Pay Up

Nine men and women stood bail totalling £114,000 to guarantee that Julian Assange (the wikileak man) who is wanted by Sweden on rape charges would not run away. Assange, if you forgive the pun, screwed his friends, ran away, and is now hiding inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Tail between their legs, the guarantors asked the court to allow them to keep the money.

They must have felt very grand when they signed bail. They must have enjoyed applause at dinner parties at which they will have explained how important it was to keep Julian Assange free from Swedish justice.

Why the hell should they not pay up? Standing bail for someone or something you believe in is honourable and admirable but it is only honourable if you are willing to pay up. Otherwise, you are no more than a loudmouth. 

The court showed compassion because of the hardship paying in full would cause some of the guarantors and reduced the amount to £93,500.   

Dinner with(out) Julian Assange

Several days ago, at dinner with friends in London, I was asked what I thought Julian Assange of Wikileaks motivation was.

To me, his motivation is not the issue. There are several players in this story:

22-year-old private Bradley Manning who as an intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq has – it has been reported - managed to access, download and export 250,000 classified State Department documents. He has been incarcerated without trial in apparently inhumane conditions at a US Marine base in Virginia.

Julian Assange who runs Wikileaks and has not been accused of anything other than some unconnected rape charges. Assange’s supporters - and there is a growing number of those - firmly believe that these are trumped up charges. Some even suggest that the Swedish women, who had sex with Assange before going to the police, work for the CIA.

The newspapers that print the leaks and probably increase their circulation and profits as a result are just net gainers. I am glad that it’s the Guardian and not one of the Murdoch papers.

And the real culprits? What interests me is not Assange's motivation but why we have not heard about the imprisonment of the real culprits? Are they in a cell so deep that no one can reach them? Or have they already been secretly executed?

Why was it possible for a junior, very junior soldier stationed in Iraq to have access to so much classified material that in no way could have been relevant to whatever his work was? Why was secret material downloadable? Why is it possible to transfer secret documents to external systems? Who created the programs that were meant to prevent that? What were the specifications? Who was in charge?

I actually believe that civil servants should be able to correspond without thinking that everything they say or write will be available to the general public. It is neither the soldier who stole the documents nor anyone who makes them available that are responsible to ensure the safety of this system. Those whose responsibility it was have betrayed the confidence entrusted to them by their country. These are the people who should be in the solitary confinement cells.

This, of course, will not happen. They are – in all likelihood - all chums and I expect that the Head of the emotionally named Department for Homeland Security, the enormous apparatus that has evidently failed in securing the Homeland continues to play golf with the director of the FBI, the head of computer and system security of the State Department and the CEO of the company that supplies the clever programs that allowed all this happen.