US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks

[Peter Presland]

Long article in The New Yorker about Assange

Fairly typical MSM Glossy puff piece of its type but too long (and much of far too dull) to post here in full. It's written in an irritating folksy, narrative style and the first 30 % or so can safely be skipped completely - it deals with the alleged mechanics of putting that 'Collateral Murder' video together. There are some interesting bits though - and, for me, Assange has an impressive side which I can't help identifying with. He's clearly out to make an MSM name for himself though, which is likely to alienate potential sympathisers and collaborators. In spite of his experiences, I think I detect something of a naive streak vis-vis the Western Elites too. His 'baddies' are resident in China, Russia, Central Asia and the Middle East ! - so maybe he's as co-optible as the next guy eh?

A couple of snippets:

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

In some respects, Assange appeared to be most annoyed by the journalistic process itself—“a craven sucking up to official sources to imbue the eventual story with some kind of official basis,” as he once put it. WikiLeaks has long maintained a complicated relationship with conventional journalism. When, in 2008, the site was sued after publishing confidential documents from a Swiss bank, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, and ten other news organizations filed amicus briefs in support. (The bank later withdrew its suit.) But, in the Bunker one evening, Gonggrijp told me, “We are not the press.” He considers WikiLeaks an advocacy group for sources; within the framework of the Web site, he said, “the source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document.”