The Real Target is Obama

If a conspiracy exists, it is against Obama. Fascinated by what they — the American proconsuls — think of us, and excited to lift the veil of private discussion, we can be sure of one thing: The release of nearly two million of State Department dispatches from all its offices worldwide is first and foremost a serious blow to the American administration.

Content aside, the WikiLeaks operation puts to shame the entire security system of the United States. WikiLeaks gets through it, opens it and makes it public, demonstrating to all its fragility. In this sense, one could say that Assange has his precursor in the young German who, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, reached Moscow with a small plane and landed in the Red Square, revealing with a single wing the fragility of a system that boasted of its stellar shields and its nuclear warheads. Except that Assange’s actions have aims and opportunities that lay far beyond the “unveiling” of the nature of power.

The operation-truth of WikiLeaks, which should be welcomed as a blow for transparency, has also a very political subtext, a side impact – and if we fail to understand it, we risk being tricked. There is, in short, a second reading of the release of these documents, a sort of heterogenesis of purposes, which raises several questions.

First, the size of this latest release is very different from that of the first, the one which concerned the war in Iraq. In that case, it looked like WikiLeaks ran to about four hundred texts. An exceptional number, but not impossible to collect given the large number of soldiers involved in the conflict, the ease with which all of them use computers and the intensity of feelings against the war now existing among the troops at the front. Therefore it was hardly surprising that in a few years such an amount of information was collected and passed to Assange. This time it’s almost two million dispatches from every American embassy around the world: How did WikiLeaks put together a collection of this size? With how many men and women? When? From which operating bases? Of course, we know that technology is flexible and it takes only a computer from a bench to work; we also know that the big states are guilty of overconfidence with respect to their operating systems and their codes. But, even so, the doubt remains: Does it take just a handful of volunteers and many deep gorges to capture two million messages from all embassies in the world? And how can a man like Assange, who, in order to do his job, is constantly on the run, continue to manage such a complex operation? And why can’t this man, who alone challenges the opacity of power, be found? There is something truly amazing in the ability of this young man to evade the most important intelligence services in the world.

So there is an incomprehensible side to this story – or, if you will, a real dark side. Who is helping Assange? Is it simply his faith in the freedom of the press, and the help of a few volunteers, that sustains him? In the same name of freedom of the press, at this point don’t we have the right to ask Assange for transparency in his operations?

Of course we can’t be so naive as to not see that the embarrassment of the Obama administration makes the creator of WikiLeaks very popular among Obama’s many enemies. What if, in addition to Assange’s efforts, there was also help from these enemies?

This opens a number of hypotheses, all disturbing ones. We know, reading the dispatches on WikiLeaks, that at the moment the world is a very uncertain place. We know that U.S. power is in steep decline and that it is the focus of many attacks. Finally, we know that Obama himself is torn by powerful forces in his own country. Is it really ridiculous to assume that WikiLeaks is being used as an instrument, involuntarily or voluntarily, for purpose of ratcheting up tensions? We’ll see. But of course Assange will forgive our doubts, since we are just applying to him the same demand for transparency that the free press asks of everyone.