a strange dinner with Julian Assange of @WikiLeaks
Reading all the furore about WikiLeaks and its mysterious frontman Julian Assange, I feel compelled to tell this story about a recent dinner conversation I had with with him.
It was at a private ‘do’ at a restaurant in Oxford right after TEDGlobal earlier this month. Julian slipped in to the party uninvited, plonked himself down opposite me and ordered some fish. Just that morning he’d given a candid interview to Chris Anderson on the TED stage in which he’d quite convincingly defended Wikileaks and its right/obligation to publish leaked military secrets that, some could argue, put lives and reputations in unnecessary peril. A cloak of secrecy surrounded his visit to the conference and even the TED production team had been kept in the dark about the identity of our surprise final day guest.
Julian Assange is a slender 6′ Australian with a flock of white hair. He cuts a striking figure in a white dress shirt, sneakers and jeans. It struck me that this charismatic guy who’s Public Enemy #1 in the eyes of several large and deadly organisations — not least the CIA — might do better to dye his hair brown and wears specs and an anorak. Sitting across the table from him, I half expected to see a tiny red laser dot dancing across his white shirt. In fact, if you’re going to stick around overnight in a city where you just made a controversial public appearance that was instantly tweeted all over the blogosphere, why not just paint a big red target on your back?
I asked him if he fears for his life. “All the time,” he said, “but if it comes I hope it comes quickly”. (I’m recalling this as accurately as I can.) “Just today after my interview at the Playhouse Theatre, I walked down the street to my hotel, tightly surrounded by a crowd of people wanting to congratulate me, or heckle me or whatever. I got to the concierge desk. As I was waiting to pick up my bag I felt a strange itch on the back of my neck. I felt for it and shit! it was a Band-Aid I’d never seen before. Christ, I thought, this is not good, this could be the bloody end right here, and I looked around for someone scurrying off into the shadows. Did I feel okay? yes, but…. then I realised. It was the sticky tape from the wireless headset microphone I’d just worn for the TED interview.”
Julian Assange left our post-TED party and reportedly gatecrashed another, leaving that one early by the emergency exit, setting off the alarm, choosing a dark back alley to make his escape in preference to the brightly lit Oxford main road. He says WikiLeaks is underfunded. I only hope the company has room in its budget for a little Kevlar in its CEO’s wardrobe.
In his line of work, paranoia is par-for-the-course (and likely justified). As for the party-crashing, it’s probably the only way the guy can get out and have some fun! Show up, unannounced, for an event where you’re surrounded by lots of people, and after a carefully debated amount of time, slip out the back. Not much of a way to live, but his site is opening our eyes to things the media is slow (or unwilling) to reveal. War-making should never go unchecked and I applaud his efforts to help the public to be informed.
Beech
The man is a treasonous asshole, worse even than a certain journo who famously published fake Iraqi prisoner torture photographs in one of the sleeze rags – almost certainly precipitating the flurry of kidnaps and beheadings we had to bear witness to. I hope they both meet a very nasty individual down a darkened alleyway – soon.
Funny, I was only thinking the other day that it can only be so long before Julian Assange succumbs to one of those pesky “accidents” that dog people who show the darker slights of hand of our so-called masters.
I discovered the following track, which I adore, this week – just as the Wikileaks debacle was exploding – the irony of it is just too painful, really.
Lest We Make It A Mistake – Auditory Canvas
Etherean,
Your compassion is overwhelming…
Dutts – if my lack of sympathy for those who put all of our lives at risk (particularly those who are fighting to protect the freedom you & I currently languish in) is misguided in your opinion then surely you need to re-examine your interpretation of “compassion”?
Etherean, your anger is founded in an important flaw. The people in Iraq and Afghanistan are already well aware of what is going on in their country. They don’t need to read Wikileaks. These things are happening right before their eyes and to their friends and families. They know all about it. Most stopped seeing coalition troops as their saviours a very long time ago.
It’s the American and British public who are being lied to and misled about what’s going on over there and thus keeping up political and popular support for the wars when most of us, if we knew what was really going on, would be demanding our troops be returned home as soon as possible. The powers-that-be don’t want you to know the information published on Wikileaks because they know that support for the war would diminish faster than Chuck Norris on amphetamine and we will demand the troops be returned home as soon as possible. That is what the troops want.
What the troops need protecting from are blind patriots — those who think that being dishonest about what they are being forced and driven to do / endure is “supporting our troops”; who think keeping them in harms way “protects our freedoms” while our very freedoms are being taken away by the very people who sent them there is “supporting our troops”; who think that putting the troops lives at risk getting them to do things that are supposed to protect us from terrorism but that have actually increased the danger to us from terrorism is “supporting our troops”; who think “supporting our troops” means keeping them fighting a war even they don’t believe in or have faith in any more.
No, the whole “support our troops” schtick stopped working on us a long time ago and the blind patriots are going to have to find another empty, meaningless slogan to make them feel special without having to think or do anything of real substance.
Thanks to organisations like “Wikileaks”, fearless journalists and the few politicians who dare to speak the truth, those who really give a damn about the troops have even more reason, and power, to demand their return home as soon as practically possible and not have them used any more as political pawns fighting an endless and unwinnable war to benefit only a few.
Before this usually sanguine comment section gets heated up let me explain that I don’t question anyone’s patriotism here esp. those who I do not know personally, nor anyone who argues that the Wikileaks documents are putting the troops in danger. I did want to point out that the phrase “support the troops” has been used all too often by those who claim patriotism but really just want to shut people up or who have spent little time thinking through the issues and it now lacks any meaning or merit. I think that in the very earliest stages of the wars there was some merit in arguing the critics be silent (I don’t fully agree but I can understand why some would say that). Now, however, I think all thinking people realise that there are many multi-faceted issues at stake and silence is no longer a suitable option and more can be done to support the troops by honestly and openly discussing the issues.
The increase in terrorism, the lies, the lack of proper justification for war, the abuses of the militaries that increase the danger to not only the troops but to ourselves (whether we know about the abuses or not, they already do) are issues that demand more openness and accountability to the ones who are funding the wars through our taxes.
I do think that proper care was taken to ensure that any documents leaked do not directly put troops or operations in danger. As for indirectly putting them in danger, as I said before, I don’t think the information in these documents would be anything not already known by word of mouth in those countries. Though it may provide some propaganda for the terrorists, most who could be radicalised will have been a long time ago. The people in Iraq and Afghanistan are mostly sensible people who understand that military operations go wrong and that individual soldiers/commanders can abuse without the knowledge or consent of their overseers. They will be angry, very angry, and justifiably so, but my opinion is they won’t go out killing as a result of reading Wikileaks– as I said, it’s not news to them and anyone feeling that strongly will already have enough knowledge of such events to have been pushed far enough in that direction anyway.
In any case, we can be sure that far more soldiers will be killed by staying in Iraq/Afghanistan than from individuals radicalised solely by reading Wikileaks (if any). If the Wikileaks documents adds to the pressure to bring the troops home then it will have saved lives (including civilian lives as the intelligence now clearly shows an increase in terrorist threat as a result of the presence of foreign troops in these countries).
Loosespark,
I couldn’t have put it better myself!
Etherean,
How has the war in Iraq or Afghanistan in any way contributed to my freedom?
If anything, the wake of 911, the threat of Al-Qaeda and the whole “coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan misadventure” has been used as a pretext by governments on both sides of the Atlantic to systematically erode civil liberties? Or haven’t you been watching the news for the last nine years or so?
Seriously, between the choice of dodging a few bombs or having to live in a police state, I’ll take the bombs. They’re nothing new for people in mainland Britain. We had the IRA conducting a far more professional, protracted and coordinated campaign of terrorism against us than Al-Qaeda has ever managed.
My grandfathers both fought (and suffered horrific consequences) in a war to protect the freedom and liberty of the world, and some of my best friends are currently serving overseas in HM services. So, you might say that, yes, I have a vested interest in supporting the troops.
And, funnily enough, it appears that Bradley Manning – the guy who is suspected of leaking this latest raft of Wikileaks material – is a Private in the US army himself. And I absolutely support what he’s done if it brings about a greater public consciousness and debate about the mess going on over there.
Because, let’s be perfectly clear: Iraq and Afghanistan has been nothing but a colossal waste of life and limb prosecuted by inept and opportunistic political shysters who refuse to send their own sons off to die for a futile cause but are happy to send off other peoples; and it is precisely “because” I am sick of seeing the endless litany of eighteen year old troops and Iraqi/Afghan civilians murdered in the sand on the news each night that I support people like Julian Assange, who dare to reveal the truths concerning the whole bloody mess and question the legitimacy and point of the entire barbarous exercise.
And if that makes me unpatriotic, then it’s a badge that I wear with swollen-chested pride because as Mark Twain observed, “patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”
I hear what you say but the fact of the matter is that sensitive miltary documents in ANY circumstances should not exist in the public domain. There is a need for secrecy. If Wikipedia had existed in the 1940′s and people had the same disregard for the privacy of this material then we would no doubt be living under a Nazi regime today…
But you could also argue that it was a culture of manufactured consent and the destruction of all dissenting views that allowed the Nazis to rise to prominence in the first place.
And by the same token, the My Lai massacre was also considered “a sensitive military operation of no interest to the public” and that was one of pretexts used to try and cover it up.
There has to be accountability. There has to be dissent. War crimes must be prosecuted.
If not, what separates us from the likes of the Taliban?
Etherean, my bet is that if Wikileaks had existed in the 30s and 40s then it is likely that the German public, and the rest of the world, had gotten to know about things like “the final solution”, concentration camps, what happened in ghettos and about the ideas behind “lebensraum”, and had had an opportunity to discuss the matter, and had thus, probably, been less patriotic about the glofied Vaterland. We will, of course, never know, but that is my guess. Secrecy, propaganda and blind patrotism are what made Nazi Germany possible. Secrecy, propaganda and blind patrotism are also exactly what Wikileaks work to uncover.
Sounds like a rough outline of a song for your ‘Australianeer’ EP!
You might have to make up the ending and romance up the emergency exit scene a bit.
Secrecy is very complex.
For example: in 1940, a pair of British engineers called Randall and Boot invented a device called a magnetron. This was capable of producing enormous amounts of radio power at a much higher frequency than anyone thought possible, and revolutionised Allied radar – it allowed accurate night bombing and navigation, and has been called the single most important invention of the war. We gave it later that year to the US – an act, incidentally, which may have sealed the cooperation between our secret services which still lies at the heart of the ‘special relationship’.
Clearly, such a potent secret weapon must be guarded carefully from the Germans – and because it was very simple, very small and carved from a block of solid copper, it proved impossible to rig an effective self-destruction mechanism (indeed, during tests, the magnetron often proved the only recognisable component retrievable after a crash), so there was a delay before it could be used over enemy territory – a delay while ineffective alternatives were tested out.
In 1977, Professor Bernard Lovell (of Jodrell Bank fame), who had been in charge of that aspect of wartime radar development, was having dinner with a German radio astronomer, Professor Hachenberg, who had been working on radar himself during the war. Indeed, Professor Hachenberg had been in a team which retrieved the first magnetron from an RAF bomber shot down over Rotterdam. Lovell took the opportunity to ask Hachenberg a question that had been bothering Lovell for more than thirty years – why, even after the Germans had discovered that magnetron, had it taken them so long to develop countermeasures?
Hachenberg replied that they’d found the magnetron and recognised it – and dismissed it as important, because they already knew about it. In fact, it had been patented by a Russian in the 1920s, and the Germans were using magnetrons in test equipment.
Lovell later calculated that Allied efforts to keep it secret had cost somewhere in the region of one to two million tons of shipping: the new radars were the only things capable of finding U-boats, and when they were finally introduced into coastal defence they led in fairly short order to the withdrawal and nullification of the entire U-boat fleet.
So – one of the most obvious and inarguable cases for complete secrecy, that of a war-changing secret weapon against a strong and technically savvy enemy, had significant negative consequences.
On the other hand, a similar decision, that to keep Bletchley Park ultra-secret, probably shortened the war by two years.
There is nothing simple about secrecy.
In my legal practice in the UK, I see and work with a lot of kids who have fled from Afghanistan. Some are older, some younger. All are scared. It is not the “want of a better life” that brings them here. I hear and see their fear in my offices, the worrying smiles and laughs we call “gallows humour”, the twitches, leg-shakes and over-excitement, or sullen silence and suspicion – they usually go one of those two ways. In the background to their arrival here, like most people in Afghanistan, they have been caught in between. Not in danger for the sides they’ve taken, but for the sides they haven’t taken. I’m thinking “shot by both sides” again. Admittedly one made the mistake of working for the troops as a translator, but for most of the others it was either trying to dodge Taliban recruitment, or their Dad had fallen out with someone else’s Dad. But the consequences usually affected the whole family and particularly the ones we see most of, the eldest sons. There was a report last month about the Taliban hanging a 7 year old boy “as a spy”, real reason being his grand-father had been trying to negotiate neutrality for the village. Because wars are toxic, most people just try to keep out of them. But the “sides” don’t like that. If you’re not with us you’re against us was the cry that got this war on terror rolling, and it still echoes.
So as to this information just disclosed, if there are families, informers, or maybe just some named as linked with lines of enquiry that the troops want to follow, who are named in the leaked documents, my experiences suggest to me that the Taliban won’t stop to “verify” the information, or look far behind it, that just being named in the document will get those families on the hitlists. And whole families, it will be, not just the named individuals.
When queried about this, Assange suggested that anyone listed there was quite possibly a “criminal informer” giving false information, and such people had pretty much themselves asked for trouble. God knows where he got that from. It sounded like defensive self-justification to me. Don’t forget, this might just be a local grocer looking for a good market for his pomegranates at the local bases. But now a “collaborator”, in a lot of danger.
It’s the inhabitants of Afghanistan who are now caught up in all this, they are the people I’m thinking of; the revelations of their names in this context damning them by association. Little people, caught in the middle. I think perhaps Assange didn’t know enough about these kinds of consequences when he took the decision to release the documents. I really wish he hadn’t.
Thanks for your post, matthew. Your points add another side to the story and give good important food for thought.
As far as I am aware (and I haven’t looked into it too deeply), no-one has yet drawn a definite conclusion that the documents have put anyone’s life in danger, but the potential is being looked into by various bodies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/world/asia/29wikileaks.html
I still support the leaks in principle but not of information puts anyone at risk. I just hope any such information is restricted only to those documents that were withheld for those reasons.
What an awful publicity circus the whole TED ‘brand’ is.
Mutual publicity for both TED and its guests assured.
Fame for both, by association – is the name of the game.
Once you’ve seen TED and TEDGlobal that way – its hard to enjoy watching people seek credibility through it.
They had a controversial guest deliberately by design – and probably a few celebs too. does anyone really care about this circus anymore?
Beauty_of_a_dream, if you are going to apply that level of cynicism to everything then nothing, and I mean nothing, would ever be worth doing and we would all have a miserable, pitiful existence.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with seeking publicity per se if it’s for a good cause or even for the sake of a career, and a person does not need to have only one single motive for doing something—after all, we enjoy doing good deeds don’t we? It doesn’t mean that because we enjoy doing something, we can’t also being doing it because it’s the right thing to do.
Furthermore, I can’t work out why you decided on this particular blog entry to vent these feelings as it is quite appropriate to ask someone like Julian to speak at their event. Whether you agree with him or not he is obviously at the forefront of something which is what TED is supposed to cover.
Sorry if my strongly worded and rather curt remarks upset anyone!
TED and TEDGLOBAL do seem rather a lot like that to me.
Thanks for allowing me to have a different opinion to most.
Please note my appology above to all those who felt I was in some way speaking out of turn or impolitely.
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Beauty_of_a_dream, no offence taken by me. I was only expressing my opinion why I disagreed with your opinion.
I think TED retains its popularity and is continuing to inspire many to aim for higher things (including myself).
I am glad that many of the speakers have taken time out to publicise themselves and their ideas as I would have unlikely had the chance to be introduced to and inspired by them otherwise.
Read this !
http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=774
Beauty_of_a_dream, I have waited a while to respond to your comments, because the ‘community’ has a way of leveling things without my intervention.
Firstly, you’re very welcome to present a contrarian view. This would not be an interesting or worthwhile blog if the comments section was just there for people to agree with me and applaud my various projects.
As to TED, it’s not surprising that its massive rise in popularity and visibility has led to criticism from some quarters. That’s the way the world works, and some people feel popularity is a bad thing in itself. That said, it’s a pretty shallow jibe to accuse TED of inviting Julian Assange so that we could get more ‘publicity.’ Yes we try to get content and speakers that are topical, controversial, timely and stimulating: that’s exactly why people come to TED events or download the talks. Of course, having selected the best content we can, we would love to get more publicity for that content. What we don’t do is pander to public taste. As many downloads as TEDtalks have had, the fact remains that ‘Woman Farts in Hot Tub’ on YouTube has more views than any single TEDtalk: that doesn’t mean that we will invite her to perform her act at TED just to get more page views. To describe it as a ‘circus’ is also pointless: a circus can be a freak show, or it can be Cirque Du Soleil. It should be plain to see which we aspire to. If I had created something as wonderful as Cirque Du Soleil, I would want it to be in multiple cities, on HBO and even Fox News, which it is. I don’t see anything shameful in that. I wish you could be a fly on the wall at a TED content meeting and hear the debating and soul-searching that goes on. We know we are hugely fortunate that the site has become an influential mouthpiece for new content, without a network, government, or Murdoch-type sugar daddy to account to. We are grateful for that and work incredibly hard to protect its integrity, despite the obvious spectres that start to raise their heads when something gets this popular. And we can’t always depend on having the ‘white knight’ of public support, because nobody’s perfect and we are liable to screw up from time to time.
But do not doubt for a moment TED’s sincerity. You’d just be plain wrong to do that. We believe in the power of ideas, even when they collide. There’s no macabre world domination plan behind this. As we get more well known, better and better ideas will be shared, from brilliant individuals, some famous like Julian and others unknown like Hans Rosling, Jill Bolte Taylor or Ken Robinson: because we believe we have built a mechanism that can unearth them and get them out in front of the public.
OK Points taken.
Fair enough – but you are on the inside and I’m just giving the point of view of how it looks and comes across to me as an outsider.
I’m sorry if the two images don’t match.
Looks like Mr Assange is certainly in demand:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11047025
Very late comment here – been fighting with my old Airwaves login for the blog, so here I am reborn.
Assange is a polarizer to be sure. TMDR’s experience live and in person is not all that different from the Wikileaks site recently, not to mention its Twitter feed…
Suffice it to say that on this side of the pond, The Powers That Be are incensed by what he has done. The “Collateral Murder” video lit the fire. The subsequent database release to the NY Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel turned it into a conflagration. My work intersects the TPTB world from time to time – “incensed” the closest word to describe what I hear.
Reading the public details about Bradley Manning, the guy who actually gave the data to Wikileaks, one has to wonder how a U.S. intel unit ever allowed a CD-ROM burner in classified network. It beggars the imagination that such a gaffe went uncorrected. More heads than Manning’s and Assange’s are certain to have rolled over that one.
TMDR is right in saying, “I half expected to see a tiny red laser dot dancing across his white shirt.” That dot may not be visible, but it’s tracking in.
…Assange clearly does not know when to stop. Further despicable leaks of private government data has now seen him appear on Interpol’s “Most Wanted” list as of time of this comment. Too little of a response to protect our safety too late I fear.
What on earth is private government data?
As far as I can remember governments are bodies elected by us to do OUR bidding. If governments have a pile of dirty secrets then the people who elected them deserve to know about it. If their double-dealing and corrupt methods get people ultimately killed your know whose hands to look at for the blood-stains.
Assange has got balls. He may be misguided and very controversial but he is doing what he believes to be right. Has he now gone too far? I believe yes.
The fact of the matter is that every government official in every corner of the world is going to be a lot more careful and honest in their dealings in future. For that part Mr Assange, I salute you.
I’m not going to comment on Assange’s motives, because I don’t know the man.
And I’m not going to say whether his actions are making the world a better place, because I really don’t know that, either.
But I will say that it seems to me that, if sufficiently documented, any war will be hated by the public. Why? Because war is, as Sherman succinctly put it, “all hell”. Now, this doesn’t mean that there are no wars that should be fought (though, again, I’m not passing judgement on any recent wars), but it does mean, I think, that the public is not mentally prepared to deal rationally with such things. In essence, they will see the horrors of war that are right under their noses, and *not* see any greater horrors that whatever war it is might be preventing.