Racing round the world this morning is a fresh “shock horror” WikiLeaks story, which purports to show that even if the organisation isn’t just a bunch of balalaika strumming Cossacks in the pay of Putin, it may as well be.
“WikiLeaks Turned Down Leaks of Russian Government During US Presidential Campaign” the headline reads to a piece on the Foreign Policy site. Has the smoking AK-47 been found?
Well, no, as it turns out. The story is based on a leaked/hacked WikiLeaks chatlog concerning a 70-gigabyte trove of documents from inside the Russian Interior Ministry, which the story alleges the organisation “refused” to publish during the 2016 US election campaign. Foreign Policy only has the WikiLeaks side of the chatlog — but that’s enough to debunk the story’s angle, for it includes the statement at the time by WikiLeaks that: “As far as we recall these are already public.” According to the story, the trove was published elsewhere, and gained little attention. Presumably because it was 70 gigabytes of turnip requisition forms. WikiLeaks has long stated that it doesn’t republish material readily available elsewhere (save for its curated reference libraries such as the Plus D database).
So no story at all, but enough to make an evidence-free charge that WikiLeaks was suppressing information because it could have been seen as anti-Trump. In that respect it’s worth remembering what Foreign Policy is: the global in-house journal of a geopolitical power elite, founded by Samuel “clash of civilisations” Huntington in the early 70s, and now publishing a range of movers and shakers — including, in 2011, Hillary Clinton herself, outlining the dream of “America’s Pacific Century,” the policy underlying the now-abandoned TPP. You won’t find isolationists, anti-imperialists or other such voices in Foreign Policy. What you do get apparently, is pro-Hillary beat-ups of such low quality that they contradict themselves from the get-go.
Twenty-twenty’s looking good. Looking good for 2020. And another five seasons of Veep.
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Malcolm Tucker, we need you now…
These were the same strutting capons that squawked about…
“If he really does anonymise his sources, how does he know that the leaks didn’t come from the Russian Government???!! BooYah!!!”
Erm, because governments don’t leak against themselves, you insouciant ballsacks?
Didn’t one of these gormless twats try to glass you once? Nick Davies I think it was.
Assange/WL: impossible not to admire him/them. The metadebate of meta debates…and the power narrative, the authorial incumbents…they get the stakes, too. It’s why they’re fighting so viciously to defend the heft of the first-as-third-person-omniscient personal pronoun together.
I can imagine Wiki/JA might just be the loneliest persons in the world, but. Respect, mans.
Does Assange have the largest target of anyone in the west on his head? Barring an outbreak of decency and self awareness in the Hegemon, the poor bastard will never, ever be able to walk down any street in the world, except perhaps the Kremlin or the Vatican, without the certainty of a black Chevy Suburban rolling up and a quick black flight to oblivion.
Exactly, AR. It’s too easy to diss JA’s (apparent? occasional? presumed? trivial? pragmatically necessary? tactical? diversionary? who knows!?) adventures in egoland…and forget the huge personal commitment behind and cost of his life’s work.
Respect, for mine.
Your point? About cronyistic journalism, or Wikileaks’ activities, or more pertinently its moral compass settings?
Seems Wleaks was so right and important to us when it was all about the Bush admin and the Iraq war.
But wanting to be a player in the increasingly confusing, murky world of gov sponsored international hacking – if true then might need to come with some reassurance of purpose and objectivity, rather than a coy “just publishing the facts”.
And we may never know all the facts here, only assertions – but being anti-Clinton meant being pro Trump, so what the.. ?
Western democracies seem to be doing a pretty good job of destabilising themselves because of corrupted party processes. But wanting to assist that process, to what end? Theocracy, or autocracy like Russia, N Korea, China?
WW, I just don’t think there’s been any credible evidence presented or case made that Assange/WL have changed their core philosophy and be one partisan players.
Assange/WL is as close to a purely libertarian movement as can remain viable, because their only real ideological interest pertains to information – and specifically, rendering it neutral by way of full disclosure.
People forget that being partisan, political, a ‘player’ isn’t about what information you project, it’s more strictly about what you withhold. It’s about being a gatekeeper.
Wilileak’s sole ideological ambition is to smash all the gates. To destroy the possibility of material irony, even. To pull the curtain back and expose the wizards to the info-blizzard.
WL is the biggest thing happening in the world of politics, changing it in ways we won’t recognise for a century.
/Hyperbole…kind of. 🙂
Well, Silk Road under the original Dread Pirate Roberts was pretty close to a “purely libertarian movement” too so I’m not sure if the term is pejorative or not. Interesting profile of His Holiness in the latest Atlantic – lamestream media, I guess? To be clear, I think Assange is a grade-A solipsistic dickhead and that Wikileaks is one of the more essential operations functioning today. I don’t see that respeck for the latter needs to imply any for the former.
I’ve never met Assange so I dunno re: the man. Could well be a wad. It’s what he does that matters, like you say. And WL not just him anyway. Haven’t read the Atlantic piece.
Silk Road ‘libertarian’? Please.
Oops! I haven’t read The Atlantic profile either, seeing as wot it was in The New Yorker (and you cite it below). Mea culpa – sorry, Jack.
So I take your word for that, or Assange’s?
Enormous leap of faith to make WL our trusted gatekeeper, when human history might just make us a little cynical about self appointed custodians.
Doesn’t help that Assange impresses with the same ambitious, narcissistic characteristics that all the power hungry wannabes of our species seem to possess.
No. JA/WL does not want the role of gatekeeper. ‘No gatekeepers’ means what it says, is the point.
How do you dilute the power that information gives an individual? Give it to everyone. That is the grand extent of the JA/WL ‘ideology’ in a nutshell. And that’s what JA/WK try to do, represent. Who does he/they make enemies of in the process?
Obviously anyone with information-power that they/he dilutes, thus. It’s why pretty much everyone powerful hates him/them, or will eventually.
Aye…it’s messy and formative times in the info-revolution still to be sure…but don’t ever underestimate just how fundamental a part Wikileaks (et al, ie all that has flowed from it, all it vanguarded) has played in the Western ‘democracies’ now ‘destabilising themselves’.
The centre can’t hold? Only because we can see it more clearly every day as not being any ‘centre’ at all. Chrs.
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-20/leaked-documents-reveal-pine-gaps-crucial-role-in-us-drone-war/8815472
So…you give everyone the information, all the information…rendering it more and more difficult for individuals to not be confronted by the personal responsibility to use their free will to make individual material/political/ethical/life choices.
Libertarianism 101.
As you say, fuck the gatekeepers – they don’t do it for free and even then only to the highest bidder.
Information wants to be free otherwise it’s just paid advertising.
So “just the facts” can never be construed as partisan?
Releasing indiscriminately lots of democratic party emails in the middle of an election, and not too much about ol’ king douchebag, whether by intent or a result of manipulation by another player, did look awfully like (to us non WL stuckons) like a partisan act, fact to fuct in one press of the send button.
I note that Snowden (whose leaked document you linked to above) also expressed concern about indiscriminate publishing of emails (he was then however accused of seeking favour from the dem party).
Unofficial discourse is important for us all, and I imagine more important for political and govt players, otherwise you only end up only accentuating an isolatory, ivory tower approach to politics.
Expect thats why Clinton and other political players in US resort to private servers, given no choice by some nice, and some not so well motivated hackers!
Yep, excellent point, WW, salient to the max.
Snowden in partics as you say was explicit in eschewing the WL mode: he was adamant about a ‘curated’ release rather than a ‘dump’.
*doffs tinfoil cap*
However…Snowden – and for that matter Manning – was a whistleblower. And all whistleblowers, however saintly, are partisan, too. They have agendas.
They may be very admirable agendas, but agendas they remain. Snowden chose to go with Poitras/Greenwald, information management professionals who duly shaped a (bespoke) narrative from the info-power he supplied them.
Snowden, understandably, was keen to cast his own motivations in the best possible light. Fair enough. But let’s not forget that he was equipped with that info-power only because for years he was complicit in the State info-power machine he eventually recognised as (only partially?) illegitimate. It may seem harsh but I think it’s a little epistemologically convenient to seek to erode one info-hegemon by way of another. At the very least you are conceding to the view underpinning the State’s own hegemon: that information ‘needs’ to be ‘curated’ by ‘curators’ at all, for the good of the peeble. Realpolitic, maybe; libertarian, no.
Assange/WL is a publisher, a radical libertarian one. He/they recognise that down the path of ‘curating’ information at all is where partisanship, of one kind or another, truly lies.
The same applies to consequences of unredacted ‘dumping’, by the way. Should a publisher be blamed if an informant is exposed and killed? Or does the responsibility properly rest with the info-hegemonic system that created the circumstance in which such exposure would result in such an outcome in the first place?
The first thing the State seeks to achieve is implicate its citizens in in its own power system. Resisting this – rejecting its very legitimacy – is where the authentic libertarian project begins and ends.
Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out! And let each man behold the poisons – the lot – and make his free will choice.
Cheers WW.
…and yes, it applies to any Assange/WK potential poisons, too. Raffi Katchadourian lets a big whoosh out in the latest New Yorker.
https://www.google.com.au/amp/www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/julian-assange-a-man-without-a-country/amp
It all goes into the mix on each of our palates, and we can swirl it around, mulling the taste.
‘A man without a country…’ …mmm, tastes increasingly least-worst-koolaidy to me, I reckons…
Sorry, last thought on your points: re: the US Dems/election/releasing their private emails/unoffocial discourse/government resort to private emails…etc:
Why don’t they just talk openly? What have they got to keep so private? Aren’t they our reps? And if they commit something to a record as they go about their ‘democratic’ biz, allegedly democratically accountably, who is to blame if it gets out? And if WL didn’t publish that would have been no less ‘partisan’. Why should ‘the peeble’ they supposedly serve/represent grant such secrecy legitimacy at all, either way? The least worst option is to ‘dump’ the lot, as you get it, as unfiltered as practical.
Chrs WW.
Suppose I should add my last thoughts. The premise of (this) Rundle article is that the media seem to be on WL’s case at the moment. Surely even the most ardent WL supporter might understand even implying a hint of partisanship, in probably the most fraught US election in history, that it would upset a lot of people. That this might be based just on a JA personal dislike of Clinton probably doesn’t help.
BTW the New Yorker article is very good, quite objective, not at all reassuring to me however about JA’s character or motivations. Methinks he would rather like being described as “one of the most influential, powerful” people in the world.
Objective enough to be a worthy gatekeeper however, NO!