Wages of Rebellion (29 page)

Clark was a Southern white soldier in the Confederate army. But his eyewitness account cannot influence those desperately seeking meaning and worth in an invented past.

“People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become,” James Baldwin wrote. “The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these individual abdications menaces life all over the world. For, in the generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today.” Observing these Americans, he “was not struck by their wickedness,” he said, “for that wickedness was but the spirit and the history of America. What struck me was the unbelievable dimension of their sorrow. I felt as though I had wandered into hell.”
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A
British police officer in a black Kevlar vest stood on the steps of the red-brick row house on Hans Crescent that housed the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Another officer was stationed on a narrow side street, facing the iconic department store Harrods, half a block away on Brompton Road. A third officer peered out the window of a neighboring high-rise building a few feet from the modest ground-floor suite occupied by the embassy. A white police communications van with a rooftop array of antennas was parked in front of the building. I was greeted when I entered the lobby by a fourth police officer, stationed immediately outside the door of the embassy suite.

By the time I arrived, the cost of this round-the-clock vigilance by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), or Scotland Yard, at the embassy, where Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, took refuge on June 19, 2012, had exceeded $1 million.
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The police presence and the communications van, which most likely intercepted all forms of electronic communications in and out of the embassy, were the visible tips of the claws poking above the surface of the vast, secret global security and surveillance monster that has cornered Assange and obliterated our privacy. An array of governmental and intelligence agencies from around the globe are working to destroy WikiLeaks and wrest Assange from the embassy so that he can be extradited to the United States, tried, and imprisoned.

I was buzzed into the modest Ecuadorean embassy suite. I passed through a metal detector. An embassy employee escorted me, after I had turned over my cell phone, to the back room. Assange was seated at a small table surrounded by leatherette chairs. The room was cluttered with cables and computer equipment. He had a full head of gray hair and gray stubble on his face. He was wearing a traditional white embroidered Ecuadorean shirt.

Britain had rejected an Ecuadorean request that Assange be granted safe passage to an airport. Because he could not get to the airport, he was trapped in an embassy room. Assange said it was like being in a “space station.” It is hard to envision how he will ever walk out to freedom.

Assange, Chelsea Manning, and WikiLeaks, by making public in 2010 half a million internal documents from the Pentagon and the State Department—along with the 2007 video of US helicopter pilots gunning down Iraqi civilians, including children, and two Reuters journalists—exposed the empire’s hypocrisy and indiscriminate violence, as well as its use of torture, lies, bribery, and crude tactics of intimidation.
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WikiLeaks fulfilled the most important role of a press when it turned a floodlight on the inner workings of the powerful, and for this it has become empire’s most coveted prey. All those around the globe with the computer skills and inclination to make public the secrets of empire, from Jeremy Hammond to Edward Snowden, are targeted.

Australian diplomatic cables obtained by the
Sydney Morning Herald
described the US campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks as “unprecedented both in its scale and nature.”
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The size of the operation was also hinted at in off-hand statements made during Manning’s pretrial hearing and reported by journalist Alexa O’Brien. According to O’Brien, the US Justice Department considered paying the contractor ManTech of Fairfax, Virginia, $1 million to $2 million for a computer system that, from the tender, appears to have been designed to exclusively handle the Wikileaks prosecution documents.
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The government line item is oblique. It refers only to “WikiLeaks Software and Hardware Maintenance.” At least a dozen US governmental agencies, including the Pentagon, the FBI, the Army’s Criminal Investigative Department, the Justice Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,
and the Diplomatic Security Service, are assigned to the WikiLeaks case, while the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are assigned to track down WikiLeaks’s supposed breaches of security. The global assault—which saw Australia, after pressure from Washington, threaten to revoke Assange’s passport—is part of the terrifying metamorphosis of the “war on terror” into a war on civil liberties.

The dragnet has swept up any person or organization that fits the profile of those who can burrow into the archives of power and disseminate it to the public. It no longer matters if they have committed a crime. Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist, was arrested in January 2011 for downloading roughly 5 million academic articles and documents from JSTOR, an online clearinghouse for scholarly journals. Swartz was charged by federal prosecutors with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The charges carried the threat of $1 million in fines and thirty-five years in prison. Swartz committed suicide.
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Barrett Brown, a journalist who specializes in military and intelligence contractors and is associated with the group Anonymous, which has mounted cyberattacks on government agencies at the local and federal levels, was arrested in September 2012. He entered a guilty plea to three counts after the government dropped some of the worst charges. He was sentenced to 63 months in federal prison. Also arrested has been Jeremy Hammond, a political activist who provided WikiLeaks with 5.5 million emails between the security firm Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) and its clients.
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Brown and Hammond were both arrested after being entrapped by an informant named Hector Xavier Monsegur, known as Sabu. Assange told me that he believed Sabu also attempted to entrap WikiLeaks while under FBI supervision. Manning was also entrapped by an FBI informant, Adrian Lamo.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And he said that denial-of-service attacks on WikiLeaks’s infrastructure have been frequent and massive.
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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.”
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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.
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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.