The smart guys at CNN pulled no punches when Sweden’s minister of justice and migration, Morgan Johansson, finally decided that he would send his investigators to London to interrogate Julian Assange of WikiLeaks who had taken refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador at Flat 3B, 3 Hans Crescent, London SW1X QLS for almost two and a half years. Even the British police were getting tired of the enormous cost of surveillance and the strain on their resources just to extradite one man to face charges of attempted rape filed by two ladies. The two women are not being named but in legal papers they are described only as AA and SW.
Against him back home in Stockholm, Assange has vehemently insisted that the encounters with the two ladies were consensual sex between two adults and that the whole setup was to extradite him to Sweden where he would be promptly handed over to US authorities who had reserved a special cell for him at Guantanamo Bay where he would be thoroughly interrogated for his embarrassing leaks of very sensitive information about the American CIA and other intelligence agencies. Much of the stuff was handed over to him by a serving officer in the US military Army Pfc Bradley Manning, who has since been convicted of Espionage Act and exposed as transvestite.
Anyway, what was even more amazing was that Julian Assange remained totally unrepentant and stoutly defiant. For good measure, he exploded with fury and threatened to spill even more damning and explosive revelations.
Julian Paul Assange (born 3 July, 1971) is an Australian publisher and journalist. He is known as the editor-in-chief of the website WikiLeaks, which he co-founded in 2006 after an earlier career in hacking and programming. WikiLeaks achieved particular prominence in 2010 when it published US military and diplomatic documents leaked by Chelsea Manning. Assange has been under investigation in the United States since that time. In the same year, the Swedish director of public prosecution opened an investigation into sexual offences that Assange is alleged to have committed. In 2012, facing extradition to Sweden, he sought refuge at the Embassy of Ecuador in London and was granted political asylum by Ecuador.
Assange began hacking in 1987 under the name Mendax (from Horace’s splendid mendax: “nobly untruthful”). He and two others – known as “Trax” and “Prime Suspect” – formed an ethical hacking group they called the International Subversives. During this time he hacked into the Pentagon and other US Department of Defense facilities, MILNET, the US Navy, NASA, and Australia’s Overseas Telecommunications Commission; Citibank, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Panasonic, and Xerox; and the Australian National University, La Trobe University, and Stanford University’s SRI International. He is thought to have been involved in the WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) hack at NASA in 1989, but he does not acknowledge this.
In 1999, Assange registered the domain leaks.org, but, as he put it, “I didn’t do anything with it.” He did, however, publicise a patent granted to the National Security Agency in August 1999 for voice-data harvesting technology: “This patent should worry people. Everyone’s overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency.” This would remain an abiding concern, to which he returned more than a decade later in Cypherpunks (2012), foreseeing a dystopian future in which “the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen”.
After his period of study at the University of Melbourne, Assange and others established Wikileaks in 2006. Assange is a member of the organisation’s advisory board and describes himself as the editor-in-chief. From 2007 to 2010, Assange travelled continuously on WikiLeaks business, visiting Africa, Asia, Europe and North America.
WikiLeaks published secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. The published material between 2006 and 2009 attracted various degrees of publicity, but it was only after it began publishing documents supplied by Chelsea Manning that WikiLeaks became a household name. The Manning material included the Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq was logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantanamo files (April 2011).
After WikiLeaks released the Manning material, US authorities began investigating Wikileaks and Assange personally with a view to prosecuting them under the Espionage Act of 1917. In November 2010, US Attorney-General Eric Holder said there was “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” into WikiLeaks. It emerged from legal documents leaked over the ensuing months that Assange and others were being investigated by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia. An email from an employee of intelligence consultancy Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor) leaked in 2012 said, “We have a sealed indictment on Assange.” The US government denies the existence of such an indictment.
Assange is wanted for questioning over one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation, and one count of lesser-degree rape alleged to have been committed against two women during a visit to Sweden in August 2010. Assange denies the allegations.
However, matters took a strange turn when a masked man who refused to disclose his identity confronted both the police and horde of pressmen – and proceeded to distribute what he termed “super (boiling) hot” revelations about international celebrities and superstars. What ensued was a huge scramble for the videos followed by media frenzy. It took only a few minutes for the eager crowd to realize that something was not quite right. The first video was a stream of photographs of Christine Lagarde, managing director of IMF. She seemed perfectly poised as she walked from her home to her office.
There were no hordes of AK-47-carrying security detail in view. Neither was there any sign of a convoy of armoured cars and Hilux vans with flashing lights together with sirens at full blast. However, there was a reference to a financial scandal while she was the minister of finance in France.
As for Julian Assange, we can only hazard a guess regarding the damage done to him by the long spell in the tiny space afforded him by the Embassy of Ecuador – no fresh air or re-invigorating sunlight. Perhaps he should try his luck with the abandoned residence of the High Commissioner for Zimboda in Kensington Palace Gardens, London W1.
J.K Randle
