“Beware him who is happy to see you
— you may owe him money.”
From Naked Profit by
Kahlil Gibberish

(Tr. From the Bullshitian by Bachchoo)

British Justice has taken a puzzling turn. Julian Assange, the “online begetter” or chief perpetrator of Wikileaks, was arrested by the Sussex police to be extradited to Sweden where he faces rape charges. He has been in solitary confinement in Wandsworth prison, which my friends tell me is no holiday camp and certainly not a place of safety and comfort for people who are yet to be found guilty.
Assange was produced in court on December 14 and granted bail by the same judge who had earlier denied it. But as soon as the bail application was granted, the prosecution appealed.
Then, inexplicably, within minutes, the prosecutors decided to drop this appeal. Nevertheless, the conditions of bail are severe. Assange or his supporters must deposit £200,000 in the court. He will be electronically tagged, confined for all but eight hours a day to his friend’s address in Sussex, and he has to wake up and polish the boots of the Burmese junta’s generals every day at 4 am — OK, the last condition was not specified by the judge but made up by me, but Justice Cocklecarrot may as well have thrown it in.
Assange goes back to jail till the cash is delivered — no cheques or Visa cards will do! (I didn’t make that one up.)
The Swedish authorities were questioned by the BBC about a possible coincidence between the political embarrassment that Assange’s actions as Wikileaker-in-chief has caused and the precisely parallel prosecution for rape and sexual assault brought against him. The Beeb pointed out that an earlier prosecution for the same offences was dropped by Sweden because of insufficient evidence but were revived by a Swedish MP when the Wikis began to leak.
What the Swedish prosecution’s spokeswoman said was that seeing it as a coincidence was akin to conspiracy theories and that Assange may have done the world a great service by publishing the opinions and judgments of diplomatic figures, but that was quite separate from his alleged conduct with someone who claims he is guilty of molestation and rape.
The logic is indeed not faulty. Assange acknowledges that he leaks documents while strongly denying that he rapes girls (one presumes his accuser is female), but one activity doesn’t sui generis, exclude the other.
Part of the peculiarity of this case is that Assange has been condemned by the government of Britain which has not let our “independent judiciary” know that they are on the side of the case for free speech and total disclosure that Mr Assange’s followers insist is the theme and principle their leaks are upholding.
Quite the contrary. Ministers have been extremely critical of the disclosures and contend that some of the information that has been made public, or could possibly be made public, endangers the lives of British and US servicemen. This contention is self-evidently true. If Wikileaks is in possession of war dispositions in Afghanistan of men or ammunition, their publication is obviously only helpful to the Taliban, to Al Qaeda, e-Qaeda and those who wish them well.
I don’t.
On the other hand the exposure of Saudi posturing is very welcome. That the Saudis want their fellow Muslims in Iran bombed is not a great surprise — oil is thicker than jihadi blood-brotherhood! The exposure of the Saudi state’s connections with “fundos” and Al Qaeda is also well known, but one welcomes the confirmation. The world ought to know that the governments of the West are very willing to send their young men out to be killed by an enemy financed and armed by their friends and partners to whom they sell armaments. A very filthy game — though we knew it all the time — is now being played in the nude.
I haven’t actually seen any Wikileak in the Guardian which exposes the troops of the US in any theatre of war to attack. Assange and his organisation may indeed be in possession of such jeopardising material. Either they haven’t exposed it because they draw the line of exposure at the point of not promoting the killing of soldiers, or there is another filter at work. They have fed the information to the liberal Guardian newspaper and it is very possible that the newspaper’s editors are acting as the sieve which separates the leaks into categories, fearlessly publishing those which embarrass and suppressing those which wantonly endanger.
In that sense, using the Guardian (whose politically correct stances often annoy me) as the international filter, if indeed that is the case, is a brilliant stroke. Assange could have handed over his information to the sort of satanic maniac who supports jehadis or suicide bombers who kill randomly and who long for or work towards Talibanic and Shariac states in Pakistan, Afghanistan and perhaps in Britain and the United States.
No, Assange has chosen the right filter — not subservient, but not unbalanced.
Adding to the perplexity of this prosecution are this UK government’s announced plans to expand the universe of public disclosure. The processes and data of civil service activity will be on the internet. The statistics gathered by the government will be public. It will, of course, involve information about the citizenry coming into the public domain. Very many of us will not want our banking transactions exposed to all and sundry, or our income-tax returns or our communications with official bodies.
The government’s response to this squeamishness is “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear”. This is patently untrue. My bank transactions, my email password, my debit card pin number and a hundred other details of my public and private transactions are in no way incriminating or evidence which could lead anywhere. They are the boring substance of boring interactions.
And yet someone calling himself Pontius Olufulabe keeps emailing me, calling himself my devoted and lifelong friend, promising me millions of pounds and dollars which he has located and is willing to share with me and merely asking for my bank account details, credit card numbers, pin numbers, addresses etc. His generosity is overwhelming. For these small pieces of information, which I have no reason to hide, he is going to make me a millionaire. My faith in human nature is adequately restored.