WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange greets supporters in 2017 outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was in self-imposed exile until 2019.
Never has the wrath and petulance of the American government been focused so relentlessly on a breach of official secrecy. The pursuit of Julian Assange is in its 14th year, as the U.S. continues trying to extradite him from London to stand trial for helping the world’s most powerful news organizations publish U.S. diplomatic and military intelligence in sweeping defiance of secrecy protocols. Assange, convicted of nothing, has been behind bars in Britain since 2019, when he was evicted from the Ecuadorian embassy where he had sheltered for seven years.
The data leaks for which three presidential administrations have now pursued Assange took place in 2010, and while his treatment has been routinely denounced by press advocates worldwide, the media have yet to address a fundamental question, one that they are uniquely qualified to answer: What did the leaks actually do? Did the material that Assange’s anti-secrecy organization, Wikileaks, made public do damage to U.S. national interests commensurate with the fury they provoked?
Or did the leaks, as his supporters claim, expose military wrongdoing that deserved exposure and, thanks to the release of reports from U.S. diplomats posted abroad, offer people worldwide valuable insight into what their own governments were doing that they might never have learned otherwise?
Isn’t it time for the press, which benefited mightily from what it got from Wikileaks, to do the reporting that would enable the public to judge whether Assange is a traitor or a benefactor?
Those questions weren’t raised — in or outside the courtroom — when Assange’s principal source Chelsea Manning, the Army clerk who leaked the 2010 files, was treated with withering brutality. Arrested within weeks, Manning was held in a Marine brig in solitary confinement for 10 months then convicted and sentenced to 35 years. By the time President Barack Obama ordered her freed in 2017, she had spent nearly seven years behind bars. She was again jailed in 2019, when she refused to turn against Assange, and was held for another 12 months. At no point was Manning allowed to testify about what motivated her, and the possibility that the disclosures were, on the whole, beneficial was never raised.
That possibility isn’t farfetched. Indeed, it’s precisely the position taken by some of the most influential news media on Earth — the New York Times, El Pais, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde. They were rewarded with journalism’s highest honors, and their editors “were unanimous in their belief that there is a justified public interest in the material,” which Times editorial chief Bill Keller said was of “immense value.”
Wikileaks first got worldwide notoriety in 2010 when it released video taken three years earlier by U.S. Army helicopter gunships as they shot to death 18 civilians in Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists. Later that year some 90,000 military documents were released, “a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan,” the Guardian reported, “revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighboring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency.”
Leaks related to the Iraq war revealed tens of thousands more civilian deaths than had previously been acknowledged, and showed, as the Guardian found, that “US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers.”
“We can bemoan how these leaks occurred,” United Kingdom Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said at the time, “but I think the nature of the allegations made are extraordinarily serious.”
Later in 2010, Wikileaks began releasing U.S. State Department documents dated from 1966 to 2010, covered in a nine-part series in the New York Times. Some described spying operations intended to gather personal information about United Nations officials in New York. Many were so-called diplomatic cables from U.S. officials reporting to Washington on the countries where they were posted. The subject matter was vast and wide-ranging and included reports that Arab leaders shared Israel’s concerns about Iran, that Vladimir Putin’s graft may have made him Europe’s richest man, that China might prefer a Korea reunified under Seoul to an independent but unstable North, that Argentina might again be coveting the Falklands.
Also among the so-called Cablegate trove were reports from the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, Tunisia, of what the Times called “self-dealing and excess” by the family of the Tunisian president, reporting later credited helping spark the overthrow of the government there and ushering in the Arab Spring.
True, among those leaked cables was material that was dated and downright wrong, and Wikileaks later infuriated supporters by releasing the documents on its own in full, without submitting to editorial redactions that its publishing partners had made to previous disclosures to avert needless harm.
But on balance, far from discrediting U.S. interests, the Cablegate leaks may have had the paradoxical effect of positioning official U.S. observers as authoritative sources of sensitive information that were more trustworthy than people in many countries could get from their own media. If so, instead of undermining U.S. influence, the leaks might have given American accounts a prominence they would never have had.
But then, we don’t know that. Just as we cannot know whether the historic Wikileaks disclosures were reckless informational pillage that endangered national security or the digital assertion of a basic right to hold officials to account for their wrongs, whatever secrecy they shroud them in. U.S. law may have no obligation to consider whether Assange did the world a favor in 2010 since this country permits no public benefit defense to what he’s accused of. But the news media do have an obligation to make an independent determination of Wikileaks’ impact, because the impact was theirs as well, and they too must be held accountable.
Edward Wasserman writes on media ethics and is a professor and former dean at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
What impact did Julian Assange and Wikileaks have? Time for the news media to find out
10
0
02.06.2023
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange greets supporters in 2017 outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was in self-imposed exile until 2019.
Never has the wrath and petulance of the American government been focused so relentlessly on a breach of official secrecy. The pursuit of Julian Assange is in its 14th year, as the U.S. continues trying to extradite him from London to stand trial for helping the world’s most powerful news organizations publish U.S. diplomatic and military intelligence in sweeping defiance of secrecy protocols. Assange, convicted of nothing, has been behind bars in Britain since 2019, when he was evicted from the Ecuadorian embassy where he had sheltered for seven years.
The data leaks for which three presidential administrations have now pursued Assange took place in 2010, and while his treatment has been routinely denounced by press advocates worldwide, the media have yet to address a fundamental question, one that they are uniquely qualified to answer: What did the leaks actually do? Did the material that Assange’s anti-secrecy organization, Wikileaks, made public do damage to U.S. national interests commensurate with the fury they provoked?
Or did the leaks, as his supporters claim, expose military wrongdoing that deserved exposure and, thanks to the release of reports from U.S. diplomats posted abroad, offer people worldwide valuable insight into what their own governments were doing that they might never have learned otherwise?
Isn’t it time for the press, which benefited mightily from what it got from Wikileaks, to do the reporting that would enable the........
© San Francisco Chronicle
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Andrew Mitrovica
Belen Fernandez
Tafi Mhaka
Marwan Bishara
Timotej Milanov
Ahmadi Ali
