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Wednesday, December 01, 2010

The Most Dangerous Man Not in America
Posted by jurassicpork | 5:29 PM

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein.)

If you were to ask Rush Limbaugh in between trips to the hubs of the child sex slave trade, he'd stubbornly insist it was Daniel Ellsberg. Then again, Limbaugh is a latter day Republican who still probably harbors a grudge about the Teapot Dome Scandal and, if Eisenhower was still President, he'd be calling for his impeachment for being a radical, anarchic Socialist for taxing the richest 1% up to 90% of their income.

But, as usual, el Rushbo fails to see the bigger picture and insists that Wikileaks founder and head Julian Assange, this decade's answer to Dr. Richard Kimble, is a traitor on a par with Ellberg.

Let's get a few things straight, starting with waving away the superficial similarities:

As with Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers in the latter half of June 1971, Julian Assange made Wikileak's most massive disclosures a year and a half into the Obama administration. The first of these Four Horsemen were the videos of gunship troops killing over a dozen Iraqi civilians, two of them Reuters photojournalists, in 2007. The second was the hardly stunning revelation through 75,000 documents pertaining to Afghanistan that not all is going well there. Hot on its heels was Wikileaks' biggest disclosure yet: The release of nearly 500,000 documents pertaining mostly to Iraq that read like a massive police blotter going back to the invasion in 2003.

Then just after Thanksgiving, the State Dept's internal memos and cables, some of them going back to the Johnson administration, were released, making Secretary of State Hillary Clinton grab her phone to apologize to foreign governments for all the nasty things she and her underlings had said amongst themselves about them. In other words, it revealed that the State Dept. was filled with little Richard Armitages, petty gossips who apparently forgot their cables and internal memos are now part of the digital age.

It's almost like the Dreyfus Affair all over again, only real and multiplied by 251,000.

The Obama administration, because it's still a new one, can hardly be held as accountable as the eight year-long Bush administration for the embarrassing and outrageous disclosures that, just as embarrassingly, were brought to us courtesy of a fresh-faced Pfc. barely out of high school and who used little more than a memory stick and a Lady Gaga CD.

As with the Pentagon Papers and the two year-old Nixon administration, the latest Wikileaks furor and the two year-old Obama administration is outraged not because it's being blamed for originating the abuses and lies spoon-fed to the media, the US public and even foreign governments but for perpetuating those self-destructive policies.

But let's be clear about the even bigger differences: The mainstream media have not divulged the secrets of the government and one nowadays can hardly imagine it showing the same intestinal fortitude of its ancestors that had holed up for weeks in hotel rooms while dedicated reporters hammered out millions of words and braved the DOJ's barking.

Wikileaks, an online entity answerable to no one, did it from the safety of their anonymity and seemingly impenetrable firewall. This time, the press is spreading the news not as actual, crusading journalists but passive spectators. In fact, it could be said the passivity of the US press, especially during wars, since Watergate is the very reason for Wikileaks' existence.

Daniel Ellsberg was a hero, an insider who was a policy analyst for the Pentagon and the Rand Corporation in California who was genuinely tortured by his conscience and felt, rightly, responsible for helping to create the bloody juggernaut that was the Vietnam War. Julian Assange is an egomaniacal little martinet living safely beyond the grasp of a vengeful government that isn't even his by birth who doesn't possess one shred or molecule of the moral currency still wielded by Ellsberg, a man who never fled the country and was quite willing to go to prison.

Ellsberg was motivated by a conscience as tortured as an Iraqi detainee. Assange's motives for embarrassing the US government? No one really knows aside from perhaps an abstract sense of outrage. Or maybe Assange and Wikileaks are merely the Nexus phase of gossip, an indelible reminder that we live in the most Gotcha Age of all time, the Alan Funt of Uncle Sam.

It's still unclear whether or not Assange authorized the leak of any classified material. In Ellsberg's case, it was undeniable (Ellsberg even had his children helping him Xerox classified documents at Rand, even cutting off the "Top Secret" from the tops.). But one thing is clear:

It will set our diplomatic credibility back to the Stone Age, which is to say back to the Bush years, a time in which the Bush Doctrine boiled down to, Agree With Us or We'll Either Blow You to Smithereens or Ignore You Until You Agree With Us. It'll make it that much harder for foreign governments to trust us and work with us and will all but wash away whatever few inroads President Obama had made to repair our international standing.

But to accuse Assange of being a traitor is ridiculous since, unlike Ellsberg, he's not a US citizen.




Assange seems to have a problem with the United States in particular and, to a lesser degree, governments that keep secrets, which is to say all of them. It would be easy to look at these four highly publicized disclosures as the World against Julian Assange but the fact is the latest batch of disclosures shows it's Uncle Sam against the World, with a greasy thumb perpetually at the tip of his nose.
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6 Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Well, Ellsberg himself seems to have a higher opinion of Assange that you do.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-06-11/daniel-ellsberg-wikileaks-julian-assange-in-danger

Oh, and Assange published his motives back in 2006 when he launched wikileaks. FYI

http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf
12/1/10, 7:21 PM  
Anonymous Joe said...
"Julian Assange is an egomaniacal little martinet living safely beyond the grasp of a vengeful government"

Really, is that true? What are your sources of information?
Do you think for a second that CIA/FBI/NSA wouldn't kill or capture and torture Assange if they could?

Do you have the same kind of stones?
I doubt it.
But, good luck with your book anyway.
12/1/10, 11:17 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Whenever Daniel Ellsberg is cited it might not be apropos to mention that the Pentagon Papers study was commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

In his autobiography released in the 1990s, he admitted frankly and correctly that he knew the Vietnam was lost in 1966.

This american piece of human waste did not inform the american public, instead he resigned and was rewarded with the post as head of the World Bank.

20,000 to 30,000 men and women of the United States and millions of Vietnamese died because Robert McNamara was a pure and simple coward.
12/2/10, 4:13 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...
"Julian Assange is an egomaniacal little martinet living safely beyond the grasp of a vengeful government"


This sounds like Fox News....

Let Digby simplify it for you....

http://twitter.com/digby56/status/10452405128790016
12/2/10, 11:02 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...
Here's from Glennzilla blog....

"Predictably, just as happened with Ellsberg, there is now a major, coordinated effort underway to smear WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, and to malign his mental health -- all as a means of distracting attention away from these highly disturbing revelations and to impede the ability of WikiLeaks to further expose government secrets and wrongdoing with its leaks. But now, the smear campaign is led not by Executive Branch officials, but by members of the establishment media. As the intelligence community reporter Tim Shorrock wrote today on Twitter: "When Dan Ellsberg leaked [the] Pentagon Papers, Nixon's henchmen tried to destroy his reputation. Today w/Wikileaks & Assange, media does the job."
12/2/10, 11:10 PM  
Blogger jurassicpork said...
First to Joe: Yeah, I do have the stones. And I've done much more drastic things than leak memos to a website by proxy.

I'm not smearing Assange. I'm just calling him out (as other people who have worked him have) and asking what his motives were. Publishing his motives from 4-5 years might not have any bearing on his motives for making the last 4 data dumps. 5 years ago, hardly anyone had heard of wikileaks. His remarks late last month in Forbes Magazine give me even more cause for alarm as it should all of us.

And isn't it funny that everyone's giving Assange credit for publishing these documents when #1, other people are actually doing it or him in Sweden and #2 How come nobody gives any kudos to Bradley Manning, the kid rotting away in Leavenworth and will likely do so for the next 52 years?
12/5/10, 7:46 PM  
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