The Year of WikiLeaks

On the screen, a suburb of Baghdad is captured from above in a military helicopter. The cross on the eyepiece runs along the roofs of houses. The bits of conversation lead us to believe that another plane is flying in close proximity.

Suddenly, a group of people grabs the soldiers’ attention. “Have five to six individuals with AK-47s,” says one of them. The firearms splatter, people start running in a cloud of dust.

“We got one guy crawling around down there,” says one soldier. More shots are fired, and the man who was crawling is not crawling anymore. Then another comments: “Look at those dead bastards.”

This attack took place on July 12, 2007. Here is the outcome: 12 dead and two children injured. All of them were Iraqi insurgents, said the American army. And how unfortunate: Among the victims were a chauffeur and a photographer from Reuters. The agency claimed a military investigation, which concluded that the soldiers had scrupulously complied with the “Rules of Engagement.”

Even though Reuters called upon the law to access information, the agency never received the video recording of this event. It was put up on WikiLeaks. Last spring, Julian Assange’s group locked themselves in an apartment in Reykjavik. It took weeks to decode the document, decipher the soldiers’ jargon, determine their units, send two Icelandic journalists to meet with the victims’ families and, finally, prepare for the media attention on the day when WikiLeaks would publish these images.

Since then, millions of people could access this video on Youtube under the title “Collateral Murder.” And these millions of people could see for themselves, with their own eyes, that the military attack was not only aimed at a group of insurgents. To this day, civilians died for nothing. And the army did everything to hide this information.

The video from Baghdad is only one example among many revelations from WikiLeaks and its Australian founder, Julian Assange, who first made his mark in 2007 with information on the corruption of the regime of the last Kenyan President, Daniel Arap Moi. Published by The Guardian on the eve of the election, these revelations made a lot of ruckus and contributed to the way people voted.

Ever since, we’ve stopped counting the number of shenanigans by a man who always seems involved in scandal. “Climategate” is him. “Cablegate” — the 250,000 diplomatic messages that have been progressively published in the international press — is also him, as well as the 77,000 confidential documents about the war in Afghanistan.

As I am writing these lines, the most recent revelation concerned India and its systematic use of torture against civilians in Kashmir.

Julian Assange is a fascinating person. His childhood with an artist mother who traveled from city to city and from spouse to spouse; their flight after a bad separation; his youth as a hacker; and, now, this accusation of rape in Sweden — all of this contributes to a kind of myth of a loose cannon of information. A man more or less respectable on occasion pumps out useful work but is not too troubled by the rules of ethics and behaves like a crazy gunman of journalism.

This is what led Amazon to stop supporting the WikiLeaks site. PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard refuse all money transfers to Julian Assange’s site. And American politicians claim that he should be tried for treason, even assassinated.

But this strong controversy also caused an opposite reaction, which is becoming increasingly important.

One WikiLeaks defender among many is the documentarian Michael Moore. “We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with,” he wrote on The Huffington Post.

An Australian journalist association also came to Assange’s rescue in the name of freedom of the press.

“WikiLeaks stands to improve our democracy, not weaken it,” wrote Wired magazine, which also adds that “A government’s best and only defense against damaging spills is to act justly and fairly.”

We reproached Julian Assange for having exposed vulnerable sources by publishing confidential information, particularly in Afghanistan. “However, no one asked for supplementary protection after these discoveries, and it doesn’t seem like informants underwent any fatal consequences,” wrote Clint Hendler in a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review.

This affirms that, over the years, Julian Assange refined his methods, especially since he joined forces with the media and now submits his documents for journalist reviews.

“He revealed very important stories on United States’ activities and its management of two wars,” Hendler said.

But how, from there, are diplomatic confidential documents made public? “The problem is that a number of important documents are kept secret for no reason,” wrote Hendler.*

One of the most convincing arguments in favor of Julian Assange comes from a surprising source: an old FBI agent, Coleen Rowley, who was involved with Zacrais Moussaoui’s arrest. This terrorist had taken pilot courses in the United States before the Sept. 11 attacks.

In a letter published in the fall in the Los Angeles Times, Coleen Rowley recalls how her bosses in Washington had forbidden the FBI agents to search Massaoui’s computer. “We worked for a strict bureaucracy incapable of acting quickly,” she laments before suggesting that if WikiLeaks had existed at that time, agents frustrated with their bosses’ indifference would have perhaps conveyed some “state secrets.” And perhaps then they would have prevented the 9/11 attacks…

Of course, it’s not sure, but in any case, this shows that an abuse of confidentiality can prove more harmful than an excess of information and that Julian Assange fully earns the title man of the year in TIME magazine, which acted terribly cold to this idea and opted more for the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. It’s necessary to say that Zuckerberg has a lot of friends. Julian Assange, on the other hand, collects enemies.

*Editor’s Note: The Hendler quotes, while accurately translated, could not be verified.