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.

Why I'm Posting Bail Money for Julian Assange (A statement from Michael Moore)

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

Friends,

Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.

Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.

We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.

So why is WikiLeaks, after performing such an important public service, under such vicious attack? Because they have outed and embarrassed those who have covered up the truth. The assault on them has been over the top:

**Sen. Joe Lieberman says WikiLeaks "has violated the Espionage Act."

**The New Yorker's George Packer calls Assange "super-secretive, thin-skinned, [and] megalomaniacal."

**Sarah Palin claims he's "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands" whom we should pursue "with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders."

**Democrat Bob Beckel (Walter Mondale's 1984 campaign manager) said about Assange on Fox: "A dead man can't leak stuff ... there's only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch."

**Republican Mary Matalin says "he's a psychopath, a sociopath ... He's a terrorist."

**Rep. Peter A. King calls WikiLeaks a "terrorist organization."

And indeed they are! They exist to terrorize the liars and warmongers who have brought ruin to our nation and to others. Perhaps the next war won't be so easy because the tables have been turned -- and now it's Big Brother who's being watched ... by us!

WikiLeaks deserves our thanks for shining a huge spotlight on all this. But some in the corporate-owned press have dismissed the importance of WikiLeaks ("they've released little that's new!") or have painted them as simple anarchists ("WikiLeaks just releases everything without any editorial control!").

WikiLeaks exists, in part, because the mainstream media has failed to live up to its responsibility. The corporate owners have decimated newsrooms, making it impossible for good journalists to do their job. There's no time or money anymore for investigative journalism. Simply put, investors don't want those stories exposed. They like their secrets kept ... as secrets.

I ask you to imagine how much different our world would be if WikiLeaks had existed 10 years ago. Take a look at this photo. That's Mr. Bush about to be handed a "secret" document on August 6th, 2001. Its heading read: "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." And on those pages it said the FBI had discovered "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings." Mr. Bush decided to ignore it and went fishing for the next four weeks.

But if that document had been leaked, how would you or I have reacted? What would Congress or the FAA have done? Was there not a greater chance that someone, somewhere would have done something if all of us knew about bin Laden's impending attack using hijacked planes?

But back then only a few people had access to that document. Because the secret was kept, a flight school instructor in San Diego who noticed that two Saudi students took no interest in takeoffs or landings, did nothing. Had he read about the bin Laden threat in the paper, might he have called the FBI? (Please read this essay by former FBI Agent Coleen Rowley, Time's 2002 co-Person of the Year, about her belief that had WikiLeaks been around in 2001, 9/11 might have been prevented.)

Or what if the public in 2003 had been able to read "secret" memos from Dick Cheney as he pressured the CIA to give him the "facts" he wanted in order to build his false case for war? If a WikiLeaks had revealed at that time that there were, in fact, no weapons of mass destruction, do you think that the war would have been launched -- or rather, wouldn't there have been calls for Cheney's arrest?

Openness, transparency -- these are among the few weapons the citizenry has to protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt. What if within days of August 4th, 1964 -- after the Pentagon had made up the lie that our ship was attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin -- there had been a WikiLeaks to tell the American people that the whole thing was made up? I guess 58,000 of our soldiers (and 2 million Vietnamese) might be alive today.

Instead, secrets killed them.

For those of you who think it's wrong to support Julian Assange because of the sexual assault allegations he's being held for, all I ask is that you not be naive about how the government works when it decides to go after its prey. Please -- never, ever believe the "official story." And regardless of Assange's guilt or innocence (see the strange nature of the allegations here), this man has the right to have bail posted and to defend himself. I have joined with filmmakers Ken Loach and John Pilger and writer Jemima Khan in putting up the bail money -- and we hope the judge will accept this and grant his release today.

Might WikiLeaks cause some unintended harm to diplomatic negotiations and U.S. interests around the world? Perhaps. But that's the price you pay when you and your government take us into a war based on a lie. Your punishment for misbehaving is that someone has to turn on all the lights in the room so that we can see what you're up to. You simply can't be trusted. So every cable, every email you write is now fair game. Sorry, but you brought this upon yourself. No one can hide from the truth now. No one can plot the next Big Lie if they know that they might be exposed.

And that is the best thing that WikiLeaks has done. WikiLeaks, God bless them, will save lives as a result of their actions. And any of you who join me in supporting them are committing a true act of patriotism. Period.

I stand today in absentia with Julian Assange in London and I ask the judge to grant him his release. I am willing to guarantee his return to court with the bail money I have wired to said court. I will not allow this injustice to continue unchallenged.

Yours,

Michael Moore

MMFlint@aol.com

MichaelMoore.com

P.S. You can read the statement I filed today in the London court here.

P.P.S. If you're reading this in London, please go support Julian Assange and WikiLeaks at a demonstration at 1 PM today, Tuesday the 14th, in front of the Westminster court. 


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CHRISTMAS STORY- MARY AND JOSEPH IN PALESTINE 2010

The settlements were still being built, financed mostly by Jewish money from America, contributions from Wall Street speculators and owners of gambling dens.

By James Petras

Times were tough for Joseph and Mary.  The real estate bubble crashed.  Unemployment soared among construction workers.  There was no work, not even for a skilled carpenter.

The settlements were still being built, financed mostly by Jewish money from America, contributions from Wall Street speculators and owners of gambling dens.

“Good thing”, Joseph thought, “we have a few sheep and olive trees and Mary keeps some chickens.   But Joseph worried, “cheese and olives are not enough to feed a growing boy.  Mary is due to deliver our son any day”. His dreams foretold of a sturdy son working alongside of him…multiplying loaves and fish.

The settlers looked down on Joseph.  He rarely attended shul, and on the high holidays, he would show up late to avoid the tithe.  Their simple cottage was located in a nearby ravine with water from a stream, which flowed year round.  It was choice real estate for any settlement expansion.  So when Joseph fell behind on his property tax, the settlers took over their home, forcibly evicted Joseph and Mary and offered them a one-way bus ticket to Jerusalem.

Joseph, born and raised in the arid hills, fought back and bloodied not a few settlers with his labor-hardened fists.  But in the end he sat, battered on their bridal bed under the olive tree, in black despair.
Mary, much the younger, felt the baby’s movements.  Her time was near.

“We have to find shelter, Joseph, we have to move on …this is no time for revenge”, she pleaded.
Joseph, who believed with the Old Testament prophets in an “eye for an eye”, reluctantly agreed.
So it was that Joseph sold their sheep, chickens and other belongings to an Arab neighbor and bought a donkey and cart.  He loaded up the mattress, some clothes, cheese, olives and eggs and they set out for the Holy City.

The donkey path was rocky and full of potholes. Mary winced at every bump; she worried that it would harm the baby.  Worse, this was the road for the Palestinians with military checkpoints everywhere.  No one ever told Joseph that, as a Jew, he could have taken a smooth paved road – forbidden to the Arabs.
At the first roadblock Joseph saw a long line of Arabs waiting.  Pointing to his very pregnant wife, Joseph asked the Palestinians, half in Arabic, half in Hebrew, if they could go ahead.  A path was opened and the couple went forward.

A young soldier raised his rifle and told Mary and Joseph to get down from the cart.  Joseph descended and nodded to his wife’s stomach.  The soldier smirked and turned to his comrades, “The old Arab knocks up the girl he bought for a dozen sheep and now he wants a free pass”.

Joseph, red with anger, shouted in rough Hebrew, “I am a Jew.  But unlike you … I respect pregnant women”.

The soldier poked Joseph with his rifle and ordered him to step back:  “You are worse than an Arab – you’re an old Jew who screws Arab girls”.

Mary frightened by the exchange turned to her husband and cried, “Stop Joseph or he will shoot you and our baby will be born an orphan”.

With great difficulty Mary got down from the wagon.  An officer came out of the guard station, summoning a female soldier, “Hey Judi, go feel under her dress, she might be carrying bombs”.
“What’s the matter?  Don’t you like to feel them yourself anymore? ” Judith barked back in Brooklyn-accented Hebrew.  While the soldiers argued, Mary leaned on Joseph for support.  Finally, the soldiers came to an agreement.

“Pull-up your dress and slip”, Judith ordered.  Mary blanched in shame.  Joseph faced the gun in disgrace.  The soldiers laughed and pointed at Mary’s swollen breasts, joking about an unborn terrorist with Arab hands and a Jewish brain.

Joseph and Mary continued on the way to the Holy City.  They were frequently detained at the checkpoints along the way.  Each time they suffered another delay, another indignity and more gratuitous insults spouted by Sephardim and Ashkenazi, male and female, secular and religious – all soldiers of the Chosen people.

It was dusk when Mary and Joseph finally reached the Wall.  The gates had closed for the night.  Mary cried out in pain, “Joseph, I can feel the baby coming soon.  Please do something quickly”.

Joseph panicked.  He saw the lights of a small village nearby and, leaving Mary on the cart, Joseph ran to the nearest house and pounded on the door.  A Palestinian woman opened the door slightly and peered into the dark, agitated face of Joseph.  “Who are you?  What do you want?”

“I am Joseph, a carpenter from the hills of Hebron.  My wife is about to give birth and I need shelter to protect Mary and the baby”. Pointing to Mary on the donkey cart, Joseph pleaded in his strange mixture of Hebrew and Arabic.

“Well, you speak like a Jew but you look like an Arab,” the Palestinian woman said laughing as she walked back with him to the cart.

Mary’s face was contorted with pain and fear: her contractions were more frequent and intense.
The woman ordered Joseph to bring the cart around to a stable where the sheep and chickens were kept.  As soon as they entered, Mary cried out in pain and the Palestinian woman, who had now been joined by a neighbor midwife, swiftly helped the young mother down onto a bed of straw.



And thus the child was born, as Joseph watched in awe.

It came to pass that shepherds, returning from their fields, heard the mingled cries of birth and joy and hurried to the stable carrying both their rifles and fresh goat milk, not knowing whether it was friend or foe, Jew or Arab.  When they entered the stable and beheld the mother and infant, they put aside their weapons and offered the milk to Mary who thanked them in both Hebrew and Arabic.

And the shepherds were amazed and wondered: Who were these strange people, a poor Jewish couple, who came in peace on a donkey cart inscribed with Arabic letters?    The news quickly spread about the strange birth of a Jewish child just outside the Wall in a Palestinian’s stable.  Many neighbors entered and beheld Mary, the infant and Joseph.

Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers, equipped with night vision goggles, reported from their watchtowers overlooking the Palestinian neighborhood, “The Arabs are meeting just outside the Wall, in a stable, by candle light”.

The gates under the watchtowers flew open and armored carriers with bright lights followed by heavily armed soldiers drove out and surrounded the stable, the assembled villagers and the Palestinian woman’s house.  A loud speaker blared, “Come out with your hands up or we’ll shoot.”  They all came out from the stable together with Joseph, who stepped forward with his hands stretched out to the sky and spoke, “My wife, Mary cannot comply with your order.  She is nursing the baby Jesus”.



James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of 64 books published in 29 languages, and over 560 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has published over 2000 articles. His latest book is War Crimes  in Gaza and the Zionist Fifth Column in America (Atlanta:Clarity Pres 2010)

A Critique on Julian Assange's accuser

In which we "smear" Julian Assange's accuser

Yesterday, Julian Assange turned himself in to British authorities for extradition to Sweden, to face a number of sexual-assault charges. Since it's for the court to determine whether or not he actually is guilty as charged, let's wait to see how that shakes out. Meanwhile, I'll address some things that started nagging at me as soon as the first feminist analyses of the situation started cropping up on Twitter yesterday.

It's pretty clear to me that battle lines are being drawn in this whole kerfuffle. The discourse has shifted from Wikileaks and Cablegate to Winkyleaks and Condomgate. And it's clear, too, that women are being used--and abused--atrociously here. No, I'm not talking about Julian Assange and what he's alleged to have done to those two women. I'm talking about feminists as a whole; we are being made into inadvertent pawns in the battle over freedom of information. And it seems to me that we're being expected to turn out against Assange--and by extension, against Wikileaks.


I've noted here before that condomless sex, while prosecutable, is not a jailing offence in Sweden; you pay a fine of a few hundred dollars, and that's it. But this case is strange, owing to the high international profile of the accused: the sex charges were pressed months ago, then dropped, and then reinstated. Awfully inconsistent prosecution for an offence generally remedied by a simple fine! And weirdest of all, why is the United States now looking to get involved, when none of the alleged offences happened on their soil? It seems obvious to me that this is all an effort to entrap the man who, for better or worse, is the public face of the Wikileaks organization.

But no, we feminists aren't supposed to remember all that, much less treat it as relevant to the case against Julian Assange. We're supposed to be righteously indignant at his obvious arrogance, and glad that Interpol was mobilized to catch an accused rapist, and deliver the douchebag to Sweden to be held without bail. Pending his extradition to the US, of course; the world's policeman and all-Amurrican good guy, natch.

But if this is how we're supposed to react as feminists, it is utterly ridiculous and an insult to our wits. As Naomi Wolf has humorously noted, this is a very strange and heavy-handed use of the legal remedies fought for--and, in Sweden, won by feminism:

I see that Julian Assange is accused of having consensual sex with two women, in one case using a condom that broke. I understand, from the alleged victims' complaints to the media, that Assange is also accused of texting and tweeting in the taxi on the way to one of the women's apartments while on a date, and, disgustingly enough, 'reading stories about himself online' in the cab. Both alleged victims are also upset that he began dating a second woman while still being in a relationship with the first. (Of course, as a feminist, I am also pleased that the alleged victims are using feminist-inspired rhetoric and law to assuage what appears to be personal injured feelings. That's what our brave suffragette foremothers intended!).

Well, poor Naomi Wolf--who is serious about issues of rape and withdrawn consent--just can't catch a break for mocking a few of the many absurdities of this case. Other feminists were quick to pile onto her, accusing her of "trivializing rape". Instead of looking at the peculiarities of the Wikileaks timeline and admitting that this is a disproportionate response to a charge formerly considered too weak even to prosecute, they accused her of smearing the alleged victim of one of the alleged attacks.

But what if the alleged victim is not so innocent? What if the alleged attack is part of an elaborate set-up?

We already know that the more prominent woman in question, Anna Ardin, has some very interesting CIA ties. And we know that just around the time the first alleged rape occurred, she tweeted enthusiastically about Assange:

I screen-capped those from here.

These tweets give no indication that anything untoward had happened. I ran them past my friend Anthony, who lives in Malmö, for a Swede's-eye view. Here's what he said:

The 8/14 tweet caught my attention; Anna wrote that Julian wanted to attend a crayfish party, so she wondered if there were any open seats that night or the following night. A few hours later, she wrote "Sitting outside at 2AM, freezing with the smartest people in the world, it's amazing!"

Ardin later deleted those tweets and locked down her blog.

But let's suppose for the sake of argument that you're convinced that Anna Ardin is just being smeared, and rape trivialized, and so on. The timing? Just a coincidence! The known CIA ties? How dare you play guilt-by-association! Rape is real, how dare "Naomi Effin' Wolf" make fun of it?

No one, least of all Naomi Wolf, is disputing that rape is real, or that victim-smearing is a dirty tactic, a re-victimization on no uncertain terms. What is being disputed here is the case against Julian Assange, which is pitifully weak and certainly doesn't warrant the involvement of Interpol. If it did, legions of human-rights abusers who used rape as a weapon of war would be behind bars by now, rotting deservedly away. You'd think Interpol could easily bust those bastards at Dyncorp, who openly bought child sex slaves in Bosnia and Afghanistan for the raping pleasure of their contractors. (That latter exposé, BTW, comes to the media courtesy of Wikileaks!)

Naomi Wolf was making fun not of rape, but of what is obviously an exceedingly stupid manhunt. And while her tone may be a bit too flip for some people's liking, she's not wrong to laugh at the transparent idiocy of it all. I do too, and so do plenty of other feminists who've been following the Wikileaks saga with interest. Oh, wouldn't it be lovely if Interpol DID chase down every dick who'd ever wronged us? I've got a couple of real lulus for them myself. Let's make a crayfish party out of this shit. You bring the wine, I'll bring the cheese. Share yer stories, girls!

And if that's not ludicrous enough, how about this? We are being asked to believe that two obviously strong women--Anna Ardin, a professed feminist who works for gender equity, and Sofia Wilen, with whom she banded together later to press charges, could not track down Julian Assange to ask him to get tested for STDs. So they were forced to press charges. They apparently had no trouble getting into his pants. So why would he suddenly be too difficult to simply meet for a coffee, like a civilized adult, to discuss blood tests? Gee, what a cad. Maybe he had something to hide?

According to the same Reuters account, Assange claims he had his cellphone turned off for fear that enemies would track him using its signal. Not an implausible reason, since he DOES have enemies in US intel circles, and if they can't track him through technology, ain't nobody can. But he was still in Sweden when the women were allegedly trying to reach him and just urge him to get tested. They could have waylaid him at his hotel, if it was really so urgent. How simple-minded do we have to be to believe that Anna Ardin's blogging about "thinking about some revenge over the last few days" can't be considered evidence that she was up to something more nefarious than simply trying to get him to a clinic?

Okay, you say, that does look bad, but that's still pretty weak. Her blog is now locked down, and it's very likely that she deleted any incriminating bits. Isn't there anything more definite? What about those alleged CIA ties you conspiracy kooks keep nattering on about?

Well, there we have a lot more to go on. A helluva lot.

Via Twitter, I found this article she'd written for the CIA-tied magazine she was working for. Here's Anthony again, translating:

GF's former columnist Anna Ardin has been in Cuba. Getting to know Cuba is a great political experience and the first thing I would say is that as a foreigner you are extremely discriminated against and constantly pressed for money.
Tourists should always use the hard currency convertible pesos, that is "dollars", which they are called to avoid misunderstandings. All trade with the U.S. dollar was banned in stores in November. A convertible peso is pegged to the dollar and worth 26 Cuban pesos.
Prevented to meet Cubans
You cannot go with the same cheap buses that Cubans use, but must take the tourist taxis, which can cost 20 dollars while the local bus for the same route costs 40 cents of a Cuban peso. Another example is that it is very difficult to live with friends, you always have to pay for hotels or bed and breakfast. The system is almost similar to apartheid!
I'm locked out of the Cuban world and the Cubans are excluded from foreigners - not just financially! Cubans are prevented in many different ways from even visiting the main tourist sites. Foreigners' cars have red registration plates instead of yellow and need not - as the Cubans - to stop and pick up hitchhikers to fill empty seats. In Cuba health care and education are free since the revolution and the Communist takeover in 1959; there are few or no one starving or living on the streets and virtually no need to worry about violence and robbery. But the wages are extremely low.
The salary for the best paid, the police, is $30, a doctor earns about 23, a garbage man 19 and a housekeeper earns seven dollars a month. A beer or a soda costs a dollar, a bottle of oil 2.50, internet for one hour 6, a sports bag 15 and a trip to a neighboring country costs several hundred pesos. Although the prices for most things - except for certain raw materials for food, bus transportation and little else - is in U.S. dollars (that is convertible pesos), the workers get salary in Cuban pesos, which is not always possible to switch.
To survive on these wages seem to be impossible (despite the very minimum required being relatively inexpensive). To save up for a pair of shoes could take half a year, not to mention buying a television or a car, yet many Cubans have this - how? Well, since 1993, it is allowed for Cubans to hold hard currency.
Want to change money
So by drinking or to work with private tourism differs more and more from the crowd. The ones that are excluded from the life you can only live if you have dollars. In that perspective, it is no wonder that in every street corner you are stopped by a so-called jinetero (riders). He asks where you come from, if you want to change money, buy cigars, follow them home to their backyard restaurant or have them as a personal guide to buy them food and clothing. As a woman, you notice nothing of the female counterpart to these, las jineteras, which might more literally ride their tourists for a few days or weeks in exchange for food, clothing and shoes. Or they run around them in their nice cars or pay, to the jinetera or directly to her jineteros - the pimps.
Sex tourism is increasing. Tourism combined with the money that exile Cubans send home accounts for well over half of the currency revenues of the treasury. That the country is so dependent on something that there is not enough of for the whole population, which excludes many and forces people to flee is not sustainable. Cuba needs a new policy. The question is what?
Between Castro or the U.S.
The Social Democratic opposition - Corriente Socialista Democrática Cubana - are trying to show that there is an alternative between the only two clearly presented options, the extremes: that Castro and his gang govern Cuba or the United States does. In a second article I will write more about what the Social Democrats in Cuba think will happen when the now 78-year-old dictator Fidel Castro dies.

Now, this is a load of crapaganda. If you can't smell the CIA's cheap cologne on that, you're hopeless.

Anyone who's really been to Cuba will tell you that it's not as bad as articles like this lead you to believe. The locals are not quarantined from you, or you from them, unless there's some good reason. Working for a CIA-connected crapaganda rag might well be a good reason for the authorities to confine you to your luxury tourist hotel room. But then, if poor Anna Ardin were really so confined, how would she "know" all those appalling details about how the poor oppressed Cubans really live? Unless, of course, she were simply being fed the dubious info by her CIA handlers, in which case she wouldn't even have to go to Cuba to "report" it; she could do it just as easily from home.

And that second-last bit really leapt out at me, too. Interesting focus on sex there for our sex-crimes complainant. Very typical CIA glurge, designed specifically to tweak our most sensitive feminist nerves: Look what that mean old dictator Fidel Castro is making those poor women do! Still more interesting is the lack of hard figures. She claims that prostitution revenues and remittances from "exiles" counts for more than half of the cash in the Cuban treasury. But without numbers and verifiable references to prove it, that all don't mean nuttin', honey.

Of course, it being a CIA rag, hard proof is not really required. Sensationalism is. And the article has that in spades. Just look at the language: "The system is almost similar to apartheid!"--the sky is falling! Oh noes!


Gee, you don't suppose someone who'd write such ghastly goop would have an ulterior motive regarding Julian Assange--whose organization just so happens to have uncovered a lot of embarrassing stuff from US embassies linked to various putsches in various countries allied to Cuba?

Nahhhh. Don't let's connect those dots. Let's just stick to our simple-minded pre-gummed narratives and be good, outraged little bourgeois féministes, huffing at the hacker boogyman and hoping The Hague locks him up for war crimes. Let's accuse those who find odd dirt on Anna Ardin of smearing her, when in fact she seems to have done a fair job of muddying herself. No, no, we can't allow that; let's just view her as a plain and simple victim. And pretend all the Wikileaks stuff is what's extraneous, and that it's not, perhaps, Julian Assange who's really being smeared.

But this feminist can't pretend, and certainly can't ignore the blindingly obvious.

Wikileaks is shining an uncomfortably bright light on things the US doesn't want us to see, and how they are being perpetrated. It's shown incriminating footage of US helicopters firing on innocent Iraqis in Baghdad. It's exposed the way US embassies lie to the citizens of the countries where they are posted, and lie about them as well. Is it really so far-fetched to surmise that Anna Ardin, who lied about Cuba in a CIA rag, just might have been sent by the same CIA to take Julian Assange down, by whatever means necessary? Is it really a smear to demonstrate--not suggest, not insinuate, but DEMONSTRATE--that she is more than a little bit connected to them, just as they are connected to every US diplomatic installation and quite a few seemingly private corporations?

Again, let's look at the timeline.

The first big bombshell Wikileaks dropped was Collateral Murder; this went down on April 5. On July 6, Bradley Manning was charged with leaking the video to Wikileaks. Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen slept with Julian Assange on August 14 and 17, respectively, while the latter, undoubtedly feeling the heat from the US, was hoping to gain residency and whistleblower protection in Sweden. The encounters were consensual according to both women, and uneventful except for the respective alleged condom disputes. Later, both allegedly sought him out, being worried about catching a sexually-transmitted disease. They couldn't find him because his cellphone was turned off. Then they turned to the authorities to press charges, only to be told it was too hard to prove, and saw the charges dropped. Only to have them reinstated now, of all times. While Bradley Manning, surely by malign coincidence, is also already jailed and awaiting trial--facing 52 years of hard time in the federal pen. He is suspected of leaking the Cablegate documents, as well, although he has not been charged with that.

Would this case have gone anywhere if the man in question were anyone other than Julian Assange, who just happened to have humiliated the US government that spring with that ghastly video release? And would he have been sought for prosecution if he hadn't just gone public with the first of many expected Cablegate releases?

The Swedish prosecutors deny that any pressure was brought to bear on them by the US. Yet just last week, the Swedish government was mortified by the revelation that Sweden is no longer neutral. Who announced it? Wikileaks, via Cablegate. The local US embassy had the gall to write as much to Washington! And I reiterate: The US authorities are now looking to extradite Assange from Sweden. Even with no charges of their own against him. They are looking for a way to do it, some hook to hang those charges on. Doesn't matter if it's as flimsy as the anti-Castro tripe Anna Ardin used to write. It doesn't have to be true. It just has to be sensational enough to get public opinion on side...

Yeah, tell me it doesn't all hang together. Denial, river in Egypt. Cleo, you're up the creek!

It's much easier to go into a "good feminist" (or full-on conspiracy nut) tizzy, I grant you, than to follow complex international developments in a more intelligent manner. It's also safer than to do another smart thing: dovetail one's feminism and freedom-of-information advocacy for the common, global good. Unfortunately, it's also the perfect way to divorce feminism from the much larger international issues that we ignore at our peril. It makes us feminists all look like laughingstocks or Limbaughian feminazis. We inadvertently contribute to our own continued alienation from our sisters in the global south if we fall for that narrative. We also end up setting back our own progress, and theirs.

But we don't have to. This radical, left-wing feminist agrees wholeheartedly with Gloria Steinem: The truth will set us all free. But first, it will piss us off.
Let it.

Posted by Sabina Becker on December 8, 2010 11:01 PM | Permalink

An Exclusive Interview with Julian Assange on the Eve of His Arrest

WikiLeaks Founder Denies Accusations, Says It’s Fascinating to See the Tentacles of the Corrupt American Elite

By Natalia Viana
Opera Mundi, translated by Narco News

December 7, 2010

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, gave an exclusive interview to Brazilian journalist Natalia Viana of the online publication Opera Mundi on Monday. (Viana, 2004 graduate of Narco News’ School of Authentic Journalism, now is co-chair, with Bill Conroy, of its investigative journalism program.) Assange didn’t hide his irritation at the freezing of his Swiss bank account (on the pretext of his having registered it at a local address while he does not reside in a European country) and with other actions taken against his organization since it published embarrassing documents from US Embassies.
Assange was preparing to turn himself in to British police, who arrested him in London this morning. Assange is accused of sexual crimes in Sweden. The accusation isn’t very clear and includes charges of having unprotected sex with two women while he was in Stockholm giving a speech. On November 18 Swedish authorities issued an arrest warrant with the objective of interrogating him for “reasonable suspicion of rape, sexual and coercive aggression.” The WikiLeaks founder faces a hearing in the Westminster court in the central region of London, where it will be decided if he will be extradited to Sweden.

Natalia Viana: What accusations are you facing at this moment?

Julian Assange: There are many accusations. The most serious is that our personnel have practiced espionage against the USA. That is false. There is also the famous allegation of “rape” in Sweden. That is false and is going to be dismissed when the real facts come to light. Mainly, it is being used to attack our reputation.

Viana: Regarding the accusation of espionage, have their been any legal charges filed?

Assange: No. There has been a formal investigation involving the directors fo the FBI, the CIA, and the US Attorney General. Australia, my country, is also conducting the same kind of investigation – in which the entire government is involved – and at the same time counseling the US. One of the alleged sources in this investigation, Bradley Manning (US soldier accused of being WikiLeaks’ source) is imprisoned in solitary confinement inside a prison cell in Virginia in the US. He could be sentenced to 52 years in prison for the total of the accusations against him, including espionage.

Viana: What is the difference between WikiLeaks and espionage?

Assange: WikiLeaks receives material from whistleblowers (persons who denounce wrongdoing in the organizations in which they work) and journalists and make it public. Accusing us of espionage theorizes that we actively work to obtain material on behalf of a foreign nation.

Viana: In the Sweden case, what do the women allege?

Assange: They say that I had consensual sex. The case was already closed for twelve hours when the attorney general in Stockholm, Eva Finne, read its contents. It was then reopened, after she gave a political speech. This whole case is very bothersome. Now, they have frozen my bank account in Switzerland which was the fund to pay for my defense.

Viana: On what basis?

Assange: They are alleging that I put them at risk. But they don’t have any evidence to suggest that. And, in any case, it’s false.

Viana: What is your opinion about the freezing of your money transfers by the business PayPal, and that Amazon removed your site? How do you see those acts?

Assange: It is fascinating to see the tentacles of the corrupt American elite. In a way, to observe this reaction is as important as seeing the material that we published. PayPal and Amazon froze our accounts for political reasons. With PayPal, 70,000 euros were frozen. With our defense fund, that was 31,000 euros.

Viana: What do they allege?

Assange: They say that we were conducting “illegal activities,” and that clearly is untrue. More, they are echoing the accusations of (US Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton that we have published documents that can cause problems for the USA. At the same time, the leader of the Senate Homeland Security Committee said he is very proud to have caused Amazon’s actions when he demanded the closing of our site.

Viana: What is WikiLeaks doing to defend itself from the freezing of its donations?

Assange: We have lost 100,000 euros this week alone as a result of the freezing of our assets. We have accounts in other banks – in Iceland and Sweden, for example, that the public can still use. We have a website. We also can accept credit card donations.

Viana: What more is WikiLeaks doing to defend itself?

Assange: We are counting on a diversity of support from good people. We have more than 350 websites in the world that are reproducing our content. We value that more than anything.

Translated from the original Portuguese to English by Al Giordano for Narco News.

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Four Scenarios for the End of the American Century by 2025 By Alfred W. McCoy

A soft landing for America 40 years from now?  Don’t bet on it.  The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines.  If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.

Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.

Future historians are likely to identify the Bush administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America's downfall. However, instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many past empires, with cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this twenty-first century imperial collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic collapse or cyberwarfare.

But have no doubt: when Washington's global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life. As a half-dozen European nations have discovered, imperial decline tends to have a remarkably demoralizing impact on a society, regularly bringing at least a generation of economic privation. As the economy cools, political temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic unrest.

Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.

Significantly, in 2008, the U.S. National Intelligence Council admitted for the first time that America's global power was indeed on a declining trajectory. In one of its periodic futuristic reports, Global Trends 2025, the Council cited “the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way, roughly from West to East" and "without precedent in modern history,” as the primary factor in the decline of the “United States' relative strength -- even in the military realm.” Like many in Washington, however, the Council’s analysts anticipated a very long, very soft landing for American global preeminence, and harbored the hope that somehow the U.S. would long “retain unique military capabilities… to project military power globally” for decades to come.

No such luck.  Under current projections, the United States will find itself in second place behind China (already the world's second largest economy) in economic output around 2026, and behind India by 2050. Similarly, Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America's current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation.

By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire.  It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced aerospace robotics that represents Washington's last best hope of retaining global power despite its waning economic influence. By that year, however, China's global network of communications satellites, backed by the world's most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of space and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe.

Wrapped in imperial hubris, like Whitehall or Quai d'Orsay before it, the White House still seems to imagine that American decline will be gradual, gentle, and partial. In his State of the Union address last January, President Obama offered the reassurance that “I do not accept second place for the United States of America.” A few days later, Vice President Biden ridiculed the very idea that “we are destined to fulfill [historian Paul] Kennedy's prophecy that we are going to be a great nation that has failed because we lost control of our economy and overextended.” Similarly, writing in the November issue of the establishment journal Foreign Affairs, neo-liberal foreign policy guru Joseph Nye waved away talk of China's economic and military rise, dismissing “misleading metaphors of organic decline” and denying that any deterioration in U.S. global power was underway.

Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head overseas, have a more realistic view than their cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August 2010 found that 65% of Americans believed the country was now “in a state of decline.”  Already, Australia and Turkey, traditional U.S. military allies, are using their American-manufactured weapons for joint air and naval maneuvers with China. Already, America's closest economic partners are backing away from Washington's opposition to China's rigged currency rates. As the president flew back from his Asian tour last month, a gloomy New York Times headline  summed the moment up this way: “Obama's Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage, China, Britain and Germany Challenge U.S., Trade Talks With Seoul Fail, Too.”

Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the decline will be. In place of Washington's wishful thinking, let’s use the National Intelligence Council's own futuristic methodology to suggest four realistic scenarios for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, U.S. global power could reach its end in the 2020s (along with four accompanying assessments of just where we are today).  The future scenarios include: economic decline, oil shock, military misadventure, and World War III.  While these are hardly the only possibilities when it comes to American decline or even collapse, they offer a window into an onrushing future.

Economic Decline: Present Situation

Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar's privileged status as the global reserve currency. 

By 2008, the United States had already fallen to number three in global merchandise exports, with just 11% of them compared to 12% for China and 16% for the European Union.  There is no reason to believe that this trend will reverse itself. 

Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation is on the wane. In 2008, the U.S. was still number two behind Japan in worldwide patent applications with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering 400% increase since 2000.  A harbinger of further decline: in 2009 the U.S. hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in “global innovation-based competitiveness” during the previous decade.  Adding substance to these statistics, in October China's Defense Ministry unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful, said one U.S. expert, that it “blows away the existing No. 1 machine” in America. 

Add to this clear evidence that the U.S. education system, that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010.  The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened.  By 2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists. 

Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly sharp criticism of the dollar's role as the world’s reserve currency. “Other countries are no longer willing to buy into the idea that the U.S. knows best on economic policy,” observed Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In mid-2009, with the world's central banks holding an astronomical $4 trillion in U.S. Treasury notes, Russian president Dimitri Medvedev insisted that it was time to end “the artificially maintained unipolar system” based on “one formerly strong reserve currency.” 

Simultaneously, China's central bank governor suggested that the future might lie with a global reserve currency “disconnected from individual nations” (that is, the U.S. dollar). Take these as signposts of a world to come, and of a possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson has argued, “to hasten the bankruptcy of the U.S. financial-military world order.” 

Economic Decline: Scenario 2020 

After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the U.S. dollar finally loses its special status as the world's reserve currency.  Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget.  Under pressure at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls U.S. forces back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter.  By now, however, it is far too late. 

Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace.  Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence. 

Oil Shock: Present Situation 

One casualty of America's waning economic power has been its lock on global oil supplies. Speeding by America's gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane, China became the world's number one energy consumer this summer, a position the U.S. had held for over a century.  Energy specialist Michael Klare has argued that this change means China will “set the pace in shaping our global future.” 

By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world's natural gas supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National Intelligence Council has warned, in just 15 years two countries, Russia and Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.” 

Despite remarkable ingenuity, the major oil powers are now draining the big basins of petroleum reserves that are amenable to easy, cheap extraction. The real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was not BP's sloppy safety standards, but the simple fact everyone saw on “spillcam”: one of the corporate energy giants had little choice but to search for what Klare calls “tough oil” miles beneath the surface of the ocean to keep its profits up. 

Compounding the problem, the Chinese and Indians have suddenly become far heavier energy consumers. Even if fossil fuel supplies were to remain constant (which they won’t), demand, and so costs, are almost certain to rise -- and sharply at that.  Other developed nations are meeting this threat aggressively by plunging into experimental programs to develop alternative energy sources.  The United States has taken a different path, doing far too little to develop alternative sources while, in the last three decades, doubling its dependence on foreign oil imports.  Between 1973 and 2007, oil imports have risen from 36% of energy consumed in the U.S. to 66%. 

Oil Shock: Scenario 2025 

The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse developments in the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock.  By comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in just months) look like the proverbial molehill.  Angered at the dollar's plummeting value, OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future energy payments in a “basket” of Yen, Yuan, and Euros.  That only hikes the cost of U.S. oil imports further.  At the same moment, while signing a new series of long-term delivery contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the Yuan.  Meanwhile, China pours countless billions into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and funding Iran's exploitation of the world largest natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf. 

Concerned that the U.S. Navy might no longer be able to protect the oil tankers traveling from the Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition of Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an unexpected new Gulf alliance and affirm that China's new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth patrol the Persian Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman.  Under heavy economic pressure, London agrees to cancel the U.S. lease on its Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia, while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a homeport, effectively evicting the U.S. Navy from the Indian Ocean. 

With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements, the “Carter Doctrine,” by which U.S. military power was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf, is laid to rest in 2025.  All the elements that long assured the United States limitless supplies of low-cost oil from that region -- logistics, exchange rates, and naval power -- evaporate. At this point, the U.S. can still cover only an insignificant 12% of its energy needs from its nascent alternative energy industry, and remains dependent on imported oil for half of its energy consumption.
The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights, making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition, putting real wages (which had long been declining) into freefall, and rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, U.S. military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases. 

Within a few years, the U.S. is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on the American Century. 

Military Misadventure: Present Situation 

Counterintuitively, as their power wanes, empires often plunge into ill-advised military misadventures.  This phenomenon is known among historians of empire as “micro-militarism” and seems to involve psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat by occupying new territories, however briefly and catastrophically. These operations, irrational even from an imperial point of view, often yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the loss of power.
Embattled empires through the ages suffer an arrogance that drives them to plunge ever deeper into military misadventures until defeat becomes debacle. In 413 BCE, a weakened Athens sent 200 ships to be slaughtered in Sicily. In 1921, a dying imperial Spain dispatched 20,000 soldiers to be massacred by Berber guerrillas in Morocco. In 1956, a fading British Empire destroyed its prestige by attacking Suez. And in 2001 and 2003, the U.S. occupied Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. With the hubris that marks empires over the millennia, Washington has increased its troops in Afghanistan to 100,000, expanded the war into Pakistan, and extended its commitment to 2014 and beyond, courting disasters large and small in this guerilla-infested, nuclear-armed graveyard of empires. 

Military Misadventure: Scenario 2014 

So irrational, so unpredictable is “micro-militarism” that seemingly fanciful scenarios are soon outdone by actual events. With the U.S. military stretched thin from Somalia to the Philippines and tensions rising in Israel, Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis abroad are multifold. 

It’s mid-summer 2014 and a drawn-down U.S. garrison in embattled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by Taliban guerrillas, while U.S. aircraft are grounded by a blinding sandstorm. Heavy loses are taken and in retaliation, an embarrassed American war commander looses B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of the city that are believed to be under Taliban control, while AC-130U “Spooky” gunships rake the rubble with devastating cannon fire. 

Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques throughout the region, and Afghan Army units, long trained by American forces to turn the tide of the war, begin to desert en masse.  Taliban fighters then launch a series of remarkably sophisticated strikes aimed at U.S. garrisons across the country, sending American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, U.S. helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians from rooftops in Kabul and Kandahar. 

Meanwhile, angry at the endless, decades-long stalemate over Palestine, OPEC’s leaders impose a new oil embargo on the U.S. to protest its backing of Israel as well as the killing of untold numbers of Muslim civilians in its ongoing wars across the Greater Middle East. With gas prices soaring and refineries running dry, Washington makes its move, sending in Special Operations forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf.  This, in turn, sparks a rash of suicide attacks and the sabotage of pipelines and oil wells. As black clouds billow skyward and diplomats rise at the U.N. to bitterly denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back into history to brand this “America's Suez,” a telling reference to the 1956 debacle that marked the end of the British Empire. 

World War III: Present Situation 

In the summer of 2010, military tensions between the U.S. and China began to rise in the western Pacific, once considered an American “lake.”  Even a year earlier no one would have predicted such a development. As Washington played upon its alliance with London to appropriate much of Britain's global power after World War II, so China is now using the profits from its export trade with the U.S. to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific. 

With its growing resources, Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the U.S. Navy. In August, after Washington expressed a “national interest” in the South China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that claim, Beijing's official Global Times responded angrily, saying, “The U.S.-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.” 

Amid growing tensions, the Pentagon reported that Beijing now holds “the capability to attack… [U.S.] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean” and target “nuclear forces throughout… the continental United States.” By developing “offensive nuclear, space, and cyber warfare capabilities,” China seems determined to vie for dominance of what the Pentagon calls “the information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.” With ongoing development of the powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well as the launch of two satellites in January 2010 and another in July, for a total of five, Beijing signaled that the country was making rapid strides toward an “independent” network of 35 satellites for global positioning, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities by 2020. 

To check China and extend its military position globally, Washington is intent on building a new digital network of air and space robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic surveillance.  Military planners expect this integrated system to envelop the Earth in a cyber-grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or taking out a single terrorist in field or favela. By 2020, if all goes according to plan, the Pentagon will launch a three-tiered shield of space drones -- reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance. 

Last April, the Pentagon made history.  It extended drone operations into the exosphere by quietly launching the X-37B unmanned space shuttle into a low orbit 255 miles above the planet.  The X-37B is the first in a new generation of unmanned vehicles that will mark the full weaponization of space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before. 

World War III: Scenario 2025 

The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new and untested that even the most outlandish scenarios may soon be superseded by a reality still hard to conceive. If we simply employ the sort of scenarios that the Air Force itself used in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game, however, we can gain “a better understanding of how air, space and cyberspace overlap in warfare,” and so begin to imagine how the next world war might actually be fought. 

It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. While cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest home electronics from China, U.S. Air Force technicians at the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) on Maui choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the U.S. CyberCommand's operations center in Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect malicious binaries that, though fired anonymously, show the distinctive digital fingerprints of China's People's Liberation Army. 

The first overt strike is one nobody predicted. Chinese “malware” seizes control of the robotics aboard an unmanned solar-powered U.S. “Vulture” drone as it flies at 70,000 feet over the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan.  It suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its enormous 400-foot wingspan, sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the Yellow Sea, effectively disarming this formidable weapon.
Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory strike.  Confident that its F-6 “Fractionated, Free-Flying” satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, ordering them to launch their “Triple Terminator” missiles at China's 35 satellites. Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches its Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle into an arc 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean and then, just 20 minutes later, sends the computer codes to fire missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby orbits.  The launch codes are suddenly inoperative. 

As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably through the F-6 satellite architecture, while those second-rate U.S. supercomputers fail to crack the malware's devilishly complex code, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of U.S. ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier fleets begin steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded. Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is exhausted. Suddenly, the United States loses what the U.S. Air Force has long called “the ultimate high ground”: space. Within hours, the military power that had dominated the globe for nearly a century has been defeated in World War III without a single human casualty. 

A New World Order? 

Even if future events prove duller than these four scenarios suggest, every significant trend points toward a far more striking decline in American global power by 2025 than anything Washington now seems to be envisioning. 

As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take cognizance of rising Asian powers, the cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling Washington. With both the U.S. and China in a race to weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to rise, making military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed. 

Complicating matters even more, the economic, military, and technological trends outlined above will not operate in tidy isolation. As happened to European empires after World War II, such negative forces will undoubtedly prove synergistic.  They will combine in thoroughly unexpected ways, create crises for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin the economy into a sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a generation or more of economic misery. 

As U.S. power recedes, the past offers a spectrum of possibilities for a future world order.  At one end of this spectrum, the rise of a new global superpower, however unlikely, cannot be ruled out. Yet both China and Russia evince self-referential cultures, recondite non-roman scripts, regional defense strategies, and underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key instruments for global dominion. At the moment then, no single superpower seems to be on the horizon likely to succeed the U.S. 

In a dark, dystopian version of our global future, a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could conceivably forge a single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at all.  While denationalized corporations and multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural wastelands. 

In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis offers at least a partial vision of such a world from the bottom up.  He argues that the billion people already packed into fetid favela-style slums worldwide (rising to two billion by 2030) will make “the 'feral, failed cities' of the Third World… the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century.” As darkness settles over some future super-favela, “the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression” as “hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts… Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”
At a midpoint on the spectrum of possible futures, a new global oligopoly might emerge between 2020 and 2040, with rising powers China, Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating with receding powers like Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States to enforce an ad hoc global dominion, akin to the loose alliance of European empires that ruled half of humanity circa 1900. 

Another possibility: the rise of regional hegemons in a return to something reminiscent of the international system that operated before modern empires took shape. In this neo-Westphalian world order, with its endless vistas of micro-violence and unchecked exploitation, each hegemon would dominate its immediate region -- Brasilia in South America, Washington in North America, Pretoria in southern Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the maritime deeps, removed from the control of the former planetary “policeman,” the United States, might even become a new global commons, controlled through an expanded U.N. Security Council or some ad hoc body. 

All of these scenarios extrapolate existing trends into the future on the assumption that Americans, blinded by the arrogance of decades of historically unparalleled power, cannot or will not take steps to manage the unchecked erosion of their global position.
If America's decline is in fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have already frittered away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that distracted us from long-term problems and, like water tossed onto desert sands, wasted trillions of desperately needed dollars. 

If only 15 years remain, the odds of frittering them all away still remain high.  Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country's role and prosperity in a changing world.

 Europe's empires are gone and America's imperium is going.  It seems increasingly doubtful that the United States will have anything like Britain's success in shaping a succeeding world order that protects its interests, preserves its prosperity, and bears the imprint of its best values.

Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  A TomDispatch regular, he is the author, most recently, of Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (2009). He is also the convener of the “Empires in Transition” project, a global working group of 140 historians from universities on four continents. The results of their first meetings at Madison, Sydney, and Manila were published as Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State and the findings from their latest conference will appear next year as “Endless Empire: Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Ascent, and the Decline of U.S. Global Power.”
Copyright 2010 Alfred W. McCoy

Cracks in the wilderness of mirrors By Pepe Escobar

The temptation to see WikiLeaks as a neo-Baudelairean artificial paradise - the marriage of libertarian anarchism and cyber-knowledge - could not be more seductive. Now no more than 40 people are helping founder Julian Assange, plus 800 from the outside. 

All this with a 200,000 euro (US$264,000) annual budget - and a nomad home base. WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson maintains that this is still a "gateway for whistleblowers", where sources are unidentified and even unknown. You can get a whistleblower to show the emperor has no clothes with just 200,000 euros - just as someone, be him Osama bin Laden or not, could usher the real "new world order" in on 9/11 with $500,000. 

Daniel Ellsberg, who broke the Pentagon Papers in 1971, sees Assange as a hero. For vast swathes of the United States establishment, he is now public enemy number one - an unlikely echo of bin Laden. He may be now in southeast England, contactable by Scotland Yard, and about to be arrested at any minute courtesy of an Interpol mandate based on his being wanted in Sweden. Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan may be doing the twist in his media tomb; if the media are the message, when you can't eliminate the message why not eliminate the media? 

The book of sand 

Let's examine Assange's crime. Here he is, in his own words, in "State and Terrorist Conspiracies":

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

So Assange understands WikiLeaks as an anti-virus that should guide our navigation across the distortion of political language. If language is a virus from outer space, as William Naked Lunch Burroughs put it, WikiLeaks should be the antidote. Assange basically believes that the (cumulative) revelation of secrets will lead to the production of no future secrets. It's an anarchic/romantic/utopian vision. 

It's vital to remember that Assange configures the US essentially as a huge authoritarian conspiracy. American political activist Noam Chomsky would say the same thing (and they wouldn't want to arrest him for it). The difference is that Assange deploys a combat strategy: he aims to corrode the ability of the system to conspire. That's where the metaphor of the computer network fits in. Assange wants to fight the power of the system, treating it as a computer choking in the desert sands. Were he alive, it would be smashing to see the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges penning a short story about this. 

On top of writing his own "Book of Sand", Assange is also counter-attacking the Pentagon's counter-insurgency doctrine. He's not in "tracking-the-Taliban-and taking-them-out" mode. This is just a detail. If the conspiracy is an electronic network - let's say, the (foreign policy) Matrix - what he wants is to strike at its cognitive ability by debasing the quality of the information. 

Here intervenes another crucial element. The ability of the conspiracy to deceive everyone through massive propaganda is equivalent to the conspiracy's penchant for deceiving itself through its own propaganda. 

That's how we get to the Assange strategy of deploying a tsunami of leaks as a key actor/vector in the informational landscape. And that takes us to another crucial point: it doesn't matter whether these leaks are new, gossip or wishful thinking (as long as they are authentic). The - very ambitious - mother idea is to undermine the system of information and thus "force the computer to crash", making the conspiracy turn against itself in self-defense. WikiLeaks believes we can only destroy a conspiracy by rendering it hallucinatory and paranoid in relation to itself. 

All this also takes us farther into crucial territory. The bulk of the cablegate-inspired global-talk-show tsunami has totally missed the point. Once again, it doesn't matter that most cables are gossip - trashy tabloid stuff. See it as Assange's way of illustrating how the conspiracy works. He is not interested in journalistic scoops (as much as his media partners, from the Guardian to Der Spiegel may be); what he wants is to strangle the nodes that make the conspiracy possible - to render the system "dumb and dumber". 

No doubt cablegate shows how the US State Department seems to be in dumb-and-dumber territory - not even creative enough to do their own versions of "pimp my cable". This is already an extraordinary victory for an organization different from anything we have seen so far, which is doing things that journalists do or should be doing, and then some. And there will be more, on a major bank's secrets (probably Bank of America), on China's secrets, on Russia's secrets. 

Mirror, mirror on the net 

The US government and most of corporate media predictably rolled out their defense mechanism, as in "there's nothing new in these cables". Some might have suspected that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had ordered American diplomats to spy on their colleagues at the United Nations. Another thing entirely is to have an official cable confirmation. If UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was not such a wimp, he would be throwing a monumental diplomatic fit by now. 

And then, at the same time, the US government and virtually the whole establishment - from neo-conservatives to Obama-light practitioners - want to pull out all stops to delete WikiLeaks or, even take out Assange, as George W Bush wanted to do with bin Laden. Grizzly nutjob Sarah Palin says Assange is worse than al-Qaeda. Such hysteria lead an Atlanta radio station to ask listeners whether Assange should be executed or imprisoned (no third option; execution won). Redneck Baptist priest Mike Huckabee, who might have been the Republican contender for president in 2008 and is now a talk-show fixture, goes for execution as well. 

Who to believe? These freaks, or two frustrated US federal investigators who told the Los Angeles Times that if WikiLeaks had been active in 2001, it would have prevented 9/11? 

French philosophers avid to escape their own irrelevancy foment conspiracy theories, lamenting that WikiLeaks gives the media unprecedented powers; other blame the Internet ogre for gobbling up journalists. That's the beauty of the leaks - this is the stuff conspiracies are made of. 

Under this framework it is very enlightening to listen to what eminent Cold Warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski has to say. He told the US Public Broadcasting Service that cablegate is "seeded" with "surprisingly pointed" information, and that "seeding" is too easy to accomplish. 

Example: those cables saying that the Chinese are inclined to cooperate with the US in view of a possible Korean unification under the aegis of South Korea (I debunk this in my previous article, See TheNaked Emperor, Asia Times Online, December 1, 2010). 

Dr Zbig says that WikiLeaks may have been manipulated by intelligence services with "very specific objectives". They could be, as he hints, internal US elements who want to embarass the Barack Obama administration. But he also suspects "foreign elements". In this case, the first on the list would be none other than the state of Israel. 

As conspiracy theories go, this one is a cracker; could WikiLeaks be the head of a real invisible "snake" - a massive Israeli disinformation campaign? Evidence would include cables seriously compromising the US-Turkey relationship; the cumulative cables painting a picture of a Sunni Arab-wide consensus for attacking Iran; and the fact that the cables reveal nothing that demonstrates how Israel has jeopardized US interests in the Middle East over and over again. 

In an interview with American talk show host Larry King, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin went Dr Zbig and said this was in fact a manipulation - the cables as a deliberate plot to discredit Russia (this was before Russia clinched the 2018 World Cup; now everyone is drowning in torrents of Stoli and no one gives a damn about cables anymore). Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad said virtually the same thing regarding Iran. 

And then there's the conspiracy that didn't happen: how come the Pentagon, for all its ultra-high-tech savvy ways, has not been willing, or able, to completely shut down WikiLeaks? 

There's thunderous chatter everywhere on WikiLeaks' "motives" for releasing these cables. We just need to go back to Assange's thinking to realize there's no "motive". The intellectual void and political autism of America's diplomats is self-evident; they can only "understand" the Other: the world in terms of good guys and bad guys. The great French-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard is 80 this Friday. How fresh if he would shoot a remake of Made in USA, now featuring the perplexity of the system as it contemplates its reflection in a giant, digital mirror. 

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.