Assange: Many Arab Leaders Closely Aligned With CIA

By on January 3, 2011 in News 18

456495d050a9ca164ca6c9bf0ed0-grandeJulian Assange claims that numerous high-ranking officials in Arab countries work closely with the CIA in secret — “[They] are spies for the US in their countries” — and says their names will be released if he is killed. Will the threat be enough to save him from the United States’ wrath? A decidedly miffed Business Insider reports:

Julian Assange has set the ultimate dead man’s switch: Arrest or kill him and thousands of files will be automatically released, including documents that out CIA-backed Arabs.

The Wikileaks leader had previously claimed to have files on auto-release. That he had info on CIA ties was first-mentioned in an interview yesterday with Al-Jazeera.

This is exactly the type of information that lead people to condemn Wikileaks as dangerous. If released it would certainly endanger many American operatives and cause a massive political disruption.

Read More in Business Insider

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  • RM
    • http://www.disinfo.com Disinformation

      Thanks, fixed.

  • RM
  • http://disinfo.com Disinformation

    Thanks, fixed.

  • DE

    Is it Wikileaks that is dangerous, or is it the situation that the overabundant use of secrecy has built that should be condemned. Ignorance is bliss, but it’s often not safe in the long run.

    • Hadrian999

      it’s a bit like a thief blaming the police for being in jail and not his own misdeeds

      • Honu

        Not quite. If the police are corrupt and the thief has proof, it’s his insurance against being jailed. Why does the whistleblower have to be the one seen as the criminal when it’s the authorities and governments doing the crimes? And for the record Assange has no pending criminal charges against him. Any accusations against Assange being a criminal are pure opinions or speculations and not factual. Beyond killing the messenger, how about we all focus on the message? That’s the real issue. People who are against Assange and Wikileaks haven’t realized fundamentally that governments (all governments but that includes the US) are corrupt and act in secret in many ways. These ways can often be crimes. Wikileaks, in lieu of the 4th estate abdicating their responsibilities, is trying to balance the scales by exposing these secrets and crimes. If our financial sector and government are engaging in crimes in the name of the American people or other countries’ peoples, there should be no debate about exposing them.

        • Hadrian999

          actually i was giving the government the tole of unrepentant criminal

  • DE

    Is it Wikileaks that is dangerous, or is it the situation that the overabundant use of secrecy has built that should be condemned. Ignorance is bliss, but it’s often not safe in the long run.

  • Hadrian999

    it’s a bit like a thief blaming the police for being in jail and not his own misdeeds

  • http://voxmagi-necessarywords.blogspot.com/ VoxMagi

    Another non-surprise from Wikileaks. I’d love to see something that wasn’t a vague confirmation of what everyone knows but politely refuses to say out loud…I hope they imprison him just for the sake of seeing the Insurance File hit the streets.

    • Liam_McGonagle

      Very true, ’bout the non-revelatory nature of the story.

      Just reinforces the sneaking sucpicion in my mind that the real problem is not so much private conspiracy as much as the public’s mental and moral inadequacy. Contributing factors:

      1. Diffusion of responsibility dynamic inherent in public affairs. Remember the Kitty Genovese story? Stabbed to death in a public thoroughfare and no one did squat–or so the legend goes. I mention this story just because of its essential usefulness in illustrating the phenom, not to re-engage in a reconstruction of a factual timeline of what really hapened that night in Kew Gardens.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese

      2. Simple appeal of denial as a strategy to maintain emotional equilibrium in a disturbing environment. Reminds me of what the fat cracker told Ralph Steadman as he got in a cab bound for the Watergate hearings (per Hunter Thompson, anyhow): “It’s terrible, like finding out your wife is running
      around but you don’t want to hear about it.”

      3. Lack of moral compass. Most Christian denominations have a pretty shaky history vis-a-vis teaching morality, and inho, they just about fell apart altogether when that nitwitted redneck Oral Roberts invented the “Prosperity Gospel” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology

      Most Americans simply lack the moral education to evaluate these things.

      While the vaccuum in the public’s moral literacy is huge, to date the only ones who seem interested in filling it are the oxygen-deprived thyroid cases that created it to begin with. Agnostics and atheists, God bless them, sometimes seem interested in logical positivism to the complete exclusion and abandonment of more idealistic approaches. Logical positivism is a great and necessary thing, but given the manifestly irrational character of much of human nature, it can never be the complete solution.

      4. Lack of civics education. I think 5by5 touched on this several times in the past (if memory serves), and I think that’s very true. Nowadays curricula are so test and trade driven that we’ve lost all respect for knowledge for its own sake or to serve the public good. There may have always been an anti-intellectual undercurrent in American life, but nowadays, with colleges turning out more shitty MBA degrees than English and Philosophy degrees, and even honest-to-god, brown-bad engineering degrees, well it’s well nigh unto Warfare Against Consciousness.

  • http://voxmagi-necessarywords.blogspot.com/ VoxMagi

    Another non-surprise from Wikileaks. I’d love to see something that wasn’t a vague confirmation of what everyone knows but politely refuses to say out loud…I hope they imprison him just for the sake of seeing the Insurance File hit the streets.

  • WhiteRose

    If Julian were that smart he should have known to mask himself, though I guess that is against his clarity cause? But then he’s withholding information to protect himself… does that make sense to anyone? Too bad JA didn’t here of a thing called a filter. His publicity stunts make his cause nil, he’s turned himself into a clown :(

  • WhiteRose

    If Julian were that smart he should have known to mask himself, though I guess that is against his clarity cause? But then he’s withholding information to protect himself… does that make sense to anyone? Too bad JA didn’t here of a thing called a filter. His publicity stunts make his cause nil, he’s turned himself into a clown :(

  • Honu

    Not quite. If the police are corrupt and the thief has proof, it’s his insurance against being jailed. Why does the whistleblower have to be the one seen as the criminal when it’s the authorities and governments doing the crimes? And for the record Assange has no pending criminal charges against him. Any accusations against Assange being a criminal are pure opinions or speculations and not factual. Beyond killing the messenger, how about we all focus on the message? That’s the real issue. People who are against Assange and Wikileaks haven’t realized fundamentally that governments (all governments but that includes the US) are corrupt and act in secret in many ways. These ways can often be crimes. Wikileaks, in lieu of the 4th estate abdicating their responsibilities, is trying to balance the scales by exposing these secrets and crimes. If our financial sector and government are engaging in crimes in the name of the American people or other countries’ peoples, there should be no debate about exposing them.

  • Liam_McGonagle

    Very true, ’bout the non-revelatory nature of the story.

    Just reinforces the sneaking sucpicion in my mind that the real problem is not so much private conspiracy as much as the public’s mental and moral inadequacy. Contributing factors:

    1. Diffusion of responsibility dynamic inherent in public affairs. Remember the Kitty Genovese story? Stabbed to death in a public thoroughfare and no one did squat–or so the legend goes. I mention this story just because of its essential usefulness in illustrating the phenom, not to re-engage in a reconstruction of a factual timeline of what really hapened that night in Kew Gardens.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese

    2. Simple appeal of denial as a strategy to maintain emotional equilibrium in a disturbing environment. Reminds me of what the fat cracker told Ralph Steadman as he got in a cab bound for the Watergate hearings (per Hunter Thompson, anyhow): “It’s terrible, like finding out your wife is running
    around but you don’t want to hear about it.”

    3. Lack of moral compass. Most Christian denominations have a pretty shaky history vis-a-vis teaching morality, and inho, they just about fell apart altogether when that nitwitted redneck Oral Roberts invented the “Prosperity Gospel” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology

    Most Americans simply lack the moral education to evaluate these things.

    While the vaccuum in the public’s moral literacy is huge, to date the only ones who seem interested in filling it are the oxygen-deprived thyroid cases that created it to begin with. Agnostics and atheists, God bless them, sometimes seem interested in logical positivism to the complete exclusion and abandonment of more idealistic approaches. Logical positivism is a great and necessary thing, but given the manifestly irrational character of much of human nature, it can never be the complete solution.

    4. Lack of civics education. I think 5by5 touched on this several times in the past (if memory serves), and I think that’s very true. Nowadays curricula are so test and trade driven that we’ve lost all respect for knowledge for its own sake or to serve the public good. There may have always been an anti-intellectual undercurrent in American life, but nowadays, with colleges turning out more shitty MBA degrees than English and Philosophy degrees, and even honest-to-god, brown-bad engineering degrees, well it’s well nigh unto Warfare Against Consciousness.

  • Hadrian999

    actually i was giving the government the tole of unrepentant criminal