December 29, 2010 / by emptywheel

 

Assange Alerts His Hostages

Remember how I suggested that Obama was establishing a practice of only making deals with people–whether they be Republicans or Democrats–who take hostages?

Well, Julian Assange just made it clear who his hostages are:

Top officials in several Arab countries have close links with the CIA, and many officials keep visiting US embassies in their respective countries voluntarily to establish links with this key US intelligence agency, says Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website, WikiLeaks.“These officials are spies for the US in their countries,” Assange told Al Jazeera Arabic channel in an interview yesterday.

The interviewer, Ahmed Mansour, said at the start of the interview which was a continuation of last week’s interface, that Assange had even shown him the files that contained the names of some top Arab officials with alleged links with the CIA.

[snip]

“If I am killed or detained for a long time, there are 2,000 websites ready to publish the remaining files. We have protected these websites through very safe passwords,” said Assange.

Assange’s message–on Al Jazeera, in a message directed to “the Arab Street”? If he is disappeared or killed or put away, the names of America’s stooges in the Middle East will be released on some outlet like Al Jazeera.

Given that some of those people are probably our crack oil dealers from Saudi Arabia, I can imagine how such a message might be persuasive–and might be made to be persuasive to the US government.

Mind you, we already know that the US has a long history of close ties between its clients–even with people like Saddam Hussein–and the CIA. We already knew this.

Much like we already knew this:

Some Arab countries even have torture houses where Washington regularly sends ‘suspects’ for ‘interrogation and torture’, he said.

But I would imagine Jordanians and Egyptians (in the case of our torturers) would be very interested in reading how their country tortured other Arabs at the behest of the US.

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Originally Posted @ https://www.emptywheel.net/2010/12/29/assange-alerts-his-hostages/