The siege of Julian Assange is a farce By John Pilger

The siege of Julian Assange is a farce By John Pilger The siege of Knightsbridge is a farce. For two years, an exaggerated, costly police presence around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state. Their quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee from gross injustice whose only security is the room given him by a brave South American country. His true crime is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war. The persecution of Julian Assange must end. Even the British government clearly believes it must end. On October 28, the deputy foreign minister, Hugo Swire, told Parliament he would "actively welcome" the Swedish prosecutor in London and "we would do absolutely everything to facilitate that". The tone was impatient. The Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, has refused to come to London to question Assange about allegations of sexual misconduct in Stockholm in 2010 - even though Swedish law allows for it and the procedure is routine for Sweden and the UK. The documentary evidence of a threat to Assange's life and freedom from the United States - should he leave the embassy - is overwhelming. On May 14 this year, US court files revealed that a "multi subject investigation" against Assange was "active and ongoing". Ny has never properly explained why she will not come to London, just as the Swedish authorities have never explained why they refuse to give Assange a guarantee that they will not extradite him on to the US under a secret arrangement agreed between Stockholm and Washington. In December 2010, the Independent revealed that the two governments had discussed his onward extradition to the US before the European Arrest Warrant was issued. Perhaps an explanation is that, contrary to its reputation as a liberal bastion, Sweden has drawn so close to Washington that it has allowed secret CIA "renditions" - including the illegal deportation of refugees. The rendition and subsequent torture of two Egyptian political refugees in 2001 was condemned by the UN Committee against Torture, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch; the complicity and duplicity of the Swedish state are documented in successful civil litigation and WikiLeaks cables. In the summer of 2010, Assange had been in Sweden to talk about WikiLeaks revelations of the war in Afghanistan - in which Sweden had forces under US command. The Americans are pursuing Assange because WikiLeaks exposed their epic crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq: the wholesale killing of tens of thousands of civilians, which they covered up; and their contempt for sovereignty and international law, as demonstrated vividly in their leaked diplomatic cables. For his part in disclosing how US soldiers murdered Afghan and Iraqi civilians, the heroic soldier Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning received a sentence of 35 years, having been held for more than a thousand days in conditions which, according to the UN Special Rapporteur, amounted to torture. Few doubt that should the US get their hands on Assange, a similar fate awaits him. Threats of capture and assassination became the currency of the political extremes in the US following Vice-President Joe Biden's preposterous slur that Assange was a "cyber-terrorist". Anyone doubting the kind of US ruthlessness he can expect should remember the forcing down of the Bolivian president's plane last year - wrongly believed to be carrying Edward Snowden. According to documents released by Snowden, Assange is on a "Manhunt target list". Washington's bid to get him, say Australian diplomatic cables, is "unprecedented in scale and nature". In Alexandria, Virginia, a secret grand jury has spent four years attempting to contrive a crime for which Assange can be prosecuted. This is not easy. The First Amendment to the US Constitution protects publishers, journalists and whistleblowers. As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama lauded whistleblowers as "part of a healthy democracy [and they] must be protected from reprisal". Under President Obama, more whistleblowers have been prosecuted than under all other US presidents combined. Even before the verdict was announced in the trial of Chelsea Manning, Obama had pronounced the whistleblowers guilty. "Documents released by WikiLeaks since Assange moved to England," wrote Al Burke, editor of the online Nordic News Network, an authority on the multiple twists and dangers facing Assange, "clearly indicate that Sweden has consistently submitted to pressure from the United States in matters relating to civil rights. There is every reason for concern that if Assange were to be taken into custody by Swedish authorities, he could be turned over to the United States without due consideration of his legal rights." There are signs that the Swedish public and legal community do not support prosecutor's Marianne Ny's intransigence. Once implacably hostile to Assange, the Swedish press has published headlines such as: "Go to London, for God's sake." Why won't she? More to the point, why won't she allow the Swedish court access to hundreds of SMS messages that the police extracted from the phone of one of the two women involved in the misconduct allegations? Why won't she hand them over to Assange's Swedish lawyers? She says she is not legally required to do so until a formal charge is laid and she has questioned him. Then, why doesn't she question him? This week, the Swedish Court of Appeal will decide whether to order Ny to hand over the SMS messages; or the matter will go to the Supreme Court and the European Court of Justice. In high farce, Assange's Swedish lawyers have been allowed only to "review" the SMS messages, which they had to memorize. One of the women's messages makes clear that she did not want any charges brought against Assange, "but the police were keen on getting a hold on him". She was "shocked" when they arrested him because she only "wanted him to take [an HIV] test". She "did not want to accuse JA of anything" and "it was the police who made up the charges". (In a witness statement, she is quoted as saying that she had been "railroaded by police and others around her".) Neither woman claimed she had been raped. Indeed, both have denied they were raped and one of them has since tweeted, "I have not been raped." That they were manipulated by police and their wishes ignored is evident - whatever their lawyers might say now. Certainly, they are victims of a saga worthy of Kafka. For Assange, his only trial has been trial by media. On August 20 2010, the Swedish police opened a "rape investigation" and immediately - and unlawfully - told the Stockholm tabloids that there was a warrant for Assange's arrest for the "rape of two women". This was the news that went round the world. In Washington, a smiling US Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters that the arrest "sounds like good news to me". Twitter accounts associated with the Pentagon described Assange as a "rapist" and a "fugitive". Less than 24 hours later, the Stockholm Chief Prosecutor, Eva Finne, took over the investigation. She wasted no time in canceling the arrest warrant, saying, "I don't believe there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape." Four days later, she dismissed the rape investigation altogether, saying, "There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever." The file was closed. Enter Claes Borgstrom, a high profile politician in the Social Democratic Party then standing as a candidate in Sweden's imminent general election. Within days of the chief prosecutor's dismissal of the case, Borgstrom, a lawyer, announced to the media that he was representing the two women and had sought a different prosecutor in the city of Gothenberg. This was Marianne Ny, whom Borgstrom knew well. She, too, was involved with the Social Democrats. On August 30, Assange attended a police station in Stockholm voluntarily and answered all the questions put to him. He understood that was the end of the matter. Two days later, Ny announced she was re-opening the case. Borgstrom was asked by a Swedish reporter why the case was proceeding when it had already been dismissed, citing one of the women as saying she had not been raped. He replied, "Ah, but she is not a lawyer." Assange's Australian barrister, James Catlin, responded, "This is a laughing stock … it's as if they make it up as they go along." On the day Marianne Ny re-activated the case, the head of Sweden's military intelligence service ("MUST") publicly denounced WikiLeaks in an article entitled "WikiLeaks [is] a threat to our soldiers." Assange was warned that the Swedish intelligence service, SAP, had been told by its US counterparts that US-Sweden intelligence-sharing arrangements would be "cut off" if Sweden sheltered him. For five weeks, Assange waited in Sweden for the new investigation to take its course. The Guardian was then on the brink of publishing the Iraq "War Logs", based on WikiLeaks' disclosures, which Assange was to oversee. His lawyer in Stockholm asked Ny if she had any objection to his leaving the country. She said he was free to leave. Inexplicably, as soon as he left Sweden - at the height of media and public interest in the WikiLeaks disclosures - Ny issued a European Arrest Warrant and an Interpol "red alert" normally used for terrorists and dangerous criminals. Put out in five languages around the world, it ensured a media frenzy. Assange attended a police station in London, was arrested and spent 10 days in Wands worth Prison, in solitary confinement. Released on ?340,000 (about US$535,000) bail, he was electronically tagged, required to report to police daily and placed under virtual house arrest while his case began its long journey to the Supreme Court. He still had not been charged with any offence. His lawyers repeated his offer to be questioned by Ny in London, pointing out that she had given him permission to leave Sweden. They suggested a special facility at Scotland Yard used for that purpose. She refused. Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote: "The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction... The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will. [Assange] has made it clear he is available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in Britain or via Skype. Why are they refusing this essential step in their investigation? What are they afraid of?" This question remained unanswered as Ny deployed the European Arrest Warrant, a draconian product of the "war on terror" supposedly designed to catch terrorists and organized criminals. The EAW had abolished the obligation on a petitioning state to provide any evidence of a crime. More than a thousand EAWs are issued each month; only a few have anything to do with potential "terror" charges. Most are issued for trivial offences-such as overdue bank charges and fines. Many of those extradited face months in prison without charge. There have been a number of shocking miscarriages of justice, of which British judges have been highly critical. The Assange case finally reached the UK Supreme Court in May 2012. In a judgement that upheld the EAW - whose rigid demands had left the courts almost no room for maneuver - the judges found that European prosecutors could issue extradition warrants in the UK without any judicial oversight, even though Parliament intended otherwise. They made clear that Parliament had been "misled" by the Blair government. The court was split, 5-2, and consequently found against Assange. However, the Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, made one mistake. He applied the Vienna Convention on treaty interpretation, allowing for state practice to override the letter of the law. As Assange's barrister, Dinah Rose QC, pointed out, this did not apply to the EAW. The Supreme Court only recognized this crucial error when it dealt with another appeal against the EAW in November last year. The Assange decision had been wrong, but it was too late to go back. Assange's choice was stark: extradition to a country that had refused to say whether or not it would send him on to the US, or to seek what seemed his last opportunity for refuge and safety. Supported by most of Latin America, the courageous government of Ecuador granted him refugee status on the basis of documented evidence and legal advice that he faced the prospect of cruel and unusual punishment in the US; that this threat violated his basic human rights; and that his own government in Australia had abandoned him and colluded with Washington. The Labor government of prime minister Julia Gillard had even threatened to take away his passport. Gareth Peirce, the renowned human rights lawyer who represents Assange in London, wrote to the then Australian foreign minister, Kevin Rudd: "Given the extent of the public discussion, frequently on the basis of entirely false assumptions... it is very hard to attempt to preserve for him any presumption of innocence. Mr. Assange has now hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords, of potential extradition to two different jurisdictions in turn for two different alleged crimes, neither of which are crimes in his own country, and that his personal safety has become at risk in circumstances that are highly politically charged." It was not until she contacted the Australian High Commission in London that Peirce received a response, which answered none of the pressing points she raised. In a meeting I attended with her, the Australian Consul-General, Ken Pascoe, made the astonishing claim that he knew "only what I read in the newspapers" about the details of the case. Meanwhile, the prospect of a grotesque miscarriage of justice was drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. Deeply personal, petty, vicious and inhuman attacks were aimed at a man not charged with any crime yet subjected to treatment not even meted out to a defendant facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife. That the US threat to Assange was a threat to all journalists, to freedom of speech, was lost in the sordid and the ambitious. Books were published, movie deals struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and an assumption that attacking Assange was fair game and he was too poor to sue. People have made money, often big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive. The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, called the WikiLeaks disclosures, which his newspaper published, "one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years". It became part of his marketing plan to raise the newspaper's cover price. With not a penny going to Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book's authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a "damaged personality" and "callous". They also revealed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables. With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that "Scotland Yard may get the last laugh". The injustice meted out to Assange is one of the reasons Parliament will eventually vote on a reformed EAW. The draconian catch-all used against him could not happen now; charges would have to be brought and "questioning" would be insufficient grounds for extradition. "His case has been won lock, stock and barrel," Gareth Peirce told me, "these changes in the law mean that the UK now recognizes as correct everything that was argued in his case. Yet he does not benefit. And the genuineness of Ecuador's offer of sanctuary is not questioned by the UK or Sweden." On March 18 2008, a war on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was foretold in a secret Pentagon document prepared by the "Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch". It described a detailed plan to destroy the feeling of "trust" which is WikiLeaks' "center of gravity". This would be achieved with threats of "exposure [and] criminal prosecution". Silencing and criminalizing this rare source of independent journalism was the aim, smear the method. Hell hath no fury like great power scorned. For important additional information, click on the following links:here, here, here, here, here, and here. Republished with permission from johnpilger.com. (Copyright 2014 John Pilger)

Protect Assange / Ecuadorian Homesick Blues

What Does it Cost to Change the World? by WikiLeaks

What Does it Cost to Change the World? from WikiLeaks on Vimeo.

Emperor waits in wings with waterboard By Pepe Escobar

Oh! spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work instead.
- Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, Act III

"He will not be going back to that cell once occupied by Oscar Wilde."

Eventually he didn't. But little did Mark Stephens, one of Julian Assange's lawyers, know that it would still take over three twisting-and-turning hours for his client to finally exit the Royal Courts of Justice in central London a free man.

It's as if WikiLeaks founder Assange, emerging from the silence of the shadows to the proverbially frantic media scrum, already knew that the real war starts now - and has nothing to do with jealous groupies, broken condoms and "sex by surprise".

This was the key passage of Assange's brief statement, read immediately after he was able to breathe the air of London again. He said, "During my time in solitary confinement in the bottom of a Victorian prison, I had time to reflect on the conditions of those people around the world also in solitary confinement, also on remand, in conditions that are more difficult than those faced by me. Those people also need your attention and support."

As in: pay excruciatingly close attention to what the US government is doing to Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old army private accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of cables to WikiLeaks. Manning has been held in solitary confinement at the US Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia, for five months now. He has not been convicted of any crime. In a devastating Salon article, Glenn Greenwald has stressed that Manning is "under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture".

So that was Assange's terse way of saying to the world: Big Brother is watching you. And what they're doing to Manning they want to do to me, to you, and metaphorically to anyone who believes in freedom of information.

Make my day, leaker
Much to the horror of the emperor, WikiLeaks is still in business, from now on comfortably ensconced in a vast, remote Georgian country house, Ellingham Hall, to where Assange is bailed, on the borders of Norfolk and Suffolk.

Assange will be the guest of honor of former British army captain Vaughan Smith, also the founder of the Frontline media club in London, where Assange previously lived for a while. As WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson made it clear, broadband is good. And that's all the members of WikiLeaks, who "have never all been in the same place", need.

What a far cry from Assange almost turning into the most notorious political prisoner in the world.

Now everyone knows, thanks to legal blogger Carl Gardner, that it was actually UK crown prosecutors - and not Sweden - that were against the Westminster court's granting of bail to Assange this past Tuesday (technically in line with Article 12 of European Arrest Warrant legislation - the Swedish prosecution has at any rate also pointed out that the door remains open to an Assange extradition to other European Union countries).

This only served to fuel worldwide suspicion that the United Kingdom was using the broken condom/"sex by surprise" Swedish drama as an excuse to hold Assange in solitary confinement, without his computer, 23 hours and 30 minutes a day, under non-stop infrared surveillance, until the "special relationship" US master could come up with some brand-new charge and go for an extradition order.

This Thursday though, before granting Assange conditional bail, British judge Duncan Ouseley acknowledged a crucial point. He stressed that Assange had cooperated with the Swedes, and even if he was ultimately convicted in Sweden there was a strong probability he would not even go to jail.

Earlier in the day, Assange's lawyer Stephens had said: "We haven't addressed the question of American legal action or the potential for it." Well, they better do it, and fast. Even if a possible US government charge of "conspiracy" has no legal equivalence in the UK. Not to mention that the US does not have jurisdiction over where any of these US-only so-called "crimes" may have occurred.

Only the terminally naive could believe that the US Justice Department did not order the Swedish government to mobilize Interpol into producing a lightning-fast arrest warrant linked to the syrupy broken condom/"sex by surprise" saga.

All across the land of the free, the emperor has been pulling a Beijing (one may say emperors are all alike), deploying a variety of methods to actually censor the net - and TV - and dispatch the cables to digital oblivion. Some methods are worthy of the Three Stooges: the US Air Force blacking out from its computers anything linked to "cablegate"; the Pentagon banning anyone from even looking at newspapers.

Other methods are slightly more refined. Assange won the readers' poll as Time magazine's Person of the Year. But the editors could not possibly have the guts to respect public opinion and infuriate the emperor even more. So they gave the prize to an autistic geek who invented Facebook

because his girlfriend dumped him.

Barbara Walters, who in the US is worshipped as a sort of Hera of TV interviewers, regards Assange as "borderline criminal"; if she didn't, she wouldn't even get a "hi!" from Hillary Clinton. Bill Keller, the chief editor of The New York Times, had the gall to write: "We agree wholeheartedly that transparency is not an absolute good. Freedom of the press includes freedom not to publish, and that is a freedom we exercise with some regularity". Keller, a so-called journalist, in practice wishes he didn't have to publish "cablegate". He has made it plain that the New York Times sees the role of mass media as upholding government secrecy. In ancient Soviet times there was Pravda; now Pravda lives in New York and is written in English.

And to top it off we have Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama's administration pulling out all stops in its extra-judicial blitzkrieg on WikiLeaks. The fact that WikiLeaks broke no US law is of course irrelevant.

The emperor badly needs to set an example: see what happens when you defy my will. Yet the US Department of Justice's strategy doesn't exactly embody Kant's categorical imperative. They will try by all means necessary to force Manning to testify against Assange - and then charge Assange as a conspirator in "cablegate" and the Iraq and Afghan file leaks.

In a nutshell: the Obama administration is about to criminalize investigative journalism. And criminalize good journalism, period. Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin has stressed that "the conspiracy theory also threatens traditional journalists as well". And all this by applying tortuous logic worthy of the Bush era: "OK, let's make a deal with this American geek who leaked the bloody thing so we can nail that bloody foreigner who put it on the net."

The US government is out to waterboard Wiki. We're all about to get drowned.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Hell hath no fury like an empire mocked

By Pepe Escobar

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised. 

The revolution will be no rerun brothers; 

The revolution will be live. 

- Gill Scott-Heron, 1970 

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned

Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned. 

- William Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 1697 

No episode of Law and Order or The Good Wife can top this. 

It all seemed to boil down to the not-insignificant detail of finding, in a rush, a mere US$315,000 in cash. 

By 3:25 pm GMT on Tuesday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been granted bail by a London court. Sure, the conditions were more suitable to someone accused of being an al-Qaeda mole: bail to the amount of said $315,000 in cash only; curfew from 10am-2pm and 10pm-2am; reporting to a police station at 6pm every day; surrendering his passport; and carrying an electronic ankle bracelet. But at least he would be free. 

Well, not really. Two hours later, Assange was rerouted back to the slammer; the Swedish prosecution had appealed the ruling. For another 48 hours at least, Assange would remain in Wandsworth prison, under conditions his lawyer Mark Stephens described as "Orwellian", "Dickensian", "Victorian" or all of the above. 

The cliffhanger unraveled as in a wild and wacky Cannes Film Festival red carpet extravaganza - complete with media scrum, flash bulbs exploding, frantic straight-from-court twittering and supporting celebs from Jemima Goldsmith to Ken Loach and Benazir Bhutto's niece. And all this engendered by accusations of rape brought by erstwhile Assange groupies Anna Ardin and Miss W, the twin Scandinavian version of Congreve's "a woman scorned". That wouldn't even be considered rape under English law, according to Assange lawyer Geoffrey Robertson. Thus, if this is no rape, there's no reason for extraditing Assange to Sweden - and from Sweden to the US, as selected "patriotic" American pitchfork mobs are clamoring for. 

Saint Julian or Assange the Rapist? 

Oh, the dangerous liaisons between sex and press freedom. 

Speaking outside the court immediately after Assange was (not) freed on bail, Vaughan Smith, the founder of the FrontLine club in west London, tried hard to frame the pertinent level of the debate. He said, "This is not just about press freedom, it is about the Internet. As journalists, we should be very concerned about the possibility of legislation that would restrict our freedom. Assange has held up a very large mirror in front of journalists. Journalists are concerned by the reflection they see." 

Before all the courtly sound and fury, Assange had won the readers poll in Time magazine's person of the year for 2010, way ahead of second place, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the same Erdogan who US diplomats, in WikiLeaks' "cablegate", described as a dangerous anti-American Islamist. 

Now couple this progressive Assange/Erdogan double bill with a CNN poll where 44% of Britons declared themselves sure that the Swedish sex charges against Assange are "an excuse" to keep him in custody so he can be prosecuted by the US government. Oh, those dangerous liaisons between sex and press freedom, again. 

And all this after Assange had sent a message to the world via his mum, Christine, relayed to the Australian news site Seven News. In it, Assange didn't fail to drop a bombshell, "We now know that Visa, Mastercard and PayPal are instruments of US foreign policy. It's not something we knew before." Now that's a front page, if there ever was one. 

So who gives the chief executive officers of Amazon, Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Facebook, Twitter and, sooner rather than later, Google - all private corporations who exercise a barely-disguised Internet monopoly - the right to act as editors of what sort of information public opinion should have access to? Mega-corporations making public-interest political decisions? World public opinion may say: "OK, you can buy the US Congress as much as you want, but don't mess with our right to choose." 

Instead of following the - granted, gripping - made-in-Scandinavia sex saga, the whole world ought to be discussing the really key issue of the times. Who is bound to benefit the most from crucial information leaks? Will it be relentlessly hegemonic hyper-capitalism and its minions? Or will it be democratic, anti-hegemonic global social movements - in sum, people power? 

Were the great Herbert Marcuse alive, he would already be warning that the empire is very quick in learning, and profiting from, the WikiLeaks lesson. 

Realists already expect fresh imperial, "anti-terrorist" legislation. It doesn't matter that former Central Intelligence Agency analyst Ray McGovern has stressed a key point to CNN: Pentagon head Robert Gates said the WikiLeaks cables do not put American lives in danger (these reports are "greatly overwrought", said Gates). The North Atlantic Treaty Organization also said: "no sources have been compromised". Even AfPak supremo General David "I'm always positioning myself to 2012" Petraeus said the same thing. But that should not be enough to appease the power elite establishment, with its slimy coterie of sycophants, ideological gangsters and assorted parasites, all frothing at the mouth and eager to take out Assange. 

They lost control, again 

Make no mistake on what the real "new world order" is all about: the battlefield reads like a resistance movement to the appropriation of information technology by the power elites. The eagerness to silence if not take out Assange by all means necessary reveals the true face of the emperor: I shall have undisputed, indivisible control over any technology. 

Naturally, even WikiLeaks itself is not immune to the battle. An apparent orgy of transparency may reveal no more than a smokescreen. Assange himself has always complained that alternative media has never been able to fully analyze and synthesize the torrents of data in WikiLeaks' massive document releases. Yet vast swathes of world public opinion are having access to "cablegate" mostly via WikiLeaks' mainstream media partners. They select, edit and find their "angle" to release the cables. That is, they manipulate them. 

There's no reason for anyone to swallow the spin applied by Le Monde, El Pais or The New York Times. There are numerous examples already of how a passing, innocuous opinion by a US diplomat becomes an indisputable fact if skillfully spun. Nothing compares to the public reading the cables themselves (WikiLeaks is already mirrored in 1,885 sites, and counting). 

On a parallel track, the net is overflowing with conspiracy theories stating that WikiLeaks is nothing but a very sophisticated psy ops – including the assertion that Assange was handsomely paid by Israel to delete any embarrassing cables (as if Israel was not embarrassed enough already for what it is perpetrating in Palestine). True, WikiLeaks should also be scrutinized for what it is not disclosing. 

But there are problems with the Israel psy-ops scenario. A writer may - or may not - have heard this from Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former, disgruntled Assange collaborator who is now launching his own whistle-blowing site, OpenLeaks, whose main differential will be to release leaks in smaller volume, and more slowly. As it stands, the best source on all these developments is WikiRebels, an enlightening one-hour documentary by Sweden's public television SVT, which may be watched here: here. 

The sack of Rome 

One does not need to possess Michel Foucault's analytical powers to be extremely suspicious of how the power elites, be they in Sweden or the US, and always in the name of "freedom", "security" and a market-friendly consensus, try to impose their own hegemonic brand of transparency. 

Sweden has managed to circumscribe and frame virtually every overtone of freedom and unpredictability in the realm of sexual relations - with the extra bonus that everything can be furiously dissected/inspected. 

So beware those fornicators whose condoms malfunction in the middle of the proceedings! And be 100% sure that in each and every second of the nitty gritty there is irrefutable, foolproof mutual consent. Otherwise, you're a rapist. Once again, it sounds like a "liberal" re-run of Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch. Confess! Confess! The Orgy of Transparency meets the Joy of Inquisition. 

And that's where Saint Julian the Apostle (of freedom of expression) converges with Assange the Rapist, the Martyr of Transparency. And this in a country that has one of the more advanced freedom of expression laws in the world. 

Deep down, it gets shabbier. From Naomi Klein to Naomi Wolf, it's clear to every thoughtful woman that Assange's Scandinavian groupies thought they were enraptured by "love". Well, it was just a one-night stand piled up on another - and how horrible to find out, in a "girlish" chat, that "love" was in fact "betrayal" by the usual soulless, chauvinist male. Who would have thought that Scandinavia harbors "women scorned" who believe in Hollywood fairy tales. Worse yet: cultured, fiercely independent women in both Europe and the US who take Hollywood for what it is consider it deeply humiliating for this chameleon Swedish law to infantilize women to such an extent. 

And since we're talking about sex, how not to refer to the poetic coincidence of this latest courtroom drama happening the same day when Italian Prime Minister Silvio "Il Cavaliere" Berlusconi, who Wiki cables basically depict as a greedy, irresponsible nutcase fond of cavorting with nymphs at Nero-style parties, barely survived a non-confidence vote and immediately afterwards Rome was (literally) burning in rage. Makes one think of Nero in reverse. 

Yet make no mistake: it's not only Ancient Rome that's burning. It's the whole empire. Hardcore hyper-capitalism may be simultaneously a Terminator and a giant with clay feet. Progressives must solve the riddle of how to fight this paradox. Sun Tzu's Art of War meets Gilles Deleuze and his underground war machine. Nomad information-technology guerrillas are already deployed. The US counter-insurgency is being turned upside down. Netwar is a go. And don't forget the condoms. 

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). 

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.