Julian Assange: Neocon Tool?

„It turns out our government has been lying to us about whether we have troops in Pakistan engaging in combat operations. The Pentagon has said the mission of American soldiers is confined to training Pakistani forces so that they can in turn train other Pakistani military, but in fact our forces have been embedded in Pakistani fighting units, giving them electronic data and other support as they kill the enemy. We know this because of WikiLeaks. It’s also thanks to WikiLeaks that we know about America’s arrangement with the President of Yemen: we kill Yemen-based terrorists and he claims that Yemen is doing the killing.

In these respects, I think, WikiLeaks is doing God’s work. I realize there are tactical rationales for both of these deceptions, but I don’t see them trumping the bedrock right of citizens in a democracy to know when their tax dollars are being used to kill people — especially when those people live in countries we’re not at war with. So, if we’re going to calculate Julian Assange’s net karma, I’d put this stuff on the positive side of the ledger. And calculate we must. Assange will presumably get Time magazine’s Person of the Year nod, and Time will no doubt remind us that the award recognizes impact, not virtue; Hitler and Stalin are past winners. It will be left for us to decide whether to file Assange under good or evil. Let’s get started.

Assange has an elaborate rationale for his actions. He laid it out in a grandiose online manifesto that ranges from the undeniably plausible (If total conspiratorial power is zero, there is no conspiracy) to the eccentrically metaphorical (What does a conspiracy compute? It computes the next action of the conspiracy) to the flat-out opaque. But the gist of his argument is clear. He thinks a basic problem with the world is authoritarian regimes, a term that he uses — in stark contrast with its American usage — to include America.”