WIKILEAKS: You Can Sleep On This If You Want To But You Won't Like What You See When You Wake Up

Michael Moore

Michael Moore is an Academy-Award winning filmmaker and best-selling author

 

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December 14th, 2010 6:23 AM

Why I'm Posting Bail Money for Julian Assange

 

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By Michael Moore

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.

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.

via michaelmoore.com

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Release on Bail of WikiLeaks Founder Is Delayed by Appeal

Oli Scarff/Getty Images

The Wikileaks founder Julian Assange arrived at court inside a prison van with heavily tinted windows on Tuesday in London.

By RAVI SOMAIYA
Published: December 14, 2010


LONDON — Julian Assange, the jailed founder of the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, was ordered freed on $315,000 bail on Tuesday but remained at least temporarily in custody awaiting a final decision on whether he will be extradited to Sweden over allegations of sexual offenses against two women.

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Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Protesters demonstrated outside the City of Westminster Magistrates Court, where Julian Assange attended a bail hearing on Tuesday.

Mr. Assange was driven back to Wandsworth Prison in London on Tuesday night, past cheering and whistling supporters and scores of flashbulbs, pending an appeal of the bail ruling by the Swedish authorities, which must be heard at Britain’s High Court within the next 48 hours.

Judge Howard Riddle, presiding over a packed and rapt courtroom at Westminster Magistrate’s Court in Central London, said that his decision to jail Mr. Assange as a “serious flight risk” at an initial hearing on Dec. 7 was “marginal” and that, with conditions, Mr. Assange should now be freed until further proceedings on Jan. 11.

Judge Riddle was swayed Tuesday, he told the court, when a friend of Mr. Assange offered to allow him to stay at a lavish country mansion in Sussex, an hour away from London. Mr. Assange, according to conditions the judge laid out, must spend every night at the mansion, Ellingham Hall, a 10-bedroom home on a 650-acre estate owned by Vaughan Smith, the wealthy founder of a journalists’ clubin London.

Geoffrey Robertson, one of Britain’s most prominent lawyers, who is assisting Mr. Assange’s defense team, described it in court as less house arrest, more “mansion arrest.” But Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, will also be electronically tagged to track his movements and must agree to curfews — from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. Additionally, he will be stripped of his passport and will be required to present himself to the police every evening.

Mr. Assange, in a dark blue suit and white shirt, his naturally gray-blond hair growing back through brown dye, had looked pensive during the hearing, his head often resting on his hand. But he smiled at his mother, present in the public gallery, and offered a thumbs-up as he heard the decision. His principal lawyer, Mark Stephens, told reporters that his client had been subjected to “Victorian conditions” in a segregation cell at the London jail over the past week.

His incarceration has not stanched the controversial flow of classified American documents from WikiLeaks, the most recent drawn from some 250,000 diplomatic cables, mostly between American diplomats abroad and the State Department in Washington.

As figures in the Obama administration weigh whether to prosecute Mr. Assange for his repeated dissemination of secret United States materials, his lawyers have darkly hinted that the Swedish extradition is motivated by a political conspiracy. Mr. Assange himself has called the allegations a “smear campaign.”

Critics and supporters alike have seized on the controversy, describing Mr. Assange alternately as a villain and traitor or as a hero and martyr. Indeed, many of the 100 or so fervent fans of Mr. Assange outside the court on Tuesday refused to believe that the Swedish charges — which relate to allegations of sexual misconduct on three occasions with two young Swedish women in Stockholm last August — were not politically motivated.

“The timing is too coincidental,” said one woman, who gave her name only as Timi, holding up the words “Exposing war crimes is no crime” on a placard.

In court on Tuesday, Gemma Lindfield, the lawyer for the Swedish authorities, emphasized that the extradition attempt was “not about WikiLeaks” but centered on crimes “of a serious sexual nature.” The two women informed the authorities that consensual relations with Mr. Assange in Sweden, over a four-day period, had turned nonconsensual. Last week, in the initial hearing, the court was told that the charges involved three incidents, including one in which Mr. Assange was alleged to have had unprotected sex with one of his accusers while she was asleep. Swedish authorities characterize the encounters as “rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion.”

Mr. Assange has repeatedly disputed the accounts, and Mr. Robertson told the court that, in a previous interview with the Swedish authorities on Aug. 30, Mr. Assange had denied any wrongdoing “fully, firmly and convincingly.”

His lawyer, Mr. Stephens, said in an interview with the journalist David Frost that the Swedish authorities had neither delineated the charges against Mr. Assange nor shown him the evidence. He added that the Swedish actions were “nothing more than a holding charge” to make Mr. Assange available to the United States, should it choose to seek his extradition in connection with the leaking of the American diplomatic and military cables.

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Mr. Stephens asserted that the Swedish authorities had said that “they will defer their interest in him to the Americans,” and that a grand jury had been impaneled in Alexandria, Va., that was currently hearing evidence of Mr. Assange’s role in exposing the diplomatic cables. Justice Department officials have refused to discuss whether there is such a grand jury hearing the case.

The assertions could not be verified, and the Swedish prosecutors could not be immediately reached for comment. But in an earlier interview, one of them, Marianne Ny, referred obliquely to the possibility that Mr. Assange might end up in the United States. In discussing the procedure for extraditing a person who has been surrendered to Sweden, the prosecutor said the authorities would need the consent of the country that gave the prisoner up. “Sweden cannot,” she said, “without such consent extradite a person, for example to the U.S.A.”

The latest twist, following others in Sweden that saw the case dropped, then reopened in a different jurisdiction in recent months, began a week ago when a Swedish prosecutor submitted an arrest warrant for Mr. Assange. At his arraignment, at a central London police station, Mr. Assange, according to statements given in court last week, refused to give fingerprints, a DNA sample or even an address.

In that first hearing, Judge Riddle had seemed troubled by the refusal to provide a fixed location and agreed with the prosecution that there were “significant grounds” for thinking Mr. Assange posed a flight risk. He cited Mr. Assange’s “nomadic lifestyle,” his lack of ties in Britain, his network of international contacts and his access to substantial sums of money donated by supporters.

This time, he said that the concerns had been “handsomely” addressed by Mr. Smith, the mansion’s owner, who stood up among other supporters in court to explain that Mr. Assange would be under the supervision of his family if allowed bail, and that Mr. Assange was unlikely to flee. In addition, he said, domestic staff members at his mansion “will be reporting” to him on Mr. Assange’s movements.

An Australian broadcaster, 7 News, reported that in a 10-minute telephone conversation with his mother, who had flown from Australia to be in London on Tuesday, Mr. Assange declared: “My convictions are unfaltering. I remain true to the ideals I have always expressed. These circumstances shall not shake them. If anything, this process has increased my determination that they are true and correct.”

In prison, Mr. Robertson told the court, Mr. Assange is allowed very limited access to information. This ban extended, he said, even to a copy of Time magazine with Mr. Assange, an American flag over his mouth, on the cover.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Berlin, and J. David Goodman from New York.