ASSANGE: THE ARREST
Yesterday I read on the news that Assange had given himself up to the London Police and that he is, at present, awaiting either possible deportation to Sweden, where is he is to answer for sexual crime accusations or, alternatively, face eventual charges coming from the U.S. Government. This has appeared to me more as a voluntary decision coming from the leader of WikiLeaks, rather than something connected to the fact that the group had its bank accounts frozen or cancelled in Switzerland, and within Visa and PayPal. Having a priority arrest warrant issued by the Interpol doesn’t quite give much chance of escaping.
What is intriguing me more is not the place where that warrant has originated, but rather Assange’s whereabouts when it was mandated. Considering the fact that the WikiLeaks’ servers are still actively standing in Sweden, and that the one registered to Finland is actually located in Sweden as well, the fact that the Pirate Party and its members are actually important supporters of the group’s cause, and that there is also an established tradition in server traffic interception, I have to deduce that, rather than an inconvenience, Assange’s extradiction to Sweden would be extremely beneficial to his own personal safety and to the continuation of his cause.
The strangest thing is, as I said, the fact that he got himself trapped in the most U.S. favourable country of Europe. Even more puzzling is, and perhaps it is too early to talk, that no claim from the U.S. courts has been made. Because the group is leaking the cables drop by drop, it would be very easy to simply charge him with blackmail, and treat the leaked cables as if they were being the fingers of a hostage whose family has not yet paid the ransom. Why haven’t they indicted him?
THE MESSIAH IN A CALVARY?
The widely accepted version of his life story is that he was born in July 1971, from parents that ran a touring theatre company. His mother would have remarried in 1979 to a musician belonging to a new age sect lead by Anne-Hamilton-Byrne, and broken up in 1982, after which a custody for his half-brother took place. She would then have had to be on the run for five years with her two children, home-schooling them.
This is the “official” version of events. Digging deeper we find that the sect was in fact the Santiniketan Park Association, known also by the names of The Family and The Great White Brotherhood. Besides the potentially high connotations present in this last designation, that we shall pass over, the sect was apparently founded by a reputed British Physics professor named Raynor Johnson who, growingly interested in the esoteric, left for Australia, where he ended up teaming up with yoga teacher Anne Hamilton-Byrne to form a religious group professing religious views that assimilated a peculiar combination of both Christianity and Hinduism.
Consisting mainly of educated people, and with a significant number of doctors and nurses, the group started acquiring property and, by the end of the 1960’s, the sect was managing a privately owned psychiatric hospital, using the infrastructure to recruit new members, many of which were supposedly treated with LSD. In the meantime, it is said that Anne Hamilton-Byrne took charge of the group’s new rural property, Kia Lama, a centre for children.
From 1968 to 1975, she acquired fourteen children and infants. Although some were the natural children of the sect’s members, claims are that many others were obtained through irregular adoptions arranged by some sectarians in the positions to manipulate the process. Then, using false birth certificates, the children had their surnames changed to Hamilton-Byrne, dressed alike and dyed their hair blonde.
At this point it is, most likely, useless to point out to the fact that Assange himself appears, on many occasions, with is hair bleached. What is interesting is that Kia Lama was raided by the Police in August 1987, and all the children returned to the authorities. The first public reference to Assange dates from, precisely, 1987, when he started hacking computers within the International Subversives, a group he co-founded with two other juveniles, using ‘Mendax’ as his personal nickname.
Another curious coincidence is that a “home schooled” child would, after many years of being an obscure “runaway”, set out to go to study Physics at “several universities”, following the example of none other but Johnson himself. He died in May 1987. Was he Assange’s father?
There are three other important questions coming to my mind. Is the The Great White Brotherhood still operational? What does it stand for? Is Assange in some way connected to it?
BASHING THE HAMMER: THE TOR NETWORK AFFAIR
To simplify things, let us say that the Tor Network is a freeware application built in order to protect the anonymity of computer users when transferring data within a network. It channels information through many other computers making it difficult to trace an origin. It relies on volunteer servers and ordinary computers as trampolines.
In its nomadic site, WikiLeaks states that any submissions made to the group will be made so through the Tor Network process, thus protecting the identity of the donours.
Upon further investigation on the story of the Tor Network, I came across some very interesting data. It was initially sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and used for military purposes, even after having been let out to the general public. It continues its funding, along with other top sponsors like Google, Internews, an organization that took part in a very recent conference with the Pentagon, and SIDA, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, which advocates transparency in public authorities. Yes, transparency.
In 2007 a curious incident involving, again, Sweden, happened. When experimenting with his Tor Network software, Dan Egerstad managed to access a significant number of embassy, NGO and corporation eMail accounts. He had discovered that, when using the Tor Network, one can actually intercept some communications if you use several computers placed in different locations. Nobody believed him until he published the concerned eMail addresses with the corresponding passwords.
This means that the more computers you have eavesdropping the Tor Network, the more chances you have of coming across sensitive information. Can you guess who owns more than one million servers around the world? Yes:Google. And do you remember what is written in the bottom screen of your Google Maps or Google Earth? Right on: U.S. Navy.
BETTER TO FOLLOW THE LEAKS OR THE LEADS?
In a recent interview to the German periodical Der Spiegel, the Presidential Advisor for Iran, Esfandiar Rahim Mashal, responds to Wikileaks stating that “The United States is Behind this Deliberate Leak”.
After the wave of delight caused by the emotion of the scandal and immense satisfaction, a careful examination of the contents of the Leaks will reveal that it is actually not so compromising to the U.S. at it seems. It puts the American Republicans in a very awkward position, it tells us what sort of strategies the war industrialists use for their arms sales, but is not, per se, dangerous to the Democrats.
What is does, is to put the Chinese walking in shattered glass, for their alleged willingness to leave North Korea and for pressuring the Finnish Government on not accepting Chinese Muslim prisoners from Guantanamo Bay; it creates the illusion that the Iranians are alone, as all its neighbouring countries are supposedly against them, and so on. It actually helps solving problems the American Foreign Policies are entangled with in an American way.
More concerning is what it does to Europe. If, on one hand, we see Russian sympathizer Berlusconi being ridiculed, we see Pro-Americans Sarkozy and Merckel being praised. And that is the point. Europe gets divided, the breaches in Constitutional Law from smaller countries specially made to please the Americans, such as the Portuguese allowing the CIA flights with the Guantanamo prisoners are revealed, reproached, condemned, The EU suddenly realizes that everybody was pretending to be united with the neighbouring country but, in the end, everybody was sleeping with the Statue of Liberty.
Greece falls because of an American Bank, because NATO is keen on supporting Turkey and pressuring Europe to have it in the EU. Iceland falls. The US yuppies take bets on who is next. Finland gets a Foreign Minister and a Finance Minister in favour of its adhesion to NATO and prepares to elect a pro-NATO President. German financial specialists start airing the idea that the weaker EU countries should abandon the Euro currency and try to cope with their own. The US monitor all Bank Transfers occurring in Europe through the SWIFT network. The great wave passes heading East and Europe rumbles. Obama declares that the US won’t demand the freeze on the Israeli colonial settling. The war in Afghanistan intensifies with Russians authorizing American tanks passing through its territory.
And the rumours that put Assange under suspicion of working either for George Soros or the Mossad aren't helping the situation either. And so being, if anything else, Assange is not the Messiah, as Obama himself wasn’t. Maybe the latter is just an idol stating that a black man can become president, and the former that a man without a degree can still become an awarded journalist. But the World remains the same.
