by Chris Hedges
Monsegur, who by the government’s calculations took part in computer hacker attacks on more than 250 public and private entities at a cost of up to $50 million in damages, was released from a Manhattan courtroom in May 2014 after Judge Loretta Preska, who had previously sentenced Hammond to ten years, saluted his “extraordinary cooperation” with the FBI. The government told the court that Monsegur had helped to identify and convict eight of his peers in the Anonymous and LulzSec hacker collectives. Judge Preska sentenced him to time served—he had spent seven months in prison in 2013—plus a year’s supervised release. This was in exchange for working for three years as a federal informant. He had been facing a maximum sentence of more than twenty-six years.8
With their fluency in computers and experience as the first victims of wholesale surveillance, WikiLeaks collaborators or supporters understood before the rest of us the reach of the security and surveillance organs. Those associated with WikiLeaks are routinely stopped—often at international airports—and attempts are made to recruit them as informants. Jérémie Zimmermann, Smári McCarthy, Jacob Appelbaum, David House, and one of Assange’s lawyers, Jennifer Robinson, have all been approached or interrogated by state security. The tactics are often heavy-handed. McCarthy, an Icelander and WikiLeaks activist, was detained and extensively questioned when he entered the United States. Soon afterward, three men who identified themselves as being from the FBI approached McCarthy in Washington, attempted to recruit him as an informant, and gave him instructions on how to spy on WikiLeaks.
On August 23, 2011, Sigurdur Thordarson, a young Icelandic WikiLeaks activist, emailed the American embassy in Reykjavik. The following day, eight FBI agents landed in Iceland on a private jet. The team told the Icelandic government that it had discovered a plan by Anonymous to hack into Icelandic government computers and proposed to help thwart it. But it was soon clear that the team had come with a different agenda. The Americans spent the next few days, in flagrant violation of Icelandic sovereignty, interrogating Thordarson in various Reykjavik hotel rooms. The Icelandic Ministry of the Interior, suspecting that the US investigation was an attempt to frame Assange, expelled the team from the country. The FBI took Thordarson to Washington, DC, for four days of further interrogation. Thordarson appears to have decided to cooperate with the FBI. It was reported in the Icelandic press that in March 2012 he went to Denmark, where he received about $5,000 in petty cash after handing over the stolen WikiLeaks files to the FBI.9
There have been secret search orders for information from Internet service providers, including Twitter, Google, and Sonic, and information about Assange and WikiLeaks has been seized from the company Dynadot, a domain name registrar and Web host.10 Assange told me that his suitcase and computer were stolen on a flight from Sweden to Germany on September 27, 2010. He said that his bank cards were blocked and that Moneybookers, WikiLeaks’s primary donation account, was shut down after being placed on a blacklist in Australia and a “watch list” in the United States.11 Following denunciations of WikiLeaks by the US government, financial service companies, including Visa, Master-Card, PayPal, Bank of America, Western Union, and American Express, blacklisted the organization.12 And he said that denial-of-service attacks on WikiLeaks’s infrastructure have been frequent and massive.13 All this has come with a well-orchestrated campaign of character assassination against Assange, including mischaracterizations of the sexual misconduct case brought against him by Swedish police.
Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy after exhausting his fight to avoid extradition from the United Kingdom to Sweden over the sexual misconduct charges. He and his lawyers contend that an extradition to Sweden would mean an extradition to the United States. And even if Sweden refused to comply with US demands for Assange, kidnapping, or “extraordinary rendition,” would remain an option for Washington. Kidnapping was given legal cover by a 1989 memorandum issued by the Justice Department stating that “the FBI may use its statutory authority to investigate and arrest individuals for violating United States law, even if the FBI’s actions contravene customary international law,” and that an “arrest that is inconsistent with international or foreign law does not violate the Fourth Amendment.”14
This is a stunning example of the corporate state’s Orwellian doublespeak. The persecution of Assange and WikiLeaks and the practice of extraordinary rendition embody the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment, which was designed to protect us from unreasonable searches and seizures and requires any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause.
Take the case of two Swedes and a Briton who were seized by the United States in August 2012 somewhere in Africa—it is assumed to have been in Somalia—and held in one of our black sites. They suddenly reappeared—with the Briton stripped of his citizenship—in a Brooklyn courtroom in December 2012 and facing terrorism charges. Sweden, rather than object to the extradition of its two citizens, dropped the Swedish charges against the prisoners to permit the rendition to occur. The prisoners, the Washington Post reported, were secretly indicted by a federal grand jury two months after being seized.15
Assange, who said he worked most of the night and slept into the late afternoon, was pale, although he was using an ultraviolet light to make up for getting no sunlight. A treadmill was tilted up against a wall of his quarters. He had set it up so that he could run three to five miles a day. He practiced calisthenics and boxing with a personal trainer. He was lanky at six feet two inches tall and exuded a raw, nervous energy. He leapt, sometimes disconcertingly, from topic to topic, idea to idea, his words rushing to keep up with his cascading thoughts. He worked with a small staff and had a steady stream of visitors, including celebrities such as Lady Gaga. When the Ecuadorean ambassador, Ana Alban Mora, and Bianca Jagger showed up late one afternoon, Assange pulled down glasses and poured everyone whiskey from a stock of liquor he kept in a cabinet. Jagger wanted to know how to protect her website from hackers. Assange told her to “make a lot of backup copies.”
Assange, who attempted to run for a seat in Australia’s upper house of Parliament from his refuge, was communicating with his global network of associates and supporters up to seventeen hours a day through numerous cell phones and a collection of laptop computers. He encrypted his communications. He religiously shredded anything put down on paper. But it was a difficult existence. The frequent movements of the police cordon outside his window disrupted his sleep. And he missed his son, whom he had raised as a single father. He may also have a daughter, but he did not speak publicly about his children, refusing to disclose their ages or where they live. His family, he said, had received death threats. He had not seen his children since his legal troubles started.
As a child, he grew up without television and moved from city to city with his stepfather and mother in a theater group that at times involved puppets. In one play called The Brain, a plaster mold of Assange’s head was cast for each play—he breathed though straws inserted up his nose—and then the plaster mold was smashed during the performance. He told me that he disliked actors because of their thirst for adulation and applause. He had more time for directors. He attended thirty-seven different schools as a child, he said, and went on to study math and physics at university.
Assange saw WikiLeaks’s primary role as giving a voice to the victims of US wars and proxy wars by using leaked documents to tell their stories. The release of the Afghan and Iraq “War Logs,” Assange said, disclosed the extent of civilian death and suffering as well as the plethora of lies told by the Pentagon and the state to conceal the human toll. He added that the logs also unmasked the bankruptcy of the traditional press and its obsequious service as war propagandists.
“There were 90,000 records in the Afghan War Logs,” Assange said. “We had to look at different angles in the material to add up the number of civilians who have been killed. We studied the records. We ranked events different ways. I wondered if we could find out the largest number of civilians killed in a
single event. It turned out that this occurred during Operation Medusa, led by Canadian forces in September 2006. The US-backed local government was quite corrupt. The Taliban was, in effect, the political opposition and had a lot of support. The locals rose up against the government. Most of the young men in the area, from a political perspective, were Taliban. There was a government crackdown that encountered strong resistance. ISAF [the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force] carried out a big sweep. It went house to house. Then an American soldier was killed. They called in an AC-130 gunship. This is a C-130 cargo plane refitted with cannons on the side. It circled overhead and rained down shells. The War Logs say 181 ‘enemy’ were killed. The logs also say there were no wounded or captured. It was a significant massacre. This event, the day when the largest number of people were killed in Afghanistan, has never been properly investigated by the old media.”
Operation Medusa, which was carried out twenty miles west of Kandahar, took the lives of four Canadian soldiers and involved some 2,000 NATO and Afghan troops. It was one of the largest military operations by the ISAF in the Kandahar region.
Assange searched for accounts by reporters who were on the scene. What he discovered appalled him. An embedded Canadian reporter, Graeme Smith of the Toronto Globe and Mail, used these words on a Canadian military website to describe his experiences during Operation Medusa: “one of the most intense experiences of my life.” Smith wrote about traveling with a Canadian platoon that called themselves the “Nomads.” “They’d even made up these little patches for their uniforms that said ‘Nomads’ on them,” he remembered. “The Nomads took me in and they sort of made me one of them.” He said he spent two weeks with the “Nomads,” used a bucket to wash himself and his clothes, and slept in his flak jacket. Smith talked about being “under fire together” and said that “they gave me a little ‘Nomads’ patch that I attached to my flak jacket.”
Assange’s point is correct. In every conflict I covered as a war correspondent, the press of the nation at war was an enthusiastic part of the machine—cheerleaders for slaughter and tireless mythmakers for the nation and the military. The few renegades within the press who refuse to wave the flag and lionize the troops become pariahs in newsrooms and find themselves attacked—like Assange and Manning—by the state.
There is no free press without a willingness to defy law and expose the abuses and lies carried out by the powerful. The Pentagon Papers, released to the New York Times in 1971, as well as the Times’ Pulitzer-winning 2005 exposure of the warrantless wiretapping of US citizens by the National Security Agency, made public information that had been classified as “top secret”—a classification more restricted than the lower-level “secret” designation of the documents released by WikiLeaks.16 But as the traditional press atrophies with dizzying speed—crippled by Barack Obama’s use of the Espionage Act seven times since 2009 to target whistle-blowers, including Edward Snowden—our last hope lies with rebels such as Manning, Assange, Hammond, and Snowden.17
WikiLeaks released after-action reports authored by US diplomats and the US military. The cables invariably put a pro-unit or pro-US spin on events. The reality is usually much worse. Those counted as dead enemy combatants are often civilians. Military units use after-action reports to justify or hide inappropriate behavior. And despite the heated rhetoric of the state about American lives being endangered by WikiLeaks exposures, there has been no evidence that any action of WikiLeaks has cost lives. Then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in a 2010 letter to Senator Carl Levin, conceded this point: “The initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security. However, the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by the disclosure.”18
The New York Times, The Guardian, El País, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel printed redacted copies of some of the WikiLeaks files, but they have underreported the prosecution of Manning and entrapment of Assange. Do these news organizations believe that if the state shuts down organizations such as WikiLeaks and imprisons Manning and Assange, traditional news outlets will be left alone? Can’t they connect the dots between the prosecutions of government whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act, warrantless wiretapping, the monitoring of communications, and the persecution of Manning, Assange, and Snowden? Haven’t they realized that this is a war by a global corporate elite not against an organization or an individual but against liberty, the freedom of the press, and democracy itself?
“The national security state can try to reduce our activity,” Assange said. “It can close the noose a little tighter. But there are three forces working against it. The first is the massive surveillance required to protect its communication, including the nature of its cryptology. In the military, everyone now has an ID card with a little chip on it so you know who is logged into what. A system this vast is prone to deterioration and breakdown. Secondly, there is widespread knowledge not only of how to leak, but how to leak and not be caught, how to even avoid suspicion that you are leaking. The military and intelligence systems collect a vast amount of information and move it around quickly. This means you can also get it out quickly. There will always be people within the system that have an agenda to defy authority. Yes, there are general deterrents, such as when the DOJ [Department of Justice] prosecutes and indicts someone. They can discourage people from engaging in this behavior. But the opposite is also true. When that behavior is successful, it is an example. It encourages others. This is why they want to eliminate all who provide this encouragement.
“The medium-term perspective is very good,” he declared. “The education of young people takes place on the Internet. You cannot hire anyone who is skilled in any field without them having been educated on the Internet. The military, the CIA, the FBI, all have no choice but to hire from a pool of people that have been educated on the Internet. This means they are hiring our moles in vast numbers. And this means that these organizations will see their capacity to control information diminish as more and more people with our values are hired.”
The long term, however, may not be as sanguine. Assange wrote a book with three coauthors—Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann—called Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. It warns that we are “galloping into a new transnational dystopia.” As Assange says in the book, “We are living under martial law as far as our communications are concerned. We just can’t see the tanks—but they are there. To that degree, the internet, which was supposed to be a civilian space, has become a militarized space.”19 The Internet has become not only a tool to educate, they write, but the mechanism to cement into place a “Postmodern Surveillance Dystopia” that is supranational and dominated by global corporate power. This new system of global control will “merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control.”20
It is only through encryption that we can protect ourselves, Assange and his coauthors argue, and it is only by breaking through the digital walls of secrecy erected by the power elite that we can expose power. What they fear, however, is the possibility that the corporate state will eventually effectively harness the power of the internet to shut down dissent.
“The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation,” Assange writes, “has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.”21
And yet, Assange continues to resist. His gloomy vision of a future when all privacy will be eradicated is in stark contrast to the utopian rebellions in the past that promised a new heaven and a new earth. He is acutely aware that his chances of escaping from the clutches of the security apparatus he can see out the windows of the embassy are very slim. Washington almost certainly has a sealed grand jury indictment prepared against him.
Chelsea Manning, like Assange, did not have a stable childhood. Her difficulties with alcoholic parents, the questioning of her sexuality, and her small stature—she is slight and five feet two inches tall—all combined w
ith her intelligence and mole-like retreat into computers to make her an object of frequent ridicule. She joined the Army in a bid to get enough money to go to college. The hypermasculine culture of the military, where hazing is frequent and some of the soldiers and Marines targeted for physical and verbal abuse in foreign deployment commit suicide, saw Manning mistreated from the moment she enlisted.
“He was a runt, so pick on him,” remembers a soldier who spoke to The Guardian but did not want to give his name. “He’s crazy, so pick on him. He’s a faggot. Pick on him. The guy took it from every side. He couldn’t please anyone. He was targeted by bullies. He was targeted by the drill sergeants. Basically he was targeted by anybody who was within arm’s reach.
“There were three guys that had him up front and cornered, and they were picking on him and he was yelling and screaming back,” remembered this soldier from Memphis. “And I’m yelling at the guys, ‘Get the hell out of here, back off,’ and everything. I start to pull Manning off. The other guys were taking care of the ones that were picking on him and stuff, and I got Manning off to the side there, and yeah, he’d pissed himself. That wasn’t the only time he did that.”22
I was in the small courtroom at Fort Meade in Maryland to hear the sentencing by Army Colonel Judge Denise Lind of then-Private First Class Bradley Manning to thirty-five years in prison. Manning’s sentence once again confirmed the inversion of our moral and legal order, the capitulation of the press, and the misuse of the law to prevent any oversight or investigation of official abuses of power, including war crimes.
