What Has WikiLeaks Changed?

Some friends are fervent defenders of the bold Australian, but — correct me if I am wrong — I wonder what his revelations have really changed on the international scene.

The information disclosed by Assange may be of interest if you ask yourself the right questions.

Certainly I have not read all of the cables, but at least those that I have read about Spain tend to be somewhat innocuous. Sometimes what the Spanish newspaper El País and others report highlights the stark language of diplomacy. If in Washington Vladimir Putin is considered an “alpha male,” or if they are aware of Berlusconi’s orgies, the only thing this shows is something we already knew: that there is a huge gap between the public face of politicians and what they do in their private life. In this regard WikiLeaks has been more like a gossip magazine of international diplomacy, at least in much of what has been leaked to the press.

For many, this whole affair is welcomed because it shows a sort of lack of courtesy to censorship. In this way of seeing things, democracies do not censor — only dictatorships do that — so it’s okay that a brave guy like Assange has returned to the people what belongs to them: information. This perspective is typical of leftists. For them, Assange is a “crusader for democracy” who exposes “the powerful.”

On the other hand, people on the “right,” or “conservatives,” are asking for Assange’s head on the charges of “treason.” In the U.S. few things have been more comical than the conservative defense of Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state who, in the past, was equated with Satan on earth by the Republicans. Now, after knowing that she wanted to obtain DNA, fingerprints, account numbers and other private information from UN officials, she is defended tooth and nail by those who attacked her before.

If we leave aside all these matters — i.e. that politicians lie, cheat, insult and threaten people — we have a letter from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee, published Oct. 18 and dated Aug. 16, in which Gates assures that “no intelligence source or method is compromised by these revelations.”

In sum, as far as I’m concerned, WikiLeaks is not such a big deal. The fundamental reason is that many seem not to have understood how modern powers manage “problem” information. Prisons and prohibitions in the Western world work but only in a very small percentage of cases dealing with small political/cultural groups or with certain historical ideas. On a larger scale, what really works are trivialization and ostracism, i.e. the denial of relevant information which has implications of considerable importance.

For example, these days we have seen the film “Fair Game,” directed by Doug Liman, which has not had any significant impact despite explaining things that have been verified. Even though senior Defense Department officials revealed the identity of a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame Wilson, it did not yield consequences for President Bush’s counselor and Vice President Cheney’s counselor and chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby. This betrayal, far more dangerous for U.S. Homeland Security than Assange’s disclosures, only resulted in a sentence of thirty months in prison and a fine of $250,000. The sentence was commuted by President Bush because the wife and children of Libby “would suffer a lot.” This film, although accurate in many ways, left out some important questions from the debate: Who was the group that was providing false information to the president? Why was nobody else convicted? What is the degree of involvement of this group in the current U.S. administration? What are their motives? But none of this was debated, and none of the questions obtained the relevance that they should have at their time.

Now we should listen to Judith Miller — who was involved in the Valerie Plame affair — wondering why Americans should not know that Saudi Arabia is interested in that the U.S. should bomb Iran. This question is without a doubt an opportunity to defend WikiLeaks. A much more appropriate question would be if Miller asked why, according to WikiLeaks, senior State Department officials have doubts about the truthfulness and sincerity of the Israeli predictions about the timing in which Iran obtained (or will obtain) a nuclear weapon. As is apparent from the cables revealed by Wikileaks, Israel has dated such an eventuality to the mid ‘90s and then to 1998, 1999, 2000, 2004, 2005 and, finally, 2010. New Israeli predictions set the date as 2011 or 2014. That Israel uses its “likudnik lobby”* in Washington to lobby for U.S. involvement in the Near East is no secret to anyone, but no one gives it too much importance. Nor is it a secret that the professional intelligence community in the U.S., a group that truly serves its country, is suspicious that such involvement is truly serving the national interest.

In addition, WikiLeaks has revealed that in August 2007 Meir Dagan, the head of Israeli intelligence, urged U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Nicholas Burns that the U.S. should join in an Israeli plan for “regime change” in Iran that included covert operations. (See the article “The Raw History,” by Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane, published Nov. 29). But it is not necessary to go to “Papa” Assange to know this because similar things were already revealed by The New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh in April 2006.

All these issues are already old-hat, and Wikileaks does not offer any novelties, whether it is for or against “regime change” in Iran or for or against a military escalation in the area. However, what is striking is that the press reports that, thanks to WikiLeaks, we know that Rubalcaba did not want to return De Juana Chaos back to jail** or that Moratinos and another minister covered up covert CIA stopovers in Spain. What a discovery.

The point of the matter is that the media machine gives different weight until almost equaling, for example, the revelation that Berlusconi is promiscuous or that Rubalcaba is capable of lying to 15 television channels at once with the fact that the world’s most important foreign policy is being abused by officials of a small Middle Eastern country. This “weight redistribution” is a much safer method of conducting the debate and of reallocating responsibilities — which is ultimately what any censorship wants — instead of going around prohibiting things and kidnapping.

Therefore, to get to the kernel of the mechanisms of power we must not surrender in the face of this information, nor stop asking questions, and gain a solid cultural background — something that eludes the media. If we don’t, this will lead to paths that nobody has travelled along, trails that lead to suicide and being herded like sheep.

Julian Assange is welcomed, but we should not magnify what does not deserve to be magnified. Definitively we will not let down our guard.

*Translator’s Note: Likudnik is the coalition of Israeli right-wing political parties

**Translator’s Note: Rubalcaba is the Spanish Minister of the Interior, and Inaki De Juana Chaos is a convicted ETA assassin who was allowed to serve out the rest of his prison sentence under house arrest. De Juana was close to death after to a four month hunger strike, and Minister Rubalcaba said that the decision was the correct one because it prevented De Juana from becoming a “martyr for radical ETA youth.”