The site indicates that -
On Wednesday the 9th of February 2011 from 6.30pm GMT people from all around the world will commence dining with their friends in a unified effort to raise awareness of the importance of freedom of speech.Visitors to the site are exhorted to -
Pledge and receive a dinner speech By Julian AssangeThey are of course not exhorted to contribute to a Bradley Manning Defence Fund.
By pledging a donation on this day, no matter how large or small, you can help support Julian's defence fund, and/or contribute to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks empowers sources to leak information (that would otherwise be silenced) to journalists.
More importantly - and much more sadly - they are not exhorted to donate to Human Rights Watch or a plethora of other organisations that have made a substantive contribution to free speech and other human rights, organisations that don't confuse the front man with those rights.
The site helpfully suggests -
Make sure you get info from your guests on any special dietary requirements. Try to balance your menu…e.g. not too much heavy carbs or cream in every course! Food that is easy to cook and serve will ensure that you are relaxed for your guests and that everyone will have a good time leaving you with plenty of time to talk.Quite so - watch out for the carbs and the cant, including cant about free speech and the persecution of St Julian. I am bemused by the site's claim of "no secret ingredients. No additives". Wikileaks, as I note in an article out this month, hasn't been transparent. Its finances are opaque. Its processes for selecting information for release are unclear. It is proudly unaccountable to anyone other than Mr Assange, a person who arguably considers that he is above the law of a liberal democratic state (ie Sweden) when that suits him.
I would be more receptive to the site's suggestion -
Preview Julian's speech before your guests arrive if you like. The speech will be available at the on this page. You can share this with your guests when everyone is seated for dinner. Help your guests join in with the interactive part of this dinner by providing a laptop at the table and allow guests to text, email and tweet between mouthfuls!if that speech was free (rather than tied to a donation), if there was a recognition of alternative views and if there was encouragement for dinner guests to engage with civil society organisations such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. Clickocracy - in which engagement is no more rigorous than a tweet to fellow true-believers and provision of a credit card number - is antithetical to free speech and to broader development of human rights in Australia and overseas.
I suggest that people eschew donations to the Julian Defence Fund and instead send money to more worthy causes ... women who are facing lapidation because of alleged proximity to a man, people facing a death sentence or long-term imprisonment for heresy, people in serious trouble because they've upset the kleptocrats in Beijing or Moscow, people in Uganda and similar regimes under threat of death because of their sexual affinity, people in Burma who disagree with the junta, people in Iran and Iraq and Egypt who are members of religious minorities ...
The Independent meanwhile reports that Assange is threatening to sue The Guardian for defamation after claims in a book published by the newspaper about its collaboration with him. He -
is believed to be upset at a claim that he initially refused to remove the names of informants mentioned in Afghan war documents, allegedly saying they would "deserve it" if they were killed as a result of the leaks.No nice dinners for them, apparently, nor adulation by the online crowd.
The Independent account continues -
Last week, the WikiLeaks Twitter account, which is understood to be written by Mr Assange, posted a message which read: "The Guardian book serialisation contains malicious libels. We will be taking action."David Green in the New Statesman was more biting, commenting that -
Guardian News & Media, the publisher of The Guardian, said it had not received any official notification of action against it by Mr Assange. A spokeswoman added: "The irony of an organisation dedicated to the free and open flow of information threatening to sue a newspaper will be lost on no one."
The wording of the Tweet is worth considering carefully:Meanwhile former Assange associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg has reportedly claimed that Assange played mindgames with Domscheit-Berg's cat -
The Guardian book serialization contains malicious libels. We will be taking action.First, the use of "we" suggests that the (presumably legal) "action" is threatened by WikiLeaks as an entity, rather than by any particular individual such as its founder Julian Assange. This suggestion is supported by the fact it was sent on the official Wikileaks Twitter feed. If this is the case, then WikiLeaks may be following the unhappy example of the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) and other organizations in making libel threats in respect of unwelcome scrutiny and comment. And, as with the BCA, such a course of action can quickly be seen as illiberal and misconceived.
Second, the alleged libels are not just your normal libels but "malicious" libels. This may be careless verbiage, but presumably this tweet was checked by a legal adviser before publication. If the invocation of "malice" was deliberate, this would be a serious (indeed defamatory) accusation against the Guardian: not only is the serialization defaming Wikileaks, it is doing so with the wrongful motive of doing damage to WikiLeaks. However, WikiLeaks has presented no evidence of such malice.
Furthermore, WikiLeaks has not even specified the alleged libels. It has instead made a bare and vague threat, the very sort of corporate attempt to deter public scrutiny which has led many to support the libel reform campaign.
But, as the founder of WikiLeaks himself recently signed the Libel Reform petition, there is the question as to whether there is a lack of consistency with this threat to bring a libel claim against the Guardian.
In any event, the use of a libel threat makes it clear that although WikiLeaks promotes transparency and openness for others, it does not really enjoy being scrutinized itself.
This basic lack of intellectual and legal consistency can be seen elsewhere. For example, it is reported that Assange believes WikiLeaks has some form of legal ownership in the confidential and secret information which it proposes to publish. This is an astonishing and legally incorrect view, especially when a great deal of that information was provided in breach of civil and criminal law. Assange even threatened to sue the Guardian on this remarkable basis.
Julian was constantly battling for dominance, even with my tomcat Herr Schmitt.Herr Schmitt supposedly sometimes managed to "dispatch Julian with a quick swipe of the paw". Nothing like the cat's eye view of history.
Ever since Julian lived with me in Wiesbaden he (the cat) has suffered from psychosis. Julian would constantly attack the animal. He would spread out his fingers like a fork and grab the cat's throat. ...
It must have been a nightmare for the tomcat.
