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.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Last week, Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) unveiled the location of Nvidia’s new Taipei headquarters and announced plans to build the world’s first large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer in Taiwan. In Taipei, Huang’s announcement was welcomed as a milestone for Taiwan’s tech industry. However, beneath the excitement lies a significant question: Can Taiwan’s electricity infrastructure, especially its renewable energy supply, keep up with growing demand from AI chipmaking? Despite its leadership in digital hardware, Taiwan lags behind in renewable energy adoption. Moreover, the electricity grid is already experiencing supply shortages. As Taiwan’s role in AI manufacturing expands, it is critical that
RSS