Wikileaks – A Discussion

Gerard Henderson, Executive Director of The Sydney Institute, is also a weekly columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald. In his weekly Sydney Institute blog Media Watch Dog, Gerard Henderson has become a regular critic of Australia’s mainsteam media, in particular some of its left leaning personalities. On Wednesday 27 January 2011, Gerard Henderson joined Richard Ackland, Janet Albrechtsen and Wendy Bacon to address The Sydney Institute on the Wikileaks phenomenon.

ADDRESS TO THE SYDNEY INSTITUTE WIKILEAKS FORUM

 

Gerard Henderson

 

Julian Assange may have had a troubled youth when growing up in numerous abodes in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.  But he was certainly fortunate to have been born some four decades ago.  This, for the obvious reason.  And also due to the fact that Assange’s emergence as an adult co-incided with the Age of Narcissism, which afflicts contemporary Western society. In this sense, the times suit Mr Assange’s personality.

The ever growing cult of celebrity – combined with the emergence of the Facebook generation – has been a boon for narcissists the world over.  This explains the recent photo shoots engaged in by the WikiLeaks founder.  Fashionably unshaven for the Wall Street types who read the New York Times Magazine.  Fashionably attired – clad in white – for the leftie intelligentsia who still purchase the New Statesman.

Anyone reading either publication, who is unaware of the story, would not guess that – according to his supporters – the occasional photographic model is facing the possibility of several years in a Swedish prison and/or life incarceration in the Supermax at Colorado.

Barack Obama and Julia Gillard as the “enemy” of WikiLeaks

What is unusual, and somewhat fascinating, about this controversy concerning the right-to-know in Western democracies turns on the fact that here the argument is not between the left-inclined civil liberties lobby and such political conservatives as George W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher and John Howard.

Rather, this is a dispute on the left of traditional politics – as John Pilger made clear in his cover story in the New Statesman on 17 January 2011.  In this article, the leftist journalist accused the left-of-centre President Barack Obama’s administration of attempting “to corrupt the law and send Assange to a hell-hole prison for the rest of his life” as part of a campaign by the “imperial mafiosi” to suppress “truth”.

This is familiar Pilgerism as hyperbole.  But it is true that the political leaders who have criticised WikiLeaks are left-of-centre social democratic types – including  President Obama, his vice-president Joe Biden and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the United States along with Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her ministers Robert McClelland and Tanya Plibersek in Australia.

Foreign Affairs Minister Kevin Rudd has been inconsistent.  He told Al Jazeera on 30 November 2010 that Australia was “deadly serious” about assisting any US efforts to prosecute Julian Assange – but on 12 December 2010 appeared to change his position and essentially blamed the US’s inadequate “diplomatic communication system” for the leaks. (The Australian, 13 December 2010).

 

WikiLeaks – the ephemeral matters

In discussing the WikiLeaks phenomenon, there is need to distinguish between the ephemeral and the real.

In considering the ephemeral first, it is important to state what the WikiLeaks controversy is not about – despite the cult of (Assange) personality and all that.

▪ Mr Assange travelled to Sweden of his own volition and was subjected to an allegation of improper behaviour by a young woman who is a member of the “Brotherhood” faction of the Swedish Social Democrats – and whom he met at a left-wing function there. This has been documented by Guy Rundle in Crikey and elsewhere.  It is widely known that Sweden has the most stringent sexual misconduct laws among the Western democratic nations.

John Pilger senses a conspiracy in all this – but I don’t.  But, then, I’m not the conspiracy type. For example, I did not even see a conspiracy in the fact that – when Saigon fell to the communists in April 1975 – Mr Pilger sought the assistance of Uncle Sam, did a bunk out of South Vietnam on a US military helicopter and landed on the USS Blue Ridge where he mixed with the last CIA station chief in Saigon (see John Pilger Heroes, 1968, Chapter 17). Conspiracy?  No – just hypocrisy or in Mr Pilger’s terminology, a “graceless exit”.

▪ Sweden’s laws with respect to sexual offences are a matter for the Swedish and European judicial systems. Naomi Wolf never spoke out on this issue before allegations were made against Assange.  It is up to the judicial systems to determine whether Assange is correct in his assertion that the case against him merely turns on a situation where one-time “mutual lovers” of his “got into a tizzy” – as he described the matter to the BBC (ABC Radio AM, 22 December 2010).

▪ Contrary to the Assange/Pilger position, there is no evidence that the WikiLeaks founder is more likely to be extradited to the US if he is sent to Sweden rather than remaining in Britain. So far, no extradition request has been made by US authorities. Precedence suggests that any such request would be no more likely to succeed in Sweden than in Britain. In other words, Julian Assange is seeking to avoid extradition to Sweden because he does not want to face the possibility of charges being laid against him by Swedish authorities.

WikiLeaks – some real issues

The cult of personality – and the consequences of The Fall – aside, what are the real and lasting issues of the WikiLeaks matter?

▪ First up, despite the intentions of Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks set, the US and Australia have emerged quite well from the documents dump.  The leaks reveal that what diplomats from Western nations say in public is not dramatically different from what they say in private.  Also, captivating gossip and hearsay aside, there have been no big unexpected and earth-shattering revelations in the material released by WikiLeaks.

Reading the WikiLeaks dump, from an Australian perspective, I’m pleased that Mr Rudd is concerned about China’s military intentions and is disparaging about the restrained role played by such nations as France and Germany in Afghanistan – and I have no idea why the Opposition spokeswoman Julie Bishop would want to criticise the Foreign Minister on these matters.

▪ Nevertheless, democratic governments – like media companies and journalists – are entitled to a degree of confidentiality, even secrecy, to enhance the effectiveness of their operations.  An unintended consequence of the WikiLeaks phenomenon is likely to be increased secrecy as diplomats and politicians suppress their private views, lest their inner-thoughts are publicly revealed.

There is an unpleasant double standard here. Julian Assange is a secrecy freak who runs a secretive organisation. Yet, when asked whether it was not inconsistent for him to criticise the alleged leaking of details of the case against him by Swedish authorities, Assange replied:

We are an organisation that does not promote leaking. We are an organisation that promotes justice. (ABC Radio AM, 22 December 2010).

This is a ludicrous proposition – coming from the founder of WikiLeaks.

▪ The fact is that Julian Assange is a committed anarchist who is opposed to the current operation of Western democracies. This is evident, inter alia, in his 2006 stream-of-unconsciousness papers titled Conspiracy as Governance and State and Terrorist Conspiracies (which I quoted in my Sydney Morning Herald column on 14 December 2010).  In response, Western governments are entitled to use the law to defend democratic governance from an anarchist attack.

Mr Assange may tell John Pilger that China is the “technological enemy” but, so far, all WikiLeaks’ technological fire has been directed at the US and its allies.

▪ And then there is the most serious case against WikiLeaks and its founder – as some of Julian Assange’s one-time colleagues recognise.  Namely, Mr Assange has been indifferent to the plight of individuals who are affected – either directly or indirectly – by the dump apparently initiated by the young US serviceman Bradley Manning. (It is noticeable that not many high profile journalists and lawyers and “go-to” leftie celebrities have lined up to support Manning, who is facing the prospect of half a century in prison).

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A few examples illustrate the point.  As Raffi Khatchadourian documented in The New Yorker on 7 June 2010, Assange has posted on the web documents that included the social security numbers of US military personnel.  A couple of years ago, WikiLeaks published the results of US Army tests designed to prevent IEDs from being triggered – information which was of value to terrorists and insurgents attempting to kill or maim US servicemen and servicewomen.

Moreover, as Jonathan Foreman documents in the January 2011 issue of Commentary, Assange rejected a request from Amnesty International to consult it before releasing the names of Afghan informants on the Taliban – who subsequently became targets of the Taliban.

WikiLeaks – and the media

The media is somewhat self-obsessed.  So, there is little reason for surprise that there has been such blanket coverage of Julian Assange and all his works and all his pomps.  Initially it was of the “Blessed Julian” genre. For example, on the ABC Radio PM program on 7 December 2010 two civil libertarian lawyers were interviewed about WikiLeaks. Julian Burnside QC agreed with James Catlin who agreed with Julian Burnside QC who supported Julian Assange  – no other view was heard.

Then The Age ran three pieces on its “Comment & Debate” page on 11 December 2010 by lawyer Peter Gordon and journalists Shaun Carney and Martin Flanagan.  All either supported Mr Assange or criticised Ms Gillard – or both. In an editorial on 12 December 2010, The Sunday Age even went so far as to give credence to the conspiracy theory that there might be “some political motivation” behind the Swedish charges.

Since then more diverse views have been heard in the media – including on the ABC and in The Age. Not before time.

Conclusion – with a modest proposal

Tonight’s forum is a contribution to a debate in which there are many questions but no easy answers.  I doubt that Julian Assange will end up in the Supermax.  However, I understand why President Obama, as the elected leader of Americans, regards the WikiLeaks dump as “deplorable”.

Who knows? The support for Julian Assange may encourage some members of the Australian civil libertarian lobby to advocate the “right-to-know” for two sets of documents for which there has been no dump and where it seems to be that the system is protecting the reputation of some left-wing heroes.

I am referring to:

▪ The decision of Bob Hawke’s Labor government to pass legislation to prevent access to the papers concerning allegations against the late leftist Justice Lionel Murphy for at least 30 years – and then only at the whim of the President of the Senate and the Speaker or the House of Representatives, i.e. politicians. There is no other situation in Australia where politicians determine the right of the public to access government archives.  The legislation passed in 1986 to protect Lionel Murphy’s reputation contains severe penalties for any unauthorised disclosures. I am not aware that Mr Burnside has ever called for full disclosure with respect to the Murphy papers.

▪ The apparent decision of Paul Keating’s Labor government to withhold the files concerning espionage carried out on behalf of the communist leadership in the Soviet Union by the pro-communist left in Australia – which were made available by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, circa 1992, when he effectively defected to Britain. This has led to a situation where Australians know significantly less about Australians who spied for Joe Stalin and the Soviet Union than Americans, the British and so on know about their own home-grown spies.

Just a thought – at this time of the modern dump.

– 27 January 2011

 

POSTSCRIPT

Appearing per courtesy of the ABC TV Q&A program last night, Julian Assange – ever the narcissist – publicly accused Julia Gillard of engaging in an act of “treason” with respect to him.  Mr Assange did not say how the Prime Minister could be charged by “the Australian people” with an act of treason.  Nor did he produce any evidence to support his assertion.

Mr Assange expressed not a word of gratitude for the fact that the Australian government – per courtesy of the Australian taxpayer – has supported him with consular assistance in his current predicament.  Rather he has been a constant critic of Australia – as has Christine Assange (Julian’s mother). To Julian Assange – life is all about him.  Narcissism, narcissism – all is narcissism.

– 15 March 2011