http://www.pakalertpress.com/2012/09/11/energy-drinks-are-more-dangerous-than-you-think/

so much going on today...Israel/US , libya fallout, the weird film and this just came my way late last night, not a peep from the MSM, big surprise....http://theintelhub.com/2012/09/13/president-of-italian-supreme-court-calls-for-international-criminal-investigation-into-911-attacks/

and this, the best 9/11 vid to show your doubting thomas friends...http://thegic.org/video/911-best-vid-ever#

Mossad behind anti-Mohammed film that has sparked murder and mayhem in mid-east?

Immediately after Obama's 'snubbing' of Netanyahu, a spate of anti-American violence breaks out over a strange film-linked to one Sam Bacile, a film-maker and real-estate agent, who seems to be neither. Efforts to establish his historicity and identity in America or Israel seem to have hit a dead-end....

follow the story here and here and see the 14 min. long trailer of the film here.

Warning, in addition to insulting Islam, lovers of fine movies and acting are also likely to be scandalized.


Coupled with Netanyahu's trying to publicily shame Obama into attacking Iran over it's likely building of their own Nukes to counteract any future American/Israeli threats, and his willingness to give Romney [a more naive, tractable - in Bibi's mind] the upper hand in the run-up to the election by showing Obama as 'weak on Zionism', seems to mark a new low for Bibi and Israel and American-Israeli relations.

Also from the excavator blog:Masking the many faces of U.S. foreign policy requires the annihilation of reason and common sense, as well as the censorship of contradictory evidence.

The murder of American ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens by Washington's Jihadist terrorists is only the latest demonstration of the schizophrenic nature of U.S. policy in the Middle East and North Africa. Ambassador Stevens was killed by the same Al-Qaeda elements in Libya that Washington and its allies sponsored as part of a larger military effort to overthrow Gaddafi.

Tony Cartalucci writes in his article, "US-Backed Terrorists Murder US' Own Ambassador in Libya":

"Not only has US policy been exposed as not "promoting democracy" but purposefully spreading destabilization, violence, and terrorism, but the exact same militants behind the death of the US' own ambassador are literally leading US efforts to visit the same violence, destabilization, and chaos upon Syria."

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared "Mission Accomplished" regarding their Libyan mission way too early, an error that former President Bush also made in his illegal war against Iraq.

Upon hearing the news of the alleged death of Gaddafi at the hands of a mob, Clinton famously stated, "We came, we saw, he died." Clinton's new statement should be, "We lied, we kind of saw this coming, and we definitely died."

The writer "b" of Moon of Alabama says:

"Hillary Clinton's and the other state department furies who had urged the U.S. to attack Libya and who are also behind the drive against Syria are now confronted with the ruins of their policies. They carry at least some blame for yesterday's deaths."

It is still not clear who actually killed ambassador Stevens and three other Americans. I thought Washington had full control over the Salafist terrorists and Al-Qaeda pests in Libya and Syria. Are they turning against their master? Or is this another false flag, as some analysts have asserted? Could both attacks on the U.S. embassies be false flags?

Obama and the Democrats: Our only hope for the future, or another 1% control scheme?

Obama and the Democrats: Our only hope for the future, or another 1% control scheme?

Obama and the Democrats: Our only hope for the future, or another 1% control scheme?

In order to understand that the D's are not just 'good light', or 'watered down goodness', one has to understand just how far the reach of the 1% has captivated and emasculated a party already known for its spinelessness.

I'll bullet the prime points of anti-democracy which I believe shows them to be more evil than lesser.

*Obama signed on for indefinite detention of any American labeled a terrorist [definition to be supplied by WH as need fits [eco-terrorists, occupiers, you name it, the label will fit], There goes (along with his nauseating continuation, support and use of the patriot act) any semblance of differing on Bush on the roll-back of civil liberties the country was founded on. Plus the new drones and willingness to assassinate extra-judicially, any aforementioned terrorist. Where does that put us ahead of the evil Bushco-years on that point.

*Obama loves monsanto: he has hired 2x's now I believe Monsanto toadies and bootlickers to top Ag spots. Determined to control the seed stock of the civilized world and pollute the rest - and Obama has been there for them. While michelle putters in her organic WH garden we are geetting increasing pro-Monsanto agenda from WH.

*The unbelievable willingness to let WS off the hook, even after the levin committee 'gift-wrapped' a prosecution, Holder and co, obviously won't go after Goldman Sachs or any other major Banksters - but they got Wesley Snipes for tax evasion!!!whoopdee do!] The evidence is in, the banksters ripped us off, took massive trillions of bailout money, sent 9 trillion of to European banks and then bonused themselves in the billions I believe [added together] for a job well done. If that is not a sell out to wall st. [that dwarfs bus's by a factor of 3-4] I really do not know what is.

IS it still a democracy when neither the party in charge, or the 'opposition' raise a peep when the largest heist in the world goes down? I mean yeah - you are voting - but is there any connection here between the vote/campaign promises and the results? Any? Once Obama put wall st. insider Timmy G. (evil slur meant to suggest vapid 'jazz artist' kenny g. intentional ;-)) in place we knew where this train was headed.

*Health care...I distinctly recall being relieved that O was going to go for single payer - which at the time 65% of Americans supported, and in a Democratic act of spinelessness exceeded only by the failure to impeach Bush for lying to america re: WMD and false flagging us into war in Iraq obviously for oil, we got a tepid bill that FORCES Americans to give yet more money to the same non health care industry that helped ruin our current system.
Are a few things better - sure. are there any caps? no, only preexisitng conditions are tied to the same rates as those without, so everyone's already excessive insurance premiums are or have already gone up. The most evil, uselss, non-value added segment of American health care has just been rewarded for their decades of screwing us, with MANDATORY allopathic insurance. As a user - nearly exclusively of natural medicine calling it insult added to injury doesn't quite sum it up.

*Jobs/Green - Energy independence: his debacle in supporting a big contributor of his has tied his hands in much of the green development, but a timely and serious mea culpa, then used as an intro to the bully pulpit, could have had him every week hammering the public/media and congress - into doing the will of the people, make energy independence a 10 yr goal, and tie it, logically to a create green jobs bill. This is such a no-brainer on every front....but instead we got lukewarm bills pushed half-halfheartedly. A massive failure in an area we desperately needed on every front.

Blaming obstructionist R congress is so lame, especially when considering Reagan [his favorite president (!?!?!?!?!?!?) went right over the heads of congress to the people who by phone calls forced unwilling congress-folk into going with his plan. Obama has traded the presidents most powerful tool, the bully pulpit for lame community organizing, can't we get along with republicans excuses.

Community organizing is fine, in it's place, but we are a country at war with a 1% trying to [and quite successfully I might add] rob, dis-enfranchise/undemocratize and dis-empower us, and the goodwill and hope for change we had after his election was in retrospect a sick joke.

*Pro-Corporate/1%er foreign policy: same old as bush, got us out of iraq quicker - but let his generals blackmail [literally see B. Woodwards book] him into an Afghani quagmire that continues to ignore the fact that Pakistan is the source of terrorism in the region and that fighting radicals willing to live in caves has never worked well for england, the soviets or us. Never, oh but the real reason we are there was actually let slip by Gen. Petraeus - 'we can't leave now, we found a trillion $'s of minerals'.

*Money out of politics: flat line

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yes - the Dems still push for the lefty wedge issues, as the R's do for the right, but I propose IT IS ALL A SHOW in terms of the above points. Not that the reps and senators don't believe there respective wedge positions, which rally the passions and pocketbooks of so much of America, but a show in the sense that the real nuts and bolts of what the 1%/plutocrats want they get no matter which party is in, they know the only price to this game, is not overly support either side too long, and let the wedge issues fall as they may, so the 1% can live to rip us off & manipulate us another day.
Thus the neo:lib/con coup that has overtaken the parties and Presidency is an evil with no real lesser or greater in terms of America's future as a democracy.

I do not for second think Obama is an intellectual lightweight like Bush was [or played so masterfully for 8 years] he is smart and maybe would do serious structural good if he could. Why he can't we can speculate, but the bottom line is he had 4 years to try and get the country turned around, and I watched closely to see how hard he tried...and not once did he use the bully pulpit in a way some who really gave a damn, or wanted to fight would.


And how can we hope for much less expect change in America, when the 2 parties are, at the level of federal leadership one party gives us: NAFTA, Indefinite detention/Assassination of Americans (cause the administrations secret panels think they might be terrorists), a budget that adds 12 'T'rillion in debt. And refuses to use the bully pulpit ala LBJ and Reagan to force needed change that the people want! Oh, and refuses to prosecute criminal Banksters in the largest heist known to mankind, when the senate hearings [by their own party!!!) give the AG a 'gift wrapped' case. And refused, even when again given a gift-wrapped catalog of impeachable offenses of worst President ever,oversees from a mere 20 miles away, the 23 hr/day torture of a whistle-blowing private,  sweeps it under the rug so they can not appear to mean and divisive before an election."

And the other party lies us into a war, that we borrow money from china to pay for, gives us the treasonous patriot act, Allows said banksters to have 3 trillion to give to europe and themselves as bonuses, open up a just over the border int'l torture center, has a VP and top adviser complicit in outing a CIA agent, lowers taxes on wealthy which loans from china have to pay for, earlier back we have the treasonous Iran-Contra.

Sadly you expect that level of criminality and contempt from the Republicans, from Nixon on, but a close examination reveals a pattern, ALL the structural changes made have been for the worse, all benefit the founding of a police state (as treatment of the Occupiers and pvt. Manning shows) and the pockets of the 1%.

We no longer have the country I was born into, it is as simple and sad as that. You can be detained without trial, known reason and disappeared just  like in Pinochet's Chile.

Our economies have become 3rd world, and our laws re: civil  liberties, right to assemble - effectively gone, freedom of the press, there but unused - except in the underground [and got to far and you will be holed up in an embassy relying on the good graces of a 3rd world president for sanctuary from....America!

I am afraid the 1% and the Military/Industrial Complex took careful notes as to what/how and why the Vietnam protests were as effective as the were. They seemed to vow never to let their power get away from them again, and they have succeeded, based primarily, in hindsight on manipulating us through fear and wedge issues.

The awful realization I had last year of the 1% needing only to cajole, fool, blackmail or threaten c. 500 people to effectively control the country has only grown as the most likely/simple explanation to what has happened to our 2 parties.

They have proved time and again who they work for, and for the answer to that we need only examine the recent words Mormon ex-Bishop Romney (of all people), and when the job is not only not getting done, but to the contrary, we are being undone, we just need to fire them. Both Parties. As soon as possible.

Do I hope to sway this election - or am I likely ?  Not really at all but will I stand back and condone Obama's continued rape of the constitution in the name of Bush's war on terror?

People on the other side of either party wonder how bad it needs to get till the other side gives up on their obviously failed and 'evil' leaders and party, that time, sadly is demonstrably past. We need to ditch both. Go ahead and, vote your lesser evil if you really must, but is it not past the hour to plan for taking back America, how many more elections will you keep doing it?  And can anyone pretend anymore that the 2 parties are 'on our side'?

~~~~~~~~~

Solutions to come next week, after the conventions are over.
Has Obama really signed extra-judical assaination and disappearance  of americans into law? http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/11264-john-cusack-and-jonathan-turley-on-obamas-constitution#.UEJvHM3ZXlE

15 things you probably wish Dems and Reps DIDN'T agree on

Are the wedge issues, just a tool to manipulate us into easily manipulated camps, this artilce explores the frightening amount of common ground between the '2' parties.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/11289-closer-than-you-think-top-15-things-romney-and-obama-agree-on:

it used to be you could make something of a case for sticking with the democrats...but since Clinton...

Republicans and Democrats, like Romney and Obama are of one mind on many more things than they disagree about. From war and empire to their policies on Big Ag, Big Energy, “clean coal and safe nuclear power,” and the war on drugs their areas of agreement are vast and troubling, and perhaps far more important than the rhetorical and stylistic differences highlighted by US political campaigns.

Too much agreement between Republicans and Democrats has always been bad news for those at the bottom of America’s class and racial totem poles.

Back in 1875, Frederick Douglass observed that it took a war among the whites to free his people from slavery. What then, he wondered, would an era of peace among the whites bring us? He already knew the answer. Louisiana had its Colfax Massacre [5] two years earlier. A wave of thousands upon thousands of terroristic bombings, shootings, mutilations, murders and threats [6] had driven African Americans from courthouses, city halls, legislatures, from their own farms, businesses and private properties and from the voting rolls across the South. They didn’t get the vote back for 80 years, and they never did get the land back. But none of that mattered because on the broad and important questions of those days there was at last peace between white Republicans and white Democrats — squabbles around the edges about who’d get elected, but wide agreement on the rules of the game.

Like Douglass, the shallow talking heads who cover the 2012 presidential campaign on corporate media have noticed out loud the remarkable absence of disagreement between Republican and Democratic candidates on many matters. They usually mention what the establishment likes to call “foreign policy.” But the list of things Republicans and Democrat presidential candidates agree on, from coddling Wall Street speculators, protecting mortgage fraudsters and corporate wrongdoers to preventing Medicare For All to so-called “foreign policy,” “free trade,” “the deficit” “clean coal and safe nuclear power” and “entitlement reform,” is clearly longer and more important than the few points of mostly race and style, upon which they disagree.

15

Although unemployment is the highest it’s been since the Great Depression, the federal government should NOT enact any sort of WPA-style program to put millions of people back to work. Under Democrat Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, Depression-era unemployment was tackled head on by direct federal hiring to dig subways, build roads, schools, parks, sewers, recreational facilities and public buildings. Oblivious of this history, Democrat Barack Obama maintains that only the private sector can or should create jobs.

14

Medicare, Medicaid and social security are “entitlements” that need to be cut to relieve what they call “the deficit.” Republicans have been on record for this since forever, though they claim not to want to mess with the Medicare people already over 65 are getting. One of the first acts of the Obama presidency was to appoint a bipartisan panel stacked with “deficit hawks” like Republican Allan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles to recommend raising retirement ages and cutting back Medicaid, Medicare and social security, and pass a law directing Congress to have an up or down no-amendments vote on its recommendations. Fortunately the “cat food commission”, as it was called, was deadlocked and offered none. But Obama and top Democrats, most recently House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi continue to express their readiness for some kind of “grand compromise” with Republicans on this issue.

13

Climate change treaties and negotiations that might lead to them should be avoided at all costs. The differences between them are only style. Democrats admit that climate change exists and is man-made, Republicans say it’s a myth. But both ignored the Kyoto protocol and Obama like Bush before him, has worked tirelessly to delay, derail and boycott any actual talks that might lead to constructive international climate change agreements.

12

NAFTA was such a great thing it really should be extended to Central and South America and the entire Pacific rim. Again, there are differences in style. On the 2008 campaign trail, Obama sometimes mumbled about renegotiating parts of NAFTA, and such. But even before the primaries were done, press reports had him assuring the Canadian government this was only campaign rhetoric, raw meat for the rubes. In four years he has pushed NAFTA-like “free trade” corporate rights agreements with South Korea, most of Central America and is now secretly hammering out something called the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement [7].

11

Banksters and Wall Street speculators deserve their bailouts and protection from criminal liability, but underwater and foreclosed homeowners deserve nothing. Well, maybe not exactly nothing. Republicans think underwater homeowners deserve blame for forcing banksters to offer millions of fraudulent high-interest loans were then re-sold to investors around the world. Democrats think underwater homeowners deserve empty promises of help that never quite arrives for most of the foreclosed, the about-to-be foreclosed, their families and communities. But both agree on free money for banksters and speculators but no moratorium on foreclosures and no criminal investigations of mortgage and securities fraud.

10

Palestinians should be occupied, dispossessed and ignored. Iran should be starved and threatened from all sides. Cuba should be embargoed, and Americans prohibited from going there to see what its people have done in a half century free of Yankee rule. Black and brown babies and their parents, relatives and neighbors should be bombed with drones in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and similar places. The politicians and corporate commentators have a misleading name for this. They call it “foreign policy.” The realistic term for it is global empire.

9

Africa should be militarized, destabilized, plundered and where necessary, invaded by proxy armies like those of Rwanda, Ethiopia, Burundi or Kenya, or directly by Western air and ground forces, as in Libya. President Georgia Bush announced the formation of AFRICOM, the US military command for the continent which has officially swallowed all US civilian diplomatic presence. But only a black US president, even under the cover of “humanitarian war” could have invaded an African nation and openly dispatched special forces to Central Africa.

8

US Presidents can kidnap citizens of their own or any nation on earth from anyplace on the planet for torture, indefinite imprisonment without trial or murder them and neighboring family and bystanders at will. To be perfectly fair, there are distinctions between Republicans and Democrats here that don’t amount to differences. Republicans Cheney and Bush got their lawyers to say these things were OK and did them. Democrat Obama got Congress to enact “laws” giving these acts a veneer of fake legality, something a Republican probably could not have done.

7

Oil and energy companies, and other mega-polluters must be freed to drill offshore almost everywhere, and permitted to poison land and watersheds with fracking to achieve “energy independence”. The Republicans say “drill baby drill” but it seems only Democrats can chill out enough supposed “environmentalists” to make this happen. Obama campaigned on restricting offshore drilling four years ago, and reversed himself just before the BP oil disaster in the Gulf. The White House cooperated with BP in lying to the public about the extent of the disaster and has shielded BO from paying anything like the value of actual damages incurred to livelihoods, human lives and the environment.

6

The FCC should not and must not regulate telecoms to ensure that poor and rural communities have access to internet, or to guarantee network neutrality. Republicans have always been in favor of digital redlining, against network neutrality. Barack Obama claimed on the campaign trail he’d take a back seat to nobody in guaranteeing network neutrality. But he appointed as FCC chair a man who helped write the infamous Telecommunications Act of 1995, which gave away the government-built internet backbone to a handful of immensely powerful telecoms like AT&T and Comcast, and flatly reversed himself on network neutrality. The Department of Justice was forced to stop the ATT-T-Mobile merger by a storm of public outrage, but approved the Comcast-NBC deal.

5

Of course there really ARE such things as “clean coal” and “safe nuclear energy”. Again these are things Republicans have always pretended to believe. At the 2008 Democratic convention Democrat Barack Obama joined them, declaring he intended to be the president of “clean coal and safe nuclear energy.” Obama is building a wave of 33 nuclear plants across the country, the first two in mostly black and poor communities of Georgia and South Carolina where leaky existing nukes are causing cancer epidemics. The people know these things are myths. But Republican and Democratic candidates for office, all the way down to state and county officials seem not to.

4

Immigrants must be jailed and deported in record numbers. To be really fair, one should note that on this issue Republicans talk a mean game about sending them all back and jailing tens or hundreds of thousands along the way. But only President Obama has walked the walk, deporting over a million immigrants in his term in office, often with little or no due process and after housing many for months in atrocious privatized immigration prisons.

3

No Medicare For All. Forget about it eliminating the Medicare age requirement so that all Americans would qualify.. Republicans never wanted Medicare even for seniors, let alone everybody. Six or seven years ago Illinois State Senator Obama was telling audiences that if they elected Democrats to Congress, the Senate and the White House, they’d get single payer health care. But once in office he excluded Medicare for All from the proposals on the table, and enacted a national version of Massachusetts RomneyCare, requiring everybody to purchase private health insurance or be penalized.

2

No minimum wage increases for you, no right to form a union, no right to negotiate or strike if you already have a union, and no enforcement or reform of existing labor laws. Again, Republicans have always opposed minimum wage laws. Obama promised to boost the minimum wage his first two years in office, while he still had majorities in the House and Senate. But he didn’t do this, or pass legislation beefing up the right to organize unions, which has been eroded under Democrat and Republican administrations alike.

1

The 40 year war on drugs must continue, and even mention of the prison state is unthinkable. There are 2.3 million people in US prisons and jails today, a per capita total that beats the world. Politicians of both parties wag their fingers in multiple directions. But as Michelle Alexander points out, if the US prison population were rolled back to say, only 1 million, the level it was about 1980, this would mean one million jobs, as contractors, sheriffs, cops, bailiffs, judges and functionaries of all kinds would have to go out and find real jobs.

The rabbit hole goes still deeper. We didn’t have to stop at these fifteen points of Democrat-Republican agreement, but you get the idea. Just as in Frederick Douglass’s day, the more Democrats and Republicans agree, the worse it is for the rest of us.

There was a time when black America had its own principles, and formed the immovable leftmost rock of the American polity. But in the 21st century, that rock has been dissolved by a tide of corporate money. With the rise of a cohort of black corporate Democrats and a right wing black Democrat in the White House there is no longer even any vaguely leftish influence on Democratic party politics. The House Progressive Caucus is the biggest in Congress, with over seventy members, but is powerless and irrelevant. Except for stylistic flourishes, the music they listen to and the color of some faces, the differences between Republicans and Democrats seem to exist mostly in political marketing campaigns and inside our own heads.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. He can be reached via this site’s contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
 [8]
2012 presidential campaign Democrats Republicans
Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/closer-you-think-top-15-things-romney-and-obama-agree

pt

This article/interview speaks for itself. from truthout.org

John Cusack interviews Constitutional Law Professor Jonathan Turley re: the Obama admin's descent into what can only be called treason to the Constituion and us, The People.

Pt 1 in our expose on the Democratic side of 2 party system run by the 1%.

Stay tuned for local Democratic Party leader Wanda Harris who has graciously offered to do an op-ed this week.

cartoon copyright by brian mcfadden http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/109162

And now for the Democrats....

Last week I focused on sharing the low down on Republicans - as much as an ethical response to their collective blindness on some many issues, This week it is Obama and the Democrats turn.

Yes, Just as the truth of the Republican Party is a shock to many of the Party faithful, so to the Democrats have an, often below the  mainstream media radar, underbelly and infrastructure that both reeks and is rotten and often leaves the lefty faithful resorting to 'but he (Obama) and they (the Party) are at least better than the Republicans. America can no longer  - and indeed since at least Bush II, plainly so, afford these 2 Parties and their corporation controlled agendas. It is just that simple.

Both parties are toxic and no longer remotely resemble true Conservatism or Liberal/Progressivism. They are beholden to those who fund there campaigns the most, and that is not 'the People'.



I am collecting my sources now and I would appreciate other sources for review and possible inclusion at lindil6@gmail.com for vetting and possible inclusion.

My avowed goal is not to promote any 1 party but to destroy the 2 current ones and get people looking, thinking and discussing where to go and what to do for honest government.

Almost done with Taibbi's Bain/Romney article. It is truly a must read.

Vulture capitalism hardly does it justice. They/he didn't just feed off the weak and dying, they raped, looted and destroyed the lives of 10's of K's if not more of workers and their pensions and families, all so Bain and Romney could walk a way with 100's of millions of completely deceptive 'business advisement'.


The fact that he is not in prison for life and instead running for office of POTUS is a horrific indictment of our media, legal system and the pathetic Republican party for even letting him run, much less giving him the nomination.

Frankly I think he got it, because he was the wealthiest, least principled and best liar of the bunch. He is bush's polar opposite; wickedly savvy, a pious hypocrisy that even sr. demons probably take note of and a willingness to pull off any heist on sheer bluff and hubris and paper thin legal veneers.

God, really, no spare lightening bolts for this kinda thing?....sigh..guess He wants us to see things for ourselves and act like grown ups, not shell shocked children afraid to call their guardians out on pure evil and. Monsanto & Exxon-Mobil,  watch out seems you have serious competition in the most evil, fiendish of all Babylon corporations race.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829

Taibbi is to be commended on trying to time the article to take the hot air out of any post-Convention updraft there may be. Not sure if the main stream media's editors will allow any coverage of this, but who knows, maybe it will get good coverage in Iceland and we will pick up on it a couple years later....

Look for our coverage of Obama's continuation of Bush's treasonous war on the American citizenry, clean gov't and the 'right' of federal law enforcement to disappear you, like any other terrorist.

Already invoked unsuccessfully [well partially - the intimidation factor was advanced, but an honest judge ordered him released after a week] against a Marine Vet in Richmond Va.

- the angry indy 
: pulls no punches and tells no lies
[and if he is proved wrong, will actually cop to it].

last vestige of east european sensible socialism...wikileaks connection

The Minsk Election in a Wikileaks Mirror

By ISRAEL SHAMIR

Wikileaks once again has provided the proof positive to unlock a mystery. It’s not the stuff of attention-grabbing headlines and retweets, but it does illustrate how the US State Department can orchestrate riots in a quiet Eastern European country. As an international observer of the December 2010 elections in Belarus, I was witness to both the orderly vote and the shocking riot. This is the story of Belarus and how dollars were used to subvert and embarrass this peaceful constitutional republic.

The Setting

Belarus in December is the ultimate winter land; a fair Nordic forest nymph dressed in a thick, luxurious lilywhite cloak - for it is much too cold to go naked. Outside the city, an endless white expanse meets the eye, broken only by a few sturdy houses and a church. The lonely roads are enlivened by white hares that leap from icy roadsides and flocks of wild geese that transverse the cloudy welkin. All is white in this country, as if in order to justify its name, for Belarus means the White Rus. The Rus were the Viking states established in the Slav hinterland a millennium ago, and so Belarus is forever connected to the Great Rus of Russia.

The people of Belarus are not very different from their Russian neighbors but they do have their own character, just as the Northerners of Yorkshire differ from the Southerners of Somerset. They are fair and calm, peaceful and orderly, obedient and enduring. The sparsely populated Belarusian borderland was a battleground between East and West for centuries; the last war cost them one third of their population, the highest loss suffered by any country in WWII. The capital of Minsk was completely destroyed, Fallujah-style, by the Luftwaffe. Once upon a time, its forests and marshes trapped crack divisions of the German SS; now they sit again in peace, healed by many snowfalls.

After all this incessant white wilderness, Minsk is surprisingly civilised and human-sized; it was rebuilt in the comfortable 1950’s and refurbished fairly recently. The streets are neat and fit for pedestrians, small cafés are made cosy with glowing fireplaces, and there are English newspapers on every table. A large and festive Christmas tree marks the main square, which has been turned into an ice rink for the holidays, and pretty young girls in white skirts and red scarves skate the day through with smartly dressed boys. The rink is open and free for all, just as in Scandinavia. Indeed, Belarus is the East European counterpart of the Scandinavian socialist states of yesteryear; but while the Swedes and the Danes are busy dismantling their social systems, Belarus has so far resisted the drive toward privatization.

It will take you a long time before you spot your first policeman, usually a simple traffic cop. There is no sign of a police state here: no mysterious black cars, no furtive stillness, no Soviet-style drabness, no post-Soviet garishness. The youngsters are stylish, friendly and open. The streets are crowded, paved and clean. The President of Belarus, the man the US State Department calls the last dictator of Europe, walks freely among his people.

But what is a dictator these days? The epithets aimed at world leaders are surprisingly consistent, but the words themselves have been redefined. To earn the title of ‘dictator’, it seems that a leader need only spurn the advice of the IMF. If a leader chooses not play along with NATO, he may well qualify for the title of ‘bloody dictator’. We have been told that Castro is a ‘dictator’. We have been told that Chavez is a ‘dictator’. We are now being told that Ahmadinejad is a ‘bloody dictator’. Long-time thorns in the flanks of US imperial might are eventually upgraded to ‘monster’ status, as were Stalin and Mao. Belarus itself has one of these State Department titles: it is to be called a ‘rebel state’. When the USSR was broken down into digestible chunks, it was tiny Belarus that chose to keep the Soviet flag, the Soviet arms, and the socialist ethos. Belarus was not as quick as other countries to cast off what was stable and good within the Soviet system. While other countries suffered under IMF-imposed privatization, Belarus took the slow and steady path to intelligently upgrade and restore their industries and cities. End result: Belarus is as up-to-date as any country in the East.

December 19, 2010

I was in Belarus to observe the Presidential election, and to tell the truth I was expecting some sort of staged little event to mar the day. The outcome of the election was in little doubt. The people were happy, fully employed, and satisfied with their government. They were well aware of what had happened when neighboring countries had embraced the IMF, and they felt no ideological need to tread that same dark road. Some people, however, are more motivated by dollars than patriotism, and these are the people I was expecting. The pro-Western ‘Gucci’ crowd can always be counted on to protest the choices of the majority. They actually overturned the vote in nearby Ukraine in 2005, and the orange gangs succeeded in stealing the presidency for five long years. If they cannot convince the people with Western dollars, then they simply riot and try to take it by force.

All day long I watched the people of Belarus queuing at their election booths. I spoke to many of them. Their President Lukashenko is an East European Chavez, who stubbornly sticks to the socialist way. A friend of Hugo Chavez and the Castro regime, he gets his oil in Venezuela and Russia, does business with the Chinese, and tries to maintain good relations with his neighbours. The people know him, and know what to expect from him. Hardly anybody knew the opposition candidates by name. There were official election posters hanging in every election centre, and these posters carried the name and photo of each candidate, but these strangers and their feel-good slogans could not touch the national spirit.

The voting was as clean as any other European election, and was attended by hundreds of international observers; no one noticed any irregularities. Each person’s vote was secret, and they cast their ballots without fear. Even most pro-Western analysts, like Alexander Rahr of Germany, concurred: Lukashenko carried the elections with an astounding 80 per cent of the popular vote. Exit polls showed similar results. Like it or not: he won.

It was only after the news began to report the exit poll results that the opposition forces in Minsk – perhaps some five thousand strong - began to march from the main square towards the government offices. They walked peaceably, and so did not attract much police presence. There were certainly much fewer police on hand than what a similar march would draw in London or Moscow. The government expected a rally at the square. They did not expect these well-dressed people to begin storming the building where the votes were counted! This mob of educated and well to do urbanites smashed the windows and broke the doors in an effort to break into the building. It was clear to all bystanders that this riot was anything but spontaneous and that this was a determined attempt to destroy the ballots and invalidate the election.

The live broadcast of rioters forcing their way into the building shocked the republic. The people of Belarus expect and demand an orderly, law-abiding society. This is always the moment of truth for authority: challenges from outside the law must be met with immediate and lawful force. The police waded into the violence and detained the rioters. But Belarus is not China, and this was not Tiananmen Square. It was not even Seattle or Gothenburg. There were no casualties; the whole event was comparable to the kind of riot raised by Manchester United, or say Luton fans after their defeat by York. Certainly the thing was disgraceful; yet suddenly, as if on cue, my colleagues, my fellow journalists in the press centre, began to send hysterical cables extolling the dreadful bloodshed caused by the last dictator’s secret police. Thank God, the Belarusians are too orderly for such excesses. Even the opposition Communist party approved of sending in the riot police. A threat to an orderly election is a threat to everyone; it is a threat to the basis of any democracy.

My cynical friend, the professor of local university and no sympathiser of Lukashenko (the President is a boorish moron in his eyes) said this to me: the opposition had to make a good show to justify all the grants and subsidies. The dollars pour in from the State Department, the NED, from Soros and the CIA in an effort to undermine the last socialist regime in Europe. All this money keeps the opposition leaders in the style they are accustomed to, but once in a while they are expected to show their mettle.

Wikileaks has now revealed how this undeclared cash flows from US coffers to the Belarus “opposition”. In the confidential cable VILNIUS 000732, dated June 12, 2005, an American diplomat informs the State Department that Lithuanian customs detained a Belarusian employee of a USAID contractor on charges of money smuggling. The courier was arrested as she attempted to leave Lithuania for Belarus with US$25,000. In addition, she admitted that had moved a total of US$50,000 out of Lithuania on two prior trips.

In case it’s not obvious by now, these dollars are just the tip of the iceberg of cash that flows from US taxpayers to fund the Belarus opposition. A Lithuanian official boasted that the Government of Lithuania “uses a variety of individuals and routes to send money to groups in Belarus, including its diplomats”. Lukashenko has always maintained that the US has spent millions of dollars to dismantle the government of tiny Belarus. Western officials automatically denied it. The Western press ridiculed it: BLOODY DICTATOR BLAMES OPPOSITION ON YANKEE MEDDLING. The proof is written in a confidential cable from a US Embassy to the US State Department. It is undeniable.

The Allure of Lukashenko

Why does the US need to pay people to oppose Lukashenko? What is the secret behind Lukashenko’s charm? He was democratically elected in 1994 just as the USSR was disintegrating. In a way, he was able to transform a chaotic collapse into a graceful denouement. He stopped privatization, he ensured full employment for everybody, he fought and defeated organized crime; in short, he preserved order and maintained the existing social network intact. For a visiting Westerner, Belarus is a rather neat and well-functioning minor East European state, not very different from its Baltic neighbors. But for an arrival from Russia or Ukraine, their immediate neighbors, it is the Shangri-la of the post-Soviet development they could have had. They, like Belarus, could have had clean streets, full employment, shops selling local products, police that do not extort bribes, pensions for old people, and economic equality.

Lukashenko stopped the kind of IMF privatization schemes that had ruined Belarus’ neighbors. In Russia, a few cronies of then-President Yeltsin (like the now-imprisoned billionaire Khodorkovsky) walked away with whole industries, iron mines and oil basins. Much of it they sold to the Western companies who raided the East in a rapacity unprecedented since Cortez’ visit to America. While ordinary Russians lost their jobs, their homes, and their social services, the super-rich oligarchs began shopping for real estate in Belgravia and the Cote d’Azur, for big yachts and football teams. It was President Putin who put a stop to this IMF-organized fire sale of assets and saved Russia, but no one will ever forget the nightmare of the “awful Nineties”.

Organized crime is a big problem in the post-Soviet space. Just last month Russian citizens read about a gang that had forced its rule upon the prosperous Kuban district of Russia, raping and murdering at will for years, the gangsters and the cops sharing alike in the crimes and the spoils. But in Belarus, there is no organized crime, no Mafia-like secret structures. “The gangsters ran away in the Nineties,” I was told by the natives. Policemen take no bribes in Belarus, a feat still beyond the reach of any other ex-Soviet state. Lukashenko achieved this police compliance by granting retired policemen decent pensions, well above average, and by mercilessly ridding the service of corrupt cops.

In Belarus, there are no oligarchs. Socialism is limited to major employers; private property and private businesses are absolutely respected. The local businessmen told me that there is little corruption, and much less than in neighboring countries. There are plenty of prosperous people but no super-rich; there are many nice cars on the streets of Minsk, but much fewer and much fancier are the cars in Moscow, where it might be said you are in a Bentley or on foot. The vast majority of cars in Minsk are modern European and Japanese economy vehicles. The old Soviet cars are practically gone.

Belarus has no national, ethnic or religious strife. Catholic and Orthodox churches share the same square; the many mosques and synagogues were built centuries before multiculturalism appeared. The East was always multicultural: Orthodox peasants, Catholic nobility, Jewish traders and Tatar horsemen lived together in Belarus long before the 15th century when this land was a part of the Great Duchy of Lithuania, then the greatest state of Europe. The old Belarusian language was the language of the Duchy, and Belarusian warriors – together with Polish and Russian soldiers – defeated the crusaders on the fields of Grunwald 500 years ago.

The opponents of Lukashenko tried to play the ethnic card that was so efficient in Ukraine and Lithuania at alienating traditional allies. They promoted Belarus nationalism and the old Belarus language, but both turned out to be non-starters. The opposition’s beatific vision of a Belarusian ethnic revival is very poetic, like the revival of Welsh, but this practical people is not willing to fight over it.

Lukashenko’s Soviet-style economy preserved the sources of local production, and alongside the ubiquitous imports you will find that the core staples are provided locally. Belarusian cheese, milk, bread and vegetables are all organic and Russian visitors always buy and carry home as much as they can carry of the delicious, healthy and inexpensive stuff. Their industry also remained intact, even as the IMF shepherded their neighbors into third world status with a speedy process of de-industrialization. Belarus still produces everything from TV sets to tractors, from giant lorries to Ives Saint Lauren-designed fashions.

Belarus has no political parties. This is not a case of one big political party like in Russia, nor is it the good-guy/bad-guy dual party system as in the US. No political parties at all. The parties are not forbidden, but they just have not developed. This was one of the great ideas of Simone Weil, the profoundly radical French philosopher, though she would have them banned altogether.

Belarus represents an interestingly successful model of economic development. It has reminded the world that a wise ruler can save a country. This lesson is an especially timely one since the IMF has littered the globe with bankrupt and insolvent countries. The world is now looking at the IMF and other international investors with caution. Monetarism is bankrupt. Military aggression, on which Bush relied, has failed. We live in the post-crisis era. A search for other ways of development is now underway. Now people are starting to think: isn’t there a better way? Belarus may lead the way.

One of Belarus’ major achievements is that it was able to fend off the large international companies. During the 20 years of western raids around the world, tiny Belarus was able to preserve its assets. This is a very important lesson for many countries. Belarus may not have produced a single Abramovitch, but the country is home to millions of rather content ordinary citizens.

The vast majority of the Belarusian people are content with their lives. Their salaries are modest, on a par with neighboring Russia, but they have no unemployment and they do not worry that their place of work will get shut down. Their cities are clean, their food is inexpensive, the heating and rent are heavily subsidized, and transport is well organized. They are not subservient to the Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, the Pentagon, nor to the Masters of Discourse. They are the cause of soul-searching for their neighbors, a living proof that the Soviet Union did not have to be destroyed, that socialism can work, and that it often works better than financial capitalism.

It is exactly for this reason that the bad guys wish to destroy Belarus.

The country is isolated from the West: it is very difficult for a Belarusian to go and visit his cousin in neighboring Poland or Lithuania because the EC will not give them visas. Poland is especially hostile: previously colonial masters of Belarus, the Poles view themselves as enforcers of the West’s will in the East. The visas are extremely expensive by local standards. The only international airport is practically empty; there are very few flights in or out.

Relations with Russia are far from perfect. The Russian oligarchs have struggled to squeeze loose Belarusian assets, industries and pipelines. Lukashenko resisted the raiders from New York and Berlin and has no intention of giving up the national jewels to raiders from Moscow. The result is tension. While there is much to be said for a close alliance to Russia, Belarus is well aware that the oligarchs lie somewhere behind the Russian smile. The more Russia can muzzle the voracity of the oligarchs, the less suspicion there will be to poison their natural affinities and mutual support.

For now, Lukashenko prefers to play a complicated game with the EC, even discussing the possible entry of Belarus to the united Europe. It is not impossible: economically Belarus is in much better shape than the majority of East European states who are EC members.

Belarus has friendly relations with Venezuela and Cuba, with China and Vietnam. It is a socialist country, but the socialism is soft, with plenty of room for private enterprise and personal freedoms. Belarus has found new life in preserving and developing the elements of socialism which in the early 1990s were most discredited. In the wake of IMF despair, socialism suddenly pops back up with a confident gait, in new clothes and carrying with it a new hope. It is wonderful that Belarus has managed walk this tightrope between freedom and responsibility in the midst of a disintegrating union and foreign interference. The Russian political analyst Sergey Kara Murza has said that the Belarusian system could serve as the pattern for the resurrection of the socialist state. The lesson for neighboring Russians is especially valid, and even poignant.

Edited by Paul Bennett

Sad News from Mexico

In Mexican Border Town, Last Police Officer Disappears

The last remaining police officer in the Mexican border town of Guadalupe is missing, the AP reports. Twenty-eight-year-old police officer Ericka Gandara of the border town of Guadalupe, Chihuahua, Mexico has been missing since December 23. She is suspected to have been kidnapped by drug cartels, which are fighting the police in "bloody battles for control of the Juarez Valley where Guadalupe is located."

ed. Our prayers go out to her and her family and to all the Mexicans fighting for a real government in the midst of a narco-revolution.

Assange aticle by the new yorker - execellent as usual [by the ny'er]

here is the whole thing - why not?

what an education!?!?! A real one of a kind, tolkien also had such.
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A Reporter at Large

No Secrets

Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency.

by Raffi Khatchadourian June 7, 2010

Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, oversees a populist intelligence network. Digitally altered photograph by Phillip Toledano.

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The house on Grettisgata Street, in Reykjavik, is a century old, small and white, situated just a few streets from the North Atlantic. The shifting northerly winds can suddenly bring ice and snow to the city, even in springtime, and when they do a certain kind of silence sets in. This was the case on the morning of March 30th, when a tall Australian man named Julian Paul Assange, with gray eyes and a mop of silver-white hair, arrived to rent the place. Assange was dressed in a gray full-body snowsuit, and he had with him a small entourage. “We are journalists,” he told the owner of the house. Eyjafjallajökull had recently begun erupting, and he said, “We’re here to write about the volcano.” After the owner left, Assange quickly closed the drapes, and he made sure that they stayed closed, day and night. The house, as far as he was concerned, would now serve as a war room; people called it the Bunker. Half a dozen computers were set up in a starkly decorated, white-walled living space. Icelandic activists arrived, and they began to work, more or less at Assange’s direction, around the clock. Their focus was Project B—Assange’s code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was still a closely guarded military secret.

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.

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Iceland was a natural place to develop Project B. In the past year, Assange has collaborated with politicians and activists there to draft a free-speech law of unprecedented strength, and a number of these same people had agreed to help him work on the video in total secrecy. The video was a striking artifact—an unmediated representation of the ambiguities and cruelties of modern warfare—and he hoped that its release would touch off a worldwide debate about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was planning to unveil the footage before a group of reporters at the National Press Club, in Washington, on April 5th, the morning after Easter, presumably a slow news day. To accomplish this, he and the other members of the WikiLeaks community would have to analyze the raw video and edit it into a short film, build a stand-alone Web site to display it, launch a media campaign, and prepare documentation for the footage—all in less than a week’s time.

Assange also wanted to insure that, once the video was posted online, it would be impossible to remove. He told me that WikiLeaks maintains its content on more than twenty servers around the world and on hundreds of domain names. (Expenses are paid by donations, and a few independent well-wishers also run “mirror sites” in support.) Assange calls the site “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis,” and a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself. So far, even though the site has received more than a hundred legal threats, almost no one has filed suit. Lawyers working for the British bank Northern Rock threatened court action after the site published an embarrassing memo, but they were practically reduced to begging. A Kenyan politician also vowed to sue after Assange published a confidential report alleging that President Daniel arap Moi and his allies had siphoned billions of dollars out of the country. The site’s work in Kenya earned it an award from Amnesty International.

Assange typically tells would-be litigants to go to hell. In 2008, WikiLeaks posted secret Scientology manuals, and lawyers representing the church demanded that they be removed. Assange’s response was to publish more of the Scientologists’ internal material, and to announce, “WikiLeaks will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than WikiLeaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, former African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon.”

In his writing online, especially on Twitter, Assange is quick to lash out at perceived enemies. By contrast, on television, where he has been appearing more frequently, he acts with uncanny sang-froid. Under the studio lights, he can seem—with his spectral white hair, pallid skin, cool eyes, and expansive forehead—like a rail-thin being who has rocketed to Earth to deliver humanity some hidden truth. This impression is magnified by his rigid demeanor and his baritone voice, which he deploys slowly, at low volume.

In private, however, Assange is often bemused and energetic. He can concentrate intensely, in binges, but he is also the kind of person who will forget to reserve a plane ticket, or reserve a plane ticket and forget to pay for it, or pay for the ticket and forget to go to the airport. People around him seem to want to care for him; they make sure that he is where he needs to be, and that he has not left all his clothes in the dryer before moving on. At such times, he can seem innocent of the considerable influence that he has acquired.

Sitting at a small wooden table in the Bunker, Assange looked exhausted. His lanky frame was arched over two computers—one of them online, and the other disconnected from the Internet, because it was full of classified military documents. (In the tradecraft of espionage, this is known as maintaining an “air gap.”) He has a cyber-security analyst’s concern about computer vulnerability, and habitually takes precautions to frustrate eavesdroppers. A low-grade fever of paranoia runs through the WikiLeaks community. Assange says that he has chased away strangers who have tried to take his picture for surveillance purposes. In March, he published a classified military report, created by the Army Counterintelligence Center in 2008, that argued that the site was a potential threat to the Army and briefly speculated on ways to deter government employees from leaking documents to it. Assange regarded the report as a declaration of war, and posted it with the title “U.S. Intelligence Planned to Destroy WikiLeaks.” During a trip to a conference before he came to the Bunker, he thought he was being followed, and his fear began to infect others. “I went to Sweden and stayed with a girl who is a foreign editor of a newspaper there, and she became so paranoid that the C.I.A. was trying to get me she left the house and abandoned me,” he said.

Assange was sitting opposite Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch activist, hacker, and businessman. Gonggrijp—thin and balding, with a soft voice—has known Assange well for several years. He had noticed Assange’s panicky communiqués about being watched and decided that his help was needed. “Julian can deal with incredibly little sleep, and a hell of a lot of chaos, but even he has his limits, and I could see that he was stretching himself,” Gonggrijp told me. “I decided to come out and make things sane again.” Gonggrijp became the unofficial manager and treasurer of Project B, advancing about ten thousand euros to WikiLeaks to finance it. He kept everyone on schedule, and made sure that the kitchen was stocked with food and that the Bunker was orderly.

At around three in the afternoon, an Icelandic parliamentarian named Birgitta Jonsdottir walked in. Jonsdottir, who is in her forties, with long brown hair and bangs, was wearing a short black skirt and a black T-shirt with skulls printed on it. She took a WikiLeaks T-shirt from her bag and tossed it at Assange.

“That’s for you,” she said. “You need to change.” He put the T-shirt on a chair next to him, and continued working.

Jonsdottir has been in parliament for about a year, but considers herself a poet, artist, writer, and activist. Her political views are mostly anarchist. “I was actually unemployed before I got this job,” she explained. “When we first got to parliament, the staff was so nervous: here are people who were protesting parliament, who were for revolution, and now we are inside. None of us had aspirations to be politicians. We have a checklist, and, once we’re done, we are out.”

As she unpacked her computer, she asked Assange how he was planning to delegate the work on Project B. More Icelandic activists were due to arrive; half a dozen ultimately contributed time to the video, and about as many WikiLeaks volunteers from other countries were participating. Assange suggested that someone make contact with Google to insure that YouTube would host the footage.

“To make sure it is not taken down under pressure?” she asked.

“They have a rule that mentions gratuitous violence,” Assange said. “The violence is not gratuitous in this case, but nonetheless they have taken things down. It is too important to be interfered with.”

“What can we ask M to do?” Jonsdottir asked. Assange, engrossed in what he was doing, didn’t reply.

His concerns about surveillance had not entirely receded. On March 26th, he had written a blast e-mail, titled “Something Is Rotten in the State of Iceland,” in which he described a teen-age Icelandic WikiLeaks volunteer’s story of being detained by local police for more than twenty hours. The volunteer was arrested for trying to break into the factory where his father worked—“the reasons he was trying to get in are not totally justified,” Assange told me—and said that while in custody he was interrogated about Project B. Assange claimed that the volunteer was “shown covert photos of me outside the Reykjavik restaurant Icelandic Fish & Chips,” where a WikiLeaks production meeting had taken place in a private back room.

The police were denying key parts of the volunteer’s story, and Assange was trying to learn more. He received a call, and after a few minutes hung up. “Our young friend talked to one of the cops,” he said. “I was about to get more details, but my battery died.” He smiled and looked suspiciously at his phone.

“We are all paranoid schizophrenics,” Jonsdottir said. She gestured at Assange, who was still wearing his snowsuit. “Just look at how he dresses.”

Gonggrijp got up, walked to the window, and parted the drapes to peer out.

“Someone?” Jonsdottir asked.

“Just the camera van,” he deadpanned. “The brain-manipulation van.”

At around six in the evening, Assange got up from his spot at the table. He was holding a hard drive containing Project B. The video—excerpts of running footage captured by a camera mounted on the Apache—depicts soldiers conducting an operation in eastern Baghdad, not long after the surge began. Using the Freedom of Information Act, Reuters has sought for three years to obtain the video from the Army, without success. Assange would not identify his source, saying only that the person was unhappy about the attack. The video was digitally encrypted, and it took WikiLeaks three months to crack. Assange, a cryptographer of exceptional skill, told me that unlocking the file was “moderately difficult.”

People gathered in front of a computer to watch. In grainy black-and-white, we join the crew of the Apache, from the Eighth Cavalry Regiment, as it hovers above Baghdad with another helicopter. A wide-angle shot frames a mosque’s dome in crosshairs. We see a jumble of buildings and palm trees and abandoned streets. We hear bursts of static, radio blips, and the clipped banter of tactical communication. Two soldiers are in mid-conversation; the first recorded words are “O.K., I got it.” Assange hit the pause button, and said, “In this video, you will see a number of people killed.” The footage, he explained, had three broad phases. “In the first phase, you will see an attack that is based upon a mistake, but certainly a very careless mistake. In the second part, the attack is clearly murder, according to the definition of the average man. And in the third part you will see the killing of innocent civilians in the course of soldiers going after a legitimate target.”

The first phase was chilling, in part because the banter of the soldiers was so far beyond the boundaries of civilian discourse. “Just fuckin’, once you get on ’em, just open ’em up,” one of them said. The crew members of the Apache came upon about a dozen men ambling down a street, a block or so from American troops, and reported that five or six of the men were armed with AK-47s; as the Apache maneuvered into position to fire at them, the crew saw one of the Reuters journalists, who were mixed in among the other men, and mistook a long-lensed camera for an RPG. The Apaches fired on the men for twenty-five seconds, killing nearly all of them instantly.

Phase two began shortly afterward. As the helicopter hovered over the carnage, the crew noticed a wounded survivor struggling on the ground. The man appeared to be unarmed. “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon,” a soldier in the Apache said. Suddenly, a van drove into view, and three unarmed men rushed to help the wounded person. “We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly, uh, picking up bodies and weapons,” the Apache reported, even though the men were helping a survivor, and were not collecting weapons. The Apache fired, killing the men and the person they were trying to save, and wounding two young children in the van’s front seat.

In phase three, the helicopter crew radioed a commander to say that at least six armed men had entered a partially constructed building in a dense urban area. Some of the armed men may have walked over from a skirmish with American troops; it is unclear. The crew asked for permission to attack the structure, which they said appeared abandoned. “We can put a missile in it,” a soldier in the Apache suggested, and the go-ahead was quickly given. Moments later, two unarmed people entered the building. Though the soldiers acknowledged them, the attack proceeded: three Hellfire missiles destroyed the building. Passersby were engulfed by clouds of debris.

Assange saw these events in sharply delineated moral terms, yet the footage did not offer easy legal judgments. In the month before the video was shot, members of the battalion on the ground, from the Sixteenth Infantry Regiment, had suffered more than a hundred and fifty attacks and roadside bombings, nineteen injuries, and four deaths; early that morning, the unit had been attacked by small-arms fire. The soldiers in the Apache were matter-of-fact about killing and spoke callously about their victims, but the first attack could be judged as a tragic misunderstanding. The attack on the van was questionable—the use of force seemed neither thoughtful nor measured—but soldiers are permitted to shoot combatants, even when they are assisting the wounded, and one could argue that the Apache’s crew, in the heat of the moment, reasonably judged the men in the van to be assisting the enemy. Phase three may have been unlawful, perhaps negligent homicide or worse. Firing missiles into a building, in daytime, to kill six people who do not appear to be of strategic importance is an excessive use of force. This attack was conducted with scant deliberation, and it is unclear why the Army did not investigate it.

Assange had obtained internal Army records of the operation, which stated that everyone killed, except for the Reuters journalists, was an insurgent. And the day after the incident an Army spokesperson said, “There is no question that Coalition Forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force.” Assange was hoping that Project B would undermine the Army’s official narrative. “This video shows what modern warfare has become, and, I think, after seeing it, whenever people hear about a certain number of casualties that resulted during fighting with close air support, they will understand what is going on,” he said in the Bunker. “The video also makes clear that civilians are listed as insurgents automatically, unless they are children, and that bystanders who are killed are not even mentioned.”

WikiLeaks receives about thirty submissions a day, and typically posts the ones it deems credible in their raw, unedited state, with commentary alongside. Assange told me, “I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.” Because Assange publishes his source material, he believes that WikiLeaks is free to offer its analysis, no matter how speculative. In the case of Project B, Assange wanted to edit the raw footage into a short film as a vehicle for commentary. For a while, he thought about calling the film “Permission to Engage,” but ultimately decided on something more forceful: “Collateral Murder.” He told Gonggrijp, “We want to knock out this ‘collateral damage’ euphemism, and so when anyone uses it they will think ‘collateral murder.’ ”

The video, in its original form, was a puzzle—a fragment of evidence divorced from context. Assange and the others in the Bunker spent much of their time trying to piece together details: the units involved, their command structure, the rules of engagement, the jargon soldiers used on the radio, and, most important, whether and how the Iraqis on the ground were armed.

“One of them has a weapon,” Assange said, peering at blurry footage of the men walking down the street. “See all those people standing out there.”

“And there is a guy with an RPG over his arm,” Gonggrijp said.

“I’m not sure.” Assange said. “It does look a little bit like an RPG.” He played the footage again. “I’ll tell you what is very strange,” he said. “If it is an RPG, then there is just one RPG. Where are all the other weapons? All those guys. It is pretty weird.”

The forensic work was made more difficult because Assange had declined to discuss the matter with military officials. “I thought it would be more harmful than helpful,” he told me. “I have approached them before, and, as soon as they hear it is WikiLeaks, they are not terribly coöperative.” Assange was running Project B as a surprise attack. He had encouraged a rumor that the video was shot in Afghanistan in 2009, in the hope that the Defense Department would be caught unprepared. Assange does not believe that the military acts in good faith with the media. He said to me, “What right does this institution have to know the story before the public?”

This adversarial mind-set permeated the Bunker. Late one night, an activist asked if Assange might be detained upon his arrival in the United States.

“If there is ever a time it was safe for me to go, it is now,” Assange assured him.

“They say that Gitmo is nice this time of year,” Gonggrijp said.

Assange was the sole decision-maker, and it was possible to leave the house at night and come back after sunrise and see him in the same place, working. (“I spent two months in one room in Paris once without leaving,” he said. “People were handing me food.”) He spoke to the team in shorthand—“I need the conversion stuff,” or “Make sure that credit-card donations are acceptable”—all the while resolving flareups with the overworked volunteers. To keep track of who was doing what, Gonggrijp and another activist maintained a workflow chart with yellow Post-Its on the kitchen cabinets. Elsewhere, people were translating the video’s subtitles into various languages, or making sure that servers wouldn’t crash from the traffic that was expected after the video was posted. Assange wanted the families of the Iraqis who had died in the attack to be contacted, to prepare them for the inevitable media attention, and to gather additional information. In conjunction with Iceland’s national broadcasting service, RUV, he sent two Icelandic journalists to Baghdad to find them.

By the end of the week, a frame-by-frame examination of the footage was nearly complete, revealing minute details—evidence of a body on the ground, for instance—that were not visible by casual viewing. (“I am about twelve thousand frames in,” the activist who reviewed it told me. “It’s been a morbid day, going through these people’s last moments.”) Assange had decided to exclude the Hellfire incident from the film; the attack lacked the obvious human dimension of the others, and he thought that viewers might be overloaded with information.

The edited film, which was eighteen minutes long, began with a quote from George Orwell that Assange and M had selected: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” It then presented information about the journalists who had been killed, and about the official response to the attack. For the audio of this section, one of the film’s Icelandic editors had layered in fragments of radio banter from the soldiers. As Assange reviewed the cut, an activist named Gudmundur Gudmundsson spoke up to say that the banter allowed viewers to “make an emotional bond” with the soldiers. Assange argued that it was mostly fragmentary and garbled, but Gudmundsson insisted: “It is just used all the time for triggering emotions.”

“At the same time, we are displaying them as monsters,” the editor said.

“But emotions always rule,” Gudmundsson said. “By the way, I worked on the sound recording for a film, ‘Children of Nature,’ that was nominated for an Oscar, so I am speaking from experience.”

“Well, what is your alternative?” Assange asked.

“Basically, bursts of sounds, interrupting the quiet,” he said.

The editor made the change, stripping the voices of the soldiers from the opening, but keeping blips and whirs of radio distortion. Assange gave the edit his final approval.

Late Saturday night, shortly before all the work had to be finished, the journalists who had gone to Baghdad sent Assange an e-mail: they had found the two children in the van. The children had lived a block from the location of the attack, and were being driven to school by their father that morning. “They remember the bombardment, felt great pain, they said, and lost consciousness,” one of the journalists wrote. The journalists also found the owner of the building that had been attacked by the Hellfires, who said that families had been living in the structure, and that seven residents had died. The owner, a retired English teacher, had lost his wife and daughter. An intense discussion arose about what to do with this news: Was it worth using at the National Press Club, or was it a better tactic to hold on to it? If the military justified the Hellfire attacks by claiming that there were no civilian casualties, WikiLeaks could respond by releasing the information, in a kind of ambush. Jonsdottir turned to Gonggrijp, whose eyes had welled up.

“Are you crying?” she asked.

“I am,” he said. “O.K., O.K., it is just the kids. It hurts.” Gonggrijp gathered himself. “Fuck!” he said. Resuming the conversation about ambushing the Army, he said, “Anyway, let them walk into this knife—”

“That is a wonderful thing to do,” one of the activists said.

“Let them walk into this, and they will,” Gonggrijp said. “It is a logical response.”

Jonsdottir was now in tears, too, and wiping her nose.

“Now I want to reëdit the thing,” Assange said. “I want to put in the missile attack. There were three families living in the bottom, so it wasn’t abandoned.” But it was impossible to reëdit the film. The activists were working at capacity, and in several hours it would be Easter.

At half past ten in the morning, Gonggrijp pulled open the drapes, and the Bunker was filled with sunlight. He was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and black pants, freshly washed and ironed, and he was struggling to keep everyone on schedule. Last-minute concerns—among them finding a criminal-defense lawyer in the United States—were being addressed. Assange was at a computer, his posture upright as he steadily typed.

“How are we on time?” he asked no one in particular.

“We have three hours,” Gonggrijp said.

Assange wrinkled his brow and turned his attention back to the screen. He was looking at a copy of classified rules of engagement in Iraq from 2006, one of several secret American military documents that he was planning to post with the video. WikiLeaks scrubs such documents to insure that no digital traces embedded in them can identify their source. Assange was purging these traces as fast as he could.

Reykjavik’s streets were empty, and the bells of a cathedral began to toll. “Remember, remember the fifth of November,” Assange said, repeating a line from the English folk poem celebrating Guy Fawkes. He smiled, as Gonggrijp dismantled the workflow chart, removing Post-Its from the cabinets and flushing them down the toilet. Shortly before noon, there was a desperate push to clear away the remaining vestiges of Project B and to get to the airport. Assange was unpacked and unshaven, and his hair was a mess. He was typing up a press release. Jonsdottir came by to help, and he asked her, “Can’t you cut my hair while I’m doing this?”

“No, I am not going to cut your hair while you are working,” she said.

Jonsdottir walked over to the sink and made tea. Assange kept on typing, and after a few minutes she reluctantly began to trim his hair. At one point, she stopped and asked, “If you get arrested, will you get in touch with me?” Assange nodded. Gonggrijp, meanwhile, shoved some of Assange’s things into a bag. He settled the bill with the owner. Dishes were washed. Furniture was put back in place. People piled into a small car, and in an instant the house was empty and still.

The name Assange is thought to derive from Ah Sang, or Mr. Sang, a Chinese émigré who settled on Thursday Island, off the coast of Australia, in the early eighteen-hundreds, and whose descendants later moved to the continent. Assange’s maternal ancestors came to Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, from Scotland and Ireland, in search of farmland, and Assange suspects, only half in jest, that his proclivity for wandering is genetic. His phone numbers and e-mail address are ever-changing, and he can drive the people around him crazy with his elusiveness and his propensity to mask details about his life.

Assange was born in 1971, in the city of Townsville, on Australia’s northeastern coast, but it is probably more accurate to say that he was born into a blur of domestic locomotion. Shortly after his first birthday, his mother—I will call her Claire—married a theatre director, and the two collaborated on small productions. They moved often, living near Byron Bay, a beachfront community in New South Wales, and on Magnetic Island, a tiny pile of rock that Captain Cook believed had magnetic properties that distorted his compass readings. They were tough-minded nonconformists. (At seventeen, Claire had burned her schoolbooks and left home on a motorcycle.) Their house on Magnetic Island burned to the ground, and rifle cartridges that Claire had kept for shooting snakes exploded like fireworks. “Most of this period of my childhood was pretty Tom Sawyer,” Assange told me. “I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was going down mine shafts and tunnels.”

Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. “I didn’t want their spirits broken,” she told me. In any event, the family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible. He was homeschooled, sometimes, and he took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. “I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,” he recalled. He absorbed a large vocabulary, but only later did he learn how to pronounce all the words that he learned.

When Assange was eight, Claire left her husband and began seeing a musician, with whom she had another child, a boy. The relationship was tempestuous; the musician became abusive, she says, and they separated. A fight ensued over the custody of Assange’s half brother, and Claire felt threatened, fearing that the musician would take away her son. Assange recalled her saying, “Now we need to disappear,” and he lived on the run with her from the age of eleven to sixteen. When I asked him about the experience, he told me that there was evidence that the man belonged to a powerful cult called the Family—its motto was “Unseen, Unknown, and Unheard.” Some members were doctors who persuaded mothers to give up their newborn children to the cult’s leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The cult had moles in government, Assange suspected, who provided the musician with leads on Claire’s whereabouts. In fact, Claire often told friends where she had gone, or hid in places where she had lived before.

While on the run, Claire rented a house across the street from an electronics shop. Assange would go there to write programs on a Commodore 64, until Claire bought it for him, moving to a cheaper place to raise the money. He was soon able to crack into well-known programs, where he found hidden messages left by their creators. “The austerity of one’s interaction with a computer is something that appealed to me,” he said. “It is like chess—chess is very austere, in that you don’t have many rules, there is no randomness, and the problem is very hard.” Assange embraced life as an outsider. He later wrote of himself and a teen-age friend, “We were bright sensitive kids who didn’t fit into the dominant subculture and fiercely castigated those who did as irredeemable boneheads.”

When Assange turned sixteen, he got a modem, and his computer was transformed into a portal. Web sites did not exist yet—this was 1987—but computer networks and telecom systems were sufficiently linked to form a hidden electronic landscape that teen-agers with the requisite technical savvy could traverse. Assange called himself Mendax—from Horace’s splendide mendax, or “nobly untruthful”—and he established a reputation as a sophisticated programmer who could break into the most secure networks. He joined with two hackers to form a group that became known as the International Subversives, and they broke into computer systems in Europe and North America, including networks belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense and to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In a book called “Underground,” which he collaborated on with a writer named Suelette Dreyfus, he outlined the hacker subculture’s early Golden Rules: “Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.”

Around this time, Assange fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl, and he briefly moved out of his mother’s home to stay with her. “A couple of days later, police turned up, and they carted off all my computer stuff,” he recalled. The raid, he said, was carried out by the state police, and “it involved some dodgy character who was alleging that we had stolen five hundred thousand dollars from Citibank.” Assange wasn’t charged, and his equipment was returned. “At that point, I decided that it might be wise to be a bit more discreet,” he said. Assange and the girl joined a squatters’ union in Melbourne, until they learned she was pregnant, and moved to be near Claire. When Assange was eighteen, the two got married in an unofficial ceremony, and soon afterward they had a son.

Hacking remained a constant in his life, and the thrill of digital exploration was amplified by the growing knowledge, among the International Subversives, that the authorities were interested in their activities. The Australian Federal Police had set up an investigation into the group, called Operation Weather, which the hackers strove to monitor.

In September, 1991, when Assange was twenty, he hacked into the master terminal that Nortel, the Canadian telecom company, maintained in Melbourne, and began to poke around. The International Subversives had been visiting the master terminal frequently. Normally, Assange hacked into computer systems at night, when they were semi-dormant, but this time a Nortel administrator was signed on. Sensing that he might be caught, Assange approached him with humor. “I have taken control,” he wrote, without giving his name. “For years, I have been struggling in this grayness. But now I have finally seen the light.” The administrator did not reply, and Assange sent another message: “It’s been nice playing with your system. We didn’t do any damage and we even improved a few things. Please don’t call the Australian Federal Police.”

The International Subversives’ incursions into Nortel turned out to be a critical development for Operation Weather. Federal investigators tapped phone lines to see which ones the hackers were using. “Julian was the most knowledgeable and the most secretive of the lot,” Ken Day, the lead investigator, told me. “He had some altruistic motive. I think he acted on the belief that everyone should have access to everything.”

“Underground” describes Assange’s growing fear of arrest: “Mendax dreamed of police raids all the time. He dreamed of footsteps crunching on the driveway gravel, of shadows in the pre-dawn darkness, of a gun-toting police squad bursting through his backdoor at 5 am.” Assange could relax only when he hid his disks in an apiary that he kept. By October, he was in a terrible state. His wife had left him, taking with her their infant son. His home was a mess. He barely ate or slept. On the night the police came, the twenty-ninth, he wired his phone through his stereo and listened to the busy signal until eleven-thirty, when Ken Day knocked on his door, and told him, “I think you’ve been expecting me.”

Assange was charged with thirty-one counts of hacking and related crimes. While awaiting trial, he fell into a depression, and briefly checked himself into a hospital. He tried to stay with his mother, but after a few days he took to sleeping in nearby parks. He lived and hiked among dense eucalyptus forests in the Dandenong Ranges National Park, which were thick with mosquitoes whose bites scarred his face. “Your inner voice quiets down,” he told me. “Internal dialogue is stimulated by a preparatory desire to speak, but it is not actually useful if there are no other people around.” He added, “I don’t want to sound too Buddhist. But your vision of yourself disappears.”

It took more than three years for the authorities to bring the case against Assange and the other International Subversives to court. Day told me, “We had just formed the computer-crimes team, and the government said, ‘Your charter is to establish a deterrent.’ Well, to get a deterrent you have to prosecute people, and we achieved that with Julian and his group.” A computer-security team working for Nortel in Canada drafted an incident report alleging that the hacking had caused damage that would cost more than a hundred thousand dollars to repair. The chief prosecutor, describing Assange’s near-limitless access, told the court, “It was God Almighty walking around doing what you like.”

Assange, facing a potential sentence of ten years in prison, found the state’s reaction confounding. He bought Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle,” a novel about scientists and technicians forced into the Gulag, and read it three times. (“How close the parallels to my own adventures!” he later wrote.) He was convinced that “look/see” hacking was a victimless crime, and intended to fight the charges. But the other members of the group decided to coöperate. “When a judge says, ‘The prisoner shall now rise,’ and no one else in the room stands—that is a test of character,” he told me. Ultimately, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges and six were dropped. But at his final sentencing the judge said, “There is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to—what’s the expression—surf through these various computers.” Assange’s only penalty was to pay the Australian state a small sum in damages.

As the criminal case was unfolding, Assange and his mother were also waging a campaign to gain full custody of Assange’s son—a legal fight that was, in many ways, far more wrenching than his criminal defense. They were convinced that the boy’s mother and her new boyfriend posed a danger to the child, and they sought to restrict her rights. The state’s child-protection agency, Health and Community Services, disagreed. The specifics of the allegations are unclear; family-court records in Australia are kept anonymous. But in 1995 a parliamentary committee found that the agency maintained an “underlying philosophy of deflecting as many cases away from itself as possible.” When the agency decided that a child was living in a safe household, there was no way to immediately appeal its decision.

The custody battle evolved into a bitter fight with the state. “What we saw was a great bureaucracy that was squashing people,” Claire told me. She and Assange, along with another activist, formed an organization called Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection. “We used full-on activist methods,” Claire recalled. In meetings with Health and Community Services, “we would go in and tape-record them secretly.” The organization used the Australian Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents from Health and Community Services, and they distributed flyers to child-protection workers, encouraging them to come forward with inside information, for a “central databank” that they were creating. “You may remain anonymous if you wish,” one flyer stated. One protection worker leaked to the group an important internal manual. Assange told me, “We had moles who were inside dissidents.”

In 1999, after nearly three dozen legal hearings and appeals, Assange worked out a custody agreement with his wife. Claire told me, “We had experienced very high levels of adrenaline, and I think that after it all finished I ended up with P.T.S.D. It was like coming back from a war. You just can’t interact with normal people to the same degree, and I am sure that Jules has some P.T.S.D. that is untreated.” Not long after the court cases, she said, Assange’s hair, which had been dark brown, became drained of all color.

Assange was burned out. He motorcycled across Vietnam. He held various jobs, and even earned money as a computer-security consultant, supporting his son to the extent that he was able. He studied physics at the University of Melbourne. He thought that trying to decrypt the secret laws governing the universe would provide the intellectual stimulation and rush of hacking. It did not. In 2006, on a blog he had started, he wrote about a conference organized by the Australian Institute of Physics, “with 900 career physicists, the body of which were sniveling fearful conformists of woefully, woefully inferior character.”

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

These ideas soon evolved into WikiLeaks. In 2006, Assange barricaded himself in a house near the university and began to work. In fits of creativity, he would write out flow diagrams for the system on the walls and doors, so as not to forget them. There was a bed in the kitchen, and he invited backpackers passing through campus to stay with him, in exchange for help building the site. “He wouldn’t sleep at all,” a person who was living in the house told me. “He wouldn’t eat.”

As it now functions, the Web site is primarily hosted on a Swedish Internet service provider called PRQ.se, which was created to withstand both legal pressure and cyber attacks, and which fiercely preserves the anonymity of its clients. Submissions are routed first through PRQ, then to a WikiLeaks server in Belgium, and then on to “another country that has some beneficial laws,” Assange told me, where they are removed at “end-point machines” and stored elsewhere. These machines are maintained by exceptionally secretive engineers, the high priesthood of WikiLeaks. One of them, who would speak only by encrypted chat, told me that Assange and the other public members of WikiLeaks “do not have access to certain parts of the system as a measure to protect them and us.” The entire pipeline, along with the submissions moving through it, is encrypted, and the traffic is kept anonymous by means of a modified version of the Tor network, which sends Internet traffic through “virtual tunnels” that are extremely private. Moreover, at any given time WikiLeaks computers are feeding hundreds of thousands of fake submissions through these tunnels, obscuring the real documents. Assange told me that there are still vulnerabilities, but “this is vastly more secure than any banking network.”

Before launching the site, Assange needed to show potential contributors that it was viable. One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, “We have received over one million documents from thirteen countries.”

In December, 2006, WikiLeaks posted its first document: a “secret decision,” signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union, that had been culled from traffic passing through the Tor network to China. The document called for the execution of government officials by hiring “criminals” as hit men. Assange and the others were uncertain of its authenticity, but they thought that readers, using Wikipedia-like features of the site, would help analyze it. They published the decision with a lengthy commentary, which asked, “Is it a bold manifesto by a flamboyant Islamic militant with links to Bin Laden? Or is it a clever smear by US intelligence, designed to discredit the Union, fracture Somali alliances and manipulate China?”

The document’s authenticity was never determined, and news about WikiLeaks quickly superseded the leak itself. Several weeks later, Assange flew to Kenya for the World Social Forum, an anti-capitalist convention, to make a presentation about the Web site. “He packed in the funniest way I have ever seen,” the person who had been living in the house recalled. “Someone came to pick him up, and he was asked, ‘Where is your luggage?’ And he ran back into the house. He had a sailor’s sack, and he grabbed a whole bunch of stuff and threw it in there, mostly socks.”

Assange ended up staying in Kenya for several months. He would check in with friends by phone and through the Internet from time to time, but was never precise about his movements. One friend told me, “It would always be, ‘Where is Julian?’ It was always difficult to know where he was. It was almost like he was trying to hide.”

It took about an hour on Easter morning to get from the house on Grettisgata Street to Iceland’s international airport, which is situated on a lava field by the sea. Assange, in the terminal, carried a threadbare blue backpack that contained hard drives, phone cards, and multiple cell phones. Gonggrijp had agreed to go to Washington to help with the press conference. He checked in, and the ticketing agent turned to Assange.

“I am sorry,” she said to him. “I cannot find your name.”

“Interesting,” Assange said to Gonggrijp. “Have fun at the press conference.”

“No,” Gonggrijp told the attendant. “We have a booking I.D. number.”

“It’s been confirmed,” Assange insisted.

The attendant looked perplexed. “I know,” she said. “But my booking information has it ‘cancelled.’ ”

The two men exchanged a look: was a government agency tampering with their plans? Assange waited anxiously, but it turned out that he had bought the ticket and neglected to confirm the purchase. He quickly bought another ticket, and the two men flew to New York and then rushed to catch the Acela to Washington. It was nearly two in the morning when they arrived. They got into a taxi, and Assange, who didn’t want to reveal the location of his hotel, told the driver to go to a nearby cross street.

“Here we are in the lion’s den,” Gonggrijp said as the taxi raced down Massachusetts Avenue, passing rows of nondescript office buildings. Assange said, “Not looking too lionish.”

A few hours after sunrise, Assange was standing at a lectern inside the National Press Club, ready to present “Collateral Murder” to the forty or so journalists who had come. He was dressed in a brown blazer, a black shirt, and a red tie. He played the film for the audience, pausing it to discuss various details. After the film ended, he ran footage of the Hellfire attack—a woman in the audience gasped as the first missile hit the building—and read from the e-mail sent by the Icelandic journalists who had gone to Iraq. The leak, he told the reporters, “sends a message that some people within the military don’t like what is going on.”

The video, in both raw and edited forms, was released on the site that WikiLeaks had built for it, and also on YouTube and a number of other Web sites. Within minutes after the press conference, Assange was invited to Al Jazeera’s Washington headquarters, where he spent half the day giving interviews, and that evening MSNBC ran a long segment about the footage. The video was covered in the Times, in multiple stories, and in every other major paper. On YouTube alone, more than seven million viewers have watched “Collateral Murder.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates was asked about the footage, and said, clearly irritated, “These people can put anything out they want and are never held accountable for it.” The video was like looking at war “through a soda straw,” he said. “There is no before and there is no after.” Army spokespeople insisted that there was no violation of the rules of engagement. At first, the media’s response hewed to Assange’s interpretation, but, in the ensuing days, as more commentators weighed in and the military offered its view, Assange grew frustrated. Much of the coverage focussed not on the Hellfire attack or the van but on the killing of the journalists and on how a soldier might reasonably mistake a camera for an RPG. On Twitter, Assange accused Gates of being “a liar,” and beseeched members of the media to “stop spinning.”

In some respects, Assange appeared to be most annoyed by the journalistic process itself—“a craven sucking up to official sources to imbue the eventual story with some kind of official basis,” as he once put it. WikiLeaks has long maintained a complicated relationship with conventional journalism. When, in 2008, the site was sued after publishing confidential documents from a Swiss bank, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, and ten other news organizations filed amicus briefs in support. (The bank later withdrew its suit.) But, in the Bunker one evening, Gonggrijp told me, “We are not the press.” He considers WikiLeaks an advocacy group for sources; within the framework of the Web site, he said, “the source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document.”

Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events. In an invitation to potential collaborators in 2006, he wrote, “Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their own governments and corporations.” He has argued that a “social movement” to expose secrets could “bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality—including the US administration.”

Assange does not recognize the limits that traditional publishers do. Recently, he posted military documents that included the Social Security numbers of soldiers, and in the Bunker I asked him if WikiLeaks’ mission would have been compromised if he had redacted these small bits. He said that some leaks risked harming innocent people—“collateral damage, if you will”—but that he could not weigh the importance of every detail in every document. Perhaps the Social Security numbers would one day be important to researchers investigating wrongdoing, he said; by releasing the information he would allow judgment to occur in the open.

A year and a half ago, WikiLeaks published the results of an Army test, conducted in 2004, of electromagnetic devices designed to prevent IEDs from being triggered. The document revealed key aspects of how the devices functioned and also showed that they interfered with communication systems used by soldiers—information that an insurgent could exploit. By the time WikiLeaks published the study, the Army had begun to deploy newer technology, but some soldiers were still using the devices. I asked Assange if he would refrain from releasing information that he knew might get someone killed. He said that he had instituted a “harm-minimization policy,” whereby people named in certain documents were contacted before publication, to warn them, but that there were also instances where the members of WikiLeaks might get “blood on our hands.”

One member told me that Assange’s editorial policy initially made her uncomfortable, but that she has come around to his position, because she believes that no one has been unjustly harmed. Of course, such harm is not always easy to measure. When Assange was looking for board members, he contacted Steven Aftergood, who runs an e-mail newsletter for the Federation of American Scientists, and who publishes sensitive documents. Aftergood declined to participate. “When a technical record is both sensitive and remote from a current subject of controversy, my editorial inclination is to err on the side of caution,” he said. “I miss that kind of questioning on their part.”

At the same time, Aftergood told me, the overclassification of information is a problem of increasing scale—one that harms not only citizens, who should be able to have access to government records, but the system of classification itself. When too many secrets are kept, it becomes difficult to know which ones are important. Had the military released the video from the Apache to Reuters under FOIA, it would probably not have become a film titled “Collateral Murder,” and a public-relations nightmare.

Lieutenant Colonel Lee Packnett, the spokesperson for intelligence matters for the Army, was deeply agitated when I called him. “We’re not going to give validity to WikiLeaks,” he said. “You’re not doing anything for the Army by putting us in a conversation about WikiLeaks. You can talk to someone else. It’s not an Army issue.” As he saw it, once “Collateral Murder” had passed through the news cycle, the broader counter-intelligence problem that WikiLeaks poses to the military had disappeared as well. “It went away,” he said.

With the release of “Collateral Murder,” WikiLeaks received more than two hundred thousand dollars in donations, and on April 7th Assange wrote on Twitter, “New funding model for journalism: try doing it for a change.” Just this winter, he had put the site into a state of semi-dormancy because there was not enough money to run it, and because its technical engineering needed adjusting. Assange has far more material than he can process, and he is seeking specialists who can sift through the chaotic WikiLeaks library and assign documents to volunteers for analysis. The donations meant that WikiLeaks would now be able to pay some volunteers, and in late May its full archive went back online. Still, the site remains a project in early development. Assange has been searching for the right way not only to manage it but also to get readers interested in the more arcane material there.

In 2007, he published thousands of pages of secret military information detailing a vast number of Army procurements in Iraq and Afghanistan. He and a volunteer spent weeks building a searchable database, studying the Army’s purchasing codes, and adding up the cost of the procurements—billions of dollars in all. The database catalogued matériel that every unit had ordered: machine guns, Humvees, cash-counting machines, satellite phones. Assange hoped that journalists would pore through it, but barely any did. “I am so angry,” he said. “This was such a fucking fantastic leak: the Army’s force structure of Afghanistan and Iraq, down to the last chair, and nothing.”

WikiLeaks is a finalist for a Knight Foundation grant of more than half a million dollars. The intended project would set up a way for sources to pass documents to newspaper reporters securely; WikiLeaks would serve as a kind of numbered Swiss bank account, where information could be anonymously exchanged. (The system would allow the source to impose a deadline on the reporter, after which the document would automatically appear on WikiLeaks.) Assange has been experimenting with other ideas, too. On the principle that people won’t regard something as valuable unless they pay for it, he has tried selling documents at auction to news organizations; in 2008, he attempted this with seven thousand internal e-mails from the account of a former speechwriter for Hugo Chávez. The auction failed. He is thinking about setting up a subscription service, where high-paying members would have early access to leaks.

But experimenting with the site’s presentation and its technical operations will not answer a deeper question that WikiLeaks must address: What is it about? The Web site’s strengths—its near-total imperviousness to lawsuits and government harassment—make it an instrument for good in societies where the laws are unjust. But, unlike authoritarian regimes, democratic governments hold secrets largely because citizens agree that they should, in order to protect legitimate policy. In liberal societies, the site’s strengths are its weaknesses. Lawsuits, if they are fair, are a form of deterrence against abuse. Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.

After the press conference in Washington, I met Assange in New York, in Bryant Park. He had brought his luggage with him, because he was moving between the apartments of friends of friends. We sat near the fountain, and drank coffee. That week, Assange was scheduled to fly to Berkeley, and then to Italy, but back in Iceland the volcano was erupting again, and his flight to Europe was likely to change. He looked a bit shell-shocked. “It was surprising to me that we were seen as such an impartial arbiter of the truth, which may speak well to what we have done,” he told me. But he also said, “To be completely impartial is to be an idiot. This would mean that we would have to treat the dust in the street the same as the lives of people who have been killed.”

A number of commentators had wondered whether the video’s title was manipulative. “In hindsight, should we have called it ‘Permission to Engage’ rather than ‘Collateral Murder’?” he said. “I’m still not sure.” He was annoyed by Gates’s comment on the film: “He says, ‘There is no before and no after.’ Well, at least there is now a middle, which is a vast improvement.” Then Assange leaned forward and, in a whisper, began to talk about a leak, code-named Project G, that he is developing in another secret location. He promised that it would be news, and I saw in him the same mixture of seriousness and amusement, devilishness and intensity that he had displayed in the Bunker. “If it feels a little bit like we’re amateurs, it is because we are,” he said. “Everyone is an amateur in this business.” And then, his coffee finished, he made his way out of the park and into Times Square, disappearing among the masses of people moving this way and that. ♦

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