December 16, 2010
Whatever the unusual aspects of the case, the Obama administration’s reported plan to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for conspiring with Army Pvt. Bradley Manning to obtain U.S. secrets strikes at the heart of investigative journalism on national security scandals.
3 comments:
Right on!
17 December 2010
["that hideous strength!..." C.S. Lewis]
"We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours," Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh dutifully reassured Empire's General David Petraeus this year, regarding the US' ongoing, secret--and, illegal-- bombing campaigns in Yemen.
Overall, the State Department cables reveal a stomach-turning dilettantism and cavalier--and hideous--disregard for life, i.e., the evil banality that Arendt referred to when covering the Eichmann trial in the sixties.
If--and according to the dictates (tacit or otherwise) of the investor class overseeing Empire's nefarious global exploits--it must be the case in this era of Late (i.e., finance) Capital that We, the People are to suffer the bumptious stench of Ivy League elites playing "world affair"--i.e., secretly contemptuous of their liaisons, their superiors, and, doubtless, in thrall to their own no-mean-degree of self-loathing--then transparency of the kind WikiLeaks has enabled is de rigueur, if only to mitigate the fated demise of this 234-year-old experiment gone utterly, miserably--and, quite predictably--awry.
"We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours," indeed!
(17 December: Assange released today!)
Unfortunately reporters in the mainstream try to distinguish themselves from Assange. Snide remarks are made about him everywhere. For example, Time magazine, which tries so hard to be neutral in all issues, says Assange appears to have a martyr complex, and Assange "lectured" the interviewer on the Founding Fathers. The editor also tries to show the supposed irony of Wikileaks' hiding the identities of its sources while exposing secrets of others. (It's totally unclear what the editor's point is.) In a CNN report, Assange's organization is compared to a cult, and Bonnie and Clyde. All of this paints a picture of Assange not being a serious journalist, or even a journalist. ("Hey look, he's not like US.") So, I don't think most journalists agree with the title of this post.
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