The WikiLeaks that Many Know

With the release of the third installment of secret documents regarding the foreign relations and military operations of the United States of America and other countries, the founder of the site WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has shaken the structure of the world order. The 39-year-old Australian, a well-known activist in the field of informatics and Internet piracy who was previously driven by an anarchist ideology, almost surpasses Osama bin Laden regarding the likelihood of his transformation into one of America’s Most Wanted People. In this context, the timing of the issuance of the arrest warrant for Assange seems significant. This warrant was issued by Interpol at the request of the Swedish government for his alleged involvement in sexual assault; it is an allegation of a political nature.

As a result of this attention-diverting maneuver, the picture of this journalist trying to warn the world has turned into a picture of a journalist under an investigation that binds him in silence and uses any viable pretext to stop his activities. From a practical standpoint, conservatives in the U.S. call out for Assange’s blood to be shed, and portray him as an evil figure, an opponent of power, and an enemy of international order and stability. However, the continuous criticism of Assange on the part of senior officials led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lack credibility, because Assange does not kowtow to any moral obligation forcing him to pay homage to American interests, nor the interests of the allies engaged in these wars. The demand to punish the WikiLeaks site or gag the mouths of those responsible for it — including its primary rebel, the incarcerated Assange — with the pretext that their behavior threatens the lives of American soldiers and their local collaborators in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries is an assertion that the U.S. undertakes all of these wars for the common good and to serve the entire world. Likewise, the observation that Assange is a figure who represents a threat to the practices and fundamentals of diplomacy, in particular, is something far from the truth, because several centuries of the density, depth and method of well-entrenched cooperation between countries cannot be disturbed by a few hundred thousand details. It needs to be said that the unearthing of these documents aims at putting a stop to American wars by planting doubts in the minds of American citizens about the façade put forward by their political leaders and those affected by security issues.

If it were possible to manufacture silence, according to the famous saying of American researcher Noam Chomsky, then it is also possible to disturb the serenity of this silence with the help of conscientious resistors endowed with bravery. Assange is considered, in a major way, one of the products of the anti-war movement which was able to exploit the technological foundation of the Internet — and its skillful fusion with the intelligence services — with the goal of exposing secrets by way of human elements implanted in American military and diplomatic circles.

It is also important to indicate that in the absence of continuous mass mobilization capable of forcing the Obama administration to stop the Afghanistan-Pakistan war, Assange comes as a strange example of the Robin Hood phenomenon: He is accompanied by “Robin Hood’s followers,” in this case, those faithful to the cause of counting on the possibilities of cyberspace.

In a related development, the prevailing assumption is that the American intelligence analyst Lance Corporal Bradley Manning, who is accused of providing WikiLeaks with secret documents regarding contentious American military objectives in Iraq and providing a similar quantity of documents linked to the method of administering the war in Afghanistan, is connected with civilian contractors in the American security services. It is believed that the enormous collection of recently released WikiLeaks documents also included telegrams and diplomatic memos which reached Assange’s team via Lance Corporal Manning, and possibly from individuals within the administration who were tired of the actions of their peers determining American values on sensitive fronts like the Middle East and South Asia.

Assange knows so much because there are Americans inside the national apparatus who detest the seemingly endless military interventions, including on the Afghan-Pakistani front, and the pressures to become embroiled in new wars.

Thanks to WikiLeaks, we now know, more than ever before, that Pakistan is an unreliable ally for the United States, as America had generally assumed. And if any person remains haunted by doubts concerning the impossibility of winning the Afghanistan-Pakistan war, he or she need only read what senior officials in their private and public sessions alike are saying about the double-sided game played with “their strategic partner” in Islamabad.

Some observers and commentators have admitted the mistakes they have made since the explosion of the WikiLeaks scandal, while playing down the valuable information by saying that “it does not bring anything new” that could possibly change the traditional arrangements of U.S. foreign policy or the political deceptions employed by senior political men.

The hungry need to obtain speedy news. The intriguing discoveries that make reality seem stranger than fiction have not obscured the underlying goal that Assange’s knights are seeking to achieve. Their purpose is exemplified in the looting of the predominant authority’s power (an authority skilled at deception) and the empowerment of the broad masses always in an unfavorable condition, partly because of the absence of comprehensive information about them. So the WikiLeaks site represents one of several recently released modern devices from the information age through which societies are able to monitor the country’s elites.

The WikiLeaks site is counted as one of a number of media launched in the information age which makes it possible for societies to scrutinize what political elites of the country are doing. In accordance with this medium, citizens acquire a better opportunity to understand a particular issue, such as abominable wars, and from there enter a social movement, whereas before they were unable to intrude under the pretext of being “uninformed” interlopers; it was not in within their means to reach the right decision on matters pertaining to the national interest and larger internationalism.

The current rift in American military circles and among the central cadres, to an equal extent, regarding the issue of wars and the threat to initiate war, helps partisans cheer up about themselves today and traverse the previously impenetrable wall of secrecy thanks to the WikiLeaks site. Along similar lines, historical transitions toward democracy and toward societies able to determine their own future could only occur amidst a breach between the authorities, when the moderate wings in the government become unified with elements of change in society faithful to these transitions.

In an era in which the Internet strengthens the role of “friends” and networks are strengthened by the Internet, the path on which Assange was popularized is no longer the path of Jeremiah — or the illegitimate path — but a sprint or surge to reach greater social collaboration on questions connected to the fate of ordinary citizens.

The WikiLeaks site absolutely does not resort to selling or exchanging its lucrative, secret information registries to those able to pay extensive sums in order to acquire these materials which are capable of blackmailing others. The revelation of the open “secret,” in this respect, is not intended to earn profit. It raises the levels of social accountability for government institutions. These two factors make Julian Assange a man deserving of protection, not prosecution.

-Sareeram Tashoulya, Representative of the Dean of Joondal College for International Affairs in Soneepat, India