Wikileaks

Some random thoughts on Wikileaks. Be warned: I’m going to be doing a bit of “people say such-and-such” w/o providing any links, because I’m feeling a bit lazy. I don’t think any of these unsourced mutterings will be much in dispute, however.

The short version:

• The horse is out of the barn
• Julian Assange ought not be prosecuted by the U.S.
• Australia could plausibly see him as a traitor, however
• And he definitely seems to be an enemy of the U.S.
• The Swedish “rape” charges look to be entirely bogus
• Bradley Manning should be prosecuted by the U.S.
• It’s possible that this is all a U.S. psyop

Spilt Milk

To begin with the obvious: whatever was leaked is now public knowledge. There’s no way to get it back; digital information can be copied too quickly, disseminated too widely, and stored too easily for anything that made its way to Wikileaks to ever be a secret again. Talk of “shutting down” Wikileaks is (mostly) petulant nonsense. Such a “shutdown” might be worth pursuing out of principle, but no practical benefit will come of it.

The biggest risk attendant to “taking on” Wikileaks is that of embarrassment resulting from the attempt to do the impossible; every time some dope started up a new website with copies of the leaked material, it would be a black eye for the U.S., and many people could misinterpret this as a sign of U.S. impotence. While harassment of the people behind Wikileaks could serve an important deterrent function, a full-scale assault would be like trying to grab water.

The only real way to (try to) keep this material out of the public consciousness would be outlaw consumption or possession of it. I’m sure that the shortcomings of this approach are self-evident. Given all this, the best course of action for the U.S. is to ignore the leaked material as much as possible.

Prosecution

There’s talk of prosecuting Assange under U.S. espionage statutes. This, I don’t get. The guy isn’t an American, and, so far as I know, didn’t do anything nefarious while on American soil or under American jurisdiction. It doesn’t seem right (i.e., it seems to violate all principles of democratic governance) to prosecute foreigners under domestic laws. Since Assange had no say in what U.S. laws were, and did not voluntarily subject himself to them (AFAIK) by, for instance, popping into the U.S. to swipe some secrets himself, it seems ridiculous to prosecute him under those laws.

To be fair, though, there’s a lot of this poison about; Europeans seem particularly fond of deciding to prosecute foreigners under their (i.e., European) laws. It’s a dangerous idea, and antithetical to freedom.

Aussies

On the other hand, if the Australians were so inclined, I could see them as having a good case against Assange for espionage, treason, or something of that kind. AUS had been a U.S. ally in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the sabotage of your nation’s allies in wartime seems like an offense to me. That’s up to them, however, and they haven’t been making enthusiastic noises on this score.

Enemy

Assange does seem to be, objectively speaking, an enemy of the U.S., actively engaged in espionage and/or sabotage. I’m pretty sure there’s something you’re supposed to do with enemy combatants during wartime, but I can’t seem to remember what it is …

I would re-iterate that any actions taken against Assange would be based either in honor or a theory of deterrence; they’ll do nothing to repair the damage he’s already done. But then the Doolittle raid didn’t have any immediate practical end, either.

Rape

The thing that’s actually hauled Assange into court is some sort of rape allegation made by a couple of Swedish women. I don’t want to get too much into Assange’s tawdry shenanigans, but the short version seems to be that on a trip to Sweden Assange bedded (separately) two women over the course of several days — these women later spoke and, upon coming to understand the situation, went to the authorities with a complaint that came out as an allegation of one of the many sorts of proscribed conduct covered under the surprisingly expansive Swedish definition of “rape”. If all is as it appears to be, then it’s all pretty pathetic.

Treason

On the other hand, we’ve got this Bradley Manning cat. This guy is a U.S. Army PFC who (allegedly!) stole and passed on all sorts of classified material to which he was given access in his capacity as an intelligence analyst with the 2nd BCT, 10th Mountain Division. How this doesn’t add up to execution for treason is beyond me. (And I should note, in the interests of clarity, that he is in prison, and that things don’t look so good for him.)

Secrets and Lies

Of course, there is something else to consider here. As a lot of people have pointed out, there doesn’t seem to be much surprising in the most recent round of Wikileaks material. Arabs don’t trust Persians, you say? Who, exactly, is that supposed to shock?

All this raises the possibility that the Wikileaks episode is some sort of elaborate U.S. psyop, designed to disperse propaganda. That doesn’t seem wildly implausible to me. When you’re dealing with professional liars, though, it’s always hard to say what’s afoot.