MONOKULTUR

Julian Assange står overfor at blive udleveret til USA. Michael Jalving skrev for et par år siden i Jyllands-Posten

Vi lærte at kende den lyslokkede aktivist på de ubekvemme sandheder fra USA’s krige i Afghanistan og Irak, som han lækkede for straks at blive venstrefløjens darling. På kort tid opnåede han, hvad man vel bedst kan sammenligne med rockstjernestatus, og modtog priser fra nær og fjern.

Men så gjorde han noget overilet. Netop efterlyst af de amerikanske myndigheder rejste han til Stockholm for at give et foredrag blandt hujende fans og endte tilsyneladende i kløerne på to kvinder, som kort efter anklagede ham for voldtægt.

Anklagen blev en stor mediesag. De svenske myndigheder udsendte en anholdelsesbegæring, og en britisk domstol fastslog, at Assange skulle udvises til Sverige. Det sidste var ham meget imod. Så meget, at han flygtede ind på på Ecuadors ambassade, hvor han fik politisk asyl og fortsatte sit virke, herunder at få to børn med en sydafrikansk jurist, der blev forelsket i ham og filmede sin anden fødsel med et Gopro-kamera, så hendes mand kunne se miraklet ske.

Det er således ikke pikante detaljer, sagen mangler. Dens efterspil er også spektakulært. Først frafaldt de svenske myndigheder voldtægtsanklagen. Dernæst udløb hans asyl på ambassaden, hvorefter han blev anholdt af britisk politi. USA kræver ham udleveret, men den trækker ud, mens han holdes indespærret i et topsikret fængsel sydøst for London.

Mearsheimer nævner i sin appel Chelsea/Bradley Manning, der altså lækkede USAs pinligheder fra Irak og Afghanistan til Wikileaks, i samme ombæring som Daniel Ellsberg, der døde forrige år. Ellsberg stjal tusindvis af dokumenter, der viste, at Pentagon og forsvarsminister McNamara ikke troede at man kunne vinde krigen i Vietnam, som de fortalte offentligheden det modsatte, mens de bad skatteyderne om penge, til at fortsætte myrderierne. Lyder det bekendt?

i 2023 blev den dengang 21 årige Jack Teixeira anholdt af FBI, fordi han havde delt hemmeligheder fra Pentagon på et af internettets mange chatfora, til andre ‘gamere’. Til at starte med ville han sikkert blot prale med, hvad han vidste om statens hemmeligheder, men uanset hvad, afslørede de hemmelige dokumenter, hvis autencitet aldrig er blevet bekræftet, at de vestlige regeringer holdt deres borgere for nar om proxy krigen mod Rusland i Ukraine. John Hayward skrev dengang i Breitbart

Why did he allegedly post classified documents? Teixeira’s friends told reporters he does not view himself as a “whistleblower” in the vein of Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who claimed his exposure of classified materials was conducted to defend privacy rights and expose government surveillance overreach.

Instead, Teixeira evidently posted these documents because he wanted to impress and educate other members of his Discord group, especially the younger members, who he viewed as proteges. The poster identified in reports as Teixeira escalated his activities when he did not think the others were paying enough attention to his opinions and the material he was exposing.

“He’s a smart person. He knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, of course. These weren’t accidental leaks of any kind,” a teenage member of Thug Shaker Central told the Washington Post.

“He got upset, and he said on multiple occasions, if you guys aren’t going to interact with them, I’m going to stop sending them,” another said of the shared documents.

One of his friends said Teixeira saw his Discord forum as a means of “keeping kids informed about real-world issues.” 

The leaker swore other group members to secrecy about the materials he was posting – a promise they kept with surprising fidelity, all things considered. Some of them told the media it took them a while to accept that he was posting genuine classified material, instead of fabrications he boastfully invented to make himself look important.

Several group members have told the media their forum was thick with “irony” and sarcasm, so it was difficult to tell exactly where Teixeira was coming from. He appears to have crafted a persona as a fiery libertarian individualist, an “anti-war Christian” who distrusted the U.S. government and had serious qualms about its Ukraine policy. 

One forum member said Teixeira came to regret joining the military because he concluded it was “run by the elite politicians” and threatened to “kick [his] ass if I thought about joining.”

How did he get caught? The code of silence on Thug Shaker Central held remarkably firm until last month, at which time some of the members began sharing “OG’s” posts and classified documents in other Discord groups, apparently because they wanted to impress other users or win arguments with them.

This brought the alleged document leak to the attention of the media, generating a few big headline news stories and sparking an intense media manhunt for the original leaker. Open-source investigation website Bellingcat reported on Sunday that the New York Times (NYT) began digging into the story after five documents related to the Ukraine invasion were shared in Russian channels on the messaging platform Telegram.

Some of Teixeira’s docs were also posted on the notoriously rambunctious 4chan system, where one poster employed a classified document to win a petty argument with the message, “Source this dick, at least my piece of paper is more credible than hearsay.” 

Bellingcat found another exposure of classified material in a March 4 Discord feud between players of the Minecraft computer game that concluded with one of them saying, “Here, have some leaked documents.” The accompanying images were of ten documents concerning the Ukraine war, some of them visibly stamped “Top Secret.”

These heated comments from 4chan and Discord users perfectly capture the overall tenor of the most embarrassing national security breach since Edward Snowden.

Bellingcat also found documents posted on a Discord channel dedicated to a Filipino YouTube celebrity. The investigators considered these “bizarre” venues for such potentially explosive disclosures, so they kept looking for the original source of the documents and eventually found the Thug Shaker Central group. It then took the Washington Post about a week to hunt Teixeira down.

Det var altså før den meget imødesete Forårsoffensiv, som skulle drive russerne afgørende tilbage og måske endda skubbe dem helt ud af Ukraine. Amerikanerne og vores egen regering vidste, at den ville slå fejl. Teixeira har altså blot afsløret “the way they lied…“

USA er ikke længere en Republik og medierne er ikke frie. De arbejder for efterretningstjenesterne, the interagency consensus, og de mange penge-interesser der er i Pentagon. Det var til at forudse, skrev Scott Adams, “A country with no intelligence services decides to create one and assigns them the mission of becoming experts at overthrowing governments.”

Jeg kunne bedre lide Washington Post, dengang Jason Robards var redaktør