Get Off Julian Assange

The mad, hysterical witch-hunt against Julian Assange has become so widespread and vicious that it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for him. Even if we agree that the actions of WikiLeaks and its owner raise some doubts, the recent events nevertheless incite a natural rebellion and Assange himself comes across as a romantic Don Quixote fighting against the mighty of the world. And this is exactly the person he claims to be.

A week ago WikiLeaks begun to reveal 250,000 confidential reports from the U.S. embassies; since that moment the website has been paralyzed by massive hacker attacks, Amazon.com ejected it from its servers, it lost its domain “wikileaks.org,” and Paypal (a system of Internet money transfers) ceased to provide the transfer of donations for WikiLeaks. Interpol has issued an arrest warrant for Assange concerning the rapes he allegedly committed in Sweden. American politicians claim that Assange is a terrorist and that he should be hunted as ruthlessly as Osama bin Laden. Journalists are more and more keen on the idea that Assange should be simply eliminated.

Charles Krauthammer writes for The Washington Post: “Let the world see a man who can’t sleep in the same bed on consecutive nights, who fears the long arm of American justice. I’m not advocating that we bring out of retirement the KGB proxy who, on a London street, killed a Bulgarian dissident with a poisoned umbrella tip. But it would be nice if people like Assange were made to worry every time they go out in the rain.”

The White House lawyers had used an anti-espionage act passed by Congress during World War I so that they could charge him with something: “Whoever, without authorization, receives information concerning the national security of the U.S., has no right to publish such information.” A very reasonable regulation, but can it be applied to an Australian citizen, Julian Assange, residing in London? Do all the people in the entire world have to guard the secrets of the U.S. government?

The secrets of the U.S.’s government shall be guarded by the U.S.’s government. And yet, dispatches classified as “secret” are available for three million Americans — in the army, in the intelligence and in various state offices — if they simply log on to the military computer network, SIPRNET. For example, classified as “secret” was a dispatch from the embassy in Riyadh, in which diplomats reported that the Saudi king, Abdullah, encouraged America to bomb Iran. Should such information be available for three million people, including the 22-year-old Private First Class from the U.S. base near Baghdad who stole the information and passed it on to Assange, together with hundreds of thousands of other secret reports?

Actually, the fact that the secrets have only leaked out now, after several years of SIPRNET’s operation, is America’s great success and evidence of its officials and soldiers’ honesty and law-abidance. If millions of people in Poland had access to secret documents, we would’ve known the contents of the documents after a couple of hours.

However, even if we take into consideration the inhumane loyalty of the Americans, an assumption that three million people can keep a secret seems overly idealistic. This, as well as the mistaken classification of dispatches, is the core of the problem.

But it’s easier to choose Assange as the scapegoat than to admit your mistake. Interestingly, The New York Times journalists who have been publishing confidential reports since Sunday are breathing easy, while the newspaper has evidently broken the regulations of the anti-espionage act. It got the stolen state secrets from the British newspaper The Guardian which, in turn, received them from Assange. Why hasn’t anyone blocked The New York Times’s Internet page yet, and why haven’t its journalists been threatened with poisoned umbrellas?

That’s all as far as the anti-Assange witch-hunt is concerned. As for Assange himself, we agree with his critics: indeed, he must be out of his mind, but that’s why we sympathize with him even more. His main motive is not to expose the unethical secret actions of the mighty of the world; it’s the belief that all actions of a democratic country (or of any institution or organization) should be overt.

For this utopian idea he is ready to discredit the U.S.’s diplomats and to unmask the people described in reports from Iraq or Afghanistan or even to put their lives in danger (even though he himself claims that such danger is not as great as it’s claimed).

The dislike and distrust for any institutions, with their strict rules and secrets, were instilled in Julian by his eccentric mother, a vagabond theatre director who, while bringing up her son, changed her place of residence 37 times and never sent the boy to school. “I didn’t want [his] spirits broken,” she explains.

Well, it seems that Assange really is a Don Quixote. A New Yorker magazine reportage presents an Australian hacker who’s been fighting for years for “total openness” almost without any money, who’s been living at WikiLeaks’ fans’ places in various different countries of the world and who’s been using the help of equally crazy volunteers working for free. Last winter he was even forced to suspend the operation of WikiLeaks due to lack of money.

In the spring he gathered a group of enthusiasts in a small house in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, where for a couple of days — in full conspiracy, with drawn curtains, even without the Internet — they were preparing the first great WikiLeaks’ bombshell: a film stolen from the U.S. army, which was shot from a helicopter flying over Baghdad; the helicopter’s crew quite rashly thought that all the people below them were rebels and liquidated them.

Assange, watching the film frame by frame and adding commentaries, was so engaged in the task that he asked his friends to cut his hair as he didn’t want to lose time going to a hairdresser. “I know it all seems amateurish,” he laughed.* A couple of months later this group of loony enthusiasts shook the world.

Now they’re a bit like Bonnie and Clyde, the romantic characters from the famous film by Arthur Penn, ruthlessly hunted by the police from several states in America. Most spectators are on their side, not the police’s, even though Bonnie and Clyde robbed banks and even shot a couple of people.

*Editor’s Note: Quote could not be verified.