Is WikiLeaks the antidote to the Washington K Street Kool-Aid?
Thursday, 29. July 2010
The acid test for Washington’s beltway experts
Since the end of the cold war, the U.S. had been looking for an enemy to match the Soviet Union and came up empty handed until 9/11. Refocusing the efforts of the world’s largest and most expensive military empire on Al Qaeda would provide the incentive for a massive re-armament, just the way the Soviet “invasion” of Afghanistan had done two decades before. According to a Washington Post report within nine years of America’s invasion of Afghanistan, hunting Al Qaeda had become the raison d’être of the American national security bureaucracy employing 854,000 military personnel, civil servants and private contractors with more than 263 organizations transformed or created including the Office of Homeland Security. The sheer scope of the growth and the extensive privatization of intelligence and security was so profound that it represented “an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in oversight.”
But the report admitted that after nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the labyrinth of secret bureaucracy put in place after 9/11 was so massive and convoluted that its ability to perform its stated function to keep America safe was impossible to determine. Even worse, it was becoming clear that the bureaucratic monster had taken on a life of its own with the U.S. lost in a maze of its own creation, trapped in an expanding web of spies and counter spies that far surpassed the worst paranoia of its old nemesis, the Soviet Union. The logic train of the war on terror and its fundamental rooting in Afghanistan had finally become clear. The perpetual Taliban/Al Qaeda threat fueled a perpetual war that could never be won, justifying an endless string of restrictions on civil liberties and governmental transparency, which then prevented Americans from seeing how their money was spent. Locked out of this “alternative geography of the United States,” Americans have become helpless to stop their democracy and their economy from being lifted right out from under them.
Thanks to the revelations the word was finally out that whatever impact the “war on terror” had made on terror worldwide ( which many claimed it made only worse) it was above all, a spectacular boondoggle.
The shocking, Sunday July 25, WikiLeaks release of 92,000 documents by the New York Times Der Spiegel and The Guardian, was the acid test for Washington’s beltway experts to square themselves with the fatal collapse confronting them and who was to blame for it. According to the New York Times , “Some of the reports describe Pakistani intelligence working alongside Al Qaeda to plan attacks.” The documents also revealed numerous embarrassing specifics that had either been downplayed or avoided entirely by the U.S. military in the 9 year old war including: that the Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against NATO aircraft; that the U.S. employs secret commando units to “capture/kill” insurgent commanders that have claimed notable successes but have at times also gone terribly wrong by killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment; that the military’s success with its Predator drones has been highly over-dramatized. Some crash or collide forcing Americans to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban could claim the drone’s weaponry. In addition, the reports reveal that retired ISI chief, Lt. General Hamid Gul, “has worked tirelessly to reactivate old networks, employing familiar allies like Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose networks of thousands of fighters are responsible for waves of violence in Afghanistan.” If anything was a guide to who’d been drinking the Washington K Street Kool-Aid, it could be measured by the degree of acceptance to the new information. According to the Boston Globe, Congressman James McGovern, a Worcester Mass. Democrat maintained, “that the documents show a far grimmer situation than members of Congress have been told about in classified briefings,..” Mass. Senator John Kerry initially declared that the documents raised “serious questions,” about policy. But under pressure from the White House, by Monday, Kerry was echoing the official line, defending Obama administration policy while insisting there was little new in the documents. The reasons for Kerry’s second thoughts were obvious. Matt Viser of the Boston Globe writes, “Kerry has what is seen as a special relationship with Pakistan; he has welcomed the country’s army chief to his house for dinner and accepted flowers from the country’s president. ‘There’s no question that Senator Kerry was instrumental in leading the initiative to triple our economic assistance to Pakistan,’ said Molly Kinder, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Development, which tracks US aid to Pakistan.”
Left out of the release, the Washington Post hissed and fumed, editorializing dismissively that the 92,000 documents contained little of interest while citing counter terrorism expert Andrew Exum as comparing the importance of the documents to the discovery that “Liberace was gay.” Had the documents amassed an equal amount of evidence that Iran or Syria were working with Al Qaeda to carry out attacks on American troops in Afghanistan, the bombers would have been warming up on the flight decks by sundown. But when it came to Pakistan, there was only restraint. To the beltway insiders the actual revelations disclosed by the leaked documents were less important than the exposure of systemic failure they represented. The disclosures had taken the floor out from under the assumptions of the war on terror imposed following 9/11. But to the beltway it was business as usual and reality had little if anything to do with it.
Little wonder that the world’s population had lost faith in the American enterprise in Afghanistan. Even the Afghan people themselves had come to believe the United States wasn’t really there to fight the Taliban, but pretended to fight as an excuse for remaining in the region. The WikiLeaks reports are the raw data from American troops fighting in the field. But the reaction from official Washington was as if the U.S. had come to be ruled by a city of isolated mandarins from another planet, completely detached from the world they governed and dismissive of any efforts to bring them down to earth.
# # # #
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration. Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media. Their next book Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire will be published February, 2011.
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Ishmael Says:
Then I think we should rotate Congressmen and women through a Mandatory tour of duty at a firebase in the Khorengal Valley for a year each so they have an opportunity to WISE UP
camusrebel Says:
When the ex-hacker/frontman, J. Assange was Chomskyesque in denigrating the 911 Truth Movement, that was a tell.
NYT is Mockingbird. These “leaks” will lead to exactly nothing except maybe ground troops in Pakistan, John “Skull-n-Bones” Kerrey be damned.
WLeaks is what they call a “honeypot”. A rogue CIA/Mossad/Soros gang invention.
Fitzgerald and Gould: May we please know to what degree you accept the truth of 9/11 being an inside job?
Simon Says:
“a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in oversight.” http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/EstablishingNewNormal.pdf This time I agree with Fitzgerald_Gould. It is all well and good to remain informed and take action to confront U.S. overseas expansion of Empire. How about here at Home? It got real personal on this website several weeks ago, when I returned to find access to Boiling Frogs Post blocked. Nothing else was blocked. Emails to Sibel went unanswered. I went to the site administrator and was able to post indirectly. That suggests that to Sibel nothing was wrong with my password, therefore nothing was wrong except at my end. How about the Mark Klein case? Has NSA taken it to the next level, by intercepting postings it deems questionable?
To add insult to injury, I have no criminal record and have a passport. I was offered a free trip to the Bahamas to spend time on a yacht. However, if you read the link above, being on a terrorist watch (I was the last time I checked) list may be an error, but changing that is up to some bureaucrat who could care less, especially about someone concerned with the freedoms of American citizens in this country. Why does everyone remain asleep? The vast majority do not have a passport or want to travel overseas. Young college students are not a threat. The gatekeepers at our nation’s borders are quietly closing the net. Even detention centers and holding facilities are unoccupied and ready if the frogs ever awake. Hey anybody out there?
Kingfisher Says:
@Simon,
I am going to tell you something that is going to hurt:
You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
The government does not give a crap about you. You simply do not matter. You are unimportant and easily swept aside by forces much larger than yourself.
Let that sink in for a bit. It’s painful to think about; that we are insignificant – immaterial beings.
When faced with this grim vision, it easy to embrace the belief that we are personally monitored, controlled, or harassed, by an all seeing and all controlling sinister dark force. That would make us important and special; it would give meaning to our lives.
The truth is that neither perspective is correct; the truth is somewhere between these two poles.
KF
Simon Says:
@kingfish You do not know the Truth. You walk in Darkness.
remo Says:
There are critical truths getting ever closer to fusion, in this matrix of the world created to confuse and separate them .
mussolini defined fascism as corporate and state function the same. Where the two become the same.
That definition is being well reached in the land of the free. we know this.
Confusion is the name of the game. Too many questions create problems, and wikileaks will be this or that, in the operational sense, but the release, per say, lifts the scab on FACT suppression in this ’911terrorWAR’, affirming programed information control central to lies being made and held and KEPT at the highest levels. Which pertains directly to 911 and how THAT lie has been made and held and kept. injecting a spark like SAM into the exhaust pipe of deception – it launches into the imaginative failures of the past 9 years.
Nuts and bolt stuff.
And it is nuts and bolt stuff that prove 911 demolitions and the wars resulting from them.
camusrebel Says:
Even fools are beings of light. Even them that want to give themselves over to pointless religion are equally eternal souls.
Reincarnation is stone cold fact. Deal with it.
And while we are veering wildly off topic, here are two more things that have more truth than the war on terra: UFO’s and Atlantis.
keep dreamin Horatio
Kingfisher Says:
“@kingfish You do not know the Truth. You walk in Darkness.”
And you do? Because you are special, right? You see the light because Morpheus came to you with the blue or red pill because you had that specialness all along, right? You are a unique snowflake, right? You didn’t need to master the basics of international relations and political science, or study transnational issues like terrorism and organized crime for years. It just comes to you, because you were special all along, right?
You are so special that the NSA has to spend its valuable and effort to harass you, right? You are such a risk and therefore important and special person that government has placed you on the no-fly list, right?
Get over yourself.
KF
Kingfisher Says:
“Reincarnation is stone cold fact. Deal with it.”
Where did you learn this? From the same guy who sold Jack his beanstalk beans?
Look, if you choose to personally believe this, I can respect that. The minute you say that it is a fact, despite zero empirical evidence, then there’s a problem: you are either a zealot, a fool, a child, or out of your mind.
KF
cinderman Says:
I too have doubts about the wikileaks – kinda like pissin in one’s pants. I think Assange, et al are a convenient “anti-christ” for the MIC, and in fact are supported by them. Everyone is ignoring the 800 lb gorilla in the room (even Sibel) – the 911 inside job – that sparked all this terrorist stuff. Even that uncle tom jerk colen bowel tipped his hand back in the mid 90′s (after the collapse of our then current enemy – USSR) when he said our next “enemy” was going to come from attacks of “rogue nations”. I think it was shortly after that the USS Cole was attacked by one such rogue nation – the US itself! Come on folks, lets get real. Ck out operation “red cell” where our dear gov went around the world setting up terrorist cells to implement a strategy of having a global enemy so we could fight endless imperialistic wars and have hegemony on every corner of the planet (d)earth. I got this tidbyte from an 8 year marine vet.
cinderman Says:
Btw, camus rebel… I agree with you entirely. Until we can accept the larger realities, all this little crap is just a sideshow for the 99% of the idiots who inhabit this planet with minds full of crap a few shades less brilliant than ordinary gray matter.
ZicaTanka Says:
Something for this life on this planet:
1 (800) 950-NAMI (6264)
Find Your State & Local NAMI
Johan Says:
Re.:
>camusrebel (July 30th, 2010 at 12:13 pm):
>
>When the ex-hacker/frontman, J. Assange was Chomskyesque in
>denigrating the 911 Truth Movement, that was a tell.
>
>NYT is Mockingbird. These “leaks” will lead to exactly nothing
>except maybe ground troops in Pakistan, John “Skull-n-Bones” Kerrey
>be damned.
>
>WLeaks is what they call a “honeypot”. A rogue CIA/Mossad/Soros
>gang invention.
>
>Fitzgerald and Gould: May we please know to what degree you accept
>the truth of 9/11 being an inside job?
One could not put it all better.
BTW, Chomsky operating strictly within the establishment approved parameters while giving appearance of dissent is no-brainer: he _is_ part of the establishment. As for F&G … “by their writing, you shall know them”.
Johan Says:
@ŽicaTanka: “Something for this life on this planet” – a great link
(Long time ago on a distant dormitory stall wall, someone a bit too freely paraphrased famous XIX century Montenegrin poet N.:
“ Blessed is he who gets loony early,
For his is life shall pass in joy.”
Someone added:
“ Blessed are you, N. The Second.”)
ZicaTanka Says:
@Johan: You and N seem to have a very joyful and nostalgic idea of mental illness. You are probably both ones who either have not witnessed it or are not aware of it.
I have witnessed serious mental illness and know that it can be the most horrible experience imaginable for someone who suffers its consequences.
Every supposedly sane person who promotes the idea of a literal soul is fooling around with their own sanity and losing.
ZicaTanka Says:
Now I’m being a zealot. Sorry. Back to Wikileaks…
Without being able to know whether or not it’s a honeypot front for govt intelligence, I think it can be said that the release of the Afg documents marks a change in whistleblowing history. Specifically, popularizing the mass distribution of large amounts of not-for-public-consumption information using the internet.
There are more organizations than just Wikileaks which provide anonymous leaking. People who want to blow a whistle and who have seen how much attention was given to this particular leak might be encouraged to research the best way to do it themselves.
Johan Says:
@ŽicaTanka (August 1st, 2010 at 4:45 am): Fully agreed. Why would anyone responsible post that particular link on a site dedicated to political analysis?
Johan Says:
Throwing light on the current neocolonial expedition in Afghanistan, a geopolitical analysis by F. W. Engdahl [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._William_Engdahl],
http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/print/Kyrgyzstan%20Part%20I.pdf and
http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/print/Kyrgyzstan%20Part%20II.pdf ,
in conclusion says, in part:
“…
Like the US war in Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s, it is becoming increasingly clear that the
US ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan is deliberately designed by Washington to be another ‘no-win
war.’
The ‘failure’ of the Afghan war is being engineered to justify a spillover into Kyrgyzstan,
Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and the Ferghana valley and from there across Central Asia. Before the
popular protests in March this year drove the Bakiyev gang into exile, Washington was well on its
way to broadening the war by means of the agreements with Bakiyev to build up ‘anti-terror’
training bases in the country. From there, control of the Eurasian land space from Xinjiang into
Kazakhstan and Russia would be just a matter of time, given the spread of the opium drug routes.
This time, unlike the early 1970s, the stakes for American hegemony are vastly higher. The role of
Kyrgyzstan’s interim provisional government, the role of Moscow and of Beijing as well as Iran and
Uzbekistan will be decisive in one of the world’s most intensive centers of conflict.
“
Simon Says:
Hoodwinked
by John Perkins 2009
(a review)
John Perkins follows his first book about global economics with a second analysis and some solutions. He provides a clear overview of the present trends, but I sometimes disagree with his solutions. My comments will be in parenthesis.
Iceland was the first target of the economic hitman strategy applied to the Developed Nations. (It is fitting that the return to a free press and Wikileaks have government support in Iceland.) Bechtel negotiated a contract with Iceland to use hydroelectric power for large aluminum manufacturing plants. When the project went belly up, the people of Iceland were broke. Now Halliburton has relocated its international headquarters to Dubai. (It will be interesting to see if this helps them avoid litigation in the BP fiasco.)
Perkins feels that unless you and I and all our friends fight the predatory capitalists, the global economy will go into shock. News reporting has been replaced by sensationalized entertainment. Keynes fought valiantly for the rights of the common man as a key to successful capitalism. Milton Friedman championed predatory capitalism with his classic, A Theory of the Consumption Function. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom . Paying off interest for many countries means diverting funds from health care, education, and social services. Almost no politician gets elected without money that flows from corporations and their stockholders. The New Deal ended with Ronald Reagan and Friedman economics. Trinket capitalism is an economy based upon aggressively marketing things no one really needs. (Investment in international equities such as alternative energy has nearly dried up.) Current policy increases paper money supply to allow the consumer ability to purchase. Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed it in the simplest possible terms. “A man in debt is so far a slave.” (Corollary A: A nation in debt is a slave.)
(Once an economic hitman does his damage, the energy required to undo that action become orders of magnitude larger.) In Ecuador, finally legal actions were taken. In 2009, a $27 billion class action environmental lawsuit was brought against Texaco, now owned by Chevron, for allegedly dumping more than 18 times the amount of wastes spilled by the Exxon Valdez. It is the largest environmental lawsuit in the history of the planet. (For this reason, it is in BP’s interest to declare bankruptcy and sell to another subsidiary of its corporate overlord to avoid liability. Then the citizens of the economic hit are told that they are responsible for paying the damages.)
Our obsession with lending money and earning higher interest rates has impacted the fundamental structure of the U.S. economy. Half the profits made by investment banks were distributed to the senior partners. J.P. Morgan steered the entire U.S. economy away from manufacturing and into a dangerous emphasis on finance. Rather than philanthropy (for after-the-fact guilt for exploitation), corporations should concentrate on improving social and environmental conditions through their daily operations. General Electric modernized by shifting its emphasis from manufacturing to financial services. These corporate oligarchs expend fortunes on lawyers and lobbyists who fight against labor. When we examine the state of our economy, there are a shortage of businesses that produce real things that people need. The modern gilded Age of Robber Barons started with deregulation of the energy sector. (locking us into a petrodollar, geopolitical fiasco dependent upon the continued existence of the nation of Israel.)
(Engdahl’s pdf I & II exposes the geopolitics of Central Asia. Again as Wayne Madsen is fond of pointing out, there is the hand of our Judische freund, Ariel Cohen. He advocates protecting the energy resources of Kyrgyzstan and the Ferghana Valley, which becomes of staggering geopolitical importance. Opium continues to play an essential role in U.S. strategy for control of Central Asia today.)
(It doesn’t take a Ph.D. political analyst such as Kingfisher purports to be to see that our evil will come home to roost. Overextended resources will break the U.S. as surely as it did the Soviet Union. Heroin is on the streets of America moving quietly under the radar while meth distracts and uses our limited police force. Ask why 9-11 is avoided at Boiling Frogs Post site? Keep asking why. There are alternative energy systems ready to go, BUT they do not support geopolitics. There is climate change caused by humans, BUT we don’t have time to address that while playing geopolitics. Does that mean the human race will go extinct? There is a distinct possibility. Kick the corporate bums out of the U.S. Bye Bye Dubai/ I drove my Chevy to the Levy, and the Levy was dry – short for Levitical priesthood)
(A group of investors put up money and received operational loans, but not construction loans for a LEED certified hotel with full array of solar panels. Even with environmental discounts, the panels would only generate 3% of the building’s required electricity. Corporations frequently allow this kind of development, and then with budget overruns, they move in to own the hotel at fire sale prices from the original investors. Meanwhile government solar panels work at 45% efficiency, and Israeli’s have developed a 95% efficient panel. The reason these seldom see the light of day results from the geopolitics of oil.)
(The corporate strategy has been to restrict freedom of the press. Until this is fully implemented, government and corporate shills like Kingfisher are needed.)
A direct consequence of bank deregulation allowed the nation’s largest banks to purchase others. Such consolidation would have been impossible under Glass-Stegall. This has ended up haunting the administrations of both Bush and Obama.
(Revelation 17:4 “And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, bedecked with gold and precious stones, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.” This becomes relevant because John Perkins was first seduced by Claudine Martin to begin his career as an economic hitman.
Joel Brinkley documents the sex trade in the U.S in “Vast Trade in Forced Labor Portrayed in CIA report” New York Times 4/2/2000.)
Today we have become a paper economy, vulnerable to the whims of lawyers and investment bankers. (Business men and activists ask me what can we do? Consider that our education system removes us from hard work. Most do not know the effort involved to produce food, much less good food. The same can be applied to manufacturing and engineering skills. Brain exercise is all well and good, but unless the core group of citizens learn how to work again, then paper pushers is our fate and then the trash can.)
War technologies are designed to kill, become obsolete, and generate more profits. The product is expendable. DoD spent $1 trillion in 2009. (This does not include all black budgets and trillions unaccounted for according to Catherine Austin Fitts. The opium profits are not accounted for at all. After WWII and the New Deal, things of real value were created that brought us out of the Great Depression.)
Part II: The Solution
The current opposition to change in the U.S. is driven primarily by CEO’s, their lobbyists, and the politicians that are beholden to them. Democracy assumes an informed electorate. (Support Wikileaks, eliminate subliminal advertising, and psychoactive frequencies piggybacking on regular transmission frequencies – yes, it’s real- it’s 70% effective on general populations. See recent discussion of the Solari Report with Nick Begich.)
NAFTA eliminated quotas limiting corn imports but allowed U.S. subsidy programs in Mexico to remain in place – promoting dumping of corn into the country. The price paid to farmers fell by over 70%. (Why do we have illegals trying to get into the U.S. I guess so they can have moose burgers with Sarah Palin.)
Leh, Ladakkh – shapeshifting Demystified: John Perkins has a conversation with the Dali Lama. They conclude that peace is possible only when we humans show compassion for all sentient beings. (Well, not quite. I backpacked in Ladakkh. I know whereof Perkins speaks, but a lesson closer to home is more relevant. An armadillo and its friends kept invading the 7 acres of formal gardens I maintain. This is for a simple ecological reason. The sprinklers overwater and there are abundant grubs. I took a box trap and captured one. Perkins mentions shapeshifting. All that involves is understanding the nature of the creature. I made two mistakes. I brutally killed the armadillo with a shovel, then watched as its soul departed. I threw the carcase over the fence in a far corner as a warning to its fellow armadillos that herein lies the fate of any that come into my territory. That was the second mistake. Some rednecks that maintain the next door mansion took offense and devised a clever payback. I was away for a week. The trap was again sprung – filled with maggots and fetid odor. The rednecks thought that rich people are too arrogant. This too ties into Ladakkh. After successfully challenging Buddhist monks through non-judgment, I was watching a polo game in Leh. A quiet thought entered my mind, “Then why are you still judging the rich people in America?” Now I work as an underpaid gardener for one of the richest people in town. I am reasonably happy.)
(Perkins thinks association with the Dalai Lama is a big deal. The Lama’s guard monks ran me off at Dharmsala – but that is another story for another time. To correct my mistakes, I reset the trap after hosing it out. The next armadillo I trap will be removed alive to a remote location on the opposite end of town. As a Cherokee Indian told me after I recounted the experience, “if you saw the armadillo spirit leaving, then it is now your ally. As for us – Native Americans – we are used to being relocated.”)
edit_mommies Says:
Mark Frauenfelder at 10:14 AM Thursday, Aug 5, 2010
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/08/05/animated-map-of-nucl.html
Johan Says:
Concerning our original topic, analyst F.W. Engdahl has an interesting article, titled “Something Stinks about Wikileaks”,
http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Geopolitics___Eurasia/WikiLeaks/wikileaks.html
“
Since the dramatic release of a US military film of a US airborne shooting of unarmed journalists in Iraq, Wiki-Leaks has gained global notoriety and credibility as a daring website that releases sensitive material to the public from whistleblowers within various governments. Their latest “coup” involved alleged leak of thousands of pages of supposedly sensitive documents regarding US informers within the Taliban in Afghanistan and their ties to senior people linked to Pakistan’s ISI military intelligence. The evidence suggests however that far from an honest leak, it is a calculated disinformation to the gain of the US and perhaps Israeli and Indian intelligence and a coverup of the US and Western role in drug trafficking out of Afghanistan.
… … …”
camusrebel Says:
good catch on the engdahl, Johan
As a retired 74 yr old, Gul makes a convenient fall guy
His early calling out of the “mother lode” made him target long time
julie asshat is clearly all spooked out
Johan Says:
http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/wikileak-founder-accused-of-rape_5167921.svd
“Wikileaks frontman Julian Assange is charged in his absence on suspicion of one case of rape and one case of molestation in Sweden.
The on-call prosecutor John Kjellsson confirms the charges … on Saturday morning.
The police are currently looking for Assange in Sweden, says Ola Törndal, investigator at the City Police in Stockholm …”
Johan Says:
… and now :-!
http://www.thelocal.se/28504/20100821/
“The warrant for the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been withdrawn, the Swedish Prosecution Authority has confirmed…”
(If this all was an attempted spy-op publicity cover, a pretty stupid one … but then, who ever said crowds were smart either…)