Christian Christensen

The media focus on Assange’s personality has overshadowed the
importance of WikiLeaks, says an American professor in Sweden

“I think most people who know him go through this process: you start off
trusting and liking him, then suddenly this kind of monster appears from
behind the scenes and you kind of think ‘where on earth did that come
from? You suddenly discover this extraordinarily dishonest man. I don’t
know that I’ve ever met a human being as dishonest as Julian.” (Nick
Davies)

“The right does not have a monopoly on paranoia, as the conspiratorial
fantasies of supporters of Julian Assange show. Glenn Greenwald, Glenn
Beck’s namesake and mirror image on the American left, made it
embarrassingly obvious in the Guardian last week that a paranoid ‘leftist’
defence of an alleged rapist was the order of the day.” (Nick Cohen)

“An extraordinary aspect of the campaign against Assange is that op-ed
writers feel free to pump out thousands of words about his alleged faults,
with never a mention of far more serious state crimes revealed by
WikiLeaks.” (Patrick Cockburn)

Let me get something off my chest right away: I will readily admit that
my views on WikiLeaks have been coloured by the fact that I am an
American, and witnessed first-hand the jingoistic, uncritical news
reporting that began to unfurl on the morning of September 11, 2001. Over
the past decade, from 9/11 to Guantanamo to drone killings, mainstream
US journalism has – with a few exceptions – done very little to
counterbalance government PR, militarism and populist patriotism. Many
on the political left in the UK and the rest of Europe might well be critical
of their respective media, yet they are relatively spoiled in comparison to
those of a similar political sensibility in the US, who struggle to find outlets
willing to challenge underlying tenets of US geo-politics.

When I see the broader WikiLeaks agenda drowned in a sea of vitriol
against Assange and his supporters – particularly post-Swedish
investigation and post-Ecuador asylum request – I cannot help but feel that
journalists on both sides of the Atlantic (many of whom work for the very
media outlets which collaborated with Assange and WikiLeaks in the first
place) have taken their eyes off of the prize. Former New York Times editor
Bill Keller offered a particularly acid post-mortem when he wrote that “not
all that much” had changed after the WikiLeaks releases, and that the leaks,
“did not herald, as the documentarians yearn to believe, some new digital
age of transparency. In fact, if there is a larger point, it is quite the
contrary.” In other words, according to Keller, WikiLeaks is actually
responsible for the more aggressive stance taken by the US government in
relation to security and surveillance. As I have noted in some of my earlier
writing on WikiLeaks, an alternative understanding of this is that increased
surveillance and security is not evidence of the solidification of old
relationships, but rather a by-product of changing relationships, or at least
the fear of changing relationships. Why would the US increase both
surveillance and security, one should ask, if it does not feel that WikiLeaks
is a legitimate threat to its power?

Playing the man not the ball

The broader issue here is that some journalists and commentators have
allowed their personal distaste for Assange (and certain factions of his
support) to interfere with a critical analysis of the past and future role of
WikiLeaks as an organisation. Are Assange and WikiLeaks at least partially
responsible for this blurring of lines between the person and the
organisation? Yes, to an extent. The allegations against Assange in Sweden
have become a central theme on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed, for example,
leading many to feel that WikiLeaks has drifted from its whistle-blowing
roots. Similarly, as journalists such as Nick Cohen have pointed out, some
supporters have done themselves, Assange and WikiLeaks no favours by
making suggestions that, for example, “radical feminism” has an iron grip
on both Swedish politics and jurisprudence. I myself have written on and
critiqued this position, and, as a result, have been accused (primarily via
Twitter) of being an anti-WikiLeaks, anti-Assange agent of US-Swedish
power. Yet, if Cohen and others had a serious point to make about the
potentially negative impact of some elements of the Assange defense, then
it was lost in a problematic line of reasoning which foregrounded Assange
the person, his purported paranoia and “conspiracy theories”, while
pushing the broader WikiLeaks agenda and the realities of US power to the
side.

As I see it, journalists who accuse Assange of delusions of grandeur —
crystallised in his well-reported fear of extradition from Sweden to the
United States – make four fundamental mistakes:

Mistake 1: An ill-founded belief in US fair-play and justice
Only a matter of days after Cohen’s broadside against Assange, former
US President Jimmy Carter published an opinion piece in The New York Times
slamming the Obama administration for what he saw as a blatant disregard
for the rights of US and global citizens. Radical socialists don’t become
President of the United States of America, so when a former
Commander-in-Chief writes the following, it carries a fair amount of weight:

“Recent legislation has made legal the president’s right to detain a
person indefinitely on suspicion of affiliation with terrorist organisations
or “associated forces”, a broad, vague power that can be abused without
meaningful oversight from the courts or Congress (the law is currently
being blocked by a federal judge). This law violates the right to freedom
of expression and to be presumed innocent until proved guilty, two other
rights enshrined in the declaration.”

Carter’s article also reminded us that there are 169 prisoners being held
in Guantanamo Bay who are denied the minimal right of habeas corpus. By
ignoring the gross violations engaged in by the United States government,
and by labelling WikiLeaks supporters conspiracy nuts, Cohen actually
threw fuel on the fire of WikiLeaks supporters who suspect that the
mainstream media have a short-sighted vendetta against Assange because
he beat them at their own game.

Mistake 2: Being ahistorical
In addition to ignoring the issues discussed by Carter — drones, Gitmo,
lack of oversight on presidential power – accusations of paranoia and
conspiracy-mongering fail to address the fact that history books on the last
50 years of domestic US and international politics are hardly reassuring
reading for a person with a fear of extradition to the United States. Salvador
Allende, Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Iran-
Contra, Gulf War I, Afghanistan, Gulf War II, Gitmo, “extraordinary
rendition”, water-boarding, Bradley Manning. When you look at this
laundry list, and consider the fact that within many of these events,
hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals have either died, been attacked
or had their rights violated, then someone like Assange surely has cause to
be worried for his own safety.

Assange’s fears are far from a conspiracy theory

What makes a theory a conspiracy theory (as a pejorative term) is a
perceived ludicrousness: a proposition so outlandish and technically
unlikely (usually due to the involvement of multiple actors engaged in
hidden activity) that the person who utters it must be divorced from reality.
Can we honestly say that Assange’s fear of extradition to, and potential
imprisonment in, the US falls into this category? Let me put it this way: if
you had told me 12 years ago that Sweden would allow CIA agents to detain,
assault and interrogate two Egyptian nationals on Swedish soil, then drug
and fly them from Stockholm to Egypt on a private jet for torture, only to
have Sweden deny it, I might have called that borderline conspiracy talk.
But it happened.

Mistake 3: If sent to the US, Assange would be protected as a journalist à
la Watergate
Every time a question pops up about freedom of speech in the United
States, Watergate, The Washington Post, Deep Throat, the “Pentagon
Papers”, Woodward, Bernstein and Nixon are trotted out and put on
display as evidence of the Fourth Estate at work. Watergate was 40 years
ago, and this is not your father’s America. In the 40 years since Watergate,
we have precious few examples of US mainstream media actively
challenging US corporate and military power. In fact, quite the opposite. We
live with (and some in) a post-9/11 America of Fox News, the Tea Party and
the Patriot Act. The First Amendment is a fantastic piece of writing, but in
2010, the Citizens United decision made by the US Supreme Court held
that corporations have the same free speech rights as regular, human
citizens. Even great political documents can be perverted.

The suggestion has also been made that WikiLeaks and Assange will
likely be protected under US law because WikiLeaks, as Cohen put it, “was
in effect a newspaper”. None other than the chair of the US Senate
Intelligence Committee, Californian Democrat Dianne Feinstein, begged to
differ. In 2010, Feinstein wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, in
which she explicitly stated that WikiLeaks should not be afforded
protection under the First Amendment, and that Assange should be
prosecuted for espionage. As then Salon and now Guardian journalist Glenn
Greenwald reported in 2011, the US had opened a grand jury hearing to
decide whether or not to prosecute WikiLeaks and Assange under the 1917
Espionage Act (the act used unsuccessfully against Daniel Ellsberg for his
1971 leak of the “Pentagon Papers” on the Vietnam War). And, it is not only
Assange and WikiLeaks in the crosshairs: in July 2012, the Los Angeles Times
reported that US Republicans on the Crime, Terrorism and Homeland
Security Subcommittee are considering the prosecution of reporters who
publish classified material obtained via leaks.

Again, some context from Sweden: one of the reasons why WikiLeaks
initially used servers located in Sweden was the perceived protection offered
to the organisation under Sweden’s stringent freedom of speech and
whistleblower protection laws. Interestingly, however, that logic was called
into question when it was noted that WikiLeaks could not be classified as a
journalistic organisation because it did not have what is known as a
“responsible publisher” (a person legally responsible for the content): a
condition necessary for an organisation to be considered journalistic in
Sweden. In other words, lots of assumptions can be made about WikiLeaks
being a news organisation, but assumptions don’t hold up in court.

Mistake 4: Conflating WikiLeaks Supporters
Although I have been subject to some accusations on Twitter in relation
to my questioning of certain arguments made in Assange’s defence
(particularly in relation to feminism), I suspect that the number of
WikiLeaks supporters who adhere to dogmatic lines of thought, and attack
those who disagree, is relatively small; and, that their voices have
disproportionate strength as a result of echo-chambers like Twitter. I get
the sense that many supporters of WikiLeaks are regular people who are
tired of being used and lied to, and want to support an organisation which
has shown a willingness and backbone to challenge some big schoolyard
bullies. It takes guts to challenge the US: just ask people who have done so
and paid the price. By playing the “conspiracy theory” card in relation to
extradition to the US, and dismissing legitimate fears when there is ample
evidence to the contrary, Cohen and others throw the baby out with the
bathwater.

As the Assange saga continued, a small clique of journalists such as
Glenn Greenwald, Patrick Cockburn and the late Alexander Cockburn
attempted to counterbalance what they considered to be an excessive focus
on Assange the person, with a discussion on WikiLeaks the organisation.
The most pointed defence has come from Greenwald, who wrote in The
Guardian in July 2012 that the animosity toward Assange on the part of
journalists is ironic, “given that he has helped to bring about more
transparency and generated more newsworthy scoops than all media outlets
combined over the last several years,” and that “this animosity leads media
commentators to toss aside their professed beliefs and principles out of an
eagerness to see him shamed or punished”.

To this I would add one final observation: while castigating Assange for
generating a cult of personality around himself, journalists have, ironically,
played a large part in contributing to that process precisely through their
focus on personality, and not the substance of Assange’s fears regarding
extradition to the United States, or WikiLeaks’ contribution to a greater
understanding of the murky worlds of military action and diplomatic geopolitics.

Christian Christensen is Professor in the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University, Sweden. His Twitter contact is @chrchristensen.