Saturday, April 13, 2019
Malodorous Assange
Recently, the unlikable Julian Assange was arrested by British authorities when Ecuador rescinded his asylum privileges at their London embassy. The immediate reason for arrest is that he jumped bail on the Swedish charges of rape which have since been dropped. The ultimate reason is no doubt the US call for extradition on charges of assisting Private Manning in penetrating the computer system beyond then his level of clearance. Of course, the MSM is full of stories of his odd behaviour in the Embassy. Also, he probably is a poor excuse for a journalist. Dumping loads of data is not exactly skilled journalism, though that's what the WP did with the Pentagon Papers. Also, the raw data may have exposed our Afghan collaborators. Wikileaks is not very balanced. It goes after the American Empire while ignoring the Russian and Chinese Empires. It dumped Democratic emails while we would all like to see Trump's tax returns. Nevertheless, I wish to follow this closely and I could very well support Assange if this is merely an opportunity to weaken the free press. God knows, and Tom Blackburn, too, that journalism is not in the best of shape. And neither is our democracy.
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I can't help but think the guy is a little nutty. Make that a lot nutty. It doesn't make sense to treat your hosts who are giving you asylum badly. Sounds like he was the world's worst house guest. Dumping data was apparently not the only thing he dumped.
ReplyDeleteNow it looks like the Brits are not anxious to turn him over to the US. Jeremy Corbyn says its because of allegations of civilian deaths caused by Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq. Almost certainly a curdled relationship between the UK and the US in the days of Trump (are we tired of winning yet?) is playing a part.
On top of everything else, the Swedes want to reopen the rape case.
I wonder what kind of childhood Assange had. All of this is taking me back to the days of: "Yeah, but if they can censor Larry Flynt today, they will be censoring the New York Times tomorrow." And it is true that most of the blows struck in favor of a freer press and your right to know what your government is doing were struck by people you wouldn't invite over for dinner.
ReplyDeleteStanley, you bring up the Pentagon Papers, which were leaked to the New York Times first. The Washington Post got them because a reporter, Ben Badekian, figured out who gave them to The Times and asked him for them. Both papers did not just dump everything they had. There was editing, and The Times said from the start that they were withholding a small amount of material because, in their judgment, it could hurt the national interest. The Times also said that some of the "secret" stuff they were being sued for printing was simply copies of stories The Times had run in earlier years. The government has always classified way more than needs to be classified because the flunkies wielding the stamps won't be fired for what they classify but could be fired for what they don't. And, besides, what we don't know won't hurt the incumbents.
There are some specific differences between the Times (and Post) printing what Daniel Ellsberg gave them and Assange printing what Chelsea Manning gave him. No. 1, the newspapers edited their material, so decisions were made and people had responsibility for the decisions; Assange just dumped his, which is sort of tossing lighted matches around willy-nilly and hoping the campfire starts before the forest catches fire. No. 2, the papers had property of value at risk, not just a main frame (if Assange even has that). No. 3, the newspapers would be back on the news stands the next day and hoping to sell newspapers, while Assange had no long-term commitments to readers, advertisers, employees and (yeah, really) the public.
Back in the day we could say, "Yeah, Flynt is a pig, but as Justice Hugo Black says, 'When the First Amendment says Congress can make "no law abridging freedom of speech, or of the press, 'no law' means no law." Now, though, anybody with a laptop can claim to be the press, and some of the claimants do intentionally work against the public. The First Amendment is not a suicide pact.
If the amendment has to be bent, possibly through a more restrictive definition of "press," though, one would hope for someone more responsible than this petty and vituperative administration to be running the show. It needs to be done with finesse, which is a word not in the vocabulary of our leader or his favorite flunkies.
"I wonder what kind of childhood Assange had." From the Wikipedia article about him, pretty bad. I could almost feel sorry for him if he didn't behave like such a jerk.
DeleteMy sense is that Assange is sociopathic thrill-seeker who has no interest in what he's dredging up as long as it involves private or classified that will garner attention.
ReplyDeleteAssange's repellant personality aside, the enterprise itself used graphic cartoons that accompany its releases (a data dump from Turkey shows a potentate on a flying carpet) that do not bespeak a Serious News Effort.
Wikileaks still lists major news outlets on its Partners pagepage, including the WSJ, WaPo, and NYT. https://wikileaks.org/-Partners-.html
Exactly what a partner is is unclear.
Though Wikileaks purports to do news and analysis, they really don't; they just turn big info dumps into searchable databases, your job to comb through it to see what it means.
There are also statements on their News page that protest they're not after anyone in particular, just that they get more info on some people than others. That suggests to me that they're just publishing what ever they're brought, but there is no editorial policy that sifts through this stuff and tries to balance it.
As to whether Wikileaks targets some regimes more than other, I did a quick search for GRU and got 4,000+ results. A search for CIA yielded 130,000 results. What that might mean, if anything, is up for interpretation.
I'd be interested in what others notice after playing around on the site.
FYI: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/article229185929.html
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