Australian Julian Assange: WikiLeaks Saga & Pentagon Papers

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, said the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been “pursued across three continents” by Western intelligence services. Ellsberg compared the Obama administration’s threat to prosecute Mr. Assange to his own treatment under President Richard M. Nixon, reports The New York Times.

(Julian Paul Assange, born 1971, is an Australian internet activist best known for his involvement with Wikileaks, a whistleblower website. Assange was a physics and mathematics student, a hacker, and a computer programmer, before taking on his current role as Wikileaks’ spokesperson and editor-in-chief.)

“Mr. Assange also said that WikiLeaks, which released the trove of almost 400,000 Iraq war documents on Friday, would shortly be posting an additional 15,000 remaining secret documents on the Afghan war.

“Mr. Assange, speaking at a news conference in a London hotel a stone’s throw from the headquarters of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, MI6, was joined by Mr. Ellsberg, 79, the former military analyst who leaked a 1,000-page secret history of the Vietnam War in 1971 that became known as the Pentagon Papers.” More here…

“Julian Assange moves like a hunted man. In a noisy Ethiopian restaurant in London’s rundown Paddington district, he pitches his voice barely above a whisper to foil the Western intelligence agencies he fears.

“He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cell phones and swaps his own as other men change shirts. He checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed from friends…” More here…

“WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his organisation are famously liberal with the secrets of the U.S. military – but the man is not so forthcoming about his own private life. Australian-born Mr Assange walked out on a CNN interview after the reporter had the temerity to ask him about his often terse relationship with fellow workers – and an even more serious personal court case in which he was cleared of sex abuse charges in Sweden.”… Read more…

Britain’s role in the alleged torture and unlawful killing of Iraqi civilians may be the subject of legal action following the publication of nearly 400,000 leaked military documents by the website WikiLeaks, reports The Guardian.

British lawyers said the classified US army field reports embroiled British as well as American forces in an alleged culture of abuse and extrajudicial killings in Iraq. Solicitor Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers, appearing alongside WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a press conference in London today, said some of the deaths documented in the reports may have involved British forces and could now go through the UK courts.

The Iraq logs, Shiner said, indicated that UK as well as US commanders were likely to have ignored evidence of torture by the Iraqi authorities, contrary to international law. More here…

Read my earlier post “Obama in India: 26/11 & Fresh WikiLeak Stink Bombs” here…