIS). And he's got a refreshing take on the WikiLeaks phenomenon, at New York Review, "Why WikiLeaks Changes Everything":

Among the cables released so far are revelations that have prompted headlines around the world, but there are also dispatches on Bavarian election results and Argentine maritime law. If the aim is to strike a blow against American imperial designs—as Assange has suggested in some of his statements—I don’t see how these particular cables support it. Assange has claimed to Time magazine that he wants to “make the world more civil” by making secretive organizations like the US State Department and Department of Defense accountable for their actions; he also told Time that, as an alternative, he wants to force them “to lock down internally and to balkanize,” protecting themselves by becoming more opaque and thereby more “closed, conspiratorial and inefficient.” This is, to say the least, a patently contradictory agenda; I’m not sure how we’re supposed to make sense of it. In practical terms it seems to boil down to a policy of disclosure for disclosure’s sake. This is what the technology allows, and Assange has merely followed its lead. I don’t see coherently articulated morality, or immorality, at work here at all; what I see is an amoral, technocratic void.

As Alan Cowell has written in The New York Times, the careers of some foreign officials—and not necessarily high-level ones—have already been destroyed or threatened by these revelations.

In at least one case the person’s name had been redacted, but his identity was clear enough from the context. One is justified in asking: Will deaths occur as these and other statements are published? We do not know, and we may not hear about them if they do. But damage of various kinds is sure to result. (For his part, Assange seems remarkably unable to discuss these very real dangers; in the Time interview he claims that “this sort of nonsense about lives being put into jeopardy” is simply an excuse.) Can WikiLeaks at least tell us why this was necessary?

In the old days, journalists would have done what WikiLeaks’s print media partners, like The Guardian and Der Spiegel, are attempting to do now: make judgments about which documents to release and whether or not to redact the names mentioned in them based on the larger public interest and the risk of inflicting harm on innocent bystanders. Yet one cannot escape the feeling that the entire exercise is rendered tragicomically moot by the mountain of raw material looming, soon to be equally accessible, in the background. Khatchadourian contends that WikiLeaks is evolving into something more like a conventional journalistic organization, one that will make value judgments about what it’s doing rather than simply dumping documents into cyberspace willy-nilly. But the sheer scale of what the group does suggests that this is something of a fool’s errand. Assange says the organization has been releasing the cables at the rate of about eighty a day. (By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that means that we have three thousand days of revelations to go as this article goes to press.)

The comparison some people have been making between the WikiLeaks document dumps and the Pentagon Papers affair back in the 1970s is illuminating precisely because it shows how little the two stories have in common. As pointed out by Max Frankel, an ex–New York Times editor who was one of those overseeing publication of the papers, the leaker in that case, Daniel Ellsberg,

was not breaching secrecy for its own sake, unlike the WikiLeakers of today; he was looking to defeat a specific government policy. Moreover, he was acutely conscious of the risks of disclosure and did not distribute documents betraying live diplomatic efforts to negotiate an end to the fighting. And it took him years to find a credible medium of distribution, which is now available at the push of a button.

I’m fully aware that Daniel Ellsberg has lent his support to Julian Assange. That’s his right. But I think he might be overlooking a few vital points.

One of the most obvious is that WikiLeaks is posting these raw documents on the Web, the most permissive information medium we have yet to invent. As a result we are now experiencing yet another jump from the ploddingly analog to the explosively digital. Just as the concept of “privacy” fades into obscurity when sixteen-year-olds can present their innermost thoughts to an audience of billions, so, too, the Internet distribution of official secrets changes the rules of the game. Once all the documents are online they will be subjected not only to the often clumsy ministrations of journalists and historians but also to the far more efficient data-mining programs and pattern- analysis software of foreign governments and private companies (the extent of which, in the case of China’s handling of Google, the cables themselves make clear). The implications for the conduct of government policy (not to mention individual lives) are monumental. I wish I could predict what they might be, but I can’t. I’m not sure anyone can.

There's more at the link.

I noted Caryl's credentials at the title above because he seems so unusual --- and incredibly lucid. Continuing the essay he unfolds the logic of the argument, which is to say that the enormity of the latest WikiLeaks data dump is greater than any one individual or institution to manage. And the consequences --- collateral damage for the information leakers, who are less interested in changing policies than they are in bringing down governments --- are the untold and potentially catastrophic risks to the lives and careers of honest people carrying out their jobs in government, military institutions, humanitarian organizations, and so forth. These are questions ultimately of tremendous power, and Caryl in fact indicates his support for much of what WikiLeaks is supposedly all about --- greater transparency and accountability of governments. But in the end, Julian Assange comes out looking both quite poor and insignificant in this account. And Caryl perhaps might have continued a bit more by delving into the motivations of Assange, and especially his more enthusiastic adherents on the anarcho- and neo-communist left. If there was ever an equalizing force for anti-establishment actors to take down the state sources of world hegemonic power, WikiLeaks is it. Its utility lies not so much in exposure of government duplicity, corruption, or realpolitik, but in radicalizing the radicals, and enabling their growing revolutionary program. And recall there's an almost perfect ideological correlation betwen those who favor and those who oppose the WikiLeaks project. Even purportedly moderate leftists are gung ho on this transformationalist agenda, while either naive or in conscious denial to the nihilist destruction that's essential to the anarcho- and neo-communist program. Caryl does yoeman's work in getting the alternative meme out in leftist outlets like New York Review. It's an interesting development that will hopefully gain traction.

I'll have more later, in any case ...

Kate Ausburn Enters #MooreandMe Feminist Minefield

Kate Ausburn, out of Sydney, Australia, has offered the latest pushback against the #MooreandMe ayatollahs, "Why Feminists and the Left Must Defend Julian Assange":

The key demands in the campaign to support Assange are that he be presumed innocent until proven otherwise, that he receive a fair and just trial, and included in that, the recognition of the case as being one against allegations of sexual misconduct by Assange and not a case against Wikileaks and its role in publishing leaked documents.

Well, extreme gender feminists have called Assange a liar, so I doubt the assumption of innocence is really in play here. But Ausburn continues:

It is important that the left continues to defend Assange’s right to a fair trial. It is not up to the media, politicians, or water-cooler conversations to condemn Assange or decide his fate, or that of Wikileaks. As Glenn Greenwald told CNN on Monday 27 December 2010: “People should go to jail when they are charged with a crime, and they are convicted of that crime, in a court of law.”

Some facts of which are certain: Assange remained in Sweden for more than a month after the initial allegations were made, he complied fully with police questioning at the time. The current arrest warrant was issued “in relation to questions the prosecutors’ office wishes him to answer regarding the accusations” (Sydney Morning Herald on 24 December 2o10).

Assange has at no time been charged with any crime and neither he or his lawyers have received evidence from Sweden of the crimes he is accused of having committed. Assange will next appear in court on 11 January for a case management session and again on 7 and 8 February for his extradition hearing.

It is up to us to ensure the process involved in prosecuting any charges brought against Assange in this case be fair and just, and that a sexual misconduct case does not instead become a case to stifle freedom of information or publishing rights.

Expect updates.

Daniel Ellsberg Responds

Daniel Ellsberg responded last night to critics of his defense of Julian Assange: "Your critiques and skepticism are all understandable and reasonable; I will respond soon on my blog." I'll bring that to readers when it's available. At the clip is Ellsberg in mid-December:

Daniel Ellsberg Defends Julian Assange Against 'False and Slanderous' Rape Allegations

Well, I wonder what hashtag the extreme gender feminists will come up with now?



I reported earlier on the Trotskyite defense of Julian Assange, which frankly offered a brutal take-down of the feminist-left's "legitimizing the suppression of nonconformists and political dissidents." And now comes news that antiwar icon Daniel Ellsberg is dissing the rape allegations, on Twitter:

Greg Mitchell at The Nation retweeted, and Melissa McEwan picked it up and ran with it, "The Thing Is, Rapists Lie":

I wonder if Ellsberg has also personally heard the accounts of Assange's accusers, and found them unconvincing. I doubt it.



I suspect that he just assumes that they would sound like liars, were he to speak to them, because Assange sounded sincere. And why would he not make that assumption? One of the key narratives of the rape culture is that false accusations are extremely common. (They are not.)



Or maybe he just assumes that rapists are easily identifiable, that he can suss out a rapist by talking to him. Unlike the stupid women who trust them, date them, marry them, work alongside them unawares. Until.



It's funny, ahem, how much implicit victim-blaming is embedded in the assertion to know a man has been wrongly accused.



The truth is, it doesn't really matter what Assange or his accusers sound like to Ellsburg, or anyone else. Because sounding honest and being honest are often mutually exclusive concepts.



And rapists are excellent liars.

More at the link.



This is a fascinating development. It's hardly constroversial to suggest that Daniel Ellsberg is a far more iconic figure on the progressive left than is Michael Moore. But clearly his support for Assange has struck a nerve among hardline anti-rape culture feminists. And while Sady Doyle's 15 minutes are up, no doubt we'll be seeing another man-hating extremist take the baton. Seriously. How far will this go? Personally, I'm hoping to see Glenn Greenwald strapped to the stocks and lashed to a bloody pulp, although so far he's stayed clear of the feminist backlash. He does have a new essay typically attacking the media's "pro-war agitprop" during the Iraq war (via Memeorandum). And linked there is another piece on WikiLeaks from Newsweek: "Why Journalists Aren’t Standing Up for WikiLeaks." But the big story is this soap opera of whiny feminist progressives who just can't catch a break. And speaking of breaks: Julian Assange is trying to break governments. Feminists are crying over broken condoms. (But to be fair, it's more complicated, for sure, but following the revolt of the violent femmes this last couple of weeks does feed the cynicism just a bit.)

Trotskyite Fourth International Attacks The Nation's 'Right-Wing Campaign' Against Julian Assange

You know this whole radical progressive schism over the Assange rape allegations has gotten out of control when one of the world's leading revolutionary parties is pushing back against the feminist left's charges against the WikiLeaks frontman. See the Socialist Equality Party's, "The Nation Joins the Campaign Against Julian Assange."

This article is just too darn good --- and I hate to admit it because I'm so bloody anti-communist! The writer David Walsh, a top editor at World Socialist Web Site, just hammers Katha Pollitt and her recent piece on the rape allegations. See, "The Nation joins the campaign against Julian Assange." There's a lot to digest, and for a progressive/communist organization, I'm even a little surprised at the not so subtle political incorrectness. More on that below. The introduction is worth sharing first of all:

The Nation magazine in the US, with its publication of “The Case of Julian Assange” by columnist Katha Pollitt (posted December 22, 2010), has joined the right-wing campaign against WikiLeaks co-founder Assange, a campaign directed by the highest levels of the American state.



The sexual assault charges against Assange in Sweden are part of an orchestrated effort to divert public attention from the content of the WikiLeaks exposures—the duplicity, hypocrisy and criminality of American and world imperialism—and bury the important revelations in a pile of scandalous garbage. Pollitt has eagerly lent a hand to that effort.



Such a development was predictable, given the history of the journalist and the publication, but that does not make it any less reprehensible… or educational. The arguments employed by Pollitt shed further light on the politically rotten character of contemporary feminism and identity politics generally.

This is conspiracy theorizing par excellence, which I doubt could be improved upon by anyone to right or left of the author. But notice this as well:

This is not the first time we have noted the alliance of the extreme right and feminism. [http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/pola-o08.shtml] The latter has assumed deeply reactionary characteristics, misappropriating the movement for women’s rights that at one time was an element of the struggle against oppression.



Pollitt goes on to lambaste Assange’s supporters who have denounced the trumped-up and politically motivated character of the “rape” charges, including Truthout’s Dave Lindorff, filmmaker Michael Moore, MSNBC talk show host Keith Olbermann and feminists Naomi Wolf and Katrin Axelsson. “What's disturbing,” she writes, “is the way some WikiLeaks admirers have misrepresented the allegations, attacked the women and made light of date rape.”



Date rape has nothing to do with it, by the women’s own statements. The case involves consensual relations. Each of the women actively sought a sexual involvement with Assange.

I had to highlight that passage about the "deeply reactionary characteristics" of contemporary feminists. Sounds about right. And that last part about consensual relations is basically what Robert Stacy McCain said with "You buy the ticket, you take the ride" --- although I doubt The Other McCain would enjoy being lumped in with some Trotskyite revolutionary internationalists.



And here's my favorite:

Feminist opinion—as the Assange case and the Polanski affair before it have demonstrated—has become one of the means of legitimizing the suppression of nonconformists and political dissidents, and of changing the subject from the great social issues, above all, class oppression and social inequality, to stale and self-pitying concerns.

That whole thing could be placed in bold, but then none of it would be. I think folks catch my drift, in any case. "The means of legitimizing the suppression of nonconformists and political dissidents" has been the issue I've been exposing here this last few weeks. I'm especially interested in this since radical feminists are among the most fanatical activists you're likely to come across --- and I definitely get my quota of these types online. And clearly Sady Doyle's in a class all of her own. And while I'm getting a kick outta blogging the #MooreandMe campaign, I had to laugh out loud when I noticed that she'd unblocked me on Twittter the other day. Yep, she wants to see me tweets and she wants to read my blog. She won't link, but she's reading. And while of course there's nothing I could say to change any of her views --- considering that for Ms. Sady my effort to document her Stalinism confirms her whole program of Dworkinite feminist machinations (misogyny, blah, blah.) --- it's certainly worth it from my point of view. Some of her acolytes have been making sensational claims puffing up the impact of #MooreandMe to the scale of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Michael Moore really is a god if women today have placed him on par with Martin Luther King, Jr. The flip side is that of course such inflation of accomplishments reveals how little today's feminists have left to achieve. Hey, once you bring down MLK let's go for dethroning the 16th President of the United States from the pantheon of America's greatest leaders. Shoot. Saving the Union from irreparable and violent dissolution? That's nothing compared to getting the Flint Fatso to confess on Rachel Maddow on MSNBC that "every woman who claims to have been raped has to be, must be taken seriously ..." Blah, blah. Gosh. I mean, wow. That has to be Michael Moore's Appomattox. Ms. Sady is the rail splitter of the radical gender feminist contingents! Surrender!



More later ...

Le Monde Names Julian Assange Man of the Year

Jazz Shaw has the story at The Green Room.

Also, a useful roundup from CBS News, "How WikiLeaks Enlightened Us in 2010."

And here's communist Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! year-end review, "Julian Assange on WikiLeaks, War and Resisting Government Crackdown" (transcribed at the link):

PREVIOUSLY: "WikiLeaks — News Story of the Year." Plus, "Progressives and the Julian Assange Rape Allegations." (And WikiLeaks search results at the link.)

RELATED: "White Knights and Rape Culture."

Pressure Builds on Wired to Release Lamo Chat Logs

Glenn Greenwald keeps pushing.

And now this at The Guardian, "Wired Journalists Deny Cover-Up Over WikiLeaks Boss and Accused U.S. Soldier."

Some background at Reason, "What's in the Manning/Lamo WikiLeaks Chat Logs?" And from the Boing Boing asshats, "Greenwald vs. Wired in 1000 words or thereabouts." More from Blake Hounshell, "The curious case of Glenn Greenwald vs. Wired magazine," and, especially interesting, from Felix Salmon, "The Evanescence of Twitter Debates."

And man, the radical progressives really want these logs released. At Firedoglake, "The Unlikely Story of Adrian Lamo, Bradley Manning, Wired Magazine and the Federal Government," "If the Justice Department Is Investigating Manning-Wikileaks, Why Isn’t It Investigating Lamo-Wired?", and "Pulling Some Threads on Lamo’s Inconsistencies."

PREVIOUSLY: "Wired Battles Glenn Greenwald."

The True Face of Anarchy

From Doctor Zero, at Human Events:

Anarchy is difficult to pin down as a political movement. Anarchist groups, unsurprisingly, squabble among themselves quite a bit. Many of them are essentially leftist or Marxist groups trying to rebrand themselves, but others declare themselves equally opposed to capitalist and Marxist concepts of order. The Greek militants organizations have flourished during riots caused by austerity measures designed to hold off government collapse, which gives us the spectacle of “anarchists” furious that a bankrupt government won’t keep giving them stuff. The Italian anarchist movement has deep roots in communism, dating back to the 19th century.

The Anarchist International Information Service defines their philosophy as “system and management without rulers, i.e. co-operation without repression, tyranny, and slavery.” For the record, they don’t think much of the Informal Anarchist Federation. It is, however, difficult to follow the ideal of “horizontal organization” to any other conclusion except violence and repression. In practice, anarchy is not the absence of rulers. It is the rule of brutality.

Society does not naturally assume a “horizontal” configuration. It must be beaten into that shape. People willingly cooperate and seek leadership, for better or worse. They must be violently prevented from doing this, and those who wield the violence become the new leaders, selected by their willingness to kill off those who would have assumed the position through merit.

Communism, Marxism, socialism, and every other incarnation of supposedly “compassionate” collectivism are sold as pathways to horizontal organization. “From each according to his means, to each according to his needs” is meant to express the moral superiority of demand, in which needs dictate the allocation of resources. This ignores the tremendous amount of deadly force necessary to take “from each according to his means.”

The anarchist is really just another species of collectivist, who holds romantic notions about the level of violence necessary to destroy the existing order, while pointedly ignoring the level of violence needed to sustain the “anarchy” he would replace it with.

There's more at the link.

RELATED: "WikiLeaks — News Story of the Year."

WikiLeaks — News Story of the Year

Read Nick Gillespie's essay, "The #1 Game-Changer of 2010: Wikileaks By a Landslide." The key point is that unlike the umpteen other purported "game-changing" news stories, WikiLeaks is genuinely new. And Gillespie argues the frequently heard point that WikiLeaks' impact goes far beyond one individual, such as Julian Assange. Beside that though is to what effect? What's the utility beyond the crazed anarchist's dream of sowing mayhem and destroying state operations, if not the state. We get that discussion at this Reason video, which features Eli Lake, Aaron David Miller, Steven Aftergood, and Heather Hurlburt (in that initial order).

It's a thoughtful clip, although there's a bit of romanticism at parts. I like Lake's comments on the immediate impact of simply generating greater knowledge of international actor behavior and interests. Miller's comments are both lyrical and penetrating. He suggests that the effects could be like footsteps on the beach, possibly washed away by the next big wave. Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, is matter-of-fact and to the point (and agreeable if not that animated), and, sorry, but I'm not learning much from Hurlburt.

What's just barely touched is the effect of WikiLeaks on the continued rise of anti-Americanism in the world. Eli Lake mentions this at the start of the clip, but the point gets lost at the remainder of the discussion. WikiLeaks has tightened the tacit alliance between the anarcho-libertarians and the neo-communist progressives. Nick Gillespie is a respectable guy, but the problem with libertarianism is that its adherents give cover for some of the most vile revolutionary doctrines now gaining increased respectability. See, "WikiLeaks: The Revolutionary as Entrepreneur." More on that later. Meanwhile see my previous entries, "How Communists Exploit WikiLeaks," and "Exposing the WikiLeaks/Communist/Media Alliance."

RELATED: "Wired Battles Glenn Greenwald."

ADDED: Linked at The Rhetorican!

Wired Battles Glenn Greenwald

At The Atlantic Wire, "The Epic Fight Between Wired and Glenn Greenwald." And following the links takes us to Wired's big response to the Greenwald smears: "Putting the Record Straight on the Lamo-Manning Chat Logs." The debate is raging at Memeorandum as well. And see Karl at Patterico's, for example: "Wired gets tired of Glenn Greenwald." And here's the clip of the Jessica Yellin/Glenn Greenwald exchange that's also been buzzing:

Progressives and the Julian Assange Rape Allegations

I thought I really had no meta-theoretical update to my previous comments on developments. Yet it turns out l that I did have something in mind, especially after seeing Richard Adams' essay at The Guardian, "#MooreandMe: the hashtag that roared." It's not easy, but I'm genuinely flabbergasted at progressives' uncritical and superficial response to Sady Doyle's campaign. And Adams here is just prostrate. It's almost comical. I'm picking him as he explains Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann's responses:

For a week, Moore didn't respond to the tide of protest. Olbermann did, foolishly and petulantly, only to make matters worse – boasting that "Feminism has no greater male supporter in TV news than me", and at one point proclaiming he was suspending his Twitter account "until/if this frenzy is stopped", although he failed to take his own good advice.

Other writers waded in and got caught in the fallout: the journalist Moe Tkacik posted at the Washington City Paper, describing #MooreandMe as "near-homicidal #rage" while naming the two women (something the Guardian and New York Times have avoided as a matter of policy), only for her editors to yank the piece. The blogging pioneer Dave Winer produced an artless car-crash of arguments that might have worked as parody. Naomi Wolf continued her upside-down defence of Assange – as can be heard in her debate with Jaclyn Friedman on Democracy Now. And so on.

In the end, though, it was Moore – without addressing #MooreandMe directly – who gave way, with his appearance on Rachel Maddow's show. Olbermann ...

RTWT at the link.



And notice Adams' mention of Moe Tkacik. I had a revealing Twitter exchange with her, and wrote it up here. What I like about her is that she wants to think things through --- to put intellect over ideology --- and to resist the obtuse and frequently mendacious herd mentality of the hardline feminists. That's something we don't see much of in political debates these days, and it takes a lot of courage. Moe of course paid with her job, and Sady Doyle's bleating non-apologies after the fact are now legend. And now I'm seeing this piece at New York Times, which is refreshing, "Is It Rape? It Depends on Who Is Asking" (via Echidne and Memeorandum):

Is it rape when you have sex with someone who didn’t tell you it was O.K., but told you it was O.K. earlier that night?



The allegations of sexual assault by two Swedish women against Julian Assange, the founder of the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, have raised a series of questions, some silly (Is a broken condom a criminal offense?), some preposterous (Were the two women on the C.I.A. payroll?), but at least one worth mulling: What, today, constitutes sexual violence?



According to a leaked police report, Swedish prosecutors want to question Mr. Assange on allegations of rape in only one of the two cases: The woman in question, a WikiLeaks groupie, let him spend the night at her apartment and had consensual sex with him at least once (reportedly with a condom). She then testified to falling asleep and being woken later by him penetrating her (without a condom).



She only went to the police days afterward, when she discovered by talking to another woman with whom Mr. Assange had stayed that the second woman, too, felt violated after he was reluctant to use a condom and then allegedly “did something” to make it break. (The allegation here is sexual molestation.)



In recent conversations, reactions among my girlfriends — all in their 30s, and most in steady, heterosexual relationships — were forceful, and almost unanimous.



“It cheapens rape,” one said.



“Why get the police into the bedroom over something like this? Grow up,” said another.



“He sounds really sleazy,” said a third, “but not exactly like a rapist.”

That's just the introduction (so RTWT). But this reminds me Andrea Grimes' essay, "Girl Talk: Who Will Rape Me?" Whereas those at the New York Times essay take the big picture, progressive feminists make essentially extremist arguments that in the end work primarily to shut down competing perspectives. And this is what I find so fascinating. I don't doubt that Assange may have committed rape (especially if he pinned down Ms. A). But to even raise the point is to summons the progressive left's neo-Stalinist commissars, most prominently Sady Doyle. Here's the query from a woman on Twitter I last night:

That's a really powerful question-cum-indictment, and it triggered a series of Tweets from Ms. Doyle (scroll down to December 28th). Basically, she claims she's a victim. After being called "hundreds of names" she snapped, because "I thought feminists had my back." The problem, of course, is that if you're the bully you can't expect folks to "have your back." If coercive power isn't enough, "friends" will defect. Ms. Sady's effective, though, and persistent. And she's obviously impressed loads of less aggressive women who wanted to be a part of the "movement." And apparently this movement is way more "revolutionary" than what Assange has on offer, at least to hear this guy Bill Weinberg make the case:

Demonizing "revolutionary feminism"

The most blatantly irritating thing is abject demonization of the women who have made the charges of sexual abuse against Assange. In any other context, the summary dismissal of a woman's rape accusations would be seen as utterly politically incorrect. But Assange gets away with anti-feminist rhetoric that would do Rush Limbaugh proud. In an interview now receiving widespread coverage in the British press (e.g. The Telegraph, Dec. 26), Assange says: "Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism... I fell into a hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism." Assange added that one of the women who said she was assaulted took a "trophy photo" of him lying naked in her bed. (TMI, Julian.)

Especially sickening is Naomi Wolf, who sneers in Huffington Post at the international "Dating Police" that have snared Assange. Flaunting her supposed creds as a "longtime feminist activist" in the opening sentence, she writes that "Assange is accused of having consensual sex with two women, in one case using a condom that broke." A Dec. 17 account in The Guardian (based on Swedish police documents that were—ahem—leaked) paints a rather different picture. (E.g.: "She told police that she had tried a number of times to reach for a condom but Assange had stopped her by holding her arms and pinning her legs.") John Pilger, who presumably wasn't there when the putative leg-pinning took place, nonetheless told ABC Sydney on Dec. 8 the case against Assange is a "political stunt." Wolf's glib dismissal of the allegations is especially ironic in light of her own sexual harassment claims against Harold Bloom, which many had similarly dismissed as spurious (e.g. Meghan O'Rourke in Slate, Feb. 25, 2004).

I've covered much of this already, but Weinberg's links open to news windows, so cruise around.

There are still some commentators who continue to go big on WikiLeaks' power to destroy sovereign state power, especially Glenn Greenwald. He's gotten so hysterical that he's now gone after Wired Magazine with a series of sensational allegations essentially claiming that the magazine's a tool of the national security state. The editors have responded here: "Putting the Record Straight on the Lamo-Manning Chat Logs."

So here we can see the big picture coming together again. Radical feminists have put progressive solidarity against rape culture to the forefront of the cause. Meanwhile, an anarchist-libertarian-progressive alliance of sorts has been promoting WikiLeaks as the model of 21st century quasi-journalistic accountability. And to be sure, there's been some extremely revealing --- and perhaps even worthwhile --- findings with this last batch of cables. But for the most part we've seen something of a nihilistic destruction of ordered relations among states and their agents. Just yesterday we learned that WikiLeaks had compromise the opposition movement in Zimbabwe. See, "How WikiLeaks Just Set Back Democracy in Zimbabwe," and "Morgan Tsvangirai faces possible Zimbabwe treason charge." And some say WikiLeaks is here for good? At this point I'm simply hoping for Assange's extradition. He can go up on charges under the Espionage Act as far as I'm concerned. The outcome wouldn't make me any more likely to take serious the left's charges of a "CIA honey-trap operation."



Image Credit: American Digest.

Moe Tkacik Responds

After a brief exchange, Moe Tkacik sent me a burst of tweets which combined to form something of a paragraph:

@AmPowerBlog omg how did I back off? There were a few tiny factual pts abt which I didn't feel like arguing in part due to solstice spirit ... always thought he was creepy but condom sabotage in consen sex not equiv of rape unless disease/impregnation is intent/result ... but! I'm not swedish law, and to me I realize this is largely abt language, and how precise and evocative you want words to be ... Guess I just dont want rape bcoming another "freedom",tho unsure what best evokes pantsless julian rubbing up agnst you/yr will ... I know and I commented bc i was surprised that was her reaction. By the end we kind of figured out where we differed...but ... also, no disrespect to naomi wolf, although "earth tones" etc etc. I found facts of case intriguing. Esp as someone who always ... wonders if it would have been a good idea to report my date rape? 90% of the time I think "no" but marcotte did make me think ... that since all that is likely to happen is he'll get a stern and semi-traumatic interrogation by police, everyone should do it ... pinning her down hpnd to Miss A right? Thought it was interesting that it didn't seem like she ever wld have gone to cops until ... younger miss W was so traumatized by the thing. Then ms A reexamined her own "worst sex ever" and (in my comic book imagination ... became filled with righteous rage on behalf of the sisterhood which is often not first thought when "worst sex ever" happens ... because young sluts are often too busy thinking "oh no am I a slut?" or "what slut disease do I have now?" Whereas old sluts ... are irritated but hardly traumatized, since let's be honest after a certain age no man can ever violate you like yr sexist boss ... anyway, I hadn't seen one dude committing two date rapes close enough for victims to confer. It was cool. There are worse probs ... and I can't tell you why the "CIA conspiracy" crap so angered the Lady Doyle set, bc obv the timing screamed "bitch(es)setmeup" ... but since Assange cant claim credit for stylish prose of cables or mindless violence of iraq footage,it doesn't really matter?

RELATED: "Rehabilitated Moe Tkacik Dishes on Robert Stacy McCain!"

Rehabilitated Moe Tkacik Dishes on Robert Stacy McCain!

Here's the dirt on Robert Stacy McCain's creds in the feminist blogosphere. We've got Amanda Marcotte dishing on the infamous "You buy the ticket, you take the ride" argument, and then we have Moe Tkacik's admission that McCain is the one Washington Times journalist that she "sometimes pays attention to because he's so radical."

What's amazing is that the #MooreandMe protest doesn't come up --- or at least not in the 25 minutes I watched. I stopped watching after that. The discussion devolved into gratuitous and surprisingly prurient sex talk, with an extremely selective commentary on the Julian Assange allegations. Note especially Moe's aggressive progressive feminist walk-back, since the discussion of her Washington City Paper piece is badly at odds with the reaction from Sady Doyle and her Twitter totalitarians. And Amanda Marcotte acknowledges so much at Pandagon:

I was ready for a fight, but Moe’s stance on both Wikileaks and the rape case changed considerably after that post, which also strangely includes ruminations on “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”, as if you can really extrapolate much about Swedish culture from a single exploitation series that has a sort of feminist message buried in a bunch of unsettling rape imagery. But the chat was amicable, and we agreed on most things, and I think it was really interesting.

We'll have to take Amanda's word for it, that she was "ready for a fight." She doesn't look flush with adrenaline at the start of the clip, but then, with all due respect, I think she's a more reasonable woman than Sady Doyle --- and that's saying a lot.

RELATED: "Unwatchable BloggingHeadsTV Episode in Which I’m Mentioned."