WikiLeaks about to hit the fan

Bildt wants Sweden to be 'world power': WikiLeaks
(David Landes, The Local: Sweden's News In English, February 27, 2012)

Foreign minister Carl Bildt believes Sweden should be a “world power” and once called Russian prime minister Vladmir Putin a “chetnik”, according to internal emails from a US security firm released by WikiLeaks on Monday.

The details are included in a September 2009 email exchange between employees of Strategic Forecasting, Inc., a US security consulting company commonly known as Stratfor and are attributed to a Swedish member of the European Parliament referred to only as “SW501”.

According to the report, SW501 is a “very well connected” Swedish MEP with “extremely close links” to Bildt.

“Bildt believes that Sweden should become a world power,” Stratfor's Marko Papic wrote in the message entitled “INSIGHT - SWEDEN: Carl Bildt”.

In addition, the report claims that Bildt has a “very rocky” relationship with Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt dating back to the days when Bildt was prime minister and Reinfeldt was head of the Moderate Party's youth organization.

According to the Stratfor report, Bildt is also “very critical” of Russia, having at one point called Putin a “chetnik”, a term used to refer to ultra-nationalist Serbs.

Bildt was reportedly also “at odds” with French president Nicolas Sarkozy over a dispute over French maneuvering related to Sweden's presidency of the EU in 2009.

The unnamed Swedish MEP explained as well that Sweden views EU enlargement as a way to “break the German-Frenc [sic] stranglehold on the EU”, according to the Stratfor report.

Bildt's work on the Balkans prompted him to conclude that "he does not like Croats and Albanians," according to the report.

Bildt spokesperson Anna Charlotta Johansson referred to the details in the emails as "hearsay".

"I think we'll do what we normally do in these circumstances which is refrain from commenting. This is information from a third party," she told The Local on Monday.

In addition to an array of alleged foreign policy insights, the email also included several personal details about Bildt, including how tall he is, his alleged brain power and the fact that his wife Anna Maria Corazza Bildt is "apparently Italian and does not speak really good Swedish

Later on Monday, Bildt used his official Twitter account to brush off the significance of the email.

"Wikileaks released obscure email saying I'm "super tall, has photographic memory and is very smart". Isn't this slightly ridiculous?" he wrote on his Twitter account.

The email exchange is one of an estimated five million Stratfor emails released by WikiLeaks on Monday in what the whisteblower website is calling “The Global Intelligence Files”.

The emails are dated between July 2004 and December 2011 and, according to WikiLeaks, “reveal the inner workings” of the Texas-headquartered global intelligence firm, which provides analytic reports to a number of major corporations and US government agencies.

The release comes just days after Swedish tabloid Expressen reported that WikiLeaks was planning a “smear campaign” against Sweden in an attempt to prevent the country from eventually extraditing founder Julian Assange to the United States.

Assange is currently in the UK in the last throes of an extended legal battle to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning over sex crimes allegations.

Wikileaks: Pakistan army officials 'knew of Bin Laden house'
28 February 2012 Last updated at 13:47 GMT/BBC News


Osama Bin Laden's home was demolished last weekend

Mid-ranking Pakistani army officials may have known that Osama Bin Laden had a safe house in Pakistan, leaked material appears to indicate.

The claim was made in e-mails allegedly from US-based security think tank Stratfor, which were published by the whistleblowing website Wikileaks.

Stratfor warned ahead of publication it would make no comment on whether the emails were authentic or inaccurate.

Pakistan's government and military have denied knowing Bin Laden's whereabouts.

The al-Qaeda chief was killed in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad in May last year in a covert mission by US special forces.

The compound in the north-western town was demolished by Pakistani authorities last weekend.

One email from a senior Stratfor employee to colleagues is quoted as saying: "Mid to senior level ISI and Pak Mil with one retired Pak Mil General that had knowledge of the OBL arrangements and safe house."

The messages go on to say that the names and specific ranks of these generals were unknown to the writer, but adds that US intelligence may have that information.

The emails allege that as many as 12 officials may have known, but says it is unclear exactly what position they may have had or even if they were retired personnel.

The information was allegedly obtained from material taken from the compound last May, according to the email exchange which took place in the weeks after the al-Qaeda chief's death.

It is unclear if the information was passed to the Pakistani government but the employee is quoted saying "I would not pass the info to the GOP [government of Pakistan], because we can't trust them." ......

Interpol arrests 25 alleged Anonymous members
(ComputerworldUK.com, February 29, 2012)

Interpol has said that 25 people suspected of being affiliated with the Anonymous hacking group were arrested in four countries in South America and Europe, with authorities seizing IT equipment, payment cards and cash.

The arrests were made across 15 cities in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain, Interpol said in a news release. They followed an investigation called "Operation Unmask" that began in mid-February following cyberattacks directed at Colombia's Ministry of Defense and the president's website, and Chile's Endesa electricity company and its national library.

Authorities searched 40 premises and seized 250 items including computer equipment and mobile phones. An investigation continues into how the alleged hackers' activities were funded, Interpol said.

A prominent Twitter account linked to Anonymous, AnonOps, hinted that the group had been attacking Interpol's website in retaliation on Wednesday. One tweet read, "Tango Down II 404 Interpol."

Anonymous often conducts distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against websites, which involves bombarding a site with so many traffic requests it becomes unavailable.

The arrests mark one of the biggest roundups so far of people allegedly affiliated with Anonymous, a decentralized group that undertakes hacking campaigns to protest policies and organizations it opposes.

Separately this week, Wikileaks on Tuesday began releasing some 5 million emails from the global intelligence analyst firm Stratfor Global Intelligence, which was targeted by Anonymous last December.

And earlier this month, Anonymous took credit for recording a conference call between U.S. and British law enforcement agents investigating the group. They posted a 17-minute recording of the call on YouTube.

The Church Committee of 1975 investigated CIA "actions" and found that we had run — if you extrapolate the figures — about thirteen thousand-plus [covert operations] since we've had the CIA — since World War II. Now, a lot of these are fairly benign, and some of them fairly trivial. But a lot of them are VERY violent, and some of them lead into wars. A long destabilization/propaganda campaign led us into the Korean War, and another one led us into the Vietnam War. Now, scholars, including myself, reading these things — and we have so many of them in the public record that it's obviously very difficult to know exactly how many people died in Vietnam or in Korea or in Nicaragua or in the Congo — but still, working with conservative figures we come up with a minimum figure of SIX MILLION PEOPLE killed in the Secret Wars of the CIA through its destabilizations over these past forty years:

http://www.serendipity.li/cia/stock2.html

Hacking Away at Internet Privacy
(Opinion Essay, TakePart.com, February 29, 2012)

Towards the end of your long and fruitful life, on a day of family celebration, it may be that a great-grandchild will approach you. With the innocence of youth, he or she will look you in the eye and ask which side you were on in the Great Internet Wars of the early 21st century.

We know the Internet is inherently unstable. It is built on the concept of Internet Protocol—IP addresses—which identifies the physical location of an Internet-enabled device. Unfortunately, IP numbers can be easily spoofed, making it very difficult to find out who might be using a computer to commit a crime.

This flaw threatens to undermine vast swathes of the online world. Now that hackers, terrorists and shadowy government agencies are alive to just how much chaos can be unleashed by one person and a keyboard, there are thousands of would-be troublemakers tapping away right now. They may not be interested in you. Yet.

Cue Anonymous. Last time we heard about this particular group, they were giving us lolz by intercepting an email and releasing the contents of its attached audio file—a telephone conversation between the FBI and British police. During this conversation the participants can be heard telling each other how this time, they’re really going to get on top of the hacking problem.

Now Anonymous has teamed up with WikiLeaks to bring us Stratfor, a tranche of five million emails, stolen from the private U.S.-based intelligence company, and passed to WikiLeaks for publication.

The contents promise to be both alarming and fascinating. The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, says the emails expose Stratfor’s corrupt business practices. According to Assange, Stratfor has a “global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards—which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world.”

Stratfor is refusing to comment, taking the view that: “Some of the emails may be forged or altered to include inaccuracies; some may be authentic. We will not validate either. Nor will we explain the thinking that went into them. Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimized twice by submitting to questioning about them.”

Internet security experts believe the upscaling of attacks by the likes of Anonymous (described by Cole Stryker as a “handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots”), LulzSec, and AntiSec suggests we have entered “open season” online.

If a company specializing in global security can have its corporate guts spilled for us all to gawk at, no one is safe. This has implications.

What if your bank was up to something Anonymous didn’t approve of? Your bank details could be all over the Internet before you had a chance to do anything about it.

What if you posted something that Anonymous didn’t like? They could steal/corrupt/obliterate your digital identity in the blink of an eye.

Think they wouldn’t? You don’t know.

Reading stolen private messages between colleagues at Stratfor might be diverting, but where do you draw the line? How would you feel about the prospect of every email you’ve ever written, or phone call you’ve ever made, or everything you’ve ever done in a public space being made available to anyone who wants to access that information?

For the past ten years we have been racing to export as much of our soul to the web as possible—our relationships, our finances, our innermost private thoughts. Most are just a password and re-post away from becoming very public. And that password, to some hackers, is secure as tissue paper.

Soon there will be no secrets. We are creating a society where the only safety will be in assuming that every human interaction can be captured and stored, forcing us to act like the paranoid citizens in George Orwell’s 1984.

It’s not just the hackers, of course. Your government wants the ability to tap into your emails and social media accounts. Corporates are building sophisticated profiles of your behavior and habits. This information can be traded and reported to powerful people who may have an interest in manipulating your actions.

There are campaigners who are doing what they can to stop this from happening. Some are working to define and protect a concept of private space where people can grow, vent, learn and change without the risk of their actions and notions being monitored.

The hackers, meanwhile, do not care for due process. They just want to take down and make vulnerable anyone they disagree with.

It’s all beginning to get very messy, and before long, innocent parties are going to get in trouble. We need to think more about what we put online, who we give it to, and how we allow it to be used. Whoever controls and exploits our data controls and exploits us. We need to protect what we have from everyone—hackers, corporates and governments included.

If we fail, no great-grandchild will ask what you did during the Great Internet Wars of the early 21st century. They will already have read about it online.

What if your bank was up to something Anonymous didn’t approve of? Your bank details could be all over the Internet before you had a chance to do anything about it.

Why the cult of Assange plays badly in Belarus
(Londoner's Diary, London Evening Standard, March 2, 2012)

Julian Assange is at the Old Vic Tunnels tonight supporting a new film called Europe’s Last Dictator about Belarus. But will the activist Belarussians thank him? Assange has been invited to moderate the Q&A after the screening of the documentary, which is narrated by Joanna Lumley.

However, democracy activists in Belarus are furious with the WikiLeaks boss because they believe unredacted US cables named their members, making them targets for the Belarus secret service.Budding film-maker Matthew Charles, one of the co-directors of Europe’s Last Dictator, has defended his decision to invite the controversial Australian to the screening.

“Nobody has given us any proof of that,” said Charles, of the unredacted cables. “I was given the cables too,” he added. Did they have the names, the Londoner asked? “Yes, some, but of activists already known to the regime.”

Charles says Assange’s critics are confined to the Guardian and Index on Censorship. “There’s a row going on between them and WikiLeaks, and the only people being critical are people from those companies.”Not so. Kapil Komireddi, an Indian journalist who recently reported from Belarus for the US magazine Tablet, spoke to activists who blamed WikiLeaks for their detention

“Matthew Charles has bought into the cult of Julian Assange and either feels personally beholden to him or drawn to his tawdry celebrity,” he tells me.Charles expects to sell out tonight, presumably helped by Assange’s name.

Hackers busted after one becomes FBI informant
(By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press, March 6, 2012)

A group of expert hackers who attacked governments and corporations around the globe has been busted after its ringleader — one of the world's most-wanted and most-feared computer vandals — turned against his comrades and secretly became an informant for the FBI months ago, authorities said Tuesday.

Five people, including a Chicago man, were charged in court papers unsealed in federal court in New York, and authorities revealed that a sixth person, Hector Xavier Monsegur, a legendary figure known in the hacking underworld as "Sabu," has pleaded guilty in New York, where he lives.

Authorities said it marked the first significant prosecution of major Internet hackers.

According to court papers, members of the group got their start as part of a large worldwide hacking organization known as Anonymous, which authorities said has been operating at least since 2008. Court papers accused Anonymous of a "deliberate campaign of online destruction, intimidation and criminality."

In chat rooms and on Twitter, Anonymous supporters erupted into a chorus of disappointment, confusion, and anger. Some wondered whether the news was an elaborate fraud. Others revisited earlier suspicions that Sabu was a government agent.

As members of Anonymous surveyed the damage Tuesday, one of its most popular Twitter feeds assured its followers that it was still OK.

"We're sailing close to the wind," the feed read. "Our crew is complete and doing fine."

Monsegur was portrayed in court papers as the ringleader of some of the group's more infamous deeds. Authorities said he formed an elite hacking organization last May — a spinoff of Anonymous — and named it "Lulz Security" or "LulzSec." ''Lulz" is Internet slang that can mean "laughs" or "amusement."

Despite the organization's lighthearted name, authorities said Monsegur and his followers embarked on a dastardly stream of deeds against business and government entities in the U.S. and around the world, resulting in the theft of confidential information, the defacing of websites and victims being temporarily put out of business.

Authorities said their crimes affected nearly 1 million people.

Their exploits included attacks on cyber-security firms and the posting of a fake story that slain rapper Tupac Shakur was alive in New Zealand.

As their exploits became known, some hackers associated with the group boasted about their prowess.

Monsegur, free on $50,000 bail, was charged with conspiracy to engage in computer hacking, among other offenses. Authorities said he pleaded guilty Aug. 15. Word of his cooperation was contained in court records.

According to the court papers, he was an influential member of three hacking organizations — Anonymous, Internet Feds and Lulz Security. Court papers said he acted as a "rooter," a hacker who identified vulnerabilities in computer systems.

The court papers said he participated in attacks over the past few years on Visa, MasterCard and PayPal; government computers in Tunisia, Algeria, Yemeni and Zimbabwe; Fox Broadcasting Co. and the Tribune Co.; PBS; and the U.S. Senate.

Also charged in court papers with conspiracy to commit computer hacking were Ryan Ackroyd, Jake Davis, Darren Martyn, Donncha O'Cearrbhail and Jeremy Hammond. Three were arrested Tuesday; Davis and Martin were previously arrested.

Hammond, who is from Chicago, appeared before a federal judge there and was ordered transferred to New York. Martyn and O'Cearrbhail lived in Ireland, Ackroyd and Davis in Britain.

LulzSec members attained notoriety last May by attacking the PBS website and planting the false story about Shakur. According to court papers Tuesday, Monsegur and others did it in retaliation for what they perceived to be unfavorable news coverage of Wikileaks on the PBS news program "Frontline."

In July, when LulzSec's attacks were grabbing world headlines, an unknown person alleged that Sabu was Monsegur, publishing his personal details on the Internet. Sabu took to Twitter to deny that he had been exposed, and as Anonymous's attacks continued, suspicions eased.

Barrett Brown, a former journalist who became closely associated with Anonymous, said Sabu's betrayal would have a serious effect on Anonymous.

"He was an admired Anon," he said. "He's been a leader. People came to him with information. God knows what else he told them."

Alleged Stratfor Hacker No Stranger to Law Enforcement
(Jaikumar Vijayan, Computerworld, March 8, 2012)

Jeremy Hammond, one of the five hackers arrested in Tuesday's crackdown on key members of LulzSec and Anonymous, is no stranger to the law.

Court documents released earlier this week show that the 27-year old Chicago native was arrested several times over the past few years for hacking activities, protests, mob action and other charges. The picture that emerges of Hammond is of an individual committed to a variety of activist causes with little concern about their potential consequences.

Hammond's latest arrest occurred late Monday night in what appears to have been a dramatic raid at the two-apartment building where he lives in Chicago. One of Hammond's neighbors who was interviewed on a local ABC news station described running out after hearing an explosion, and seeing about 30 FBI agents swarming Hammond's home.

Hammond was one of five individuals arrested this week in connection with a string of high-profile attacks by hackers claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous and splinter groups LulzSec and AntiSec. He is charged with breaking into computers at security intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) last December and stealing account information on more than 860,000 Stratfor subscribers and credit card information on about 60,000 of them.

If convicted, Hammond faces up to 20 years in prison. A lawyer for Hammond quoted in the ABC news segment described the suspect as looking "shell-shocked" after his 9:30 p.m. Monday arrest.

Hammond's arrest by the FBI was facilitated in part by Hector Monsegur , also known as 'Sabu,'' a former head of LulzSec who was arrested last July and became an FBI informant Monsegur engaged in numerous online chat conversations with Hammond. The transcripts of those chats were later used to make a case for Hammond's arrest.

Hammond's first major brush with the law was in 2005, when he was arrested for breaking into the website of politically conservative activist group Protest Warrior and stealing information on about 5,000 credit cards.

Hammond claimed he planned on using the cards to make donations to several liberal organizations though he ultimately never did. He pleaded guilty to one count of computer intrusion in connection with the 2004 incident and was sentenced to 24 months in federal custody and an additional three years of supervised probation. He spent about 18 months of that sentence in federal prison and was released in August 2008.

Hammond was arrested again in November 2009 for "violently protesting" a speech by a Holocaust denier at a restaurant in a Chicago suburb though it is not immediately clear whether he spent any time in prison on that charge. In November 2010, Hammond was sentenced to 18 months probation for throwing an Olympic banner into an open fire in Chicago's Daly Plaza to protest the city's attempts to bring the 2016 Olympics to the city.

The FBI in Chicago has information obtained from another investigation that Hammond may also have been involved in hacking the website of a white supremacist group, the complaint filed against him in connection with the Stratfor hack, alleged.

Transcripts of chat conversations between Hammond and other hackers suggest that the Chicago native was not shy about his run-ins with the law. The complaint against him has several examples where he is caught chatting with others about being arrested during the Republican National Convention in 2004, spending two weeks in county jail for marijuana possession and of his time in federal prison in connection with the Protest Warrior breach.

On more than one occasion he talks about his sympathy for left-leaning groups and anarchist organizations, and in one chat, describes himself as an "anarchist communist." Hammond's chats also revealed his links with militant anti-racist groups.

Hammond also is a freegan, an individual who reclaims and eats food that has been discarded by others, as part of an anti-consumerist movement. "Dumpster diving is all good I'm a freegan goddess," he says in one online chat conversation with another alleged hacker. Federal agents conducting surveillance on Hammond reported seeing him going into dumpsters for food.

A profile of Hammond in the Chicago Tribune portrays him as an extremely bright individual with a penchant for messing around with computers. As a student at Glenbard East High School near Chicago, Hammond allegedly broke into the school's computers to show administrators how vulnerable they were, and was thanked by administrators for the effort.

An effort to do the same while he was a student at the University of Illinois in Chicago got him expelled and may have spurred his transformation from helpful hacker to cyber vigilante, according to the Tribune.

Federal agents maintained a painstaking surveillance on Hammond's home for about a week before they moved in to arrest him Tuesday. They obtained a court order authorizing them to use a so-called Pen/Trap device (pen register and trap and trace device) to secretly collect dialing, routing, addressing and signaling information from his home. The goal was to gather information that would conclusively show that Hammond was the sole person using the computers and network in his home.

In an interview with the Tribune this week, Hammond's mother described her son as genius with a 168 IQ but little wisdom. "I love my son, but he is a genius with no brain," his mother Rose Collins told the newspaper.

Ellsberg discusses Pentagon Papers
(Caleb Kennedy, The Daily Princetonian, March 9, 2012)

Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the top secret Pentagon Papers in the midst of the Vietnam War, gave a lecture on Thursday afternoon titled “Secrets, Lies and Leaks: From the Pentagon Papers to WikiLeaks.”

The conversation also included Bart Gellman ’82, a visiting lecturer in the Wilson School and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. The pair discussed the balance between government secrecy and the First Amendment.

Ellsberg drew a direct link between his actions as a whistleblower and the recent actions of Bradley Manning, a former Army private who was arrested in May 2010 for the alleged leaking of tens of thousands of classified war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq and some 250,000 State Department cables.

“It’s virtually impossible to distinguish what WikiLeaks did and what The New York Times did at the time,” said Ellsberg. “I identify very much with Bradley Manning.”

In 1967, as a member of the Rand Corporation, Ellsberg was responsible for a top-secret study of documents commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara surrounding the handling of the Vietnam War.

After learning the lies of the Johnson administration regarding the number of U.S. forces in Vietnam, the extent of their involvement and the subsequent plan to escalate troop levels without informing Congress or the public, Ellsberg and others ultimately provided The New York Times with copies of the classified documents which the newspaper then published.

Ellsberg was indicted and prosecuted on twelve felony counts, including espionage, theft and conspiracy, which in total numbered up to 115 years in prison. This was the first prosecution ever for a leak of classified information to the public. The charges were eventually dismissed due to gross governmental misconduct toward Ellsberg following the leak.

“I don’t think anyone should be prosecuted ... for releasing information to Congress or the public that reveals criminal behavior,” Ellsberg said.

Ellsberg criticized the Obama administration’s prosecution of six leak cases that utilizied statutes in the Espionage Act of 1917. Until then, the statutes had been used in only three other leak cases, according to Ellsberg.

“President Obama has shown a willingness to indict people for leaks beyond that of any previous president,” Ellsberg said.

Ellsberg also responded to criticism of the actions of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks who some have accused of assisting Bradley Manning in his theft of confidential documents and publishing information that has threatened American national security interests and American lives.

He said that although he would have done some things differently from Assange, he still supports his actions.

“He assumed judgment. I think Bradley Manning did the right thing there,” said Ellsberg, who commended Manning for leaking the information to Assange. Ellsberg said he thought it was a good idea to leak to someone with the resources to limit the release of the most sensitive and potentially harmful information. “[Assange] didn’t redact enough in my opinion.”

Ellsberg lamented the fact that the names of officials, including covert operatives, were published along with thousands of the sensitive diplomatic cables.

“I’m confident that he does not have intent to harm the United States or aid the enemy,” Ellsberg said.

Ellsberg suggested that more harm had been done by the Bush administration’s illegal actions following 9/11 than might come from the information contained in the leaks.

He also criticized actions ranging from the administration’s warrantless domestic wiretapping operations to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, both cases in which officials would eventually leak related classified intelligence.

“Here is a case where Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld were as worthy of going before the International Court of Justice — for the crime of aggression, not genocide — as any of the defendants at Tokyo or Nuremberg,” Ellsberg said.

Ellsberg said he admires the courage of those within the government who are willing to go forward with leaking illegal activities, knowing the consequences they might face.

“He is a hero,” Ellsberg said of Bradley Manning. “The U.S. government will never see him other than as a rat, a snitch, a traitor, a bad guy ... he’s been successfully defamed.”

The event was held in Dodds Auditorium in Robertson Hall and co-sponsored by the Princeton University Committee on Public Lectures and the Wilson School, as part of the School’s “Media and Public Policy” thematic lecture series.

The dirty war on WikiLeaks
John Pilger
Guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 March 2012 21.00 GMT

Media smears suggest Swedish complicity in a Washington-driven push to punish Julian Assange


Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, arriving for an extradition hearing at the high court in London on 2 November 2011. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

War by media, says current military doctrine, is as important as the battlefield. This is because the real enemy is the public at home, whose manipulation and deception is essential for starting an unpopular colonial war. Like the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, attacks on Iran and Syria require a steady drip-effect on readers' and viewers' consciousness. This is the essence of a propaganda that rarely speaks its name.

To the chagrin of many in authority and the media, WikiLeaks has torn down the facade behind which rapacious western power and journalism collude. This was an enduring taboo; the BBC could claim impartiality and expect people to believe it. Today, war by media is increasingly understood by the public, as is the trial by media of WikiLeaks' founder and editor Julian Assange.

Assange will soon know if the supreme court in London is to allow his appeal against extradition to Sweden, where he faces allegations of sexual misconduct, most of which were dismissed by a senior prosecutor in Stockholm. On bail for 16 months, tagged and effectively under house arrest, he has been charged with nothing. His "crime" has been an epic form of investigative journalism: revealing to millions of people the lies and machinations of their politicians and officials and the barbarism of criminal war conducted in their name.

For this, as the American historian William Blum points out, "dozens of members of the American media and public officials have called for [his] execution or assassination". If he is passed from Sweden to the US, an orange jumpsuit, shackles and a fabricated indictment await him. And there go all who dare challenge rogue America.

In Britain, Assange's trial by media has been a campaign of character assassination, often cowardly and inhuman, reeking of jealousy of the courageous outsider, while books of perfidious hearsay have been published, movie deals struck and media careers launched or resuscitated on the assumption that he is too poor to sue. In Sweden this trial by media has become, according to one observer there, "a full-on mobbing campaign with the victim denied a voice". For more than 18 months, the salacious Expressen, Sweden's equivalent of the Sun, has been fed the ingredients of a smear by Stockholm police.

Expressen is the megaphone of the Swedish right, including the Conservative party, which dominates the governing coalition. Its latest "scoop" is an unsubstantiated story about "the great WikiLeaks war against Sweden". On 6 March Expressen claimed, with no evidence, that WikiLeaks was running a conspiracy against Sweden and its foreign minister Carl Bildt. The political pique is understandable. In a 2009 US embassy cable obtained by WikiLeaks, the Swedish elite's vaunted reputation for neutrality is exposed as sham. (Cable title: "Sweden puts neutrality in the Dustbin of History.") Another US diplomatic cable reveals that "the extent of [Sweden's military and intelligence] co-operation [with Nato] is not widely known", and unless kept secret "would open up the government to domestic criticism".

Swedish foreign policy is largely controlled by Bildt, whose obeisance to the US goes back to his defence of the Vietnam war and includes his leading role in George W Bush's Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He retains close ties to Republican party extreme rightwing figures such as the disgraced Bush spin doctor, Karl Rove. It is known that his government has "informally" discussed Assange's future with Washington, which has made its position clear. A secret Pentagon document describes US intelligence plans to destroy WikiLeaks' "centre of gravity" with "threats of exposure [and] criminal prosecution".

In much of the Swedish media, proper journalistic scepticism about the allegations against Assange is overwhelmed by a defensive jingoism, as if the nation's honour is defiled by revelations about dodgy coppers and politicians, a universal breed. On Swedish public TV "experts" debate not the country's deepening militarist state and its service to Nato and Washington, but the state of Assange's mind and his "paranoia". A headline in Tuesday's Aftonbladet declared: "Assange's moral collapse". The article suggests Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks' alleged source, may not be sane, and attacks Assange for not protecting Manning from himself. What was not mentioned was that the source was anonymous, that no connection has been demonstrated between Assange and Manning, and that Aftonbladet, WikiLeaks' Swedish partner, had published the same leaks undeterred.

Ironically, this circus has performed under cover of some of the world's most enlightened laws protecting journalists, which attracted Assange to Sweden in 2010 to establish a base for WikiLeaks. Should his extradition be allowed, and with Damocles swords of malice and a vengeful Washington hanging over his head, who will protect him and provide the justice to which we all have a right?

May I add my approval to that of JT and Olga wande.

But they are both pillocks.

Mr Manning looks as if it comes naturally and Mr Assange looks like it is a worked up act. I think the latter was too impatient for fame to risk the greasy pole of proper politics.

Mr Manning looks as if it comes naturally and Mr Assange looks like it is a worked up act. I think the latter was too impatient for fame to risk the greasy pole of proper politics.