Wikileaks DADT
A sends:
The unexplained delay by the Swedish Prosecution Authority in advancing the case against Julian Assange may be due to the time needed to complete blood tests on the alleged victims for sexually transmitted disease, especially for HIV, tests for which require 6 to 12 weeks, rather than for pregnancy test results obtainable much quicker.
If the sexual activity was in part anal in which condom breakage is common, condom failure would have terrified the other parties suddenly confronted with the threat of bi-sexual misogyny characterized by female seduction as prelude to conflicted male homophilic aggression -- residue of witnessed father-and-mother coupling parental incest desire.
If HIV is suspected, or found, there is a requirement to track other potential victims by interviews and other forms of tracing. This begins with testing of the transmitter, if available and willing, followed by interviews on the sexual history of the transmitter and suspected victims, then notification and testing of suspects. The time required for this can be lengthy or short depending on the history and candor of the transmitter, many of whom lie to evade culpability.
These investigations are customarily kept confidential to induce candid revelations. In some instances courts may order disclosure if a transmitter balks so that affected parties can receive tests and medical care.
Beyond this, Assange is suspected of being bi-sexually promiscuous and not attentive to partners after brief or extended relationships, often concurrently multiple as in the Swedish instance, in which he insists on being a dominant controller and insensitive to the after-needs of his companions.
More generally, defiance toward him leads to immediate breakoff of relationships, with dissidents blamed and denigrated.
He has repeatedly demonstrated intolerance toward those he recruits for his various ventures, Wikileaks the latest. He recruits with flattery of targets and promises of important stature in the actions, maintains dominance over those less capable than he with vulgar bragging about his recruitment successes, and dismisses anyone who challenges his supremacy. Refusing or walking out of interviews and halting discussions is typical. He much prefers to orate without interruption, inveterately solipsistic.
He is hyper-sensitive to criticism and loses his temper rather than answer disagreements. He believes he is smarter than his doubters and has no patience with those who do not succumb to flattery, oration and bullying.
In turn, he craves praise and flattery, and becomes depressed and suicidal if he does not get those from admirers he cultivates for that purpose -- susceptible adorants and especially those more notable than he. "Kicks down, kisses up."
He has left a trail of persons infected by what he promises, were used by him so long as they were believers, then abandoned when not. His wife and children among them; only his mother remains as loyal as a dominating wife -- perhaps the source of his misogynism and homophilic longing for a dominant father (a characterisic among many shared with Obama).
He suffers an emotional and intellectual messianism for which he believes there is no antidote. He does not expect to be punished for infecting with promises of glory and love as done with Bradley Manning and others yet untracked. If he is also spreading a fatal disease such as HIV he is intentionally sacrificing victims as his last god-like action so common in narcissists.
His quick cooperation with Swedish blood tests could put this frightening scenario to rest, or provide aid for immediate treatment of those who may have been victimized. This can be done quietly without public disclosure although Wikileaks has published confidential sexual investigations with names of innocents.
NOW, ASIA TIMES;
THE ROVING EYECracks in the wilderness of mirrors
By Pepe Escobar
The temptation to see WikiLeaks as a neo-
Baudelairean artificial paradise - the
marriage of libertarian anarchism and cyberknowledge
- could not be more seductive.
Now no more than 40 people are helping
founder Julian Assange, plus 800 from the
outside.
All this with a 200,000 euro (US$264,000)
annual budget - and a nomad home base.
WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn
Hrafnsson maintains that this is still a
"gateway for whistleblowers", where
sources are unidentified and even unknown.
You can get a whistleblower to show the
emperor has no clothes with just 200,000
euros - just as someone, be him Osama bin
Laden or not, could usher the real "new world order"
in on 9/11 with $500,000.
Daniel Ellsberg, who broke the Pentagon
Papers in 1971, sees Assange as a hero. For
vast swathes of the United States
establishment, he is now public enemy
number one - an unlikely echo of bin Laden.
He may be now in southeast England,
contactable by Scotland Yard, and about to
be arrested at any minute courtesy of an
Interpol mandate based on his being wanted
in Sweden. Canadian scholar Marshall
McLuhan may be doing the twist in his
media tomb; if the media are the message,
when you can't eliminate the message why
not eliminate the media?
The book of sand
Let's examine Assange's crime. Here he is,
in his own words, in "State and Terrorist
Conspiracies":
To radically shift regime behavior
we must think clearly and boldly
for if we have learned anything, it
is that regimes do not want to be
changed. We must think beyond
those who have gone before us,
and discover technological
changes that embolden us with
ways to act in which our forebears
could not. Firstly we must
understand what aspect of
government or neo-corporatist
behavior we wish to change or
remove. Secondly we must
develop a way of thinking about
this behavior that is strong enough
to carry us through the mire of
politically distorted language, and
into a position of clarity. Finally
we must use these insights to
inspire within us and others a
course of ennobling, and effective action.
So Assange understands WikiLeaks as an
anti-virus that should guide our navigation
across the distortion of political language. If
language is a virus from outer space, as
William Naked Lunch Burroughs put it,
WikiLeaks should be the antidote. Assange
basically believes that the (cumulative)
revelation of secrets will lead to the
production of no future secrets. It's an
anarchic/romantic/utopian vision.
It's vital to remember that Assange
configures the US essentially as a huge
authoritarian conspiracy. American political
activist Noam Chomsky would say the same
thing (and they wouldn't want to arrest him
for it). The difference is that Assange
deploys a combat strategy: he aims to
corrode the ability of the system to conspire.
That's where the metaphor of the computer
network fits in. Assange wants to fight the
power of the system, treating it as a
computer choking in the desert sands. Were
he alive, it would be smashing to see the
great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges
penning a short story about this.
On top of writing his own "Book of Sand",
Assange is also counter-attacking the
Pentagon's counter-insurgency doctrine.
He's not in "tracking-the-Taliban-and
taking-them-out" mode. This is just a detail.
If the conspiracy is an electronic network -
let's say, the (foreign policy) Matrix - what
he wants is to strike at its cognitive ability
by debasing the quality of the information.
Here intervenes another crucial element.
The ability of the conspiracy to deceive
everyone through massive propaganda is
equivalent to the conspiracy's penchant for
deceiving itself through its own propaganda.
That's how we get to the Assange strategy of
deploying a tsunami of leaks as a key
actor/vector in the informational landscape.
And that takes us to another crucial point: it
doesn't matter whether these leaks are new,
gossip or wishful thinking (as long as they
are authentic). The - very ambitious -
mother idea is to undermine the system of
information and thus "force the to
crash", making the conspiracy turn against
itself in self-defense. WikiLeaks believes
we can only destroy a conspiracy by
rendering it hallucinatory and paranoid in
relation to itself.
All this also takes us farther into crucial
territory. The bulk of the cablegate-inspired
global-talk-show tsunami has totally missed
the point. Once again, it doesn't matter that
most cables are gossip - trashy tabloid stuff.
See it as Assange's way of illustrating how
the conspiracy works. He is not interested in
journalistic scoops (as much as his media
partners, from the Guardian to Der Spiegel
may be); what he wants is to strangle the
nodes that make the conspiracy possible - to
render the system "dumb and dumber".
No doubt cablegate shows how the US State
Department seems to be in dumb-anddumber
territory - not even creative enough
to do their own versions of "pimp my
cable". This is already an extraordinary
victory for an organization different from
anything we have seen so far, which is
doing things that journalists do or should be
doing, and then some. And there will be
more, on a major bank's secrets (probably
Bank of America), on China's secrets, on
Russia's secrets.
Mirror, mirror on the net
The US government and most of corporate
media predictably rolled out their defense
mechanism, as in "there's nothing new in
these cables". Some might have suspected
that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had
ordered American diplomats to spy on their
colleagues at the United Nations. Another
thing entirely is to have an official cable
confirmation. If UN Secretary General Ban
Ki-moon was not such a wimp, he would be
throwing a monumental diplomatic fit by
now.
And then, at the same time, the US
government and virtually the whole
establishment - from neo-conservatives to
Obama-light practitioners - want to pull out
all stops to delete WikiLeaks or, even take
out Assange, as George W Bush wanted to
do with bin Laden. Grizzly nutjob Sarah
Palin says Assange is worse than al-Qaeda.
Such hysteria lead an Atlanta radio station
to ask listeners whether Assange should be
executed or imprisoned (no third option;
execution won). Redneck Baptist priest
Mike Huckabee, who might have been the
Republican contender for president in 2008
and is now a talk-show fixture, goes for
execution as well.
Who to believe? These freaks, or two
frustrated US federal investigators who told
the Los Angeles Times that if WikiLeaks
had been active in 2001, it would have
prevented 9/11?
French philosophers avid to escape their
own irrelevancy foment conspiracy theories,
lamenting that WikiLeaks gives the media
unprecedented powers; other blame the
Internet ogre for gobbling up journalists.
That's the beauty of the leaks - this is the
stuff conspiracies are made of.
Under this framework it is very enlightening
to listen to what eminent Cold Warrior
Zbigniew Brzezinski has to say. He told the
US Public Broadcasting Service that
cablegate is "seeded" with "surprisingly
pointed" information, and that "seeding" is
too easy to accomplish.
Example: those cables saying that the
Chinese are inclined to cooperate with the
US in view of a possible Korean unification
under the aegis of South Korea (I debunk
this in my previous article, See TheNaked
Emperor, Asia Times Online, December 1,
2010).
Dr Zbig says that WikiLeaks may have been
manipulated by intelligence services with
"very specific objectives". They could be, as
he hints, internal US elements who want to
embarass the Barack Obama administration.
But he also suspects "foreign elements". In
this case, the first on the list would be none
other than the state of Israel.
As conspiracy theories go, this one is a
cracker; could WikiLeaks be the head of a
real invisible "snake" - a massive Israeli
disinformation campaign? Evidence would
include cables seriously compromising the
US-Turkey relationship; the cumulative
painting a picture of a Sunni Arab-wide
consensus for attacking Iran; and the fact
that the cables reveal nothing that
demonstrates how Israel has jeopardized US
interests in the Middle East over and over
again.
In an interview with American talk show
host Larry King, Russian Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin went Dr Zbig and said this
was in fact a manipulation - the cables as a
deliberate plot to discredit Russia (this was
before Russia clinched the 2018 World Cup;
now everyone is drowning in of Stoli
and no one gives a damn about cables
anymore). Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad said virtually the same thing
regarding Iran.
And then there's the conspiracy that didn't
happen: how come the Pentagon, for all its
ultra-high- ways, has not been
willing, or able, to completely shut down
WikiLeaks?
There's thunderous chatter everywhere on
WikiLeaks' "motives" for releasing these
cables. We just need to go back to Assange's
thinking to realize there's no "motive". The
intellectual void and political autism of
America's diplomats is self-evident; they
can only "understand" the Other: the world
in terms of good guys and bad guys. The
great French-Swiss film director Jean-Luc
Godard is 80 this Friday. How fresh if he
would shoot a remake of Made in USA, now
featuring the perplexity of the system as it
contemplates its reflection in a giant,
mirror.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan:
How the Globalized World is Dissolving
into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and
Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad
during the surge. His new book, just out, is
Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books,
2009).
He may be reached at
pepeasia@yahoo.com.
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