By Richard Ackland
'I am the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier and all the rest . . . if you have a problem with me, piss off.''
That's Julian Assange showing off some his talents.
Julian seems to bring out gallant responses and hyperbole from the best of them.
''Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders?'' - Sarah Palin.
"The heart and soul of this organisation" ... Julian Assange.Credit: John Shakespeare
''Can anyone really say that the resources of two states and an international police force should be directed to investigating the provenance of a wayward morning glory?'' - Guy Rundle.
''In my opinion, what WikiLeaks has done amounts to espionage in a most serious form. It's probably the single greatest act and most terrible act of espionage against the United States in our history.'' - Senator Joe Lieberman.
Actually, Julian is wrong. WikiLeaks, or a similar internet-based system for the upload and download of state secrets, could exist perfectly well without him.
The confected outcry over the release of the US embassy cables shows an alarming degree of stupefaction and hypocrisy by those steering the ship of state.
The Prime Minister covered herself in ignominy when lecturing us the other day about the ''foundation stone'' of the illegality and ''irresponsibility'' of these publications, and in the next breath being unable to point to any law that Assange or his organisation had broken.
Even the opposition's legal spokesman, George Brandis, stepped in to state the obvious: ''As far as I can see he hasn't broken any Australian law.''
The sabre-rattling of Attorney General Robert McClelland over Assange's Australian passport and sooling the federal police on to him looked particularly cack-handed.
Governments conspire to leak secrets on a regular basis, if it suits them. Jack Goldsmith, a former US assistant attorney-general, now at Harvard Law School, the other day queried why there had not been a witch-hunt into who disclosed national security information to the journalist Bob Woodward for his book Obama's Wars. This was, he said, ''opportunistic top-level leaking reflected in Woodward's book''.
The point is that vast troves of information are over-classified by the executive arm. The ''Top secret'' stamp is flung on documents that more properly should just be labelled ''Embarrassing''.
Law enforcement agencies are far more focused on chasing low-level officials who blow the whistle (for example the current case in the US of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim), than politicians and higher-ups who leak state secrets for political advantage, as opposed to the public interest.
We have seen instances of that here. The Allan Kessing and Desmond Kelly cases, for starters. Yet ministers of the Crown blithely turn a blind eye to their flunkies who leak damaging confidential information to special toadies in the media, and get away with it. Andrew Wilkie probably can tell you more about that.
In the US there is uncertainty about the legal ramifications of these revelations. The century-old Espionage Act is not up to the job, and the inflamed Senator Lieberman is introducing legislation to make it an offence to publish state secrets. Even then it's by no means certain that the US Supreme Court might not stick to the first amendment guns it fired in the Pentagon Papers case, upholding the press's right to publish. The obvious difficulty is that if the law takes down WikiLeaks it would have to apply equally to The New York Times and other mainstream publishers.
There's been a four-year history of secrets being published by WikiLeaks, including, you may remember, last year's revelation of the list of websites to be subject to the federal government's mandatory internet filter. Hardly a squeak then was made to threaten the independence of WikiLeaks. Yet the diplomatic cables have set off a disproportionate bellicosity against the ''founder-philosopher'' and his organisation.
Maybe it's because, as Umberto Eco wrote the other day, these embassies have been sprung filling up their cables back to HQ with stuff they've snitched from the local press clippings. Any reasonable newspaper coverage in Italy (apart from the ones owned by Berlusconi) would have told you that the Prime Minister was a serial love rat, just as the Australian media was reporting with regular monotony that Kevin Rudd was a control freak.
Admittedly, other cables did bring us some of the juicy private traffic between officials. The extradition proceedings under way in Britain seem to be pretty much a sideshow - I hope that doesn't turn out to be an inaccurate assessment. They are steeped in murk and uncertainty and, on the strength of what's known about the Swedish case, it's not certain they'll amount to much.
Even if Assange does porridge in a Stockholm nick, WikiLeaks or something similar would keep functioning. Bradley Manning, the US Army private who allegedly had the fortitude to provide all this material to Assange, has made sure of that.
Unfortunately, overblown rhetorical flourishes are not the exclusive preserve of politicians. Assange has done himself no favours by suggesting that Julia Gillard has defamed him or that Hillary Clinton should resign if it is shown that she ordered her diplomats to spy on UN officials. He is quite fond of his own hype. He described the earlier Iraq documents as ''the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record''.
Those familiar with the Pentagon Papers say that this is nonsense. What Daniel Ellsberg achieved was far more significant. Anyone who saw the SBS Dateline interview with Assange might forgivably get the impression that he has a tendency to narcissistic overreach.
I'd say Bradley Manning is the real hero here. He's the one with his neck on the block. If he's found guilty of anything he's the one who'll do a meaningful amount of time. Not Julian Assange.
justinian@lawpress.com.au
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