JOHN F. BURNS and ALAN COWELL
The New York Times
December 1, 2010
For nearly two weeks, Interpol has been circulating a broad international call for the arrest of Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing organization, to face questioning about alleged sex crimes, Interpol said on its Web site on Wednesday.
In a statement issued from its headquarters in the French city of Lyon, the international police agency said that it had issued the call on Nov. 20, two days after Swedish prosecutors won court approval for a warrant that Interpol could circulate, and that it had only now received Sweden’s authorization to make its action public.
The whereabouts of Mr. Assange, 39, is unknown, but the sequence suggested that if he had wanted to flee Britain, his last known location, without being arrested, he might have had to do so within 48 hours of the Swedish court ruling.
The developments came as several newspapers, including The New York Times, published confidential documents obtained by WikiLeaks and made available from a mass of some 250,000 diplomatic cables from the State Department, including communications concerning American policy toward Iran, Pakistan, North Korea and many other countries.
In a message posted on Twitter, WikiLeaks said its servers at Amazon had been “ousted,” adding that its money would now be spent “to employ people in Europe.”
An hour and a half later, WikiLeaks continued the attack, saying, “If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.” WikiLeaks then posted a link to its donations page, with an appeal to “Keep WikiLeaks strong.”
Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment about any business relationship with WikiLeaks.
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent of Connecticut, said Amazon had stopped hosting the WikiLeaks site on Wednesday after being contacted by the staff of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Staff members had asked Amazon to explain its business relationship with WikiLeaks, which Senator Lieberman, the committee’s chairman, had criticized for publishing sensitive government documents.
“I wish that Amazon had taken this action earlier, based on WikiLeaks’s previous publication of classified material,” Senator Lieberman said in a statement. “The company’s decision to cut off WikiLeaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies WikiLeaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material.”
Senator Lieberman called on any other company that is hosting WikiLeaks’s Web site to stop immediately, saying that its “illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world.”
“No responsible company — whether American or foreign — should assist WikiLeaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials,” he said. “I will be asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks and what it and other Web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information.”
The Swedish prosecutor’s office said almost two weeks ago that a court in Stockholm had approved its request for the arrest of Mr. Assange to face questioning on suspicion of “rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion” — charges that he has strongly denied and that WikiLeaks has dismissed as “dirty tricks” meant to punish him for his organization’s work. Appeals by Mr. Assange to suspend the warrant have been unsuccessful.
The accusations were first made against Mr. Assange after he traveled to Sweden in mid-August and had brief relationships with two Swedish women.
According to accounts they gave to the police and friends, each had consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange that became nonconsensual. Mr. Assange has portrayed the relationships as consensual and questioned the veracity of the women’s accounts.
A spokesman for Scotland Yard said the force had received “no intelligence” that Mr. Assange, an Australian, was still in London, and that while the Interpol alert did not compel the British police to hunt for him, “if that intelligence comes in, or we have reason to believe that a person who has a Red Notice out on them is in a certain location, we will find them and extradite them as per the international rules.”
Unconfirmed reports on Wednesday, attributed to WikiLeaks associates, said Mr. Assange was staying out of sight outside London. The cellphones of two close associates of Mr. Assange seemed to be switched off, with recorded messages saying their owners were outside Britain.
A Web report by the British newspaper The Guardian, which has developed close ties with Mr. Assange in the months that The Guardian, The Times and other publications have been preparing articles based on the documents obtained by WikiLeaks, said Tuesday that Mr. Assange was “in a secret location somewhere outside London with fellow hackers and WikiLeaks enthusiasts.”
