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The Justice Department is reportedly considering (and may in fact have already filed) a criminal indictment against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. Now, the Daily Beast reports, the administration is asking America’s allies to do the same:

The Obama administration is pressing Britain, Germany, Australia, and other allied Western governments to consider opening criminal investigations of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and to severely limit his nomadic travels across international borders, American officials say.

Officials tell The Daily Beast that the U.S. effort reflects a growing belief that WikiLeaks and organizations like it threaten grave damage to American national security, as well as a growing suspicion in Washington that Assange has damaged his own standing with foreign governments and organizations that might otherwise be sympathetic to his anti-censorship cause.

American officials confirmed last month that the Justice Department was weighing a range of criminal charges against Assange and others as a result of the massive leaking of classified U.S. military reports from the war in Afghanistan, including potential violations of the Espionage Act by Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst in Iraq accused of providing the documents to WikiLeaks.

Now, the officials say, they want other foreign governments to consider the same sorts of criminal charges.

“It’s not just our troops that are put in jeopardy by this leaking,” said an American diplomatic official who is involved in responding to the aftermath of the release of more than 70,000 Afghanistan war logs—and WikiLeaks’ threat to reveal 15,000 more of the classified reports.

“It’s U.K. troops, it’s German troops, it’s Australian troops—all of the NATO troops and foreign forces working together in Afghanistan,” he said. Their governments, he said, should follow the lead of the Justice Department and “review whether the actions of WikiLeaks could constitute crimes under their own national-security laws.”

The idea that Assange is not a journalist, but the leader of a criminal enterprise, is gaining steam—and the noose is tightening around the WikiLeaks founder.

Image by banspy

When I visited Guantanamo Bay last September, President Obama’s order to close the facility by January 2010 was prominently displayed in the detainee recreation area for all to see. No word as to whether the order is still posted, but apparently neither the terrorists nor Obama administration officials believe that the facility is going to close anytime soon—at least if you are following the military commissions convening this week on the island.

Consider this item from this morning’s Washington Post:

A former cook for Osama bin Laden’s entourage in Afghanistan has reached an agreement with the U.S. government that will allow him to serve any sentence at a minimum security facility at Guantanamo Bay.

Come again? Serve his sentence at Gitmo? The plea agreement for the cook, Ibrahim al-Qosi, has been sealed, and the length of his sentence had not yet been revealed. Still, it is telling that the administration is now cutting deals with terrorists to let them serve out their sentences at a facility that—in theory at least—it still claims to be closing.

Image by woody1778.

In the Washington Post today, I discuss the effects of WikiLeaks’ unlawful intelligence disclosures on General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy. But the disclosures of the identities of more than 100 U.S. intelligence sources will also have impact beyond Afghanistan, undermining our efforts to defeat al Qaeda and prevent another attack on the American homeland.

As former CIA director Mike Hayden explained in my book, Courting Disaster, we have just three tools of human intelligence available to uncover and disrupt terrorist plots: Interrogation, informants, and eavesdropping.

The Obama administration has eliminated the first tool. The Washington Post reported earlier this year that there has not been one reported detention of a high-value terrorist since President Obama took office. Not one. Putting aside the question of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, the administration has simply stopped capturing and interrogating high-value terrorists using any techniques at all. Period. This is unilateral disarmament.

At least we still had the other two tools… that is, until WikiLeaks came along. Now, with the disclosure of over 100 U.S. intelligence sources in Afghanistan, our ability to recruit sources anywhere in the world has been compromised. Why would anyone step forward to cooperate with American intelligence, when WikiLeaks has publicly demonstrated that we are powerless to keep their identities secret? The damage the WikiLeaks disclosures have done to this vital human intelligence tool is immeasurable.

That leaves us with just one tool: signals intelligence. SIGINT is critical, but it cannot alone provide us with the intelligence necessary to protect the country. For one thing, the terrorists know we are monitoring their communications—so they speak in codes that we cannot decipher without either high-value detainees or human sources within al Qaeda to translate for us. And even then, the terrorists often use primitive means of communication, such as couriers, to avoid surveillance altogether. In short, signals intelligence alone cannot keep the terrorists from carrying out the next 9/11.

In other words, of the three legs of the stool that our intelligence community employs to prevent new attacks, we have now lost two. The first was knocked out voluntarily by the Obama administration. The second has just been knocked out WikiLeaks. And the danger to the American homeland has grown exponentially.

Apparently, WikiLeaks is taking seriously the threat that the U.S. government may take action against it. According to Wired magazine, WikiLeaks has posted a mysterious 1.4 GB encrypted file on its website. Entitled “Insurance,” the file is larger than all the previously released documents combined. According to Wired, no one knows what the file contains, but it appears to have been posted “in case something happens to the WikiLeaks website or to the organization’s founder, Julian Assange. In either scenario, WikiLeaks volunteers, under a prearranged agreement with Assange, could send out a password or passphrase to allow anyone who has downloaded the file to open it.”

Image by .hj barraza.

In March I wrote for the Weekly Standard about Michael Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the organization that is leading the legal crusade on behalf of al Qaeda terrorists. In addition to coordinating the work of hundreds of pro-bono lawyers representing Gitmo detainees, CCR’s direct clients include Jose Padilla, the American-born terrorist sent by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to blow up apartment buildings in a major American city; Mohammed al-Qahtani, the 20th hijacker in the 9/11 plot, who would have been on United Flight 93 had he not been turned away by immigration officials at the Orlando airport; and Majid Khan, an al Qaeda operative groomed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for suicide missions against America.

Well, the Washington Post reports today that CCR has signed up yet another big name terrorist client: Anwar al-Aulaqi, the American-born al Qaeda cleric.

Together with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), CCR has filed a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s authority to target U.S. citizens like al-Aulaqi overseas for involvement with terrorism, and claiming that the Treasury Department’s designation of al-Aulaqi as a terrorist makes it a crime to provide free legal services to defend him.

Treasury officials say this is patently untrue. The Post reports:

In a statement, OFAC [Office of Foreign Assets Control] Director Adam Szubin called the civil liberties groups’ claim significantly misleading, saying, “The Treasury Department has long had in place a general license that broadly authorizes the provision of pro bono legal services to or on behalf of designated persons such as Anwar al Aulaqi” without any requirement for a specific permit. Szubin said the general rule applies to “criminal, civil or administrative proceedings,” as well as challenges to “detention or the imposition of sanctions,” adding that to the extent the legal groups’ intended services fall outside those categories, “OFAC will work with the ACLU to ensure that the legal services can be delivered.”

So who is CCR’s new terrorist client? Writes the Post:

Stuart Levey, Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said at the time of Aulaqi’s designation that “Anwar al-Aulaqi has proven that he is extraordinarily dangerous, committed to carrying out deadly attacks on Americans and others worldwide.” He added that Aulaqi “has involved himself in every aspect of the supply chain of terrorism—fundraising for terrorist groups, recruiting and training operatives, and planning and ordering attacks on innocents”… Michael E. Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said June 30 that Aulaqi “had a direct operational role” in a failed bombing attempt against a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day carrying 290 passengers and crew. Last month, the Treasury said Aulaqi instructed alleged bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to detonate an explosive aboard a U.S. airplane, after which Abdulmutallab received the bomb from trainers with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, also based in Yemen … Aulaqi also exchanged e-mails with Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., in November, U.S. officials said.

According to Tom Joscelyn, al-Aulaqi was also involved in the 9/11 attacks:

He hosted two of the hijackers in San Diego beginning in Jan. 2000 and became, according to the Joint Inquiry, their “spiritual advisor.” When Awlaki left for Falls Church, VA, one of the two followed him there. Awlaki’s congregation then assisted both this hijacker (Hazmi) and another hijacker in their tour of the Northeast.

In other words, he has all the right qualifications to merit free legal support of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU.

Image by Jonathan McIntosh.

Newsweek reports that the Taliban has already started executing Afghans in the wake of WikiLeaks’ illegal disclosures:

Late last week, just four days after the documents were published [by WikiLeaks], death threats began arriving at the homes of key tribal elders in southern Afghanistan. And over the weekend one tribal elder, Khalifa Abdullah, who the Taliban believed had been in close contact with the Americans, was taken from his home in Monar village, in Kandahar province’s embattled Arghandab district, and executed by insurgent gunmen … The frightening combination of the Taliban spokesman’s threat, Abdullah’s death, and the spate of letters has sparked a panic among many Afghans who have worked closely with coalition forces in the past, according to a senior Taliban intelligence officer who declined to be named for security reasons … The Taliban officer claimed that the group’s English-language media department continues to actively examine the WikiLeaks material and intends to draw up lists of collaborators in each province, to add to the hit lists of local insurgent commanders.

One of the death threats was signed by a Taliban leader who had been released from Guantanamo last year by the Obama administration:

One short handwritten note, shown to Newsweek, said: “We have made a decision for your death. You have five days to leave Afghan soil. If you don’t, you don’t have the right to complain.” The screed, written on the letterhead of Mullah Mohammed Omar’s defunct Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, bore the signature of Abdul Rauf Khadim, a senior Taliban official and former inmate at the American lockup in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who had been released into—and subsequently escaped from—Kabul’s custody last year.

So let’s get this straight: WikiLeaks has effectively provided a “hit list” to a Taliban leader released from Guantanamo Bay. Yet the Left wants to keep WikiLeaks open and shut down Guantanamo Bay. We should do precisely the opposite: Shut down WikiLeaks to stop them from providing more classified information to the enemy and keep Guantanamo open to stop the terrorists held there from killing more innocent people.