We all knew it was coming. Ever since July, when WikiLeaks released classified Afghanistan War documents over the objections of the U.S. government, there was simply no chance that website founder Julian Assange would be allowed to make a clean getaway. Not after challenging the same people who left a hundred thousand dead in Iraq without so much as a backward glance. And certainly not after the Australian hacker-turned-activist continued his work, releasing both documents relating to the Iraq War and, in the latest outrage, U.S. State Department cables that shed light on its back-room dealings. Such repeated acts of defiance would not – could not – go unpunished. Too much was at stake. It was only a matter of time before the inevitable response.
Now Assange sits in solitary confinement in a London prison, awaiting extradition to Sweden to face sex-crime allegations as the U.S. government builds its own case against him. And yet, for all its tragic inevitability, there remains something shocking in the swiftness and single-minded ferocity with which Assange was taken down. In just over a week, the coordinated assault by state and corporate power stripped WikiLeaks of its domain name and banished it, through a campaign of harassment and disruption, onto unrecognizable mirror sites. Far from decrying this act of censorship, the establishment press denounced Assange, calling for his prosecution if not his outright assassination. Pundits howled that the leak threatened national security even as they reassured the public that it revealed nothing new and could be safely dismissed as irrelevant.
Both claims, of course, are false, just as they were when the press made them during the last two WikiLeaks disclosures. Despite the shrill accusations of Assange having “blood on his hands,” the very same government making those charges has acknowledged that it does not know of anyone being harmed, much less killed, as a result of the leaks. The notion that the released cables are uninformative is similarly incorrect. We now know that U.S. Special Forces are operating in Pakistan, just as Jeremy Scahill reported last year to a chorus of denials from military officials, and that the U.S. turned a blind eye to hundreds of murders committed by its military allies in that country. We know that it was indeed the U.S. that has been bombing Yemen, contrary to the statements of U.S. and Yemeni officials. We know that Hillary Clinton ordered diplomats to spy on United Nations dignitaries and that the U.S. government was aware of Shell and Pfizer’s corporate malfeasance in Nigeria. But the most valuable lesson of the WikiLeaks affair lies less in the cables than it does in the world’s response to them.
Even before the documents were released, the U.S. government launched a full-fledged public relations assault on WikiLeaks. What is most striking, however, is that the fight against WikiLeaks was soon taken up by virtually every major government in the world, regardless of political system or stated commitment to freedom of speech. Iran and China moved to block online access to the cables. The United Kingdom condemned the leak as “not in the national interest.” These remarks were echoed by the Canadian foreign affairs minister, who called the release “irresponsible.” Australia, too, condemned the action, promising to “support any law enforcement action that may be taken.” Italy blasted the release as the “September 11 of world diplomacy,” while France denounced it as “a threat to democracy.” The Japanese foreign minister, not to be outdone, declared the release “a monstrosity and criminal act.” Taken together, these statements are nearly indistinguishable. The Italian minister could have just as easily read the remarks of the Australian attorney general, or the Canadian or French or Japanese dignitaries, and it would not have made the slightest difference. Separated by thousands of miles, they were all reading from the same script.
There were a few notable holdouts from the WikiLeaks roast. The president of Brazil expressed solidarity with Assange, while Russia proposed that he receive the Nobel Peace Prize in a cynical attempt to score political points. By and large, however, the world’s governments were in lockstep on the danger presented by WikiLeaks. This sheer uniformity of opinion crossed all political lines: authoritarian regimes and liberal democracies, U.S. allies and rivals joined as one in condemning the anti-secrecy website. Faced with the disclosure of diplomatic secrets, even alleged U.S. enemies put aside their dislike of American empire to face down a far more dangerous threat to their systems: the idea that their citizens might know what they were saying behind closed doors.
Corporations followed suit, rapidly closing ranks against the whistleblower site. In a matter of days, WikiLeaks was abandoned by EveryDNS.net, Amazon.com, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and PostFinance, limiting the site’s ability to receive donations and hampering its accessibility to internet users. With world governments spearheading the legal assault on WikiLeaks and the mainstream media disparaging the site in the court of public opinion, the corporate boycott served as the third prong of the attack on WikiLeaks. Mainstream commentators often speak of the adversarial relationship between government and business. The reaction to the WikiLeaks affair shows nothing could be further from the truth. When push came to shove, far from providing checks and balances on one another, the power centers of the establishment – government, corporate, and media – united in pursuit of a common cause: the destruction of WikiLeaks and its founder.
There has been resistance. Anti-censorship hackers have launched attacks on the websites of the corporations guilty of dropping WikiLeaks, and have succeeded in temporarily disrupting them. For their troubles, they have been rewarded with the promise of a criminal investigation by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who has made no similar promise to investigate the hackers who launched damaging denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks. Meanwhile, in its efforts to prosecute Assange, the ironically-named Justice Department is considering dusting off the Espionage Act of 1917, which was used to persecute antiwar activists during the two world wars. Back in August, I wrote that WikiLeaks’ truth-telling constituted a revolutionary act. Now the long-awaited crackdown is here – and, if Julian Assange's legal troubles are anything to go by, it is only just beginning.
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