Julian Assange: Obama a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says the reelection of President Barack Obama is no cause for celebration due to the administration’s aggressive pursuit  and persecution of the whistleblower website.

“Obama seems to be a nice man, and that is precisely the problem,” the 41-year-old told AFP, speaking from his room in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. “It’s better to have a sheep in wolf’s clothing than a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” he said. “All of the activities against WikiLeaks by the United States have occurred under an Obama administration.”

Assange also spoke on the Republicans in Congress, saying it “has not been an effective restraining force on government excesses over the last four years.”

“There is no reason to believe that will change – in fact, the Republicans will push the administration into ever greater excesses,” he added.

Last month, Ecuador said it had requested a meeting with British officials to discuss claims that Assange was losing weight and suffering vision problems.

Assange claimed asylum in the embassy in June to escape extradition to Sweden for questioning over sex crimes allegations. He denies the charges, and believes that if extradited he would then be sent to the US, which regards him as an enemy of the state, where he could possibly face the death penalty.

In 2010, WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of classified US documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as diplomatic cables from US embassies around the world. The Obama administration in turn forced companies to cut off WikiLeaks’ sources of funding.

UN Torture Chief Rules Bradley Manning’s Treatment Cruel and Inhuman

The UN special investigator on torture said the US government’s treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning was cruel, inhuman and degrading. He was held in solitary confinement for almost a year on suspicion of being a WikiLeaks source.

Juan Mendez’s 14-month investigation into the treatment of Manning came to the conclusion that the US military was at least culpable of cruel and inhumane treatment. Manning was locked up for 23 hours a day, in solitary confinement, over an 11-month period in conditions that Mendez found might have constituted torture.

“The special rapporteur concludes that imposing seriously punitive conditions of detention on someone who has not been found guilty of any crime is a violation of his right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of his presumption of innocence,” Mendez writes.

Manning, 24, was arrested on May 29, 2010 at the Forward Operating Base Hammer outside Baghdad, where he was working as an intelligence analyst. He has been charged with 22 counts, including aiding the enemy, relating to the leaking of state secrets to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. Manning was held for almost three months at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, then moved in July to the Marine corps base at Quantico in Virginia. He was held there for another eight months in conditions that brought about widespread condemnation, including being held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and being made to strip naked at night.

In his opening letter to the US government on December 30 2010, Mendez said that the prolonged period of isolated confinement was believed to have been imposed “in an effort to coerce him into ‘cooperation’ with the authorities, allegedly for the purpose of persuading him to implicate others.”

The US department of justice is conducting a grand jury in Virginia exploring the possibility of bringing charges against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder.

The US mission to the UN in Geneva responded to Mendez on January 27 2011. It said that the US government “is committed to protecting human rights in our country and abroad, and we value the work of the special rapporteur”.

In a later letter, dated May 19 2011, the Pentagon’s legal counsel told Mendez that it was satisfied that Manning’s treatment at Quantico had been fine. “Though Private Manning was classified as a maximum custody detainee at Quantico, he occupied the very same type of single-occupancy cell that all other pretrial detainees occupied.”

Mendez stressed in his final conclusions that “solitary confinement is a harsh measure which may cause serious psychological and physiological adverse effects on individuals regardless of their specific conditions.” Moreover, “depending on the specific reason for its application, conditions, length, effects and other circumstances, solitary confinement can amount to a breach of article seven of the international covenant on civil and political rights, and to an act defined in article one or article 16 of the convention against torture.”

He also said that the US government had tried to justify Manning’s solitary confinement by calling it “prevention of harm watch”. Yet the military had offered no details as to what actual harm was being prevented.

The Pentagon has refused to allow Mendez to see Manning in private, insisting that all conversations be monitored. “You should have no expectation of privacy in your communications with Private Manning,” the Pentagon wrote.

The lack of privacy is a violation of human rights procedures, the UN says, and considered unacceptable by the UN special rapporteur.

Manning’s solitary confinement came to an end on April 20, 2011 when he was transferred from Quantico to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. He is currently being held in a facility in Virginia so that he can make pre-trial appearances at Fort Meade in Maryland ahead of his eventual court martial.

WikiLeaks Publishing The Global Intelligence Files

From WikiLeaks:

 

“LONDON—Today, Monday 27 February, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files – more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered “global intelligence” company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods”

Read more at http://www.wikileaks.org/the-gifiles.html