Thursday, August 12, 2010

A War on Wikileaks?

In the interest of full disclosure, I am one of Wikileaks’ many financial donors. I have downloaded their entire Afghan War Diary, and numerous other documents in the past, and I have shared them. I am also one of the critics of some aspects of the Wikileaks review process. Some might rush to conclude that this puts individuals such as myself in a difficult position. Not from our standpoint. Instead the difficult positions are owned by the U.S. State Department and Pentagon, whose emissions have been chock full of absurd assertions, twisted logic, while appealing to us with as much charm as that of a delinquent about to commit date rape: first the appeal to our good side (ethics), then the threat of destruction (prosecution).

The past week has seen a mounting cascade of legal threats against Wikileaks, launched first via the mainstream media, which along with its patron state is clearly smarting from the lash of uncontrolled information access. A Pentagon official reportedly exclaimed, with obvious joy: “It’s amazing how [Wikileaks’ Julian] Assange has overplayed his hand. Now, he’s alienating the sort of people who you’d normally think would be his biggest supporters.” In one step, three fallacies: one, that this story is all about Julian Assange, thus reducing the complex to the personal; two, that supporters of Wikileaks have become antagonistic toward what is an amorphous transnational movement without clear boundaries of membership or location; and three, the implication that support has shifted toward the Pentagon, as if it now has some sort of green light of legitimacy to commit any acts against Wikileaks that it wishes. It’s only at these big historical moments, with so much at stake, with everything seemingly up in the air, that one finds so many people who are so wrong about so much.

If the state fails to make any sense—not surprising—it is because it is has no intention of doing so. The state is appealing to something more visceral with all of this posturing: fear. It wants to strike fear into the minds and bodies of people working with Wikileaks, or anyone else doing such work, and anyone contemplating leaking any classified records. Fear is its greatest weapon of psychological destruction, with proven success at home. And in this case, the danger lies at home. The outcome the state hopes for is greater self-censorship and greater self-monitoring.

Bullying Assange, or worse yet, actually capturing him and imprisoning him, will only make Assange into an international hero, the Che Guevara of information warfare. For all those who may be “alienated,” or who expressed any criticisms, they/we would clearly pick Assange over the Pentagon any day. The U.S. does not want this to be publicly proven on a world stage, so our answers to the question of what the U.S. is up to, and why it seems to have become so utterly unhinged, have to lie elsewhere. I contend that it is fear promotion, as part of a campaign of global counterinsurgency on psychological and emotional levels, to which the best answer is a combination of further tactical innovation, and greater humor.