Google Ads

Showing posts with label Julian Assange WikiLeaks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Julian Assange WikiLeaks. Show all posts

Sunday, January 23, 2011

If Julian Assange is a Terrorist, What is Luis Posada Carriles Then?

by Jean Guy Allard




The trials of the creator of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and of international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles will begin with less than 24-hour difference on January 10 and 11, one in London and the other one in El Paso, Texas. The anomaly immediately catching the attention of people is that the champion of freedom of information will be accused of the very serious crime of terrorism, while the confessed terrorist will be tried for migratory crimes sanctioned by a sentence he has already served.

The ANSA news agency reports that the request of extradition made by Sweden for the charge of "sexual molestation" against Assange was transferred from a court in the center of London to Belmarsh Court, specializing in terrorism issues and annexed to a maximum security prison, re-baptized years ago by the BBC as "The British Guantánamo."

Assange will appear in court on a charge of terrorism, which implies, according to British laws, his arrest and confinement.

Luis Posada Carriles will continue to be free on bail when he appears in the United States before a judge who acquitted him in a first trial and who openly expressed her sympathy for him in a hall full of followers, many of them with a terrorist past, who will come from Batista’s Miami and so as not to miss an opportunity to celebrate his crimes.

A spokesperson of the British legal authorities stated that the transfer to the court of Belmarsh, in the south-east area of the capital, is due to "logistic reasons" and not, as stated by WikiLeaks, due to US pressure.

SPEEDED UP FOR ASSANGE, DELAYED FOR POSADA

The truth is that while in the case of Assange, the procedures have been speeded up, skipping stages as much as possible, after a series of tricks to silence the blonde Australian man, in the case of Posada Carriles, a former CIA agent that served the Company as an instructor of explosives, a torturer, a police captain, a hired assassin, a terrorist and a promoter of assassination, records of dilatory maneuvers to drown out his case are broken.

In addition to use a panoply of dirty tricks to pressure Assange, sabotage his operations system, take away its income, recover its leaks, manipulate its content, in short, terrorize the man who dared to open the valves of the huge can of diplomatic trash of the United States, the US intelligence services and its branches, they have kidnapped the man to be blame for so much courage for not being able to eliminate him without expanding the scandal even more.

Hundreds of texts have been written, books have been published, and documentaries have been made about the criminal record Posada, the Klaus Barbie of US intelligence.

On May 17, 2005, at 1:30 pm, Luis Posada Carriles was arrested near Miami, and taken in a gulf cart to a helicopter, "with every kindness and courtesy possible", for his transfer to the offices of the Department of Internal Security.

On April 1st, 2005, a lawyer for Posada Carriles, Eduardo Soto, confirmed in Miami that his client –illegally introduced in US territory on board of a shrimp vessel owned by a capo of the Cuban-American mafia-, would ask for asylum and parole to stay in the country permanently.

In spite of the accusations presented in Caracas for his participation in the terrorist attack against a Cuban aircraft that killed all 73 people on board in 1976; his arrest in Panama in 2000, in connection with a plan for an assassination attempt against Cuban leader Fidel Castro; his public acceptance for having organized a terrorist campaign against tourist facilities in Havana in 1997; and his close links with terrorist networks, Posada Carriles would receive from Bush’s government absolute support that Obama never dared to alter.

On September 27, 2005, an immigration judge in El Paso, Texas, William Abbott, following federal instructions, had used the absurd testimony of an old accomplice of Posada, a former official of the Venezuelan secret police, Joaquin Chaffardet, to order that the criminal could be deported to Venezuela.

GETTING RID OF THE "HOT POTATO"

Four months later, on January 24, 2006, three days before the formal assuming of power of the new Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, The Miami Herald -the bonds of which with US intelligence have been well demonstrated-, cited what it called "fragments" of a Statement by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau (ICE), that pointed out the following: "The ICE is progressing in the carrying out of the removal of Mr. Posada from the USA."

The White House –in the face of an international scandal-, assessed that the best way to get rid of the "hot potato" the former agent, terrorist, torturer and assassin represented, was to find him refuge anywhere outside US territory.

Three days later, on January 27, 2006, the US ambassador to Honduras, Charles "Charlie" Ford, visited Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, scarcely eight days after his coming to power, to present him an insolent request.

"Ambassador Charles Ford came to ask me, by way of the Foreign Ministry, for the granting of a visa to Posada Carriles", said Zelaya later, referring to the then Foreign Minister Milton Jiménez Puerto.

"It was impossible to give a visa to Luis Posada Carriles, since he was questioned for terrorist acts. They defend that kind of terrorism, I vouch for that, and it’s for that kind of thing that we hold different stances," he underlined.

On April 19, 2007, Posada Carriles, found not guilty by Cardone, was back in Miami not to set foot in a detention center ever again.

BROWNFIELD: "POSADA DOESN’T PUT ANYBODY AT RISK"

On March 18, 2008, as a response to the statements made by Cuba and Venezuela at the UN, the person in charge of legal affairs in the US mission, Caroline Wilson, pointed out with candor that her country "had carefully followed the legal procedures in force in the case of Posada Carriles".

"As happens in democracies in the world, a person can’t be tried or extradited if there isn’t enough evidence that he committed the crime he’s accused of," she asserted.

In July, 2008, the US ambassador to Venezuela at the time, William Brownfield, in statements to the Panorama newspaper, in Maracaibo, made it clear that the United States had no intention whatsoever of putting Posada at the disposal of Venezuelan justice, which was claiming and continues to claim him.

"Mr. Luis Posada Carriles doesn’t represent an imminent danger for anybody," Brownfield had asserted, making it clear that the Bush administration would never turn over its veteran agent.

Ironically, a few days before the Brownfield stupidity, the Undersecretary of State, Thomas Shannon, today an ambassador in Brazil, assured the OAS that the US Department of Justice was "still carrying out investigations" about Posada Carriles.

While Assange is hastily taken from a minor court to another one that can lock him up for good, the Venezuelan government is waiting for an answer, for more than five years now, to the request of extradition of the terrorist.

Assange, the Web idealist demonized by the major communication networks and persecuted by the police of the US spiders web, will soon know how imperial justice gives a piece of its mind, with or without intermediaries.

Ignored by an accomplice press, Posada, the mercenary assassin, will keep on evading law, and the dozens of victims and relatives of victims of his crimes, the lives of whom, in many cases, have been devastated by the permanent despicable and cowardly willingness of the swine without scruples of serving the empire.

10 January 2011 14:42

cubanradio.cu

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Free Julian Assange! Hands off WikiLeaks!

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was jailed in Britain Tuesday on charges that are nothing more than a pretext for an act of political repression dictated by the US government.

The aim of this judicial travesty is, in the first instance, to punish Assange for having made public secret cables exposing crimes and conspiracies carried out by US officials.

Second, by throwing Assange into London’s Wandsworth prison, the US and British authorities hope not only to silence WikiLeaks but also to intimidate anyone else from daring to lift the lid on government secrets and lies.

It is almost certain that the ultimate goal of the shoddy legal frame-up is to have Assange extradited to the United States to be tried as a spy or even as an accomplice of terrorism.

Given the unprecedented and shameful public outcry by leading American politicians and media figures for Assange to be declared an “enemy combatant” or “terrorist” and “taken out” or “assassinated,” not only would his ability to get a fair trial in the US be excluded, but his very survival would be in doubt.

Those leading the campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks are representatives of a government and a ruling establishment that is responsible for decades of criminality carried out behind the backs of the American people—from stolen elections, to illegal wars of aggression, to torture and other acts of international terror.

This is a country that was dragged into a war in Iraq that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives based upon outright lies—reported as fact by an obedient and complicit media—about “weapons of mass destruction” and nonexistent terrorist ties.

This and other crimes have been either concealed or justified by means of propaganda, the invocation of state secrets or outright lying to the public. This is what makes those attacking WikiLeaks hate and fear its work, and what makes this work so vitally necessary.

Last April, the WikiLeaks site made public the “Collateral Murder” videotape, documenting a 2007 massacre in Baghdad carried out by an attack helicopter in which 15 Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, were killed. Private First Class Bradley Manning was arrested soon after, charged with leaking the video and other documents. He is presently being held in a prison cell in Quantico, Virginia.

This was followed by the release of some 391,000 Afghanistan battlefield reports last July, documenting killings of civilians that had been covered up by the Pentagon, including the mowing down of unarmed demonstrators and assassinations by Special Forces death squads. Then in October, WikiLeaks made available 400,000 battlefield reports from Iraq, documenting more carnage against civilians and the complicity of the US military in horrific forms of torture against Iraqi detainees.

These documents laid bare to the public information that the government had systematically suppressed, with the assistance of a self-censoring media for which being “embedded” has become a permanent state of affairs. They provide ample evidence of war crimes carried out by both the Bush and Obama administrations.

The diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks began releasing last month—with less than 1,000 out of 250,000 thus far published—have already uncovered similar evidence of crimes and conspiracies, from the confirmation of a US missile strike that killed over 50 Yemeni civilians last December, to pressure campaigns to halt prosecutions of US officials for illegal kidnappings and torture, to instructions to US diplomats to gather personal intelligence—including DNA samples—on United Nations and foreign government officials.

Those now baying for Assange’s blood, calling his actions “criminal,” are responsible for real crimes whose victims number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

Not only the Republican right, but “liberal” Democrats have joined in this campaign. Among them is California’s Democratic senator, Dianne Feinstein, who called in a column published by the Wall Street Journal Tuesday for the prosecution of Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917.

Feinstein charges Assange — a citizen of Australia—with being indifferent to “national security” and “our vital national interests,” interests that she, as a US senator, a multimillionaire and the wife of a wealthy Pentagon contractor, holds especially dear.

“Mr. Assange claims to be a journalist and would no doubt rely on the First Amendment to defend his actions,” she writes. “But he is no journalist: He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.”

Dismissing claims that WikiLeaks is covered by the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech, Feinstein continues, “Just as the First Amendment is not a license to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, it is also not a license to jeopardize national security.”

The Espionage Act invoked by Feinstein has a long and reactionary history, used to jail the legendary workers’ leader Eugene V. Debs in 1918 along with thousands of members of the Industrial Workers of the World and other working class militants.

The senator articulates the same kind of police-state, lynch-mob spirit that animated that wave of repression. According to the Orwellian logic of the current vendetta, an “agitator” who exposes the crimes of a government engaged in armed aggression and torture is a criminal. And the right to free speech can be suspended by the mere invocation of “national security.”

This will not end with Assange and WikiLeaks. A frontal assault on core democratic rights is being prepared by a ruling elite that lives in fear of the people, concealing its actions and aims because it knows that the policies of social reaction at home and war abroad enjoy no popular support.

The attack on WikiLeaks has been aided and abetted by the cowardly media and by corporations ranging from Amazon to MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, all of which swung into line at the first sign of government intimidation, joining in the campaign to silence the Internet organization and cut off its funding.

Success in this act of state repression would set the stage for a more far-ranging drive to suppress freedom of the Internet as a whole, shut down other web sites that oppose the policies of the US government, and impose an even tighter veil of secrecy over the operations of the CIA, the Pentagon and the White House.

The financial aristocracy and its political representatives feel an urgent need to impose a stranglehold on the flow of information. They know that the crisis of their economic system and their attempts to impose its full weight on the backs of the working class, both at home and abroad, are creating the conditions for an eruption of class struggles. Depriving such a movement of free information and political perspective is seen as vital by the ruling elite.

This is what makes the launching of an international campaign in defense of WikiLeaks a life-and-death question for working people in every country. Mass protests and movements of solidarity must be organized to demand the immediate release of Julian Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning and an end to the campaign of intimidation and repression against WikiLeaks.

Bill Van Auken

8 December 2010

wsws