Julian Assange - WikiLeaks (10 page)

Many discussions on the Internet questioned her actions. In fact, she became associated with a friend, Chris Gemmel-Smith, a man who owns a textile business that he proudly calls
100% Aussie
. For the occasion he created a T-shirt with
Uncovered Meat
printed on it. Internet users and bloggers debated the commercial approach of this bikini march for Chris Gemmel-Smith. They ended up calling Christine's opinions simplistic and populist, blowing the affair out of proportion.

The movement on the Internet ended in conspiratorial unrest. A local nationalist leader decided to support the action and an upset and tired Christine announced that the demonstration was cancelled, scared of being taken over by right-wing activists.

Julian supported his mother in her action by creating a website for her and promoting it on his blog.

Christine had always shared with Julian her desire for individual freedom and aversion against reductive and legislative systems. And like Julian, she was quick to commit with fervor actions and words at the risk of sometimes being misinterpreted or accused of dubious alliances.

However, like Julian, she tended to be clumsy in her defense, protecting her private life above all, which only added to the mystery surrounding her.

During this smear campaign, she declared that she didn't want to talk about herself, that she was just a grandmother, that she didn't have any links to any party. It was this mystery that evoked all the theories, even attributing a second degree of relationship with Miss Universe 2004, Jennifer Hawkins.

Christine seemed to be a woman with simplistic ideas and humanist convictions. For many years she's run a
papier-mâché
puppet theater with puppets she makes herself and fills the faces of hundreds of Australian school children with joy.

Christine likes children and strongly believes in their ability to change the world. In fact, she defines her art as a quality show for children aimed at a far-sighted audience. It was with these values that she raised her children and she has absolute confidence in their choices. In London, in December 2010, she declared that she wanted to hold her son in her arms: “I'm reacting as any mother would... He's my son and I love him.”

Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor of the Nixon administration, called him “The most dangerous man in America.” It was 1971 and the man he was talking about was Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst he once collaborated with.

It was the ‘Pentagon Papers' affair that would propel Ellsberg to the forefront and light the fuse that would help blow up the Nixon administration.

That year Daniel Ellsberg was just forty years old and working for the RAND Corporation since 1959, defining the military strategy of the US armed forces at the time. He was an intelligent man with a sharp ability to synthesize, demonstrating his allegiance to his country by joining the Marine Corps at age twenty-three as a platoon leader for two years. After a first stint at the RAND Corporation dealing with nuclear strategy, this ardent patriot and anti-communist worked for the Pentagon on the team of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara for one year. He became one of the most appreciated tactical analysts of the Cold War and Vietnam War the ultimate civil service grade of GS-18, equivalent to a Major General, which he obtained at age thirty-three.

Not content with just sticking to theory, Daniel Ellsberg transferred to Vietnam in 1965 and served in the US Embassy in Saigon where he evaluated methods of pacification on the front lines for General Edward Lansdale who appreciated him for his democratic commitment. However, his patriotism and military training pushed Ellsberg to participate in several combat operations, despite the reticence of his superior who wanted to get closer to the Vietnamese instead of fighting them. He would deploy an astonishing fury fighting
Charlie
¹⁴
.

By being there and mingling with the population, he understood that the process of pacification would not work without involving the Vietnamese themselves.

Back in 1967 at the RAND Corporation, Ellsberg worked on the conduct of the South Vietnamese conflict within the McNamara Study Group. It was thanks to his high-level security clearance and mission that he had access to the most secret documentation on the subject. It dawned on him that a large number of his analyses, carried out all these years for the US armed forces, could be used for much less pacifistic and culturally respectful ends than he had imagined during his tour in Vietnam. His mind raced, plagued by doubt and bitterness, and moved closer to pacifistic events.

In 1969, while attending a conference of the War Resisters League, he had an epiphany. He listened to a young man proudly claim that he would soon go to prison for desertion and draft resistance. The decision to deliberately go to prison for a cause he felt was just, shocked Ellsberg to the point where he admitted:

There was no question in my mind that my government was involved in an unjust war that was going to continue and get larger. Thousands of young men were dying each year. I left the auditorium and found a deserted men's room. I sat on the floor
and cried for over an hour, just sobbing. The only time in my life I've reacted to something like that.

This emotional experience pushed him to be more critical of this work, trying to understand possible hidden agendas. Very quickly he understood Kissinger's peace plan: Put pressure on Hanoi through the USSR and China, and annihilate Cambodia by bombing it instead of negotiating with the French. He was disgusted. From that moment on, he compiled an entire file to try and revert the process, but Kissinger couldn't be bothered to even look at it. This file contained seven thousand pages and described the confidential analyses and decisions taken during the Vietnam War, known under the name ‘Pentagon Papers.' He decided to expose it in the open and said about it: “I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.”

This decision was not easy to make for a man whose Harvard economics dissertation introduced a new theory in decision theory, known today as the Ellsberg paradox: When people have to choose between two options, the majority opt for the one whose law of probability is known.

Ellsberg certainly didn't try to calculate the success or failure probabilities of his decision; he acted with conviction and responsibility. However, the first leaks were a lot of work. After having photocopied all the documents taken out every night from his office, with his children and his friend and colleague Anthony Russo, he would submit the file to anti-war Senator, J. William Fulbright. Fulbright didn't see this as an efficient enough tool to stop the conflict, and therefore didn't do anything. It was
November 1969. He tried many political and parliamentary leads for more than a year without finding a single person willing to support him. Later he wrote:

He then met Senator George McGovern who suggested he go to the press, more specifically
The New York Times
.

On Sunday June 13, 1971, the paper published its first article. It was six pages long, and the stories and revelations abound:

Ben Bradlee of
The Washington Post
was too scared to break the story when Ellsberg went to see him. But once
The New York Times
was attacked by the government, the paper made sure they published the information. The gears were in motion and the Nixon administration couldn't prevent the publishing of the articles, one after the other. Many newspapers published the information –
Boston Globe
,
Los Angeles Times
,
Chicago Sun Times
,
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
– always fed by Ellsberg who chopped up his leaks from a safe house where he hid for thirteen days. Such a mobilization around the First Amendment
of the Constitution was a true declaration of independence of the American press with regards to the government.

The order of the Supreme Court, who would establish that national security did not justify censorship in this case, would be the founder of the freedom of the press in the United States.

The only solution left to stop this effusion was to attack the man. Track him down, stop him, and discredit him to lessen the impact of this scandal.

A secret team was set up from the White House with a free hand to find anything to discredit Ellsberg. They broke into his shrink's office to steal his file and failed. The team, called the ‘White House Plumbers,' would be the same people who would break into the Watergate building a year later, with consequences everyone would learn about.

On June 28, 1971, Ellsberg finally gave himself up at the Attorney General's Office in Boston. He and his friend Anthony Russo were charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 of spying, theft and conspiracy against the State, risking a total sentence of 115 years!

It was only after the court case on May 11, 1973 that all charges were dropped against Ellsberg, following the discovery of many illegal actions carried out by the government in this matter. Aside from the failed theft, there was evidence of illegal wiretapping, as well as an attempt to bribe the judge by offering him a job as the director of the FBI. Gordon Liddy's memoirs, himself chief of the ‘White House Plumbers,' tell of certain other operations that had been thought up like putting LSD in Ellsberg's soup during a charity dinner so that when he would give his speech, he'd sound incoherent, a sign of psychological weakness or hard drug addiction.

Ellsberg continued his activism by participating in articles, books, conferences, and televised debates. He fervently opposed the policies of George W. Bush, going as far as being arrested in 2005 for too strong a demonstration protest against the war in Iraq. He also called upon all the informants in power to leak government plans on invading Iran. He still believed that leaking information was the best way to access the truth. In fact, he defended whistleblowers many times. In 2003, for example, he spoke up when a female employee of a British intelligence agency was suspected of having leaked a top secret diplomatic memo to the press mentioning plans from the National Security Agency to spy on UN delegates in the scope of a new resolution on Iraq.

These are the words of Bradley Manning, US army intelligence analyst who disclosed several documents to WikiLeaks. They echo what Daniel Ellsberg declared back in 1971 word for word.

At the time, Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg didn't know each other personally and had yet to meet, however, Daniel personified Julian's mentor. Julian very much admired his courage, rigor and righteousness. His actions had served as an example and encouraged him to go down this path. Ellsberg succeeded in getting media coverage for his story, giving him notoriety that made him a respected man today among modern American thinkers. And being heard was one of Julian's goals as well.

However, in December 2006, Ellsberg did not answer Julian's call, asking him to be part of the advisory board of the new
organization, as he only saw a technical means without any real implication or democratic commitment. He didn't really discern the human stories behind this technological facade.

Of course, if Ellsberg had had these means for the ‘Pentagon Papers,' he wouldn't have spent nights photocopying, he wouldn't have had to arrange secret meetings to hand over documents and his partners wouldn't have lost time traveling across the country to give to the press an entire case of files to weed through.

Julian claimed that he could produce one ‘Pentagon Papers' a week, echoing the hopes Ellsberg had once expressed. The tribute was nice, but he was not the congratulatory type. All of this just seemed like a question of means to him. Where were the real motivations of this new organization? Who were the people behind it?

And so Ellsberg waited and observed this website delivering bombs of information little by little and becoming ever so loud. At the beginning, he thought the leaks of WikiLeaks represented ‘low-level' information, too raw to cause radical change. When he was asked to compare the
War Logs
¹⁵
to his own ‘Pentagon Papers,' he regretted that these leaks were just military notes written up in the field, like those he had written when he was in Vietnam. Nevertheless, he noted that these documents show the similarity between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War.

Everything changed from the moment when the WikiLeaks adventure showed its human face. Ellsberg started to come out of woodwork when the
Collateral Murder
video was broadcast-Julian spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks for the first time. Some critics, like John Young, would say that it was only when visibility would become really hyped that Daniel Ellsberg would come out to play. However, he did demonstrate his solidarity with

WikiLeaks when he recognized Bradley Manning as the insider that he was in 1969, scared by his association with the atrocities committed by his army and government. He started getting loud when he recognized Julian as the warrior he was in 1971, plagued by accusations and a discredited campaign: “Every attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the ‘Pentagon Papers' at the time.”