Must. Stop. Laughing.

News reaches us all that the great fighter for free speech, Julian Assange, has asked for asylum in Ecuador. It seems he walked into the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and "told diplomats he was being persecuted for political reasons".

This is the man who, proclaiming that truth mattered above all, unredacted US cables that he released, thus making the names of oppositionists in countries like Belarus known to the government agencies and is highly regarded in that freedom loving country, Russia (here, here and here) but has fought tooth and nail against his own extradition to Sweden on charges of rape. Sweden is not precisely Belarus or Russia in terms of its judicial structure and openness.

Some time ago, I suggested that Assange might think of asking for asylum in Russia.

If all these people's [Jemima Khan, John Pilger et al] worst suspicions should come true and the United States asks for his extradition, Mr Assange can, one assumes, apply for asylum in Russia. Of course, he will not be able to publish any material that might damage or seriously criticize the Russian government if he wants to stay alive and healthy, but he can, as the old Soviet joke had it, criticize the United States to his heart's content.

Maybe Assange took my advice and decided on going to Ecuador, instead, where as a friend of mine has pointed out, the chocolate, at least, is excellent.

As the Guardian points out,

By choosing Ecuador, he has alighted on a country that is clearly in accord with his political views, not closely aligned with the United States and, he will hope, beyond the reach of the European arrest warrant system.

It may be beyond the reach of the European arrest warrant but it may have an extradition treaty with Sweden, anyway. My guess is that the Ecuadorian authorities are rather unhappy about the situation though they talk bravely about analyzing the situation and taking a decision on the basis of that analysis.

There is another problem but that applies to that much derided group, the trendy luvvies.

Assange was granted bail on a surety of £240,000 raised and pledged by supporters. His apparent flight from the legal process could now place that money at risk of confiscation by the court.

One really does have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the whole story.

What's sauce for the goose ...

Reuters reports that WikiLeaks, the hero of all freedom loving people those who think publishing State Department information is the acme of courage, has lost its "Icelanding financial lifeline".

On Thursday, WikiLeaks payments provider DataCell said it could start processing donations to Assange's group again, circumventing a months-long ban by Visa and MasterCard.

An Icelandic bank called Valitor had agreed to accept payments processed by DataCell, but DataCell did not tell Valitor that those payments would include donations to WikiLeaks, the bank told Reuters on Friday.

"Valitor was not informed that DataCell would be conducting these activities when their business agreement was made," spokeswoman Jonina Ingvadottir told Reuters in an emailed statement on Friday.

She cited Visa and MasterCard's prohibition on the "service such as DataCell is offering WikiLeaks."

The world's two largest credit card processing networks were among several companies to cut off services to WikiLeaks late last year after the whistleblower organisation made public a massive trove of secret U.S. diplomatic cables.

Well, if you can use financial power to fight the News of the World, you can use it to fight WikiLeaks. No?

John Pilger, Jemima Khan and Vladimir Putin

What do they have in common? Obvious, really: they are all supporters of the sainted (if one listens to some people) Julian Assange. Presidetn Prime Minister Putin, a great expert in democracy and freedom of information, is, according to this story, leading the world-wide support for Mr Assange who was arrested in Britain at the request of the Swedish authorities as he has been accused of rape (a crime in this country, as well, though some people seem to have forgotten that). His treatment by the British authorities, says Mr Putin with only a slight chuckle, one assumes, is undemocratic. It is, of course, entirely possible that Mr Putin was not too happy about some of the surprisingly perceptive comments made by State Department officials and diplomats about the situation in Russia.

Needless to say, President No.1, Medvedev has also commented on Julian Assange. As Russia Today reports,

Non-governmental organizations should consider nominating Julian Assange for a Nobel Prize, a source in the Russian presidential administration has said.

Public and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) “should think of how to help” the founder of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, the source said on Tuesday, as reported by Interfax news agency.

How very delightful and how it takes one back to the days of the dear departed Soviet Union when organizations that had been set up and allowed by the state and party would parade their willingness to repeat the party line.

One wonders how Ms Khan is reacting to her unexpected allies in the fight for Mr Assange's freedom. Of course, if all these people's worst suspicions should come true and the United States asks for his extradition, Mr Assange can, one assumes, apply for asylum in Russia. Of course, he will not be able to publish any material that might damage or seriously criticize the Russian government if he wants to stay alive and healthy, but he can, as the old Soviet joke had it, criticize the United States to his heart's content.

More on those Leaks

This morning there was another item from the department of the bleedin' obvious in the WikiLeaks saga: Putin might well have known about the plot to assassinate Alexander Litvinenko. In fact, he probably did know. Gosh, I thought, not really! Then I thought: has Julian Assange actually got round to publishing Russian cables. He'd better look out then. But, of course, nothing of the kind.

Senior American officials believed Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin may well have known about the operation to murder dissident former spy Alexander Litvinenko in London, according to leaked US diplomatic cables.

Washington's senior diplomat in Europe challenged suggestions that the killing could have been the work of "rogue elements" in the Russian security forces, according to the latest documents posted on the WikiLeaks website.

Assistant secretary of state Daniel Fried said that Mr Putin's attention to detail meant that it would have been difficult for such an operation to be carried out without his knowledge.

We are still in the realm of American State Department cables, acquired by Mr Assange with very little difficulty or danger.

As an article on the Henry Jackson Society site that also appeared in the Daily Telegraph, says:

If Assange is genuinely committed to shining light into the darkness, and exposing real corruption and human rights abuse, we must ask ourselves, where are the ‘Chinese Embassy Cables’? What has become of the ‘Iran Files’? Whither the ‘Chechnya War Logs’?


It is very important to make the distinction between the latest leaks about Russian corruption under Putin, which are allegations taken from Western sources, and the kind of revelations that would be truly devastating to the Kremlin's credibility: damaging revelations, in other words, from Russian state sources. This we have yet to see, and are unlikely to anytime soon.

The point is that Assange has made grandiloquent claims for his activity, quoted in the same article:

Speaking at a dinner of the Oslo Freedom Forum in April this year, Assange eloquently countered claims that he is anti-Western. On the contrary, he said, he is very much pro-Western. The object of his chagrin is not the West but its leaders, who have distorted and corrupted Western values for their own nefarious ends, and he – like all good revolutionaries – is out to claim those values back.

“The United States”, he said, “once had a proud tradition of freedom of the press... [but] when we see the path that [it is now] going down, we have to question whether it is really holding those values anymore”. The United Kingdom is no better, he says. 300 gag orders in force at any one time make a mockery of the notion of a British free press.

So far from the Enlightenment path has the West apparently strayed in its obsession with secrecy and perversion of justice that Assange now likens it to the Soviet Union in the era of Stalin and Solzhenitsyn. He speaks of an ‘Orwellian’ atmosphere of information control, and a muted media made incapable of speaking out.

Confronted by this nightmare, Assange’s duty is clear: “We have become the publisher of last resort... And in that endeavour [we have] been successful in putting over a million restricted documents into the historical record that weren’t there before. That’s more pages of information than is in Wikipedia.”

One's immediate reaction is that this man either knows nothing about Stalin's Soviet Union or is a liar of monumental proportions.

It is, nevertheless, true: if he really cares about freedom, transparency and human rights then he should start looking at some other countries that are somewhat more deficient in those than the West with all its undoubted problems.

It may well be that Assange – who claims that the ‘exponential’ increase in leaks to his site has forced him to refuse further submissions – has received nothing from any of these potential sources.

If that is the case, this in itself says something quite significant. Private Bradley Manning, the US soldier suspected of the latest leaks, can be confident that the worst punishment he will receive for his crime is a jail term if found guilty. Dissidents in the kinds of countries where Assange should be focusing his efforts could never be so certain. A bullet in the head for themselves and their families – no trial – would be the almost inevitable consequence. Small wonder there aren’t many leaks coming out of the Russian embassy or the Chinese mission.

The second answer to this question could just as easily be, however, that Assange is not really all that interested in exposing corruption and human rights abuse at all, rather his objective is to embarrass and weaken the US and its Western allies because he hates them for what they are and what they stand for. How many of the ‘US Embassy Cables’ reveal actual crimes? Sure, Prince Andrew’s comments about the Serious Fraud Office are unpleasant; certainly the revelation that the US Embassy in Paris sent a memo describing Nicholas Sarkozy as ‘thin-skinned and authoritarian’ is a bit embarrassing, but the majority of these leaks can be filed under the category ‘political titillation’ not ‘serious breaches of the law’.

Some of these leaks, however, are much more serious. Many contain highly sensitive information, the exposure of which will unquestionably do more harm than good to the kind of causes Assange claims he espouses. The fact that China may have been secretly communicating its intention to withdraw its support for North Korea, one of the most repressive and murderous regimes on earth, is enormously significant; the fact that Wikileaks has just made that information public will probably set this process back by several years. The revelation, if it can be described as such, that Iran’s Arab neighbours are so concerned about its nuclear ambitions that they are ready to support US-led military action against Tehran will only give an already paranoid President Ahmadinejad further cause to intensify the oppression of ethnic groups within Iran that he suspects of subversive activity.

Finally of course, all those would-be whistleblowers in countries where real corruption and human rights abuse take place will be vastly less inclined to share that information now than they otherwise would have been. If Julian Assange really wanted to encourage whistleblowing about issues that genuinely impact on human lives, instead of just weakening and embarrassing the United States, he would not be so reckless. Of course, the truth of the matter is that this doesn’t really seem to be his objective at all.

And all this time Julian Assange is staying in hiding because the Swedish police want to interview him in connection with a rape accusation.