Julian Assange Gets The Bog Standard Smear Technique 1895


The Russians call it Kompromat – the use by the state of sexual accusations to destroy a public figure. When I was attacked in this way by the government I worked for, Uzbek dissidents smiled at me, shook their heads and said “Kompromat“. They were used to it from the Soviet and Uzbek governments. They found it rather amusing to find that Western governments did it too.

Well, Julian Assange has been getting the bog standard Kompromat. I had imagined he would get something rather more spectacular, like being framed for murder and found hanging with an orange in his mouth. He deserves a better class of kompromat. If I am a whistleblower, then Julian is a veritable mighty pipe organ. Yet we just have the normal sex stuff, and very weak.

Bizarrely the offence for which Julian is wanted for questioning in Sweden was dropped from rape to sexual harassment, and then from sexual harassment to just harassment. The precise law in Swedish, as translated for me and other Sam Adams alumni by our colleague Major Frank Grevil, reads:

“He who lays hands on or by means of shooting from a firearm, throwing of stones, noise or in any other way harasses another person will be sentenced for harassment to fines or imprisonment for up to one year.”

So from rape to non-sexual something. Actually I rather like that law – if we had it here, I could have had Jack Straw locked up for a year.

Julian tells us that the first woman accuser and prime mover had worked in the Swedish Embassy in Washington DC and had been expelled from Cuba for anti-Cuban government activity, as well as the rather different persona of being a feminist lesbian who owns lesbian night clubs.

Scott Ritter and I are well known whistleblowers subsequently accused of sexual offences. A less well known whistleblower is James Cameron, another FCO employee. Almost simultaneous with my case, a number of the sexual allegations the FCO made against Cameron were identical even in wording to those the FCO initially threw at me.

Another fascinating point about kompromat is that being cleared of the allegations – as happens in virtually every case – doesn’t help, as the blackening of reputation has taken effect. In my own case I was formerly cleared of all allegations of both misconduct and gross misconduct, except for the Kafkaesque charge of having told defence witnesses of the existence of the allegations. The allegations were officially a state secret, even though it was the government who leaked them to the tabloids.

Yet, even to this day, the FCO has refused to acknowledge in public that I was in fact cleared of all charges. This is even true of the new government. A letter I wrote for my MP to pass to William Hague, complaining that the FCO was obscuring the fact that I was cleared on all charges, received a reply from a junior Conservative minister stating that the allegations were serious and had needed to be properly investigated – but still failing to acknowledge the result of the process. Nor has there been any official revelation of who originated these “serious allegations”.

Governments operate in the blackest of ways, especially when it comes to big war money and big oil money. I can see what they are doing to Julian Assange, I know what they did to me and others (another recent example – Brigadier Janis Karpinski was framed for shoplifting). In a very real sense, it makes little difference if they murdered David Kelly or terrified him into doing it himself. Telling the truth is hazardous in today’s Western political system.


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1,895 thoughts on “Julian Assange Gets The Bog Standard Smear Technique

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  • glenn

    Good point – where are the trolls, even those who aren’t banned haven’t shown up yet!

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Glenn, well, now the goblins (there’s the screaming one with OCD, the minimalist toxic cynic and…) are back with renewed vigour and zest (if one can ascribe vigour and zest to semi-automatic zombies) on the new thread, amongst the ‘Imelda Marcos’ spambots advertising shoes and handbags. So, comrade old boy, in more ways than one, ‘The Old Man’s Back Again’ (the ‘old man’ is not Craig, btw!). Did I ever say that that passage of yours about the sky was beautifully written? It was. Ride on…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-zgdGQB4S4

  • glenn

    Suhayl: We should be gratified by their presence! That they’ve stuck here with us through thick and thin, particularly thin these past couple of months… even mbt shoes, bless them… well, it leaves me with a lump in the throat, and I’m not too proud to admit it.

    Good tune, thank you, but for some reason I thought you were going to put out a reference to this (which is what sprung to mind while watching that post-sunset scene):

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFlH9sbd7jw

    The image is eerily like that which we saw at the beginning too.

    A couple of friends (both male) could play and sing a duet on classic and acoustic guitar of this, and it couldn’t fail to bring tears to the eye. I hoped to find a better version of it for you, there are numerous examples, but I’ve not found one to match them yet. My only copy is on cassette tape. Shame they never got anywhere, they were the best twin-guitar/singer folk musicians duo I’ve ever heard.

    From an author as accomplished as yourself, I very much appreciate your comment about the sky writing. It seemed only fair to make an attempt to go as far in one direction as I had given way to in the other.

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