Julian Assange
Although Wikileaks is associated with one person, the Australian Internet activist Julian Assange who founded it and who remains its editor-in-chief and director, the real significance of WikiLeaks is not in one person but in the fact that such an organisation would not have to exist at all in a society in which governments were free with the material they generated. Further, and in the cases of the corporations like Trafigura and other organisations such as The Church of Scientology, Wikileaks acts as a resource for investigative journalists.
That WikiLeaks is properly speaking a journalistic organisation occasionally raises an eyebrow, because WikiLeaks does not publish material that we are used to seeing in journalistic format. According to WikiLeaks own website, its goal is ‘to bring important news and information to the public.’ It goes on: ‘One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth.’
The functional aspect to this leaks website, which includes the electronic dropbox, endeavours to ensure than journalists and whistle-blowers are not jailed for revealing sensitive or classified documents. Since its inception, WikiLeaks has continued its business on this model although governments have tended not to style it as a public service but as a criminal organisation — a charge which rocketed to stratospheric levels in 2010 when the website released video footage shot from helicopter gunships in Iraq, in which the American military were shown shooting people who appeared to be civilians, including Reuters employees.
The Iraq War Document leaks shamed the US government and as if it weren’t bad enough for the public to hear gunship pilots making jokes about dead civilians there were numerous further details which emerged. These included the fact that there had been an estimated 15,000 civilian deaths that had not been previously admitted by the US government (Iraq war Logs, 02.01.12) and the fact that the same US authorities had failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers (The Guardian 23.10.10). One report released by WikiLeaks showed that the US military had cleared an Apache helicopter gunship to open fire on Iraqi insurgents who were trying to surrender (Bureau of Investigative Journalism 23.10.10), while a number of documents showed how US troops killed almost 700 civilians for coming too close to checkpoints, and these civilians including pregnant women and the mentally ill (Al Jazeera English, 23.10.10). Interfaced with this was evidence of civilian deaths committed by contractors, such as Blackwater (New York Times 23.10.10), and allegations of widespread torture and mistreatment of prisoners in the hands of the Iraqi police. Although Blackwater changed its name first to XE Services in 2009, and then to Academi in 2011, it was already known from the global publicity it generated in 2007 when a group of its employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured 20 in Nisour Square, Baghdad, for which four contractors were convicted of voluntary manslaughter and first degree murder.
As the reputation of WikiLeaks increased, its trove of documents showed with no ambiguity that our governments are keeping far too many things secret, and this information has even at times led to popular revolutions. One of the U.S. cables released by WikiLeaks titled Corruption in Tunisia: What’s Yours is Mine and dated 23rd June 2008, exposed the long-established venality of Tunisia's President's family, its reach into business in the country and its penchant for transcending the rule of law, all of which led to that government’s downfall and the subsequent protest that swept across the Middle East.
To use a phrase popularised by the lower reaches of the Internet the US government were colossally butthurt by WikiLeaks and their immediate and ongoing reaction has been to go on the offensive. The common croon in defending mass surveillance is that a person will only make something secret if they have something to hide — but of course the same applies to our governments and the more they protested and called for the arrest and trial of Julian Assange, the more it became apparent that they had plenty they wished to hide.
The secrets that emerged from the WikiLeaks releases on the US government were on the whole banal, but within them there were confidences that would still shame even the most obdurate and iron-handed tyrants. These included details of torture practises — still very much denied by the US administration despite obvious evidence to the contrary — and other illegal acts, such as the practise of so-called ‘double-clicking’, a phrase which refers to the killing the wounded on a battlefield, an action which is against the Geneva Convention. For his role in highlighting such stratagems, it is not surprising how many US public officials have called for Julian Assange’s execution. In the months following the release of the Iraq War Logs a long line of would-be media executioners stepped up to denounce Assange. This included television and radio host Glenn Beck — political commentator and host Bill O’Reilly — entertainer and radio host Rush Limbaugh — and Eric Bolling of Fox News who called for Assange to be hanged in public.
Political and media anger has clearly been widespread, especially in the USA, but what does the government and their co-opted media wish to prosecute Julian Assange for? Assange was certainly not the thief of the information he published and as a publisher he had First Amendment freedom to release what he did, as do the hundreds of other news organisations that have subsequently reported on and disclosed material from WikiLeaks. The logical consequence of any Assange inquisition would therefore be a virtual news shutdown that would have to take place if the publishing of this information was deemed to be illegal. Although the idea of blacking out the news is too madly exorbitant to be of practical use, it now remains the only way our governments could ensure that their secrets remain classified and unseen.
