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How Much Would You Pay For British Prison Coffee?

Posted by: Linda Carbonell on September 17, 2011.

The "new" Julian Assange (make-over complements of wealthy supporters)

The “official” line is that Visa, Mastercharge and PayPal are responsible for the drastic drop-off in contributions to WikiLeaks. To help fill their bank account, WikiLeaks auctioned off lunch in London with Julian Assange. They raised less cash than Princess Bea’s hat. Anonymous says that much of its operation is aimed to punishing those who have targeted WikiLeaks. No one has changed their minds about processing payments to WikiLeaks, but Anonymous has had many of its members arrested in three countries. It appears only a miracle will solve WikiLeaks financial problems.

So, they are holding another eBay auction. This time, instead of Assange, you can buy something he has come in contact with (except those young ladies in Sweden.) Bids for a packet of British prison coffee start at $315. The coffee was “smuggled” out of prison when Assange was released in December, 2010. For a minimum bid of $6,000 you can get a laptop that was allegedly used to “prepare the cables for media partners and releases,” along with a “full set of Wikileaks Cables, the Wikileaks computer and its passwords.” It has a “buy it now” price of $552,615 as of this date. But, for maximum nostalgia purposes, the crown jewel of the collection, for a minimum bid of $947, is an “exclusive” photograph of Assange signed “Julian A., Ellingham Hall, 10 July 2011 while under house-arrest two days before high court appeal at his 40^th birthday.” It was quite a lavish party, by the way, befitting the venue’s reputation for high-end receptions. The minimum bids are actually in British Pounds Sterling, which is the reason the numbers are so unusual when rendered in Dollars U. S.

Assange and Domscheit-Berg

WikiLeaks’ problems have been snowballing since late 2009, starting with the extradition request for Assange for questioning in Sweden to complete an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct filed by two Swedish women. Assange has been fighting the extradition ever since. The more vehemently he and his attorneys insisted that his return to Sweden would just be a ruse to turn him over to the Americans for incarceration at Guantanamo or summary execution, the more people began to doubt his grip on reality. His “media partners,” The New York Times and The Guardian in particular, have published scathing accounts of working with him, as has former partner Daniel Domscheit-Berg who either quit or was dismissed depending on who is telling the story in part for his refusal to kill his girlfriend on Assange’s orders. There have been other defections of high-level members of WikiLeaks, including Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir. A “leak” (don’t you love the irony?) of WikiLeaks material led to their uncensored release of tens of thousands of United States Department of State cables which in turn led to WikiLeaks being condemned by almost every legitimate media outlet in the world. WikiLeaks was officially criticized in the past by governments for jeopardizing the lives of collaborators and sources with their releases, but the backlash for this release was overwhelming.

WikiLeaks is in deep financial difficulty. That part is indisputable. But blaming credit card processors is naive. There are more ways than payment through a credit card to get money to WikiLeaks, starting with the fact that since December, Assange has had a physical address accessible to anyone with a computer – Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, England, the home of Vaughan Smith, director of the Frontline media club and an estate that is available for rental for weddings and has a very nice website complete with mailing address, e-mail address, ability to process credit card transactions and a phone number. If someone wanted to keep their contribution secret, they would only have to use cash instead of a personal check.

Of course, the simpler way to deal with WikiLeaks financial problems is the most obvious. Assange’s wealthy supporters, like Vaughan Smith and Bianca Jagger, have spent a small fortune on his legal defense, living expenses and make-over, all to “save” him from answering questions in a criminal investigation and “protect” him from renditioning by notoriously neutral Sweden to those big, bad, homicidal American authorities who have no basis whatsoever to prosecute him anymore than they could prosecute those who received Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers. If they had just put the money into WikiLeaks and let Assange pull up his big boy pants and go back to Sweden, the company would be in the black right now.