{"id":2181,"date":"2019-04-11T23:21:21","date_gmt":"2019-04-11T21:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.AVNER-FALK.NET\/?page_id=2181"},"modified":"2019-05-01T14:30:38","modified_gmt":"2019-05-01T12:30:38","slug":"julian-assange","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/?page_id=2181","title":{"rendered":"Julian Assange"},"content":{"rendered":"

Secrets and Lies
\n<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the factors that contributed to Hillary Clinton\u2019s defeat and to Donald Trump\u2019s election in 2016 was the \u201canti-establishment\u201d WikiLeaks<\/em>[i]<\/a> and its founder, Julian Assange,[ii]<\/a> who, for his own personal reasons, which we shall analyze below, hated Hillary Clinton with a passion, and wanted to expose her abuse of political power and to destroy Hillary. In July 2016 Assange\u2019s WikiLeaks published documents that it had probably received from Russian hackers, stolen from the Democratic National Committee,[iii]<\/a> which was trying to get Hillary elected President of the United States. In October it also published the e-mail messages of John Podesta,[iv]<\/a> a key aide to Hillary\u2019s husband, President Bill Clinton.[v]<\/a> The Russians created a parallel website called DCLeaks<\/em>, where in June 2016 a hacker named Guccifer 2.0,[vi]<\/a> allied with the Russian G.R.U.,[vii]<\/a> similarly leaked information damaging to the Democrats.<\/span><\/p>\n

All this badly damaged Hillary. One journalist wondered, \u201cWhy does it seem like WikiLeaks hates Clinton so much? Part of the explanation is ideological: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has consistently expressed a kind of leftist-sounding critique of the United States that would lead him to despise Clinton\u2019s foreign policy. That likely explains the seemingly personal antipathy that you see on, say, the group\u2019s Twitter<\/em> feed.\u201d[viii]<\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hillary as the Bad Mother<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The deeper explanation of Julian\u2019s hatred for Hillary lay in Assange\u2019s unconscious mind, where Hillary had taken the place of his \u201dbad mother.\u201d Julian had had a traumatic childhood and a troubled life. He had been born in Australia to Christine Ann Hawkins, a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. Both parents seem to haver been emotionally troubled. Julian\u2019s parents had separated before he was born, and later divorced. He did not know his biological father and did not carry his name. When he was a year old, his mother married Richard Brett Assange, an Australian actor, with whom she ran a small traveling-theater company. Brett adopted the boy Julian and gave him his last name. <\/span><\/p>\n

Christine and Brett, however, fought, separated, and divorced in 1979, when Julian was about eight years old.[ix]<\/a> Christine Ann was not a \u201cgood enough\u201d mother. She was narcissistic and could not love her son as a person separate from herself. The little Julian had unconsciously split his inner image of his mother into two: an all-good mother who loved him and took care of hum, and an all-bad mother, who hated him and whom he wanted to kill. Consciously, Julian idealized and lover his mother; in his deeper feelings, she was the \u201cbad mother\u201d he wanted to murder.<\/span><\/p>\n

After her separation from Julian\u2019s stepfather, Brett Assange, the young Christine Ann Assange became involved with a charismatic but seriously-disturbed man named Leif Meynell,[x]<\/a> also known as Leif Hamilton, a member of the \u201cThe Family,\u201d[xi]<\/a> with whom she had a son. \u201cThe Family,\u201d which was formally known as the Santiniketan Park Association, after the Indian village of Santiniketan,[xii]<\/a> founded by the father of the Indian Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore,[xiii]<\/a> or the Great White Brotherhood, was an Australian \u201cNew Age\u201d doomsday cult formed in the mid-1960s by the Australian yoga teacher Anne Hamilton-Byrne (Evelyn Edwards, born 1921), a beautiful and charismatic, but also delusional and very dangerous woman.[xiv]<\/a> There was sexual abuse of children, rape, kidnapping, and all manner of dangerous goings-on in \u201cThe Family.\u201d[xv]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

In a classic case of unconscious splitting,[xvi]<\/a> Julian Assange idealized and loved his first stepfather, Richard Brett, whom he had taken for his real father, and denigrated and hated his second one, Leif, who had \u201cusurped his place.\u201d[xvii]<\/a> Leif tried in vain to persuade the boy Julian that he was his father. When Leif became murderously enraged with his stepson, he beat Julian up: \u201cHe had this brilliant ability to insinuate himself. He punched me in the face once and my nose bled. Another time, I pulled a knife on him, told him to keep back from me; but the relationship with him wasn\u2019t about physical abuse. It was about a certain psychological power he sought to have over us.\u201d[xviii]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Before Christine Ann and Leif Meynell broke up in 1982, when Julian was eleven years old, they had a son, a step-brother to Julian. Julian\u2019s mother and stepfather often lied to him and concealed \u201cshameful family secrets\u201d from him. Julian feared that his stepfather might murder him or his mother. \u201cMy mother was in love with Leif. And I was too young to understand what sexual love was all about. I just knew that he wasn\u2019t my father and that he was a sinister presence. He tried, again and again, to make the case that I should not reject him and he had this thing with my mother and he was my brother\u2019s father and everything. But a time came when I told him I no longer accepted this deal. He had lied to us in a way that I hadn\u2019t known adults could lie<\/em>. I remember he once said all ugly people should be killed. He beat my mother from time to time, and you felt he might be capable of just about anything. I wanted him to leave, as he had promised me he would, but he denied that the conversation had ever happened<\/em>.\u201d[xix]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Julian Assange does not seem to have consciously realized that his beloved and idealized mother had lied to him as well. He unconsciously denied her painful character and idealized her. Julian had a nomadic childhood. By the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne, he had lived in over thirty Australian towns. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Basic Mistrust<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

As Julian gradually discovered his parents\u2019 secrets and lies, he became enraged, lost what little trust he had had in them, and sought to expose the lies and secrets of political leaders. In 2006 he created WikiLeaks. Four years later Assange leaked hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government military and civilian documents obtained from Bradley Manning[xx]<\/a> to the press and published them on the WikiLeaks website. After WikiLeaks released the Manning material, the U.S. authorities began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange personally, with a view to prosecuting them under the Espionage Act of 1917.<\/span><\/p>\n

Assange\u2019s compulsive need to fight lies and reveal \u201cthe truth\u201d at all costs was overwhelming. In 2010 Assange\u2019s WikiLeaks published a quarter of a million classified U.S. diplomatic cables and hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. military documents. U.S. Attorney General[xxi]<\/a> Eric Holder[xxii]<\/a> announced the existence of an active criminal investigation into Assange and WikiLeaks. Legal documents leaked over the ensuing months showed that Assange and others were being investigated by a federal grand jury[xxiii]<\/a> in the Washington, D. C. suburb of Alexandria, Virginia. An e-mail message from a Stratfor[xxiv]<\/a> employee leaked in 2012 said, \u201cWe have a sealed indictment on Assange.\u201d The U.S. government, however, denied the existence of such an indictment.<\/span><\/p>\n

Julian Assange had witnessed many traumatic scenes of sexual violence in his childhood and youth. In 2010 he was invited to Sweden, where he apparently had sexual relations with two women, who later filed complaints with the Swedish police alleging that he had raped them. The Swedish female prosecutor for this case, Marianne Ny,[xxv]<\/a> wanted to question Assange personally. Assange said he would be happy to face questioning in Britain but the Swedish prosecutor said that Swedish law prevented her from questioning him by video link or in the Swedish embassy in London. Assange was arrested by the British police and had a bail hearing at the City of Westminster Magistrates\u2019 Court in London. In 2012 the government of Ecuador gave Assange political asylum in its London embassy. He remained in that embassy for years, knowing that he would be arrested if her ever left it.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2015, under criticism from her fellow lawyers, the Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, changed her mind and agreed to interrogate Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The interrogation lasted from 2016 until 2017. It involved the British police, Swedish prosecutors, and Ecuadorian officials, and the transcripts of its sessions were published online. By this time, the Swedish statute of limitations had expired on the less serious allegations against Assange. The interrogation was about the \u201clesser-degree rape,\u201d whose statute of limitations is due to expire in 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2016, during the U.S. presidential election campaign, Assange personally attacked the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, on the WikiLeaks website: \u201cI have had years of experience in dealing with Hillary Clinton and have read thousands of her cables,\u201c he wrote. \u201cHillary lacks judgment and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism […] she certainly should not become president of the United States.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Julian Assange\u2019s attacks contributed to Hillary Clinton\u2019s election loss. Following the Republican National Convention, during an interview by Amy Goodman, Assange said that choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is like \u201cchoosing between cholera or gonorrhea.\u201d He added, \u201cPersonally, I would prefer neither.\u201d The WikiLeaks editor, Sarah Harrison, has stated that the website was not choosing which damaging publications to release, but rather releasing all the information that is available to them.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2017 the Swedish authorities dropped their sex-crimes investigation of Assange, claiming that the Ecuadorian embassy in London did not communicate reliably with Assange about their case. Mike Pompeo,[xxvi]<\/a> the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (later Donald\u2019s Trump\u2019s State Secretary), formally classified Wikileaks as \u201ca nonstate hostile intelligence service\u201d and a threat to U.S. national security.\u201d[xxvii]<\/a> Realizing the utility of her efforts, the Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, revoked Assange\u2019s arrest warrant but said that his investigation could still be resumed if he visited Sweden before August 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Martyrdom as Self-Destruction<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n

In late January 2019 Assange\u2019s WikiLeaks published a secret Vatican document showing the pope\u2019s\u00a0 personal involvement in the power struggles among the Catholic Church\u2019s cardinals.[xxviii]<\/a> Pope Francis appealed to Ecuador\u2019s president, Len\u00edn Moreno,[xxix]<\/a> and Ecuador\u2019s population was mostly Roman Catholic. Assange seemed to be in a bad mental state. He had allegedly soiled the walls of the embassy with feces. <\/span><\/p>\n

This was the straw that broke the proverbial camel\u2019s back. After almost seven years of harboring Assange in their London embassy, the Ecuadorians evicted Assange from it. President Moreno posted a video on Twitter<\/em> declaring that Assange had repeatedly \u201cviolated the provisions of the conventions on diplomatic asylum of Havana and Caracas, despite the fact that he was requested on several occasions to respect and abide by these rules, particularly the norm of not intervening in the internal affairs of other states.\u201d[xxx]<\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n

A white-haired, white-bearded, distraught Assange was dragged from the embassy by British police and arrested under a U.S. extradition warrant. He could be extradited to the U.S. to stand trial on charges of conspiracy, theft of government property and violating the U.S. Espionage Act.[xxxi]<\/a> Assange could also be extradited to Sweden to face charges of rape. <\/span><\/p>\n

Assange\u2019s lawyers, the British Liam Walker, the Australian Jennifer Robinson and the American Barry Pollack, announced that he would fight his extradition in the British courts, but the chances of his success were slim. <\/span>The British judge Julian was brought before, District Judge Michael Snow, angrily <\/span>accused Assange of taking advantage of the journalists in the courtroom to accuse previous British judges of so-called \u201cbias\u201dagainst him. <\/span><\/p>\n

Assange <\/span>had previously accused another British judge, Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot, of lack of impartiality, and his lawyer, Liam Walker, claimed that Assange had been \u201csubjected to a tribunal clearly biased\u201d against him. A clearly-angry Judge Snow told Walker that it was <\/span>unacceptable for him to air that claim in front of a \u201cpacked press gallery.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

The judge told Walker that it was grossly unfair of him to drag Ms. Arbuthnot\u2019s reputation in front of the press \u201cwhen you should have challenged it yourself [in Judge Arbuthnot\u2019s court]. <\/span>He (Mr Assange) has chosen to make accusations about a senior judge not having the courage for cross examination.\u201d The judge <\/span>described Mr Assange as displaying the \u201cbehaviour of a narcissist\u201d, and called his behaviour \u201cshameful,\u201d adding \u201c<\/span>I therefore have no hesitation to find Mr Assange guilty.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

Julian\u2019s compulsion to expose the secrets and lies of his parents, s<\/span>ymbolized in his <\/span>unconscious <\/span>mind by the authority figures of the political world, <\/span>was his undoing. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> WikiLeaks, international non-profit organization that publishes secret political, diplomatic and military information, news leaks, and classified \u201cmedia\u201d provided by anonymous sources, which had accumulated a database of ten million documents from 2006 to 2016<\/span><\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> Julian Paul Assange (Hawkins, born 1971), Australian computer programmer, founder and editor of WikiLeaks<\/em>, who came to international attention in 2010, when WikiLeaks published a series of leaked secret U.S. Government documents that helped Russia hack the U.S. election; the federal government of the U.S. launched a criminal investigation into Assange and WikiLeaks and asked allied nations for assistance; in 2018 it filed secret criminal charges against Assange<\/span><\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a> The Democratic National Committee is the governing body of the U.S. Democratic Party; the DNC coordinates political strategy to support Democratic Party candidates in local, state, and federal elections; every four years it organizes the Democratic National Convention to nominate and confirm its candidate for president and to formulate the party\u2019s platform<\/span><\/p>\n

[iv]<\/a> John David Podesta Jr. (born 1949), American Democratic political aide, White House Staff Secretary and White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations for Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1998, White House Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton from 1998 to 2001, Counselor to President Barack Obama from 2014 to 2015<\/span><\/p>\n

[v]<\/a> Philip Bump, \u201cWhat we know \u2014 and don\u2019t know \u2014 about WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and the 2016 campaign,\u201d in The Washington Post,<\/em> April 11, 2019<\/span><\/p>\n

[vi]<\/a> Guccifer 2.0 <\/em>was the online nickname of a group of Russian intelligence officers who hacked into the U.S. Democratic National Committee computers and leaked its documents to WikiLeaks<\/em>; in February 2018 the indictments by Special Counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s grand jury called Guccifer 2.0 an officer of the Russian state security organization GRU; in July 2018 Mueller\u2019s grand jury indicted twelve GRU agents for allegedly perpetrating the cyberattacks<\/span><\/p>\n

[vii]<\/a> G.R.U. was the acronym for the former Russian military intelligence agency, now the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation<\/span><\/p>\n

[viii]<\/a> Zack Beauchamp, \u201cWhy WikiLeaks hates Hillary Clinton,\u201d in Vox,<\/em> October 11, 2016<\/span><\/p>\n

[ix]<\/a> Julian Assange, Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography<\/em>, Edinburgh, Canongate Books, 2011<\/span><\/p>\n

[x]<\/a> Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, a member of the \u201cThe Family\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

[xi]<\/a> \u201cThe Family,\u201d also known as the Santiniketan Park Association and the Great White Brotherhood, Australian \u201cNew Age\u201d doomsday cult<\/span><\/p>\n

[xii]<\/a> Santiniketan (abode of peace), Indian town near Bolpur, West Bengal, seat of the Visva Bharati University, founded in 1862-1863 by the father of Rabindranath Tagore<\/span><\/p>\n

[xiii]<\/a> Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Indian Bengali poet and polymath who reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art, with contextual modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.<\/span><\/p>\n

[xiv]<\/a> Aileen Cullen, \u201cAnne Hamilton-Byrne Wiki: Facts to Know about The Family Cult Leader,\u201d in Earn the Necklace,<\/em> December 18, 2017<\/span><\/p>\n

[xv]<\/a> Chris Johnston & Rosie Jones, The Family: A powerful story of investigative journalism that reveals the legacy of a notorious cult,<\/em> Melbourne and London, Scribe Publications, 2016; U.S. Edition, The Family: the shocking true story of a notorious cult,<\/em> Scribe US, 2017<\/span><\/p>\n

[xvi]<\/a> Splitting<\/em> is the unconscious defensive psychological process underlying a person\u2019s failure to bring together the pleasant and painful qualities of his or her self, and those of others, into a cohesive, realistic whole; splitting leads to black-and-white and all-or-nothing thinking; the person thinks and feels in extremes and sees his own and other people\u2019s actions and motivations as all-good or all-bad, with no middle ground; Donald Trump is another classic case in point<\/span><\/p>\n

[xvii]<\/a> \u201cJulian Assange: \u2018We just kept moving\u2019,\u201d in The Independent,<\/em> September 22, 2011<\/span><\/p>\n

[xviii]<\/a> ibid.<\/span><\/p>\n

[xix]<\/a> ibid. (my italics)<\/span><\/p>\n

[xx]<\/a> Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning in 1987), trans-sexual American activist, politician, and former U.S. Army soldier who was convicted by a U.S. Army court-martial in 2013 of violations of the U.S. Espionage Act and other offenses, after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 classified military and diplomatic documents; in a statement the day after his sentencing, Manning said that he had had a female gender identity since childhood, that he wanted to be known as Chelsea Manning, and that he desired to begin hormone-replacement therapy; he (or she) was imprisoned from 2010 to 2017<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxi]<\/a> In the U.S. the Attorney General is the Cabinet member who heads the Department of Justice<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxii]<\/a> Eric Himpton Holder Jr. (born 1951), African-American attorney, 82nd<\/sup> Attorney General of the United States, under President Barack Obama, from 2009 to 2015, the first African American to hold the position of U.S. Attorney General<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxiii]<\/a> Under the U.S. legal system, a \u201cgrand jury\u201d is a jury empowered by law to conduct legal proceedings and investigate potential criminal conduct, and determine whether criminal charges should be brought; its is separate from and independent of the courts, and it may subpoena physical evidence or a person to testify before it<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxiv]<\/a> Stratfor (short for Strategic Forecasting), American geopolitical intelligence-gathering firm founded in 1996 in Austin, Texas, by George Friedman, who was its chairman; Chip Harmon became its president in 2018; Fred Burton is Stratfor\u2019s chief security officer.<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxv]<\/a> Inger Marianne Ny (born 1953), Swedish lawyer, jurist and state prosecutor, chief prosecutor for the Swedish government, former prosecutor at the Swedish Prosecution Authority\u2019s development center in G\u00f6teborg (Gothenburg)<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxvi]<\/a> Michael Richard (Mike) Pompeo (born 1963), American Republican businessman and politician, U.S. Secretary of State since 2018, former Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, member of the arch-conservative \u201cTea Party\u201d movement within the Republican Party<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxvii]<\/a> James McAuley, Karla Adam & Ellen Nakashima, \u201cWikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested on behalf of U.S. authorities, British police say, citing extradition warrant,\u201d in The Washington Post, <\/em>April 11, 2019<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxviii]<\/a> \u201cPope\u2019s Orders: Pope\u2019s Private Letter Reveals Early Involvement in Power Struggle,\u201d on WikiLeaks, January 30, 2019<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxix]<\/a> Len\u00edn Boltaire Moreno Garc\u00e9s (born 1953), Ecuadorian politician, President of Ecuador since 2017, former Vice President from 2007 to 2013 under President Rafael Correa<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxx]<\/a> Len\u00edn Moreno on Twitter,<\/em> April 11, 2019<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxxi]<\/a> McAuley & al., ibid.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Secrets and Lies One of the factors that contributed to Hillary Clinton\u2019s defeat and to Donald Trump\u2019s election in 2016 was the \u201canti-establishment\u201d WikiLeaks[i] and its founder, Julian Assange,[ii] who, for his own personal reasons, which we shall analyze below, hated Hillary Clinton with a passion, and wanted to expose her abuse of political power […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2181","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}