Julian Assange: the man behind WikiLeaks(The man who turned the world eyes:He is the super hero)
Last Updated: Tuesday, December 7, 2010 | 2:16 PM ET
CBC News
WikiLeaks founder and editor in chief Julian Assange takes his seat before a news conference in Geneva in November. He turned himself in to British police Tuesday to face Swedish sex-crime charges. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone/Associated Press) WikiLeaks founder and editor in chief Julian Assange's exact whereabouts are often unknown, and he has acknowledged hopping between countries amid death threats against him and his family.
That's no longer the case. The 39-year-old Australian, the figurehead and self-described "lightning rod" behind the ongoing release of 250,000 classified U.S. State Department documents, is behind bars in Britain.
Assange turned himself in to police in London on Tuesday morning in response to European and international warrants for his arrest. He is wanted in Sweden to face four allegations of sexual offences, stemming from separate incidents with two women in mid-August.
News photographers swarm a prison van believed to be transporting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after he was ordered to be held in jail at a court hearing Tuesday in London. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press) The computer programmer and journalist was denied bail in an afternoon court session and will remain in jail until at least Dec. 14, for a follow-up hearing. Rejecting surety proposals for Assange from filmmaker Ken Loach, journalist John Pilger and two others — who offered to put up a total of £120,000 in bail money — the judge said there was too great a risk of flight.
Assange's organization is also increasingly cut off from sources of financing. MasterCard announced Monday night that it would no longer permit its credit cards to be used for donations to WikiLeaks; Visa followed suit Tuesday; and the Swiss bank PostFinance has shut an account Assange had there that held the equivalent of $41,700. Last week, the online payments company PayPal cut off WikiLeaks.
The latest developments highlight an aspect of Assange that's been debated ever since WikiLeaks jolted the world in July with its release of 75,000 secret U.S. military documents on the Afghanistan invasion: that the internet activist is as controversial as the website is transparent.
Loved and reviled
Assange is extolled by human rights groups on the one hand and despised by governments and institutions around the world on the other — often for the same reason.
WikiLeaks, which he founded in 2006, is known for posting classified government documents supplied by whistle-blowers in their entirety. The most controversial ones so far have been the hundreds of thousands of secret reports on the wars in Iraq, released in October, and Afghanistan, which have gotten him attention from the CIA.
The spotlight veered back onto WikiLeaks and Assange in late November, when the website began posting classified diplomatic cables between the U.S. State Department and its embassies that news outlets seized on to publish details of frank and unflattering assessments of world leaders, as well as candid views of rogue nations and discussions about global crises.
Assange holds a news conference in London in October after the release of 400,000 U.S. military documents about the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The files revealed 15,000 previously unreported civilian deaths. (Lennart Preiss/Associated Press) Revelations include that the U.S. ordered its spies to collect DNA, bank account info and other personal information on UN officials, in violation of international law; that attacks on militants in Yemen, which the government there avowed were its own counterinsurgency efforts, were the covert work of the United States; and that Arab leaders have implored the U.S. to confront Iran with military might.
To some, Assange is a hero for these and other disclosures. He won an Amnesty International Media Award last year, was named in Utne Reader this month as one of 25 visionaries changing the world and is being considered for Time magazine's 2010 Person of the Year.
In a TedTalk last July, Assange provided some insight into his core values.
"Capable, generous men do not create victims. They nurture victims, and that's something from my father and something from other capable, generous men that have been in my life," he said. "I am a combative person, so I'm not actually so big on the nurturing, but there's another way of nurturing victims, which is to police perpetrators of crimes."
But despite his good intentions, he's still viewed by some as a dangerous troublemaker, one that the U.S. government and other countries, including his native Australia, are trying to prosecute. There are even some who would rather see him dead.
Former U.S. Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has accused President Barack Obama of not doing enough to stop Assange and wrote in a Facebook posting, "Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?"
North of the border, Tom Flanagan, the prime minister's former chief of staff, told CBC News on Tuesday that he'd like to see Assange assassinated. In a panel interview on Power & Politics with Evan Solomon, he said Obama "should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something." But on Wednesday, Flanagan said that he regretted his remarks.
A secretive man
Assange noted both these threats, as well as an American blogger's call for his 20-year-old son to be harmed, on Tuesday in an op-ed article about WikiLeaks in the newspaper the Australian.
"The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption," Assange writes.
'WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time ... not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed.'
—Julian Assange
"People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it."
Assange goes on to address critics alleging that his website has put people's lives risk.
"WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the U.S., with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone."
For someone who espouses openness and transparency, Assange is a private and secretive man. He doesn't appear to have a fixed address and has acknowledged the use of "four bases" in the past several years, including ones in Iceland, Kenya and Sweden. He is said to be constantly on the move, a way of life he's known since he was a child.
Born in July 1971 in Townsville on Australia's northeastern coast, Assange's parents ran a touring theatre company that travelled a lot. His mother later divorced and remarried a man who was part of a cult that Assange has joked about spending time running away from when he was young.
In his youth, Assange reportedly attended 37 schools and six universities. He studied physics and math at the University of Melbourne, but never completed a degree. In his twenties and early thirties, he was a computer programmer of free software in Melbourne before starting WikiLeaks.
Because of WikiLeaks, Assange said he has had to take security precautions. After the website published 400,000 documents on the war in Iraq in October, he brought bodyguards with him during a TV interview, Israel's Channel Two confirmed.
What is next?
Assange's legal woes could go several ways. He will fight Sweden's bid to extradite him from the United Kingdom, a court process that should take no more than three weeks. Then, if a British judge approves his transfer to Stockholm to face charges there, he will contest them. His lawyer Mark Stephens has previously said that the allegations were made after Assange had consensual sex with two women who turned on him after becoming aware of each other's relationships.
There is also a risk the United States could indict Assange and then seek his transfer, either from Britain or Sweden, with which it has extradition treaties. Several American commentators and politicians have urged charges against Assange under the U.S.'s Espionage Act or for possession of stolen government property. But the possibility is remote.
And though its figurehead and founder is behind bars, WikiLeaks says it will soldier on. The website has only released a small fraction, under 1,000, of the 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables it possesses. The world could be in for many more months of Assange and his brainchild in the headlines.Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/12/01/profile-assange.html#ixzz17Uyx7Wjw
The latest leak being released by a whistleblower web site Wikileaks.org beats a record set by the previous leak of Iraq War Diaries. The new leak includes 251,287 United States embassy cables dating from 1966 up to February 2010 containing confidential communications between Washington DC and 274 embassies in other countries.