By Chris Floyd 
Here it comes: with the bizarre "rape-no rape" charges against Julian Assange, the War Machine’s assault against Wikileaks has now begun in earnest.
These days, the powers-that-be don’t go straight to the shiv in the back or the poison in the drink or the faked suicide or the tragic car accident on a dark road; no, today we are a bit more circumspect in taking down high-profile irritants of empire. The modern way is to begin the takedown with a smear campaign — preferably some sort of ""moral turpitude" to sully their public image and discredit their entire cause.
And so on late Friday we had the announcement that Swedish authorities had issued an arrest warrant for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on charges of rape and molestation. This was followed a few hours later — after Wikileaks mounted a ferocious defense against the charges, and promised to carry on with its work regardless — by a sudden decision to withdraw the warrant, with officials now saying the rape charge was unfounded — although they said nothing about the lesser charge of molestation, leaving that vague but resonant charge hanging in the air for the moment.
This rigmarole is about as blatant a smear as can be imagined, coming as it does just after the Obama Administration has been caught out in an outright lie about Wikileaks attempts to redact its next release of classified war documents to ensure that no Afghans named in the papers will be put at risk. Not only has the Peace Laureate’s minions been lying about Wikileaks’ earnest efforts in the regard, but this deceit has been actively abetted by the New York Times, whose own reporter passed along Wikileaks’ offer to the Pentagon — then publicly dismissed the claim that Wikileaks had made the good-faith offer. (Glenn Greenwald has the story on this egregious — if depressingly standard — malefaction by the imperial servitors in the media.)
Wikileaks made the offer to ward off the criticism it received after the last release; i.e., that it had "blood on its hands" because Afghan insurgents would strike at any Afghans named in the documents as cooperating with the occupation forces. This "blood libel" was trumpeted all over the media by Obama officials — while their own hands were absolutely pouring with the blood of innocent Afghans murdered at their command.
But this initial blood libel — belched forth by such longtime butchers as Obama’s favorite Bush Family factotum, Bob Gates — did not really take hold. The revelations continued to pour forth from the 92,000 documents unveiled by Wikileaks last month — such as this remarkable story by Pratap Chatterjee at TomDispatch, detailing the operations of the American death squad, Task Force 373, whose existence was revealed in the Wikileaks trove. These professional assassins are a key element of the Peace Laureate’s strategy in Afghanistan — and an example of a large-scale trend in the War Machine’s ever-evolving "philosophy" of Terror War.
Indeed, many of the proponents of Obama’s "surge" in assassination liken it — favorably! — to the murderous Phoenix Program in Vietnam directed by the CIA, which killed at least 20,000 people, by the Agency’s own admission. (Other, more independent examinations put the true death count of those slaughtered in these non-combat, "extrajudicial killings" at in the range of 40,000 to 70,000. For more on the Phoenix Program, and on Obama’s grand "continuity" with imperial atrocities past, see here.) As Chatterjee notes:
There are quite a few outspoken supporters of the “capture/kill” doctrine. Columbia University Professor Austin Long is one academic who has jumped on the F3EA bandwagon. Noting its similarity to the Phoenix assassination program, responsible for tens of thousands of deaths during the U.S. war in Vietnam (which he defends), he has called for a shrinking of the U.S. military “footprint” in Afghanistan to 13,000 Special Forces troops who would focus exclusively on counter-terrorism, particularly assassination operations. “Phoenix suggests that intelligence coordination and the integration of intelligence with an action arm can have a powerful effect on even extremely large and capable armed groups,” he and his co-author William Rosenau wrote in a July 2009 Rand Institute monograph entitled” “The Phoenix Program and Contemporary Counterinsurgency.”
Others are even more aggressively inclined. Lieutenant George Crawford, who retired from the position of “lead strategist” for the Special Forces Command to go work for Archimedes Global, Inc., a Washington consulting firm, has suggested that F3EA be replaced by one term: “Manhunting.” In a monograph published by the Joint Special Operations University in September 2009, “Manhunting: Counter-Network Organization for Irregular Warfare,” Crawford spells out “how to best address the responsibility to develop manhunting as a capability for American national security.”
And these are the moral paragons who have now turned their machinery of lies and smears against Wikileaks. For make no mistake; although the rape charges were manufactured in Sweden — which, incidentally, is where some of Wikileaks’ servers are located — they emanate from the proud deathlords in Washington.
But although this first foray has been rebuffed, it is certain that what we are seeing is the beginning of a concerted effort to destroy Assange as a public figure and thereby discredit the work of Wikileaks — and by extension, the truth of its revelations.
And smearing, of course, is just the first step. If that doesn’t work … well, the avowed and openly proclaimed proponents of assassination certainly have other, more "prejudicial" methods at their disposal, nicht war?