Julian Assange - Wikileaks: Warrior For True Part 16

The surprises continued when Julian wanted the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a British not-for-profit initiative backed by many journalists, to have access to the Iraq War Logs, which meant a delay in publishing the cables. Leigh accepted on condition that Julian would provide them with a new bunch of doc.u.ments; package three containing the famous U.S. cables. a.s.sange answered "You can have package three tonight, but you have to give me a letter signed by The Guardian's editor saying you won't publish package three until I say so." Julian got the letter.

Then a new episode started, the one where The Guardian discovered that a former WikiLeaks volunteer leaked the content of package three to Heather Brooke, an independent journalist and author who is currently fighting for freedom of information. And so David Leigh invited Brooke to join the Guardian team. He realized that by obtaining the database from a different source than Julian, the media partners didn't have to wait for the green light from Julian to publish. They shared the doc.u.ments with The New York Times and Der Spiegel, and agreed to publish on November 8, 2010.

Seven days before that date, a furious Julian went to the London offices of The Guardian with his lawyer Mark Stephens. Julian burst in like a storm to the office of Editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, and threatened him with a lawsuit.

A meeting marathon was quickly improvised. At the table, the main protagonists: Rusbridger and Leigh of The Guardian, managers of Der Spiegel and along with Mark Stephens and Julian a.s.sange, Kristin Hrafnsson was there. The atmosphere was tense. Ellison wrote in detail about this high-tension meeting: "a.s.sange was pallid and sweaty, his thin frame racked by a cough that had been plaguing him for weeks. He was also angry, and his message was simple: he would sue the newspaper if it went ahead and published stories based on the quarter of a million doc.u.ments that he had handed over to the Guardian just three months earlier...Rusbridger somehow kept all parties at the table-a process involving a great deal of coffee followed by a great deal of wine. Ultimately, he agreed to a further delay, allowing a.s.sange time to bring in other media partners, this time France's Le Monde and Spain's El Pais."

Le Monde and El Pais joined in at the end of November 2010, to launch the third wave, the one that would make the most noise, divulging 250,000 telegrams of the U.S. diplomacy network.

The road was rough, but Rusbridger didn't regret any of it: "I think given the complexity of it all, touch wood, as I speak at the moment, it is remarkable it has gone so well. Given all the tensions that were built into it, it would have been surprising to get out of it without some friction, but we negotiated it all quite well."

Ian Katz, Deputy Editor of The Guardian recalls this rough patch.

Ian: When we started this collaboration, Julian and WikiLeaks were much more inclined to dump data raw onto the Internet. That was his instinct and that's why the Afghan war logs he published caused so much trouble about exposing informers and so on. I think through the process, we increasingly convinced him. I'm not taking credit for this. I think he would agree, but it was worth mediating the material more, and that although it didn't allow you to get everything onto the Internet, it allowed you to publish in a more responsible way. That was the gist of it. She also made a big deal of the dispute that we had back in November, but that was a storm in a teacup. We had an eight-month collaboration during which we had one slightly testy encounter and we resolved it so I don't think it was a big deal.

elise: What's the situation like today?

Ian: He was very angry about the piece we ran about the Swedish s.e.x allegations. He felt that was a sort of smear operation but these doc.u.ments fell into our lap. They came to us. Imagine if we had not run the story based on them, what people would say. Imagine, all our credibility in reporting terms, would have been out the door, and people would say The Guardian just sat on these doc.u.ments because it was in bed with a.s.sange and didn't want to upset him.

The truth was, we had to run it and we gave them every opportunity to respond. We held onto that story for more than four days and his lawyers gave us written a.s.surance that he would respond the next day if we held one more day, one more day, one more day and he didn't, and they didn't. So I feel very confident that we behaved in the most decent way we could.

Julian, I think, feels that in a number of different ways, we have been hostile towards him. There really is no hostility there. It's just that he didn't like that piece. He didn't like the fact that our book t.i.tle accidentally got listed as 'The Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks.' He didn't like the Vanity Fair piece but we didn't write that. So my view is that this has been a long and extremely stressful marriage. Like all marriages it has its b.u.mpy patches, but I certainly have huge respect for him and feel that what we did together was very significant in terms of journalism, and I know that he does too, because we've talked about it. I think this sort of stuff will come out in the wash over time.

elise: How is the marriage today?

Ian: It's b.u.mpy but I wouldn't say it's terminal. To a certain extent it's inevitable that when you communicate mostly by encrypted chat and you just pick up things on Twitter or you get the wrong end of the stick-something happens and you just a.s.sume that there's a negative motive behind it, but in fact, the broad position of the newspaper about Julian a.s.sange and WikiLeaks is very positive, if you look at everything we've written about him, everything we've said in our editorials.

We think he plays a positive role and we're very supportive of what he's done, and we will continue to support him going forward in terms of the stuff that he's done that relates to us. We have to draw the line between, for instance, his Swedish legal problems and his involvement in the U.S. cable and war log leaks, in which we support him a hundred percent.

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 'five' 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 a.s.similate 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 a.s.sange 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 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 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 and Channel 4 certainly tried to do so. It meant that there was a ma.s.sive 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 doc.u.ments, 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 doc.u.ments they received from WikiLeaks. They used codes to communicate discretely on how the work was progressing. Keller explained: "a.s.sange was always 'the source'. The latest data drop was 'the package.'" For the American, the most important thing was handling the doc.u.ments. 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 'scientific' 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 doc.u.ments 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 doc.u.ments with us, then for having taken into account the accusations of rape that a.s.sange 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 doc.u.ments in the name of the freedom of expression: "We regarded a.s.sange 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.

31.

TRANSPARENCY.

The 'Streisand 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 doc.u.ment 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 'Streisand effect.'

Julian a.s.sange and WikiLeaks had experienced the 'Streisand 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 doc.u.ments 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 doc.u.ments 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 doc.u.ments.

a.s.sange 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 partic.i.p.ated 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 cla.s.sifying 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 'a.s.sessments,' describing their Head of States and realizing that diplomats 'judge' 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 emba.s.sies. In the past, amba.s.sadors 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.

In 1946 George Kennan, American advisor and diplomat in Moscow, formulated in his 'long telegram' of 8,000 words the principle of 'containment,' which inspired American foreign policy towards the Soviet Union during the entire Cold War. The goal of containment was to maintain the Soviet zone of influence at the level it had achieved in 1947 and stop any other States from adopting communism.

But in an era when information circulates in real time on the Internet, the role of emba.s.sies and diplomats was destined to decline. At a time when the threat of WikiLeaks is defined by an avalanche of doc.u.ments cla.s.sified as confidential or noforn (not for release to foreign nationals), the risk is that State departments can no longer have an honest conversation with their allies or a secret negotiation with an enemy. It will become more difficult to discuss sensitive subjects within governments.

Secrecy exists, and WikiLeaks has updated its existence. The knowledge of its content, cla.s.sified top secret will be in an even smaller circle with the danger that the most important elements are no longer even re-transcribed. A former American amba.s.sador to the Middle East explains: "If there are less and less written reports and communication, which is catastrophic when you want to reconst.i.tute what happened, the consequences will be dramatic and a situation that was already not great will deteriorate. Everyone will start pa.s.sing on information verbally to realize in the end that it will arrive completely deformed."

Many commentators claim that the memos revealed by WikiLeaks didn't contain anything new. However, amid the writing of American diplomats published to this day, there were some beauties.

In Nigeria, oil giant Sh.e.l.l bragged about having "inserted staff into all the main ministries." Pharmaceutical firm Pfizer hired investigators to find evidence of corruption against the attorney general responsible for the court case of the clinical trials of the antibiotic Trovan in Kano, Nigeria, which caused the death of several children.

By announcing to the American amba.s.sador in Paris his intention to run for president, Nicolas Sarkozy evoked the need for France to have a term "similar to that of Reagan or Thatcher." Socialists also marched into the offices of the emba.s.sy. Hillary Clinton was worried about the debt the US owes to Beijing: "How do you deal toughly with your banker?" In 2009, New Zealand had "totally re-established" its espionage relations with the United States, exposed in 1985 by the anti-nuclear policy of David Lange's government.

Here's a worldview of newspapers following the release of the diplomatic cables: The Independent, Robert Fisk London "Vast amounts of diplomatic literature prove that the mainstay of Washington's Middle East policy is alignment with Israel, that its princ.i.p.al aim is to encourage the Arabs to join the American-Israeli alliance against Iran, that the compa.s.s point of US policy over years and years is the need to tame/bully/crush/oppress/ultimately destroy the power of Iran."

Komsomolskaya Pravda Moscow "Even in their worst nightmares diplomats couldn't have imagined that the whole world would read their secret dispatches."

La Repubblica Ma.s.simo Razzi Rome "November 28, 2010 will be remembered as the day when: 1. Information became dependent on the Internet.

2. Citizens, for the first time, had access to these types of secrets that until now only history dispensed when and how it was decided by the authorities.

3. These same citizens have for the first time the opportunity to dissect numerous recent events and discover the lies of those in power.

4. As well, professional information was faced with a huge challenge and the possibility of emerging victorious."

Suddeutsche Zeitung Nicolas Richter Munich "It is a betrayal of state secrets without precedent, whose consequences are unpredictable. The Americans will see the relations they had with many countries will suffer, compromised by the arrogant judgment they made on their politicians."

Yediot Aharonot Sever Plocker Tel Aviv "It is doubtful whether in recent years Israel's foreign and defense policy received such significant backing and reinforcement as happened Sunday [November 28, 2010]."

Milliyet Can Dundar Istanbul "And what will go through the mind of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Ahmet Davutoglu when he will be confronted with Americans who consider him a "very dangerous Islamist"? WikiLeaks allows us to realize the dream of a "transparent state"... Thanks, WikiLeaks."

Kayhan Teheran "It is important to note that without the complicity of the Western media WikiLeaks would have never been able to attract the attention of internal public opinion and even less being taken seriously. Why was this information also printed in The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, El Pais and Der Spiegel if the goal wasn't to convince public opinion of the "danger" of Iran?"

Al-Quds Al-Arabi Independent pan-Arab daily published in London "Didn't the Saudi King think of the dramatic consequences of an attack? These revelations will surely not please Iran... Strong tension can be expected in the relations between Iran and its neighbors, Saudi Arabia first."

La Repubblica Giuseppe D'avanzo Rome "Here's a summary of what the confidential doc.u.ments reveal about American diplomacy broadcast on WikiLeaks: it's the Berlusconi we know, but half of the country stubbornly refused to "recognize" because most media, controlled or influenced by the Cavaliere, cannot or will not divulge anything."

The Telegraph K.P. Nayar Calcutta "Over the next months, when the last telegrams published by WikiLeaks will have been a.n.a.lyzed, it is quite certain that the offices of the Indian prime minister will issue a "top secret" message telling Indian diplomats to be prudent when dealing with their American counterparts."

El Pais Jose Ignacio Torreblanca Madrid "Most likely, WikiLeaks has hammered the final nail in the coffin of cla.s.sic diplomacy".

One must realize that every newspaper emphasized their choice and interpreted it in their own way. A new party to the truth didn't cover up the necessary filter of the traditional world press, a filter subjected to government pressure, as it was the case for the French paper Le Monde, which censored a diplomatic cable exposing prominent French politicians.3 The diplomatic cable revealed that in June 2009, four days after the death of Gabonese President Omar Bongo, a high-ranking official of the Banque des etats d'Afrique Centrale (BEAC) claimed that the Bongo clan had funneled funds close to thirty million euro to their advantage and to the advantage of French political parties. The scoop was immediately picked up by El Pais, but not by Le Monde, which preferred to say that the information was not sure enough because of a comment at the end of the cable, signed by the American amba.s.sador to Cameroon, Janet Garvey: "The US emba.s.sy was unable to a.s.sess the veracity of the allegation that French politicians benefited from BEAC's loss."

However, Le Monde 'forgot' a cable addressed to the US Secretary of State by the American Emba.s.sy in Paris (cable 07PARIS306). This doc.u.ment provided an instructive point of view of the American Emba.s.sy in Paris on French media4, among others: "17. Top French journalists are often products of the same elite schools as many French government leaders. These journalists do not necessarily regard their primary role as that of checking the power of government. Rather, many see themselves more as intellectuals, preferring to a.n.a.lyze events and influence readers rather than reporting events.

18. The private sector media in France print and broadcast continues to be dominated by a small number of conglomerates, and all French media are more regulated and subjected to political and commercial pressure than are their American counterparts. The Higher Audio-Visual Council, created in 1989, appoints the CEOs of all French public broadcasting channels and monitors their political content.

19. Internet access is growing steadily in France, especially among the younger generation, rapidly replacing traditional media. All the important television and radio channels in France have their own websites, as do the major print media. Blogs are an increasingly popular method of communication for minorities and NGOs, who use them to express opinions they do not feel are reflected in the traditional media."

"Transparency and discernment are not incompatible," wrote Sylvie Kauffmann, Executive Director of Le Monde. Apparently, Le Monde chose discernment and kept the transparency for another cable. It was independent bloggers and journalists who had accused the newspaper of omissions. And the question came back: Could we consider what Julian did as journalism? Is journalism the release of information that's rawer than the information of the mainstream press?

Jack Shafer of Slate magazine wrote, "a.s.sange bedevils the journalists who work with him because he refuses to conform to any of the roles they expect him to play. He acts like a leaking source when it suits him. He masquerades as publisher or newspaper syndicate when that's advantageous. Like a PR agent, he manipulates news organizations to maximize publicity for his 'clients,' or when moved to, he threatens to throw info-bombs like an agent provocateur. He's a wily shape-shifter who won't sit still, an unpredictable negotiator who is forever changing the terms of the deal."

Journalists were backing away from Julian despite their continued interest in publishing stories based on the cables posted by WikiLeaks.

The freedom of the press committee of the Overseas Press Club of America has declared him "not one of us." The a.s.sociated Press, which once filed legal actions on Julian's behalf, refused to comment on him.

And the National Press Club in Washington, the venue less than a year ago for a Julian a.s.sange news conference, had decided not to speak out on his behalf.