Some rather bizarre developments here in The Netherlands. Monday there was an extensive article (PDF, dutch) about me in De Telegraaf. De Telegraaf is the newspaper with the largest circulation and it leans to the right politically. In it, they describe all the developments with the court order to Twitter.

More interestingly, the article features me as “Julian Assange’s adjudant” as well asÂ “a left-wing terror activist” with “close ties to the Chaos Computer Club who in turn had ties with RAF terrorists”. Also, the article claims that “their research shows that US intelligence has been told by a Dutch source that I was offering close to a million euros to various web hosting companies on behalf of Wikileaks.”

The article leans quite extensively on “research” done by “intelligence expert” Peter Siebelt. Siebelt wrote a book in 2005 called “The Fourth World War”, a crackpot theory of seamless continuity from Marxism to radical Islamism in which everyone left of center in this country is part of a large and well-coordinated conspiracy to introduce sharia law and make the Netherlands a caliphate. (Don’t ask me what happened to the third world war.)

Now: I did not arrange web-hosting for Wikileaks. Not now, not back in the time I was helping out. Not that I see anything terribly wrong with doing so, but I just didn’t. And I most certainly didn’t do it with “close to million euros” in my pocket. I mean: think about it… Â A million euros worth of web-hosting. I’m not sure what kind of hosting services package to imagine at 1M euro. A million euros probably gets you a sizable stake in many web hosting companies, if it doesn’t buy them outright.

Remarkable transformations happen. You go to bed having helped release a video of soldiers routinely killing people trying to save the wounded, and you wake up the next day a nefarious left-wing terror activist-adjudant secretly spending millions on web hosting. I wonder what I’ll be tomorrow.