Issues analysis
Is Barack Obama in bed -- so to speak -- with Julian Assange?
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Joan Swirsky, RenewAmerica analyst
December 16, 2010

The fanatical hard Left — those communists, socialists, and radicals currently in power — view anything that is bad for our country — massive Intelligence leaks, disastrous oil spills, escalating unemployment, chaos on our borders, military setbacks, et al. — as a thundering success. To them, anything that undermines the United States brings them closer to their Grand Plan of toppling Big Bad America and transforming it into the kind of totalitarian Banana Republic they never tire of glamorizing.

That's why it is clear to me that the potential damage from the Australian-born Julian Assange's release of 250,000 classified State Department and Pentagon cables on November 28 — and an equal number last July — is part not only of this Australian's wish to harm our country but also the American Left's premeditated and malevolent plan to destroy America. And let us not forget that Assange's assault began in April 2010 with nearly 80,000 documents "dumped" for public consumption, as well as another 400,000 that the Marxist Assange released in October 2010 — all of which he claims are just the tip of the iceberg.

The accountability factor

Clearly Assange is delighted that his leaks have gained international attention. And so delighted are the Russians with his anti-American raison d'être that they suggested he be rewarded with a Nobel Prize!

It is obvious that "president" Obama is pleased as well. Hence the complete lack of reaction or sanction not only from Attorney General Eric Holder, who seems never to have met a thug he didn't like, but especially from Mr. Obama himself, who to this day cannot bring himself to speak out against Assange.

In an article entitled "The lunatic who thinks he's Barack Obama," Spengler writes: "Napoleon was a lunatic who thought he was Napoleon, and the joke applies to the 44th United States president with a vengeance. What doesn't the president know, and when didn't he know it? American foreign policy turned delusional when Barack Obama took office, and the latest batch of leaks suggests that the main source of the delusion is sitting in the Oval Office."

As for Holder, writer Quin Hillyer elaborates at length in this must-read article on the AG, stating that "the Obama Department of Justice is dangerously politicized, radically leftist, racialist, lawless, and at times corrupt. The good news is that it's also often incompetent."

As author and journalist Austin Bay has written: "WikiLeaks harms the US. But the president's refusal to acknowledge the threats we face is a bigger danger." Bay calls Obama's response "weak, wrong-headed, and erratic."

"...His Secretary of State does not comprehend that America is the subject of the attack, his Department of Defense is not interested in defending us, and the president himself seems utterly indifferent to the whole affair. All of this underscores the real problem. It is not WikiLeaks that ultimately imperils our national security, but the failing Obama administration, which ignores the nature and extent of threats we face, and which is too often unwilling to act to thwart them."

Bay's comments echo those made by Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, who commented to Reuters that it is "not WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange [who is] legally liable, but rather the questionable "adequacy" of U.S. security.

Well, far be it for the man who has spent his entire tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to be at all displeased that the WikiLeaks revelations cast our country in the worst possible light. For the past 24 months, after all, he has been:

  • Apologizing for America.

  • Denying her exceptionalism.

  • Undermining our military, as reporter Arnie Rosner describes here in detail.

  • Suing Arizona for simply upholding federal immigration law.

  • Kowtowing to and cozily fist-bumping our country's enemies.

  • Being as incapable of saluting Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta at a recent White House ceremony as he has been at saluting the American flag on numerous occasions — just two examples here and here.

  • And enacting, as Ben Lieberman chillingly describes, job-killing measures in industries that are the lifeblood of our country, but that he and his fellow environmental radicals revile: oil exploration, factory manufacturing, mining, and fishing.

But all this is not surprising, as a new book by Stanley Kurtz Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism — demonstrates.

Like a rotten fish, the reaction to the whole WikiLeaks thing stinks — as they say — from the head, meaning not only Obama but also his Capo di Tutti Capi, George Soros, whose major role in the political lives of both Hillary and Obama and their historically toxic anti-American agendas has been brilliantly, rivetingly, and illuminatingly spelled out in exquisite detail in The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party, by David Horowitz and Richard Poe.

The Hillary factor

Of course our Secretary of State pretended to be outraged when in truth she and other Leftists in our government are secretly thrilled that America is made to look weak and feckless, with an incredibly incompetent Intelligence system and an indiscriminately murderous military. Her statement of "outrage" was delivered so robotically that she may as well have been telling a waiter that her tuna-melt was cold.

I'm sure that when both our allies and enemies learned that the treacherous Ms. Hillary was involved in — gasp — treachery, asking for UN personnel's telephone numbers, e-mails, credit card data and frequent-flier numbers, spewing insults at foreign dignitaries, etc., not a single eyebrow was raised in surprise.

As journalist Tyler Durden has written: "When we first heard of the latest WikiLeaks 'cablegate' fiasco, we speculated that Hillary Clinton may be forced to resign for what is rapidly becoming the biggest crisis for U.S. foreign policy since the Bay of Pigs. Let's recall that Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment under somewhat comparable circumstances."

Rich, is it not, that Hillary sat on Nixon's impeachment panel, but now this acolyte of anti-American radicals Saul Alinsky and George Soros is being accused of the same rank corruption!?

Liberal writer David Corn seems to think that Hillary's departure will be just a shade less ignominious than Nixon's. "Diplomacy is about face," he writes in the Arizona Sentinel, "and the only way for other nations to save face will be to give them Clinton's scalp. There is no way that the new WikiLeaks leaks don't leave Hillary Clinton holding the smoking gun. The time for her departure may come next week or next month, but sooner or later, the weakened and humiliated Secretary of State will have to pay."

Ironic too that the Nixon-era exposés that Woodward and Bernstein were lionized for by the Left, as well as the release of the Pentagon Papers and the Ellsberg Papers, are the same kind of exposé Assange is being vilified for. Leftists still thrill at bad news for America — only not when they're in power! Liberal hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Who benefits?

Just who exactly benefits when Hillary is thrown under the bus? Certainly Obama benefits by having a potential rival in 2012 tainted irreparably. What amazing timing that these particular leaks came so closely after the midterms, when the 2012 presidential race de facto began.

Personally, I don't believe Obama will run again, as I spelled out in my last article, "Obama Won't Run...His Work Is Done." But the leaks will keep Hill and Bill, the perpetual thorns in Obama's side (especially after Bubba stole the show in the White House last week), scrambling to re-burnish her tarnished image.

But according to Dr. Jack Wheeler, a longtime Washington insider, all the burnishing in the world won't help. Everyone "should shout Hallelujah for the enormous act of public service Assange has performed," Wheeler writes. "He has single-handedly obliterated — as in nuked — Hillary Clinton's chances for the White House. 'The greatest foreign policy disaster in U.S. history' has happened on Hillary's watch. Any chief executive would have to fire her, and Zero [Wheeler's name for Obama] needs a scapegoat in any regard. Her political career is over — finita la musica, the Clinton's music is finished. Thanks, Julian."

When you think about the magnitude of Assange's assault on America, you know two things immediately:

  1. Private Bradley Manning, the man accused of disseminating the leaks while pretending to listen to Lady Gaga, was certainly a minor cog (or perhaps scapegoat) in a much huger scenario. Manning's rank had been reduced and he was considered a potential candidate for discharge for unsatisfactory performance, but strangely retained his clearance. Was that decision made by the same "authority" who knew about but failed to report the terrorist links and jihadist rants of U.S. Army major and psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan, the Palestinian Muslim fanatic who on February 9, 2009, murdered 13 people in cold blood at Fort Hood in Texas?

  2. Suspicions that the torrent of WikiLeaks was orchestrated by the Obama government, with the generous help of a craven left-wing media, are increasingly credible. How else to explain their absolute lack of intervention? When the feds want to stop something or kill someone anywhere in the world — except for Osama bin Laden — poof! But in this case, nothing!

Again, who benefits?

  • Certainly Obama would benefit by using the leaks as a pretext to abandon our missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving the 50 million people in those countries who tasted democracy for the first time — through the ballot as well as the press — to the predatory machinations of the feudal hordes who operated with both savagery and impunity before our military campaigns introduced them to the 21st century. Clearly he hates (and is not very proficient in) foreign policy and would love those billions of dollars to help support his socialist domestic agenda.

  • Again, Obama would benefit by using Assange's abuse of the Internet to actualize his own and his henchmen's oft-stated desire to censor if not outright control Internet content, especially when it comes to voices that dispute his űber-Leftist policies. Eric Blair has spelled this out in "WikiLeaks Being Used to Justify 'Patriot Act' Legislation for Internet."

  • And yet again Obama would benefit by delivering to his overseers and puppet masters worldwide publicity for the view they all share: America is bad!

The co-conspirators

No wonder that the personal flunkies of this regime, who share its anti-American views — most egregiously the New York Times — couldn't wait to publish leaks potentially damaging to the United States.

As Pamela Geller of AtlasShrugs.com points out, Obama "ignored the whole WikiLeaks issue [but] he could only accomplish this with the tacit support and silence of the media. Once again the criminal media is providing aid and comfort to our enemies. It had to strike you as ironic that the New York Times would not publish the 13,000 Climategate emails because they were 'private emails' but they had no problem with the treason of WikiLeaks."

And as the Gawker website states: Holder said that a "criminal investigation into WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is more than just 'saber-rattling' and Justice Department officials are claiming he violated the Espionage Act. If that's true, isn't the New York Times guilty as well? If Holder really believes that the Espionage Act is a constitutional law that ought to be enforced — as opposed to a mere pretext for making Assange's life as miserable as possible — then he'd better be prepared to go after the New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El Pais, all of which published the classified cables after being granted early access and were part of a clear conspiracy with WikiLeaks to break the Espionage Act. So if it was a crime when Assange obtained the database, why wasn't it a crime when the Times did?"

Apparently, the U.S. Air Force is asking the same question, which is why this branch of our military has blocked the website of the New York Times on its computers because the paper published bits of secret diplomatic cables leaked by secret-sharing site WikiLeaks.

Here is a mere smattering of leaks the Times gleefully published:

  • The fact that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. I wrote about this here in 2005, Geller has documented this fact exhaustively, and Jim Kouri, columnist for The Examiner and Chiefs of Police executive, said that the WikiLeaks classified documents "reveal that U.S. military intelligence discovered chemical weapons labs, encountered insurgents who were specialists in the creation of toxins, and uncovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.... [A]s late as 2008, American troops continued to find WMD in the region." No other conclusion but that the Leftist media knew this but withheld it in their shameful obsession to discredit President Bush.

  • A detailed list of sites throughout the world that U.S. officials say could be vulnerable to terrorist attack.

  • Cables indicating that the U.S. leaked documents designed to pit Middle East governments against each other.

  • Secretary of State Clinton's charges that Saudi Arabia is the Number One financier of terrorist activity "worldwide."

  • Revelations that the White House sides with Islamists both in and out of power throughout the world (see "WikiLeaks Exposes White House's Conscious Support of Islamists," written by Seth Mandel).

  • Indications that Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, Bahrain's King Khalifa, the United Arab Emirates' rulers, Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, et al., all placed the threat of a nuclear Iran far ahead of the concern they had, if any, for the Israel-Palestinian issue, practically begging Obama to take military action, to no avail. Former Israeli minister and journalist on Irapundit, Yoram Ettinger, writes: "...the [WikiLeaks] documents refute Obama's fundamental assumptions...that the Palestinian issue is a root cause of Middle East turbulence and anti-Western terrorism; that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are allies of the US; that there is no Islamic terrorism since Islam promotes peace and not terrorism; that there is no Jihadist terrorism since Jihad is a process which purifies the soul; that there is no global terrorism...." Morton A. Klein, the national president of the Zionist Organization of America, says that the Obama Administration "has been cynically using the Iranian nuclear issue as a tool for extracting concessions from Israel, knowing all the while that such concessions bear no relation whatsoever to regional support for confronting Iran. These cables increase the validity of many analysts' and journalists' views [which] state that President Obama may be the most hostile president to Israel, ever."

  • Tehran's use of the Iranian Red Crescent (member of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies) to smuggle weapons and Iranian Revolutionary Guards' forces into Lebanon during the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war, and into Iraq, to fight against U.S. soldiers.

  • Evidence that North Korea is supplying Iran with advanced ballistic missile systems that could accurately hit Tel Aviv or Moscow, and is also playing a significant role in the proliferation of nuclear equipment and ballistic delivery systems in the Middle East.

  • Exposure of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as "an exceptionally dangerous" Islamist whose anti-Israel rhetoric derives from a personal, visceral hatred of Israel.

  • Obama's deception about his Middle East stance. According to Joshuapundit, citing Doug Ross: "WikiLeaks proved Obama lied repeatedly about Middle East policy." The blog reports that Obama "has a sentimental sympathy for Islam, which explains his coddling of Iran and Pakistan and his animus towards Israel.... If you feel like you may have seen this movie before, you have...in the appeasement of Hitler by Britain prior to WWII. WikiLeaks, if nothing else, revealed exactly how incompetent and dangerous Barack Obama really is." (See this video by Dick Morris, in which Clinton's former advisor explains why Obama's disgraceful abandonment of Israel could lead to a "second Holocaust.")

Jim Kouri, mentioned above, reports that this week "a new threat emerged in the world of cybersecurity: 'hacktivists' have openly launched retaliatory attacks on businesses, organizations and even governments, shutting down their websites for hours or days, in protest over actions taken against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange."

Given the clear advantage Obama stands to yield from Assange's leaks, could these attacks also have been coordinated from the White House?

The more things change...

Columnist Daniel Greenfield explains that "the WikiLeaks mess is a reminder that the enmity of the International Left did not die when the Soviet Union did. It sends the stark message that we have political enemies who are using the internet to organize their attacks in new and dangerous ways. From Soros to Assange to Chavez, the International Left is a highly active and dangerous foe, and it is working to aid Islamic terrorists...because speaking the truth out loud would be 'unhelpful' and embarrassing to the Muslim regimes whom they fear and whose favor they court."

So true, and I also agree with Vasko Kohlmayer, who has called WikiLeaks "Obama's Katrina" [and] Hillary Clinton "the Michael Brown in this affair." He goes on to write:

    Our government officials tell us that Assange's act somehow poses a threat to our national security by undermining America's foreign policy. One may as well ask: What foreign policy? The cables show something many have always known — that most so-called leaders and politicians are liars, schemers, crooks, egomaniacs, and incompetents.

    Ask yourself this: Who is the greater threat to America? Is it an Australian programmer or Barack Obama? Assange is merely a website operator. He has no backing or powers to inflict harm on this country. Obama, on the other hand, has been using the powers of his office to systematically destroy the American economy, the dollar, our standard of living, and our standing in the world. He has been stoking racial tensions. He has been taking private property of American citizens and giving it to his friends. He and his people have been destroying the values and fabric of American society faster than you can say 'bam.' In reality, it is this regime that is a menace to America.

    But above all, let us not get fooled this time around. The ruling elites will try to play on our patriotic feelings in order to save their skins. Contrary to what you will hear from this administration and its acolytes, WikiLeaks' disclosures are not a threat to America. But they are an immense threat to the current regime, because they represent a colossal indictment of its incompetence and doltishness.

Amen, Mr. Kohlmayer.

As I stated in my last article, one of the bedrock so-called principles of the Left is: If it's bad for America, it's good! Clearly these leaks are bad for America, which is why I'm firmly convinced that the regime in Washington, D.C., is behind them, or at least complicit, and that indeed Barack Obama is in bed — so to speak — with Julian Assange.

I remember in the mid-seventies hating the Supreme Court decision to allow Nazis to march through the streets of Skokie, Illinois. But I had to agree with the Court that the right of free speech (and assembly) was more important than my personal feelings. And I agree with Fox Business Network's Judge Andrew Napolitano that Assange has the same right to free speech, objectionable as it may be.

The problem with the WikiLeaks is not that they will threaten our national security. The problem is that our national security is threatened by a far worse menace, specifically by the man I consider a usurper in the White House and his rogue regime.

Writers like me hate to repeat themselves, but I have to end this article the same way I ended another fairly recent article. It is with the three words most deeply in my heart: God Save America!

© Joan Swirsky

RenewAmerica analyst Joan Swirsky also writes a column for RenewAmerica.

 

The views expressed by RenewAmerica analysts generally reflect the VALUES AND PHILOSOPHY of RenewAmerica — although each writer is responsible for the accuracy of individual pieces, and the position taken is the writer's own.
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