Read Julian Assange - WikiLeaks Online
Authors: Sophie Radermecker
Julian Assange - WikiLeaks (33 page)
At the start of 2011,
The Guardian
was not working on any project in particular. Like his American and German colleagues, Ian Katz felt that their alliance was a force. They would continue to collaborate on other projects that had nothing to do with WikiLeaks. The possibility of organizing other operations with him and the âfive' remained open, depending on what he could provide and his will to collaborate in the future.
In the ranks of the journalists involved in these three major operations, some saw Julian as a hero, albeit an imperfect one. Through their involvement, they saw in him a major historical figure that we will probably assimilate some day to a particular moment in the history of information, a man who defined his era and played a positive role. Julian is not without faults or weaknesses, but they believe he meant well.
Nick Davies was the first of these journalists to conclude an agreement with Julian. A privileged relationship was born from their meeting in June 2010. Davies thought he had concluded a gentlemen's agreement, but Assange welshed on it. Frustrated,
Nick had had enough, as he had the impression that the Australian was playing him.
Nick Davies agreed to tell us his story:
“
When we were working together, we got on well. I liked him. I thought he was clever and brave and interesting and funny. He came to stay at my home. The problem that arose was that he broke the very serious agreement, which we made in Brussels. That agreement was for WikiLeaks to provide
The Guardian
and
The New York Times
(and, added a little later,
Der Spiegel)
with a sequence of four packages of information â Afghan war logs, Iraq war logs, diplomatic cables, Guantanamo Bay prisoner files. Based on that agreement, the three news organisations invested big resources in this project â and Julian understood very well that they were doing that only because they had been guaranteed by him that they would publish first. Based on that agreement, we all did our best to keep the project secret, in order to protect it from any kind of American attack, and this involved lying to friends, family and colleagues about what we were doing. Based on that agreement, the reporters and editors who were involved trusted each other and trusted Julian. All of us were extremely shocked to discover that 48 hours before we were due to publish the Afghan war logs, he went off secretly, behind our backs, and provided the entire Afghan database to CNN, Al Jazeera and Channel 4. He also handed over information about some of the stories, which we had uncovered. This was a very serious breach of our agreement. It meant that there was a clear risk that one of these other news organisations might break
the story first â and Channel 4 certainly tried to do so. It meant that there was a massive breach of security, with a whole lot of new people informed of the project at a point when it was still vulnerable to an American attack. And, at a personal level, it was a very surprising breach of the trust, which we had placed in him. When we discovered that he had done this, we were all angry and shocked. I spoke to the investigations editor at
The Guardian
about how we should react. We agreed that we had to do something to register our disapproval.
I was under pressure to leave the project so that I could go back to working on another very big story and so I suggested that I would cut all contact with him in order to show our disapproval for what he had done. I finished the work I was doing on detainee abuse in Iraq and left the project to concentrate on other work. David Leigh took over the role of liaising with him. Julian then broke the agreement again, by bringing in Al Jazeera and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism to make TV programs of the Iraq database. David later also cut off contact with him. I think it is fair to say that he taught us all that we could not trust him. He seems to have alienated the media organizations who were most willing to support the WikiLeaks project.
”
On the five editorial boards, very few journalists changed course. Everyone preciously kept the view they shared from the beginning of their alliance with Julian. They still adhered to the man's views of attacking the culture of secrecy, having information flow freely, fighting bad governance and despotism, corruption and the abuse of power.
Ian
: My broader sense is that he thinks that there are lots of injustices out there: killing of civilians in Afghanistan to spying by U.S. diplomats to Russian corruption, which the dissemination of information will help to combat. I think that is what fires him.
As for
The New York Times,
journalists there didn't hesitate talking about its tumultuous relationship with Julian. When Executive Editor Bill Keller remembers the end of June 2010, he described a hacker who looked like a homeless guy. “I was interested. As if that were not complicated enough, the project also entailed a source who was elusive, manipulative and volatile (and ultimately openly hostile.)” When the journalist Eric Schmitt arrived in London to verify the veracity of the documents, his first impressions were promising, but the comments quickly became less flattering regarding Julian. During their first meeting, the Australian was disguised as a woman for fear of being followed: “A bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn't bathed in days.”
The three of the alliance built a database to perform targeted searches in order to better handle the documents they received from WikiLeaks. They used codes to communicate discretely on how the work was progressing. Keller explained: “Assange was always âthe source'. The latest data drop was âthe package.'” For the American, the most important thing was handling the documents. The journalistic work required making the protagonists anonymous when necessary and scrambling the data that could provide strategic information to American enemies in Afghanistan.
The New York Times
wanted to have a maximum of freedom in dealing with Julian who favored âscientific'
journalism so that the audience could form an opinion based on raw information.
The anger and the breakdown started showing between the two parties in October 2010, as Julian was annoyed by this journalistic freedom. The situation got worse when the American newspaper published a profile of Bradley Manning. “He criticized us for having psychologized Manning to the detriment of his political awakening,” Bill Keller wrote.
The reprisals came very quickly. Julian no longer wanted to share his information with
The New York Times,
but with the
Washington Post
. In November, when he provided new documents to
The Guardian
, the editorial board chose to continue its collaboration with Bill Keller. Julian was furious. The breakdown had started. “
The Guardian
seemed to have joined WikiLeaks' enemy list,” said Keller. “First for having shared documents with us, then for having taken into account the accusations of rape that Assange is facing in Sweden.”
Finally, the Editor-in-chief of
The New York Times
ensured that he was ready to oppose any attempt to prosecute Julian or the publication of these documents in the name of the freedom of expression: “We regarded Assange throughout as a source, not as a partner or collaborator, and I would hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism, but it is chilling to think that the government could prosecute WikiLeaks for disclosing secrets.”
Six months after the start of an unheard partnership, Bill Keller deplored that the founder of WikiLeaks had gone deeper into exile, between delirious paranoia and high on stardom. Julian took up position regarding this barrage of criticism. WikiLeaks tweeted: “NYTimes does another self-serving smear. Facts wrong, top to bottom. Dark day for U.S. journalism.”
The breakdown had been completed.
T
RANSPARENCY
The âStreisand effect' is an online phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide or remove information has the unintended result of substantially increasing its publicity.
In 2003, Barbra Streisand tried to sue photographer Kenneth Adelman and the site pictopia.com, a site that posted an aerial photograph of her house. Adelman stated that he had photographed beachfront properties to document coastal erosion as part of a project. Following the court case, public knowledge of the picture increased substantially with more than 420,000 visits to the site during the following month. From that point on, the phenomenon has been called the âStreisand effect.'
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks had experienced the âStreisand effect' many times: with the Julius Baer Group affair, for example. WikiLeaks leaked the names of 1,600 clients who had accounts in the Cayman Islands. The Julius Baer Group fought back by suing them and demanding that they remove the list from their website. Julian charged back and pointed fingers at those who look to encourage their secret fraud. As a result, hundreds of people relayed the information on sites and blogs to such a point that it became absurd to pull the documents from the WikiLeaks site, and so the Julius Baer Group dropped its lawsuit.
When Icelandic television wanted to broadcast a report on the Kaupthing bank explaining that they had documents to prove that the bank committed serious fraud, the station received an injunction forbidding it to broadcast the report. Instead, the station showed the WikiLeaks' website address on screen. Icelanders rushed to their computers and downloaded the compromising documents.
Assange gave talks on different shows until November 2010, claiming that he was being followed and threatened by the American government. Then the Swedish police arrested him. He cried bloody murder. Julian attracted huge amounts of interest with the media and the general public. The impact was at a maximum. He became a highly mediatized figure. He skillfully eluded the Swedish affair to deliver his message on transparency, truth, liberalization of the Internet, and his theory of conspiratorial governance, and how he proposed exposing them thanks to the technical means available to all. Citizens would control governments.
His theory on truth goes right back to the question of diplomacy missions. Since November 28, 2010, WikiLeaks has been progressively exposing its collection of 250,000 American diplomatic cables.
Handling problems without violence by properly leading negotiations between people, groups or nations was diplomacy's job. It was mediation that required keeping in mind global human values.
Journalists and politicians participated in creating a fear of rhetoric to their speeches by writing two words that didn't mix well at all: dictatorship and transparency.
How could transparency bring about any kind of dictatorship? By realizing that governments often place themselves above the law.
Secrecy was regularly presented as an essential component of governance, which was such a widely accepted principle that many journalists felt that WikiLeaks' work really went too far. A journalist's job is in fact to reveal the hidden workings of states and provide a view of reality that allows everyone to form his or her own opinion.
According to Romain Bertrand: “The efficiency of secrecy as a mode of persuasion or legitimization requires its existence to be recognized, but its content ignored.”
2
If there was one point that WikiLeaks kept repeating, it was that secrecy exists. Julian's goal was to reveal its content, but in doing so, he warned governments that they should review how they protected their most important findings. He played the court jester who warned the king of what his subjects thought when he didn't even honor his rank appropriately.
If the heads of States were the star dancers of politics, diplomats were their ballet troop. People whispered in the backstage of power, and Julian, like a little devil, tripped up those who felt divinely blessed before they went on stage. And this brought them back down to earth like the rest of us!
Here are a few diplomatic cable rumors published by
Le Monde
US diplomats said that the Russian president Dimitri
Medvedev “plays Robin to Putin's Batman.”
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is seen as
“vain and ineffective as a modern European leader.”
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is “susceptible and
authoritarian.”
Afghan President Hamid Karzai is described as “weak”
and “easily swayed.”
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe is a “crazy old man.”
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, always travels accompanied by a “voluptuous blonde” that he presents as his “Ukrainian nurse.”
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia thinks that the Pakistani President is “rotten.”
French diplomatic adviser describes Iran as a “fascist state.”
Governor of the Bank of England thinks that his Prime Minister is “shallow.”
All while classifying these half-secret correspondences, Anne Appelbaum of
Washington Post/Stale column
said that people fall from high above, they will be shocked, scandalized and even horrified with such âassessments,' describing their Head of States and realizing that diplomats âjudge' their interlocutors in a very common language like we judge our colleagues and superiors.
Who was actually uncomfortable with all of this? The authors of words like these who were supposed to be the last defenders of a chaste language and who obviously weren't anymore? The men targeted who had to face a carnival mirror? The truth hurts!
All it took to have these comments published was having them appear to be shouting the truth, which matched what we already suspected!
The leaks of WikiLeaks would probably not make a dent in American foreign policy, but they would have an impact on how diplomats worked in their respective embassies. In the past, ambassadors were the best connoisseurs of the country in which
they were posted, to such a point that they created the foreign policy of their government toward the State they were in.