Assange in 2009. He has changed his appearance several times in the past 18 months in the wake of consistent threats.
Call me a conspiracy theorist.
It might be coincidental that MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and Amazon.com have all almost simultaneously decided to sever ties with WikiLeaks (though when your organization is on the other side of a moral dispute from a credit card company, you have to be doing something right). Much as they may try to market themselves otherwise (BP and Exxon Mobil love green energy!) multinational corporations primary interest is making money. Anything that could possibly divert from this primary aim is pushed to the side. Raising the ire — even unofficially — of the U.S. government is not a good business decision, nor is potentially alienating customers who oppose what WikiLeaks stands for.
But there may be no greater sign that all the forces constituting the established world order are aligning themselves against against WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange than the freezing of a Swiss bank account used to collect donations for the site.
Somehow the billions stowed away by African dictators, Columbian drug kingpins, Bernie Madoff and Nazis who stole Jewish-owned property managed to avoid this fate (note the $1.25 billion settlement paid out tot he World Jewish Congress in 1999), but alas Assange & Co. haven’t, and all for doing only what is simultaneously being done by The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde and Der Spiegel.
Ah but of course, there is difference the argument goes, these newspapers (and one magazine) are being responsible with the material they publish. They are being selective and placing the cables they publish alongside analysis provided by expert reporters who place these events in context. Names of those who may be harmed by the publication of these documents are being redacted and the only cables being published are ones that have been vetted and deemed to be in the public interest. There is something to be said about this general argument, except that it doesn’t really apply in any condemnation of WikiLeaks, as to this point they have done virtually the same thing. But you don’t have to believe me, just ask The New York Times:
“So far, [WikiLeaks] has moved cautiously. The whole archive was made available to five news organizations including The New York Times. But WikiLeaks has posted only a few dozen cables on its own in addition to matching those made public by the news publications. According to the State Department’s count, 1,325 cables, or fewer than 1 percent of the total, have been made public by all parties to date.”
The story continues…
“Since Nov. 28, each publication has been publishing a series of articles about revelations in the cables, accompanied online by the texts of some of the documents. The publications have removed the names of some confidential sources of American diplomats, and WikiLeaks has generally posted the cables with the same redactions.”
Hmmm, so all told less than 1 percent of the cables have been made public, and WikiLeaks is taking the same caution as mainstream news outlets in removing the names of people who might be endangered by these reports. WikiLeaks, its founder and even its web address have been on the run in one way or another for the past 10 days, but to my knowledge all the web sites of the five aforementioned publications are still operating at full capacity (probably above capacity thanks to the additional traffic these leaks have generated). Unlike WikiLeaks nobody is talking about prosecutions of editors or reporters at these five publications (they shouldn’t be), despite the fact that whereas WikiLeaks is giving their information away for free, all five of the publications are monetizing it — literally selling state secrets. Oh yeah, and did I mention that WikiLeaks is not actually breaking the law in the United States or anywhere else:
“Justice Department prosecutors have been struggling to find a way to indict Mr. Assange since July, when WikiLeaks made public documents on the war in Afghanistan. But while it is clearly illegal for a government official with a security clearance to give a classified document to WikiLeaks, it is far from clear that is illegal for the organization to make it public.”
If the Justice Department attempts to charge Assange with a crime for receiving and making classified documents public, one would think the same charge would apply to all five of the publications, no? Isn’t that exactly what they did and are doing too? Shouldn’t the law (assuming there is one, which there doesn’t appear there is) be applicable to everyone equally?.
Couple all of the above with the spurious criminal allegations against Assange in Sweden that suddenly appeared a few weeks after the initial release of documents on the Afghan war and just as he was seeking to base WikiLeaks in the Nordic country — a move that would have made the organization virtually untouchable because of Sweden’s liberal press laws — and you have a plot resembling that of 1970s conspiracy films like The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor. And while all these things may not be a sign of corporations, governments and the media all coordinating their actions (that would too conspiratorial, even for a conspiracy theory), it is most certainly a sign of that the establishment in all three fields have considerable overlapping and intertwined interests — ones they very much fear an unknown, but entirely legal, quantity like WikiLeaks could un-twine.
How does an organization that in 2007 Time magazine said “could become as important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act” become the enemy?
By doing exactly what it said it would do: “Publish[ing] material of ethical, political and historical significance while keeping the identity of our sources anonymous.”
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