Thread: Australian has abandoned me: Assange

Australian has abandoned me: Assange
Updated 15 minutes ago


The 39-year-old Australian has embarrassed the US government and foreign leaders by leaking thousands of secret American diplomatic cables.
(AFP: Fabrice Coffrini, file photo)

As authorities close in on Julian Assange, the controversial Wikileaks founder has blasted Australia's response to the scandal, saying the Federal Government has thrown away his rights in an attempt to pander to US interests.

The 39-year-old Australian has embarrassed the US government and foreign leaders by leaking thousands of secret American diplomatic cables.

And Swedish authorities have issued a fresh arrest warrant over sex crime allegations against Mr Assange, who is believed to be hiding in Britain.

Mr Assange broke his silence in an online Q&A session for the Guardian newspaper, in which he questioned the motives of the Australian Government.

"I am an Australian citizen and I miss my country a great deal," he wrote.

"However, during the last weeks the Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and the Attorney General, Robert McClelland, have made it clear that not only is my return impossible but that they are actively working to assist the United States government in its attacks on myself and our people."

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has been heavily critical of Mr Assange, labelling him 'grossly irresponsible' and calling the leaks illegal.

The Attorney General, Robert McClelland, has asked the AFP to investigate whether Mr Assange has broken any laws in leaking the US diplomatic cables.

In response, the Wikileaks head questioned the value of his citizenship, comparing his treatment to that of David Hicks.

"This brings into question what does it mean to be an Australian citizen - does that mean anything at all," he wrote.

"Or are we all to be treated like David Hicks at the first possible opportunity merely so that Australian politicians and diplomats can be invited to the best US embassy cocktail parties."

But Mr McClelland has stopped short of cancelling Mr Assange's passport, saying it would be counter-productive.

The Attorney General says Australian authorities considered cancelling his passport but decided against it.

"There has been some discussion as to whether it would be counter productive to remove the identification that would trigger the law enforcement processes," he said.

Mr Assange's London-based lawyer Mark Stephens said he was not aware whether authorities in Britain had yet received the latest international arrest warrant, which was issued in relation to allegations of rape and sexual molestation.

However, Mr Stephens confirmed that any potential arrest of his client would take place by arrangement.

He added: "The last warrant took 10 days to come through, we know that it was incompetently filled out, so another one was sent on Friday.

"So I expect another 10 days, unless of course they are going to treat Julian Assange differently than anyone else."

Mr Assange has denied the allegations and hinted they could be part of a "smear campaign" designed to distract attention from the leaks.

Funding cut

While authorities zone in on Mr Assange, WikiLeaks faces a fresh threat to its survival after the online payment service PayPal cut off the account used for donations to the whistle-blowing website.

WikiLeaks is already fighting to stay on the Internet. It had to switch its domain to Switzerland because its original web address was shut down by a US provider, as it continues to release tens of thousands of classified US diplomatic cables.

The US-based PayPal, which is owned by auctions group eBay, announced overnight that it would stop taking donations for WikiLeaks thus blocking a key source of its income.

"PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal acceptable use policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity," it said in a statement.

WikiLeaks blamed "US government pressure" for the PayPal ban, in a message on its Twitter feed.

Meanwhile, some targets of the sometimes brutally frank US diplomats' assessments threw doubt on their credibility.

Afghan president Hamid Karzai said at least one of the incidents described in a cable which portrayed him as corrupt and weak could not have happened as described, while he dismissed others as an attempt by US officials to discredit him and his government.

In one cable, US diplomats said one of Mr Karzai's deputies had transported $SU52 million out of the country in suitcases, a claim Mr Karzai rejected.
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said on Saturday she had contacted dozens of foreign leaders to smooth over any frictions and will continue to do so for "the next weeks".

"I haven't seen everybody in the world, and apparently there are 252,000 of these things out there in cyberspace somewhere," she said, noting that all of them had not yet been published.

"So I think I'll have some outreach to continue doing over the next weeks just to make sure that as things become public, if they raise concerns, I will be prepared to reach out and talk to my counterparts and heads of state and governments."

The release marked the third major publication of secret US files by WikiLeaks this year, after the site had published tens of thousands of US military files from the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.

WikiLeaks was forced to turn to Switzerland for a new domain name after its original wikileaks.org address was shut down by an American provider, while Paris tried to ban French servers from hosting it.

The Swiss domain - www.wikileaks.ch - was up and running again on Saturday after migrating to new servers, the group which owns the name said.

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Australian government joins persecution of WikiLeaks` Julian Assange
James Cogan
2010/12/05


The Australian Labor government has joined with the Obama administration in its attempt to manufacture criminal charges against Julian Assange, an Australian citizen and the editor of WikiLeaks.

On Monday, Attorney General Robert McClelland told a doorstop press conference that Australia “will support any law enforcement action that may be taken. The United States will be the lead government in that respect, but certainly Australian agencies will assist”. The Australian Federal Police, he stated, would “look at the issue as to whether any Australian laws have been breached as a specific issue as well”.

A taskforce, made up of personnel from various intelligence and police agencies, has been formed to scour through the leaked material to determine if Assange can be charged with releasing “national security-classified documents”.

McClelland indicated that the Australian government had not received a specific request from Washington to cancel Assange’s passport. This is likely because both the US and Australian governments hope he will emerge from hiding and attempt to travel, whereupon he can be detained on either the trumped-up rape charges brought by the Swedish government or whatever equally politically-motivated charges are ultimately laid in the US.

McClelland left no doubt that if Assange returned to Australia—where he is a citizen and supposedly protected from political persecution by other states—the Labor government would provide “every assistance” to his deportation and prosecution in the US.

In a separate statement, McClelland also made clear that the Australian government would demand that any country providing Assange refuge, before charges are laid in the US, hands him over to Swedish authorities. The prosecution in Sweden, he declared on Tuesday, “places an obligation on those countries that are part of the Interpol arrangements to actually detain him when he arrives”.

Australia’s foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, told journalists in the United Arab Emirates, where he is attending forums on the Afghanistan war, that “our attitude, like most governments, is one of absolute condemnation” of WikiLeaks. “The Australian government” he said, “like other governments, is looking at full recourse to its legal jurisdiction, in terms of whether any of these actions have breached the Australian criminal law as well”.

The treatment being meted out to Assange demonstrates the contempt for democratic rights and international law within the Australian ruling elite and its political parties. Not one figure in the Labor government, the conservative opposition or the Greens has even expressed concern, let alone condemnation, of the implied death threats against Assange that were made by former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin—who wrote that he should be hunted down like “Al Qaeda”—or the hysterical calls in the US for WikiLeaks to be declared a “terrorist organisation”.

WikiLeaks is a media organisation. It has both a legal and moral right to make available to the public the mass of documents made available to it regarding the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and US diplomatic activity around the world. By doing so, it has brought into the light of day such atrocities as the killing of tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians and the US use of death squads and torture in Iraq to repress resistance.

The initial leaks since Sunday of some 250,000 cables from US embassies and consulates around the world have already revealed that US imperialism is actively plotting a war against Iran and carrying out secret bombing missions in Yemen. US diplomats have been ordered by the Obama administration to systematically collect personal information and even DNA samples on officials of foreign governments and the United Nations. It does not take a great deal of imagination to envisage the filthy purposes for which such information could be used, from frame-ups to blackmail.

All the outrage in the Australian political establishment, however, has been reserved for Assange and WikiLeaks. It is prepared for one of its citizens to be hounded, persecuted, imprisoned and even killed because he has contributed to exposing, before the world’s population, the criminality of the foreign policy of Australia’s primary ally.

For the Australian ruling class, the US alliance is the so-called “bedrock” of its foreign policy. It depends upon Washington’s backing to assert economic and strategic influence in the South Pacific and South East Asia—Canberra’s own “sphere of influence”. The democratic rights, liberty and lives of Australian citizens count for little in comparison.

There are parallels in the treatment of Assange with the willingness of the Howard Liberal-National government to allow two Australian citizens—Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks—to be held for years without charges in the Guantánamo Bay prison camp. Instead, Canberra supported the criminal treatment of the two men, doing nothing to assist them in defending themselves and securing their release.

Above all, the Australian government’s hostility to WikiLeaks is conditioned by the role it plays as junior partner in US military aggression and imperialist intrigue around the world. Australian troops have participated in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; Australian ministers and diplomats vocally defend US foreign policy in every international forum, and Australian intelligence agencies cooperate closely with their US counterparts in spying on perceived rivals, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. Moreover, the Australian government hosts Pine Gap, one of the most important satellite bases and missile-targeting facilities in the US network.

Evidence revealed by WikiLeaks may well provide the basis for war crimes charges against several politicians and military personnel in Australia. There may also be concerns within the Labor government about the contents of the 1,003 cables from the US embassy in Canberra and US consulate in Melbourne reportedly in the hands of WikiLeaks.

In particular, there could be highly revealing information on any US involvement in the June 23-24 political coup that removed Kevin Rudd as prime minister, especially given the well-known acrimony between the Obama administration and Rudd over Afghanistan and other foreign policy issues.

Since Rudd’s removal, his replacement, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has made an indefinite and unconditional commitment to the war in Afghanistan and aligned her government with US efforts to stem rising Chinese influence in Asia, despite the fact that China is now Australia’s largest trading partner. The documents from the US embassy in Australia may contain highly embarrassing and diplomatically damaging revelations about joint US-Australian activity directed against Chinese interests. As the WikiLeaks cables from Australia are released, the WSWS will comment further.

mathaba.net

guess what he has landed up in britain ....
we are a small island ,how come everything get washed up on our overcrowded shores?
he will be claiming asylum next

I hope Assange gets the support he needs. People like him, who have the guts to speak the unspeakable, need to be admired & not admonished.

never thought i would help an ausie after one done me for 10,000baht but i got a house in taffyland where you can hide good luck.

Geez taffyy!!! You got easily 'sucked in' by somebody!
A simple question; do you need signs or external information in order to progress with your daily life?

Originally Posted by blue

we are a small island ,how come everything get washed up on our overcrowded shores?

Probably exactly the same way you got there on a fucking bannana boat!

Sad to see the open hypocrisy of the Australian government. Still, good for their special relationship with a failed state.