Assange guilty of anything and everything

Interviewed recently on ABC radio, computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier pithily observed:

In the United States the reporting about the expulsion of Mubarak in Egypt has been entirely dominated by Google and Facebook, and to a lesser degree Wikileaks, and everyone talks about it as the Facebook revolution, and every headline is about the Facebook revolution in Egypt.

And the problem with that is that I think there’s sort of this orgy of narcissism involved where we’re seeing our own American tech companies as being at the centre of the universe. And I’m concerned that what it really does is it makes us find yet another way not to actually listen to what somebody in Egypt might really be saying. For all our talk about all this openness and connection, I think we’re just using it as a way to look at ourselves, instead of them.

There’s very likely some truth in Lanier’s off-the-cuff remarks. In an interview last August for The Observer, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange related...

. . . the story of the Kenyan 2007 elections when a WikiLeak document “swung the election”.

The leak exposed massive corruption by Daniel Arap Moi, and the Kenyan people sat up and took notice. In the ensuing elections, in which corruption became a major issue, violence swept the country. “1,300 people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced. That was a result of our leak,” says Assange. It’s a chilling statistic, but then he states: “On the other hand, the Kenyan people had a right to that information and 40,000 children a year die of malaria in Kenya. And many more die of money being pulled out of Kenya, and as a result of the Kenyan shilling being debased.”

Assange here quite arguably has overstated WikiLeaks’ contribution to that “chilling statistic”. It’s clearly absurd to suppose that the people of Kenya had no idea, before the WikiLeaks material was published, about the tribal and clan-based corruption that has blighted the country. But apart from all that, much of the 2007 violence was in reaction to disputed election results.

It might more accurately have been said that the WikiLeaks material probably helped, to some significant degree, in bringing the problem of corruption in Kenya more sharply into focus. The extent to which WikiLeaks ‘contributed’ to the 1,300 killed, however, is at best a matter of loose conjecture. To claim otherwise is perhaps a symptom of the narcissism Lanier described above.

When in December Assange burst into the headlines with the Swedish ‘sex charges’, his self-aggrandising claims regarding Kenya allowed motoring writer and blogger Tim Blair to declaim wildly about Assange’s culpability in...

tipping an already-volatile African nation into further mayhem.

Assange’s apparent non sequitir about 40,000 children dying of malaria was readily lampooned by Blair with the throwaway line: “So another 1300 corpses won’t matter much.”

Following Blair’s post, Andrew Bolt posted on his blog this brief item:

Tim Blair says WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is claiming credit ... for inspiring the murder of 1700 Kenyans.

(Yep, Bolt inflated the 1,300 figure by about 30 per cent, but perhaps in his paranoid make-believe world, another 400 fictitious corpses don’t matter much.)

While Bolt seems to have taken (Blair’s claims about) Assange’s claims at face value, obviously because it suited his ideological position against Assange, Blair in the above instance seemed to view it all with some scepticism, presumably because he wanted to portray Assange as unreliable and given to exaggerated claims such as “attempting to take credit for the Climategate scandal.”

Blair is probably quite correct to be sceptical about WikiLeaks purported role in the Kenya violence, but when it suits him he’s quite comfortable about exploiting the factoid of Assange’s culpability for those 1,300 deaths, such as in a later post in which he juxtaposed Assange’s Kenya claim with the following more recent statement:

WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed.

Neither Blair nor Bolt had anything to say, of course, on the crucial point of whether people in Kenya “had a right” to the leaked information. As far as they’re concerned, it’s all about Assange — and, of course, themselves.

If the people of “already-volatile” Kenya are permitted in the picture at all, it’s as hapless victims of Assange’s wicked meddling and volatility-tipping. And the brave resistance by many Kenyans during the 2007 crisis is reduced to being merely an outbreak of “further mayhem” whose only meaning is resolved as an indictment of Assange.

Assange will by now be well acquainted with the perils of being a ‘mover-and-shaker’. It may even occur to him what an easier gig it would be to just shout from the sidelines.

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Latest ‘last word’ on Assange

“I think Julian Assange’s personal life might be the saddest confirmation that all the information in the world, all the openness in the world doesn’t prevent you from being kind of a prick sometimes.”

• Jaron Lanier — computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author

Julian Assange and the rise of nerd supremacy

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Wikipissing in the Murdoch media

For all its trilling about the “irresponsible” publication of “sensitive” documents by Wikileaks, it has to be said that the Murdoch media doesn’t hesitate to use those documents to serve its own ‘editorial’ purposes.

For instance, while Andrew Bolt — our own Doctor Easychair — has not been shy about condemning  Wikileaks and its chief Julian Assange, he’s been equally quick to expropriate Wikileaks material when it supports his views on perennial hate-object Kevin Rudd.

So too with an unattributed op-ed piece today in The Australian, which takes the leaked cables about Rudd as vindicating — and indeed confirming the rectitude of — the paper’s long-time critical stance against the former Rudd Government.

The narrative of Mr Rudd’s chaotic government would be familiar to readers of The Australian, which began reporting on the emerging problems of the Rudd administration in mid-2008. Our sources, named and un-named, included senior public servants, politicians and diplomats. More than five months after the caucus revolt that brought an end to a regime Mr Rudd’s deputy argued had lost its way, these facts were finally reported yesterday on the front pages of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, which gleaned its information from US diplomatic cables dropped by WikiLeaks.

Though not wholly unexpected, it’s unfortunate that the writer of this piece has conflated purported “facts” with what are, after all, opinions based on subjective assessments.

Whether the assessments are those of “sources, named and un-named,” or of hapless de-cloaked US diplomats — and whether one agrees or disagrees with those assessments — they remain as opinions, not facts. Not withstanding that assessments and opinions, when repeated often and loudly enough, can reify to become factoids.

For my own assessment of The Oz’s self-serving and self-aggrandising piece here, I can only conclude the paper has enlisted our friend Doctor Easychair to help write its op-eds.

As for our good Doctor, one might wonder whether he’s half-expecting a smoking-gun revelation that “Kevin Rudd gave aid to Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe” in the next tranche of Wikileaks.

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Stop Press: Abbott says lawbreakers should be prosecuted

I presume that the US government is going after the people who provided information to Assange. As for Assange, if he’s broken the law he should be prosecuted.

Thus opined Australian Opposition leader Tony Abbott on the ABC’s Insiders program. Mr Abbott’s remaining statements on the topic of the Wikileaks controversy went on to drive home what he evidently considers a winning formula:

Well, as I said, if he’s broken the law he should be prosecuted. That’s what should happen. ... Well that’s up to the relevant authorities. If he's broken the law he should be prosecuted.

Well, it would be most unusual for a politician to profess that lawbreakers should not be prosecuted.

But Mr Abbott, like his opposite number Prime Minister Julia Gillard, was unable to say which law(s) Julian Assange is alleged to have broken, thus completing a deuce set of apparent cluelessness in Canberra.

Moreover, being in lock-step with US policy on the dreaded Wikileaks ‘threat,’ the Gillard-Abbott bipartisan chorus might also play well with US negotiators in Australia’s horse-trading for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

Readers may recall how, the last time an Australian government prostrated itself before US policy demands, forty US trade negotiators filed into Australia on the eve of the Iraq War to hammer out the vaunted Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, which in the end delivered bugger all of any real benefit to Australia.

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