Posted on December 7, 2010 - by Venik
WikiLeaks US embassy cables: live updates
• Julian Assange arrested and due to appear in court
• US attorney general Eric Holder pledges to stem leaks
• Latest cables reveal US plans to defend Baltic states
• Full coverage of the WikiLeaks cables
11.54am: WikiLeaks claims the arrest is an attack on media freedom, but it is worth pointing out that one of the claimants making the sexual assault allegations has strongly denied that the charges are trumped up, saying: “The charges against Assange are of course not orchestrated by the Pentagon.”
It should also be pointed out of course that Assange strenuously denies the sex assault charges.
The New York Times reports on how the US have been going after Assange over the separate issue of the leaked cables.
Justice department prosecutors have been struggling to find a way to indict Assange since July, when WikiLeaks made public documents on the war in Afghanistan. But while it is clearly illegal for a government official with a security clearance to give a classified document to WikiLeaks, it is far from clear that it is illegal for the organisation to make it public.
The Justice department has considered trying to indict Assange under the Espionage Act, which has never been successfully used to prosecute a third-party recipient of a leak. Some lawmakers have suggested accusing WikiLeaks of receiving stolen government property, but experts said Monday that would also pose difficulties.
11.40am: Internet guru Clay Shirky has an interesting post on WikiLeaks and how America’s pursuit of the site opens it up to the charge of hypocrisy:
The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us: “You went after WikiLeaks’ domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don’t like the site. If that’s the way governments get to behave, we can live with that.”
In this context comments by Hillary Clinton (below) in a Foreign Policy article earlier this year are coming back to haunt her:
On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress. But the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognise that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it.
This challenge may be new, but our responsibility to help ensure the free exchange of ideas goes back to the birth of our republic. The words of the first amendment to the constitution [guaranteeing freedom of speech] are carved in 50 tons of Tennessee marble on the front of this building. And every generation of Americans has worked to protect the values etched in that stone.
11.28am: WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said the arrest would not derail the release of the cables. “This will not change our operation,” he told the Associated Press news agency.
ITV’s Kier Simmons , citing a court source.
The Guardian has two reporters at the court. Caroline Davies is inside and Sam Jones is waiting outside in the cold.
Court staff confirmed to Sam that Assange probably won’t appear before 2pm.
Caroline texted me this on the scene outside:
Scrum of up to 30 photographers outside Horseferry Road magistrates court. A van arrived with blacked-out windows about 10 minutes ago, but no one could see if it was Assange.
11.19am: :
Assange’s article in the Australian will be published in full at 1pm our time, an hour later than we said earlier.
11.06am: The Australian has issued a sneak preview of Assange’s op-ed piece due later today:
Mr Assange begins by saying: “In 1958, a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s the News, wrote: ‘In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.’”
It goes on to say a few more things about freedom of speech; the “dark days” of corrupt government in Queensland (where Assange was raised); the Fitzgerald inquiry; and it says much about his upbringing in a country town, “where people spoke their minds bluntly”.
It says that Australian politicians are chanting a “provably false chorus” with the US State Department of “You’ll risk lives! You’ll endanger troops!” by releasing information, and “then they say there is nothing of importance in what Wikileaks publishes. It can’t be both.”
11.02am: More details are emerging about Assange’s meeting with the police. He was accompanied by both his British lawyers, Mark Stephens and Jennifer Robinson. The plans for the meeting continued to “chop and change” to prevent the event becoming a media circus, according to sources.
Assange will release a video statement later today. WikiLeaks had threatened to issue an encryption code that would release all of the remaining cables, if Assange was arrested.
But our sources say there are no current plans to do that.
10.53am: Here’s that video with comments from Assange’s lawyers.
10.45am: A spokesman for City of Westminster magistrates court said Assange must appear before 12.30pm, unless a judge gives special permission for a later hearing.
We do not know what is happening at the moment. We have not been told. 12.30pm is the cut-off time.
If they cannot produce him before then, we will have to wait for a decision from the judge, whether he or she gives permission.
10.41am: As of last night Assange had still not been told of the full allegations against him, his lawyer Jennifer Robinson explained in a video to be published on our site soon.
10.33am: Assange has written a comment piece for the , which is due to be published in about 90 minutes’ time.
The paper’s Caroline Overington tweets:
10.30am: Here’s a statement from Metropolitan police:
Officers from the Metropolitan police extradition unit have this morning arrested Julian Assange on behalf of the Swedish authorities on suspicion of rape.
Julian Assange, 39, was arrested on a European arrest warrant by appointment at a London police station at 9.30am.
He is accused by the Swedish authorities of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape, all alleged to have been committed in August 2010.
Assange is due to appear at City of Westminster magistrates court today.
Sam Jones is on his way to the court.
10.26am: Police say Julian Assange (left) has been arrested on Swedish warrant, AP confirms.
10.18am: . It says he is expected to appear before City of Westminster magistrates court later today.
9.55am: The cyber war over WikiLeaks appears to be escalating, with supporters of the site reportedly taking revenge against the Swiss bank that froze Assange’s assets.
Operation Payback is now threatening to go after PayPal after claiming credit for shutting down the website of the Swiss bank PostFinance, Raw Story claims.
The site of the bank is currently unavailable.
On its Twitter account the group said: AND YES WE ARE FIRING NOW!!! KEEP FIRING!”
9.40am: We are hanging on every word of Mark Stephens at the moment. This is what he told PA on his way to work:
I haven’t even seen the warrant yet. We have got 10 days to do this and a lot of complex schedules to organise.
I am sure it will be announced when it happens. I have not yet spoken to the police.
Stephens declined to say where Assange is and where he expected to be arrested and interviewed.
9.28am: Assange’s lawyers have pointed out that he will not be appearing in court today, but is expected to meet police later.
My colleague Sam Jones has been talking to Assange’s lawyer Mark Stephens.
Sam emailed this note:
Seems the pre-hearing meeting with police has yet to go ahead and there will be “scheduling” discussions around the magistrates court appearance that could take days to hammer out. If and when it happens, Stephens says, they’ll give it out – or the police will leak it.
Last night Stephens told Newsnight that the arrest warrant against Assange was a “political stunt” and that his client had repeatedly offered to talk to the Swedish authorities.
It’s about time we got to the end of the day and we got some truth, justice and rule of law. Julian Assange has been the one in hot pursuit to vindicate himself to clear his good name.
He has been trying to meet with her [the Swedish prosecutor] to find out what the allegations are he has to face and also the evidence against him, which he still hasn’t seen.
9.19am: The Daily Mail’s Richard Pendlebury travelled to Enkoping in Sweden to examine the alleged sexual assault case against Julian Assange. The Mail has been portraying Assange as a international Bond villain in recent days, and there are plenty of sordid details in Pendlebury’s article. But it also examines “several puzzling flaws in prosecution case”.
He says Assange’s supporters suspect US dirty tricks:
They argue that the whole squalid affair is a sexfalla, which translates loosely from the Swedish as a ‘honeytrap’.
One thing is clear, though: Sweden’s complex rape laws are central to the story.
Using a number of sources including leaked police interviews, we can begin to piece together the sequence of events which led to Assange’s liberty being threatened by Stockholm police rather than Washington, where already one U.S. politician has called on him to executed for “spying”.
8.47am: The WikiLeaks story continues to focus on the fate of Julian Assange as much as the contents of the leaked cables.
Assange was meeting his lawyers Mark Stephens and Jennifer Robinson this morning and is expected to meet police within hours. He will release a video statement later today.
Last night Robinson said: “We have a received an arrest warrant [related to claims in Sweden]. We are negotiating a meeting with police.”
Our legal affairs correspondent Afua Hirsch explains how Assange’s legal team will fight extradition.
Robert Booth reports on how the net has tightened around Assange since WikiLeaks began publishing thousands of classified cables.
Meanwhile, the US attorney general Eric Holder said his justice department was examining ways to stem the flow of leaked cables, as PayPal and a Swiss bank took action against WikiLeaks.
Here are the headlines on the latest leaked cables.
• Secret Nato plans to defend Baltics from Russia
• Burma general considered Manchester United buyout
• Poland wants missile shield to protect against Russia
• Sudan warned to block Iranian arms bound for Gaza
• US pressured UN climate chief to bar Iranian from job
• Algeria goes from security joke to US ally in Maghreb
You can follow all the previous disclosures and reaction on our other live blogs about the cables. And for full coverage go to our US embassy cables page or follow our US embassy cable Twitter feed .
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