Assange is not the messiah, but Wikileaks is a cult

It popped up in my in box yesterday. One of those tiresome exhortations to sign a petition. This one had already been signed by more than 40,000 people demanding that Julian Assange be returned to Australia.

Naturally, the email was quickly deleted. I have no sympathy for Assange and the position he finds himself in now is case of consequence finally catching up with him.

To his supporters, Assange is a portrayed as a beacon of truth, a journalist (he’s not and I’ll explain why later) and a publisher. Anyone with a functioning internet connection can be a publisher these days.

Exclusion, isolation, harassment

The best way to understand Wikileaks is as a cult with Assange its messianic leader.

His communications with his devotees reveal the organisation to be misogynistic, transphobic and vaguely anti-Semitic. Assange exhorts his devotees to troll his detractors, especially anyone who has left its confines.

The practice is a characteristic of all cults — exclusion, isolation and harassment for anyone who refuses to drink the Kool Aid.

Assange is now a criminal having been convicted of absconding bail in the UK. The crime comes with a sentence of 12 months’ imprisonment. One imagines that the gravity of the offence is at the higher end of the scale given he remained in breach for almost seven years.

He will be sentenced on May 2.

There is no prospect that he could be released from prison. Nor should he.

In an earlier column I joked that it would be cruel not to lock up Assange after he’d spent the best part of seven years living in a converted toilet. A bad case of agoraphobia just waiting to happen. All jests aside, jail is not a bad place for him to be. He can receive medical care and spend at least part of his day getting some sun and fresh air.

In short, he is being treated like any other criminal.

I have been a critic of Wikileaks for a long time for the simple reason that the organisation’s defining operational principle is recklessness.

The US State department dump in 2010 was just the start. In those days, The New York Times and The Guardian co-published the release of classified material relating to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Potentially deadly

They did what Wikileaks did not. They sifted through the material carefully and excluded documents that might put people’s lives at risk.

The problem was that anyone could go direct to Wikileaks where there was no editorial or curatorial method in place.

The information, which in some cases identified sources providing intelligence on the Taliban were potentially deadly.

In 2016, WikiLeaks rolled out a document dump from Turkey in an effort to embarrass Turkish President Erdogan. The leak did precisely the reverse, publishing names, addresses and medical records of people, many of whom were opposed to Erdogan. Some of the data included people’s sexual orientation and this in Turkey would be sufficient to have them arrested.

Another dump of Saudi government material caused similar problems to innocent Saudi citizens.

Wikileaks also published 19,242 emails from the Democratic National Committee prior to the US Presidential election. The material was almost certainly hacked by Russian intelligence operatives and included names, addresses, credit card numbers and in one case the details of a man who had attempted suicide.

Under no circumstances would an editor of any reputable news organisation publish that kind of material. It is a profound breach of privacy, enables identity theft and is not in the public interest.

But Assange and Wikileaks respond that they do not curate the material that comes their way. It is, they say, their practice to publish holus-bolus and be damned.

That might be acceptable if it were true.

Publishing a document dump in 2016 known as the Syria Files, Wikileaks withheld a batch of emails showing a $US2.2 billion transaction between the Syrian regime and a Russian government-owned bank, according to a credible report from Texas based media company, the Daily Dot.

In 2017, Wikileaks declined to publish hacked documents from within the Kremlin, claiming the material was not new. This was a half-truth. A small portion of the material had been released earlier and had been published by the BBC in 2015 but the majority of it had never been published before and was acutely embarrassing to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Player and plaything

Around the same time, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, declared Wikileaks was a “non-state, hostile intelligence service” that is often “abetted by state actors like Russia.”

That may be true. The evidence points to Assange being, if not a Putinist, then an apologist for Putin’s vicious adventurism and state sponsored murders.

What is unarguable is that Wikileaks under Assange has become both a player in geopolitics and a plaything of intelligence services around the world. Assange has been playing a very dangerous game, picking sides and manipulating events.

Now he faces extradition to the US on a charge that he and US military intelligence officer, Chelsea Manning, conspired to break into a classified government computer. In an unsealed affidavit released earlier this week, the US Government outlined more details of the charge, alleging that Manning and Assange had discussed how to crack a password on a government computer in March, 2010, two months after Manning had walked out of a US base in Iraq with classified war reports from the Iraq and Afghanistan theatres.

There is no evidence to indicate the attempt to crack the password was successful. That does not help Assange much.

What about Sweden?

The charge is one of conspiracy. He fears if he is extradited to the US, he will face more serious charges and may spend the rest of his life in a US federal prison. That is quite likely.

My view is Assange should be brought to account for the offences he is alleged to have committed in Sweden in 2010.

Two women, known as Miss A and Miss W, have alleged that Assange had consensual sex with them that became non-consensual when he removed or tore the condom he was wearing during intercourse in the case of Miss A or refused to wear one in the case of Miss W.

Assange was charged with other offences in relation to Miss A that have lapsed under the Sweden’s statute of limitations.

At present the Swedish government has made no request for extradition but there is considerable pressure to do so from lawyers representing the two alleged victims.

In the wake of the rape allegations, WikiLeaks, including Assange’s legal team labelled the two women ‘honey pots’, a colloquialism for female intelligence operatives who entrap men through sex. Assange himself virtually called the two women US spies.

The fact that these two women are still standing and keen to have their day in court, puts paid to the lurid conspiracies put about by Wikileaks back in 2010.

Where Assange goes next is not entirely clear. The UK courts will make a determination on any request for extradition in part based on the date of the alleged offence and the seriousness of the alleged offence. The extradition process, be it from an application by the US or Sweden will take a year or more.

The allegations against Assange in Sweden are very serious and if proven would show him not to be see some heroic figure shining a light into dark places but just another nasty little criminal.

The best way to take down a cult is to show its leader is not the messiah, that he’s a very naughty boy.

This column was first published in The Australian on 17 April 2019