You did not have to listen for too long to WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange’s half-educated condemnations of the US “military-industrial complex” to know that he was aching to betray better and braver people than he could ever be.
As soon as WikiLeaks received the US State Department cables, Assange announced that the opponents of dictatorial regimes and movements were fair game. That the targets of the Taliban, for instance, were fighting a clerical-fascist force, which threatened every good liberal value, did not concern him. They had spoken to US diplomats. They had collaborated with the great Satan. Their safety was not his concern.
David Leigh and Luke Harding’s history of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to Moro’s, a classy Spanish restaurant in central London. A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with US forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names.
“Well, they’re informants,” Assange replied. “So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”
A silence fell on the table as the reporters realized that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was a sociopath who was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths.
They persuaded Assange to remove names before publishing the US State Department Afghanistan cables. However, Assange’s disillusioned associates suggest that the failure to expose “informants” niggled in his mind.
It is hard to believe now, but honest people once worked for WikiLeaks for all the right reasons. Like me, they saw the site as a haven; a protected space where writers could publish stories that authoritarian censors and libel lawyers would otherwise have suppressed.
James Ball joined and thought that in his own small way he was making the world a better place. He realized that -WikiLeaks was not what it seemed when an associate of Assange — a stocky man with a graying moustache who called himself “Adam” — asked if he could pull out everything the US State Department documents “had on the Jews.”
ALLY OF TYRANTS
Ball discovered that “Adam” was Israel Shamir, a dangerous crank who uses six different names as he agitates among the anti-semitic groups of the far right and far left. As well as signing up to the conspiracy theories of fascism, Shamir was happy to collaborate with Belarus’ decayed Brezhnevian dictatorship. Left-wing tyranny, right-wing tyranny, as long as it was anti-Western and anti-Israel, Shamir did not care.
Nor did Assange. He made Shamir WikiLeaks’ representative in Russia and eastern Europe. Shamir praised the Belarussian dictatorship. He compared the pro-democracy protesters beaten and imprisoned by the KGB to soccer hooligans.
On Dec. 19 last year, the Belarus-Telegraf, a state newspaper, said that WikiLeaks had allowed the dictatorship to identify the “organizers, instigators and rioters, including foreign ones” who had protested against rigged elections.
The proof of Assange and Shamir’s treachery was strong, but not conclusive. Given Shamir’s history, there were reasonable grounds for fearing the worst. However, even now, you cannot show beyond reasonable doubt that the state has charged this pro-democracy politician or that liberal artist with treason or collaborating with a foreign power because WikiLeaks named names.
However, one can say with certainty that Assange’s involvement with Shamir is enough to discredit his claim that he published the documents in full because my colleagues on the Guardian inadvertently revealed a link to a site he was meant to have taken down. WikiLeaks put the cables on the Web last month with evident relish, and ever since I have been wondering who would be its first incontrovertible victim. China appeared a promising place to look. The authorities and pro-regime newspapers are going through the names of hundreds of dissidents and activists from ethnic minorities. To date, there have been no arrests, although in China, as elsewhere, the chilling effect WikiLeaks has spread has caused critics of the communists to bite their tongues.
However, in Ethiopia Assange has already claimed his first scalp. Argaw Ashine fled the country last week after -WikiLeaks revealed that the reporter had spoken to an official from the US embassy in Addis Ababa about the regime’s plans to intimidate the independent press. WikiLeaks also revealed that a government official told Arshine about the planned assault on opposition journalists. Thus Assange and his colleagues not only endangered the journalist. They tipped off the police that he had a source in the state apparatus.
PLAYING WITH FIRE
Once we have repeated Orwell’s line that “so much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot,” there is work to do. First, there needs to be relentless pressure on the socialist socialites and haggard soixante-huitards who cheered Assange on. Bianca Jagger, Jemima Khan, John Pilger, Ken Loach and their like are fond of the egotistical slogan “not in my name.” They are well-heeled and well-padded men and women who know no fear in their lives. Yet they are happy to let their names be used by Assange as he brings fear into the lives of others.
We need also to question the motives of the wider transparency movement. Anti-Americanism is one of its driving inspirations and helps explain its perfidies. If you believe that the US “military-industrial complex,” Europe or Israel is the sole or main source of oppression, it is too easy to dismiss the victims of regimes whose excesses cannot be blamed on the West. Assange’s former colleagues tell me that the infantile leftism of the 2000s is not the end of it. Never forget, they say, that Assange came from the backwater Queensland city of Townsville, Australia. He is a small-town boy desperate to make the world notice.
The informer usually blabs because he wants to settle scores or ingratiate himself with the authorities. Assange represents a new breed, which technology has enabled: The snitch as show-off.
The Web made Assange famous. It allows him to monitor his celebrity — I am told that even the smallest blogpost about him rarely escapes his attention. When he sees that the audience is tiring, the Web provides him with the means to publish new secrets and generate new headlines.
Under the cover of holding power to account, Assange can revel in the power the Web gives to put lives in danger and ensure he can be what he always wanted: the center of attention.
Whether in terms of market commonality or resource similarity, South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co is the biggest competitor of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC). The two companies have agreed to set up factories in the US and are also recipients of subsidies from the US CHIPS and Science Act, which was signed into law by former US president Joe Biden. However, changes in the market competitiveness of the two companies clearly reveal the context behind TSMC’s investments in the US. As US semiconductor giant Intel Corp has faced continuous delays developing its advanced processes, the world’s two major wafer foundries, TSMC and
The first Donald Trump term was a boon for Taiwan. The administration regularized the arms sales process and enhanced bilateral ties. Taipei will not be so fortunate the second time around. Given recent events, Taiwan must proceed with the assumption that it cannot count on the United States to defend it — diplomatically or militarily — during the next four years. Early indications suggested otherwise. The nomination of Marco Rubio as US Secretary of State and the appointment of Mike Waltz as the national security advisor, both of whom have expressed full-throated support for Taiwan in the past, raised hopes that
Authorities last week revoked the residency permit of a Chinese social media influencer surnamed Liu (劉), better known by her online channel name Yaya in Taiwan (亞亞在台灣), who has more than 440,000 followers online and is living in Taiwan with a marriage-based residency permit, for her “reunification by force” comments. She was asked to leave the country in 10 days. The National Immigration Agency (NIA) on Tuesday last week announced the decision, citing the influencer’s several controversial public comments, including saying that “China does not need any other reason to reunify Taiwan with force” and “why is it [China] hesitant
We are witnessing a sea change in the government’s approach to China, from one of reasonable, low-key reluctance at rocking the boat to a collapse of pretense over and patience in Beijing’s willful intransigence. Finally, we are seeing a more common sense approach in the face of active shows of hostility from a foreign power. According to Article 2 of the 2020 Anti-Infiltration Act (反滲透法), a “foreign hostile force” is defined as “countries, political entities or groups that are at war with or are engaged in a military standoff with the Republic of China [ROC]. The same stipulation applies to
RSS