The release in December 2010 by the WikiLeaks website of hundreds of thousands of leaked diplomatic cables raised a number of questions. Is freedom of information always good? Is government secrecy ever justified? If so, when? The Inroads listserv was sharply divided on these questions. It was a suggestion by Tom Flanagan – no stranger to Inroads or the listserv – that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange deserved to be assassinated that set the debate in motion.

From: Philip Resnick | December 5

Tom Flanagan, Julian Assange and the Return of the Mailed (Maled) Fist

It is impossible to ignore the significance of the material that WikiLeaks, with the cooperation of five of the world’s leading newspapers (none of them Canadian, I would note) has made public – 250,000 documents from the American State Department, unveiling the operations of the arcana imperii (the secrets of the empire) for all to see. It is an extraordinary development of the Internet, a new form of journalism and an equally extraordinary insight into the hypocrisies of diplomacy, the corruption of power (the Putin-Berlusconi interface alone is worth the price of admission) and the fault lines that characterize our planet in the second decade of a new millennium.

A tiny item caught my eye when the list of contributors to the Winter/Spring issue of Inroads was posted the other day. One of the contributors was Tom Flanagan, no stranger to the world of Canadian political commentary and strategy and a one-time contributor to this list. No great shakes, except for another little item. The same Tom Flanagan, in an interview on the CBC’s Power & Politics on December 1, had the following to say about Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks: “Assange should be assassinated [laughs]. I think Obama should put out a contract on him.” When the program’s host, Evan Solomon, said to him, “that is pretty tough,” and asked for clarification, Flanagan simply said, “ I’m feeling pretty manly..”

Flanagan subsequently issued an apology for his statement, but the cat was out of the bag. For the manly right, Assange was a dangerous enemy, and the prescribed punishment for enemies of the empire is the traditional one of all empires – off with their head. The chorus of opponents to Assange and WikiLeaks is a swelling one – Sen. Mitch McConnell, Sen. Joe Lieberman, Sarah Palin – and they all come from the right of the political spectrum. No surprise here, given the solace some of these documents will give to opponents of American foreign policy in various parts of the world. (Not that Turkey, China, Russia or the Governor of the Bank of England, for that matter, emerge from the WikiLeaks documents as shining lights.)

The most striking feature of the Flanagan intervention is how quickly hard ideologues reach for the metaphorical gun or the mailed fist when the political game takes a turn which they despise. No bullshitting about civility, freedom of the press, the need for transparency in public life – this is for the sotty set, or wets as Margaret Thatcher might have called them. The manly types, the Tom Flanagans of this world, deal in a harder political currency – that of friends and enemies.

He is not unique. That great German democrat, Hermann Göring, once famously stated, “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.” Comrades Stalin and Mao, and their smaller clones, also knew how to deal with pesky opponents who might stand in their way. Interesting, how quickly the veneer of civilized discourse peals away and the reptilian brain takes over for the practitioners of realpolitik.

As for Julian Assange, he is no modern-day saint, to be sure. But he is a whistle-blower who deserves the respect of any and all who value openness and veracity in public life.

Philip Resnick is Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and a member of the Inroads editorial board.

From: Reg Whitaker | December 6

I have been out of the country for the past three months, but it seems on my return that not much ever changes – including fatuous media commentary on public affairs. Tom Flanagan is usually an articulate and thoughtful exception, even though I don’t often agree with him, but in this case his quoted remarks on putting out a contract to whack Julian Assange fall, I think, into the silly category.

Philip takes the remark as sinister, and reflective of a “hard,” nasty edge to right-wing attitudes. There is no doubt a lot of nasty stuff on the right these days – the relentless, reckless attacks on President Obama as un-American verge on the hysterical and irrational – but I can’t agree that Tom’s silliness needs be taken seriously. He sometimes plays a conservative curmudgeon role on TV panels, and on occasion can actually be funny: one of the last things I saw of him prior to departing the country was on the so-called gun registry “debate”; he brought a popgun to the panel which he waved around like a crazy NRAer.

Whacking Assange is not funny, and Tom has already apologized. But hey, a Calgary Poli Sci prof doesn’t actually command hit squads. His fellow panelist, Liberal adviser Scott Reid, has waved the remark off. Reid knows all about silly remarks: remember his “beer and popcorn” gaffe in the 2006 election? That too was met with a lot of sanctimony.

Political scientist Reg Whitaker is a member of the Inroads editorial board. He lives in Victoria, B.C.

From: Alastair Sweeny | December 6

It seems to me the major hit against Assange is that he makes it a whole lot easier for the bad guys to operate. Is this transparency?

For example, there’s a shopping list of “Critical Foreign Dependencies,” including some Canadian ones. So now the loonies know where to go. Thanks, Assange.

Alastair Sweeny is Vice-President, Development, of Northern Blue Publishing in Ottawa.

From: Henry Milner | December 6

In the Winter/Spring Inroads, Tom Flanagan uncritically portrays the Harper government’s efforts to control information about itself, an attitude reflected in his own antagonism toward Julian Assange et al.

But if Flanagan represents one extreme, there is another one. And to judge by the voices of the callers to Cross Country Checkup Sunday [December 5], it is a position held by many Canadians, especially those who have grown up with the Internet. It states, without reservation, that transparency is good: in publicly posting messages intended to be private, Assange is doing what comes naturally. That’s what the Web is for.

Philip Resnick seems to agree, concluding that “as for Julian Assange, he is no modern-day saint, to be sure. But he is a whistle-blower who deserves the respect of any and all who value openness and veracity in public life.”

Philip and I are of the generation that remembers Daniel Ellsberg. Because of his job, Ellsberg had access to documents that showed a concerted, systematic government effort to distort the reality of the Vietnam war. In releasing the Pentagon Papers, he knew just what he was doing, and what effect it would have. I would describe Ellsberg as a whistle-blower who deserved our respect.

Can we say the same of Assange? I don’t believe so: I don’t buy the principle of transparency for the sake of transparency.

Henry Milner is co-publisher of Inroads.

From: Philip Resnick | December 6

A few quick thoughts. Reg, I fear, is being unnecessarily charitable toward Tom Flanagan, who is not given to show the same indulgence toward those whom he opposes. In the context in which figures in public life are calling for Julian Assange’s elimination as a cyber-terrorist, to go on television and smirkingly call for his assassination is to join the braying hounds. And it behooves those of us who do not want to join the chorus of furies to call him out on it, and to underline the mailed fist that underlines the more conventional rhetoric that a Flanagan deploys.

As for Henry’s point, not all whistle-blowing is necessarily virtuous, nor is transparency an unalloyed good. Assange may well be a narcissistic publicity seeker of a type that Daniel Ellsberg was not, and some of the material that he is releasing is not of the same incendiary quality as what the Pentagon Papers contained. The fact remains, however, that we live in a world where control over the media by the Murdochs and Berlusconis and Putins of this world is increasingly constricting what ordinary citizens can access, and that light shone into the hidden corners of political, corporate and military power – C. Wright Mills’s old power elite – is to be welcomed. WikiLeaks has taken the Internet and global communications to a whole new level of information. Call me a naive Canadian, if you wish. But I see this a step toward a more, not a less, informed democratic public.

From: Joe Murray | December 6

The public debate is turning a bit into those for and against Assange or for and against WikiLeaks. To bring some nuance it might help to identify a few of the competing ideas at play, and whether WikiLeaks heralds the arrival of a new era.

1. Freedom of information

In the wake of the Pentagon Papers there were efforts to improve the freedom of information held by governments. These built on centuries-old notions of freedom of the press that are closely allied in liberal philosophy with Enlightenment reason.

I buy many of the general justifications in the abstract: shining light on government activities will allow citizens to hold their governments to account for bad policies and bad acts, and having this accountability mechanism in place will provide a strong incentive for governments and officials not to do many things that are wrong or boneheaded for fear of being held accountable.

Here in Canada we just need to review the federal information commissioner’s reports or the history of the sponsorship scandal to know this isn’t working well. Putting a regime in place doesn’t really change the motivations and intentions of actors. Bureaucratic systems get set up to ensure that redactions are done in ways and on timeframes that serve the interests of those who would like political control over the release and reporting of information. Whistle-blower protection laws, another form of FOI, aren’t that effective either when the whistle-blowers’ careers are still derailed and those whose actions they have exposed as wrong are promoted.

The journalistic ethos of some of the founders of WikiLeaks was to provide strong guarantees of protection to sources in government so they could leak documents that could be added to by citizen journalists to create stories that would hold governments responsible in these traditional ways. Leaking a video of a military helicopter shooting innocent civilians and journalists without good cause and then not owning up to that and trying to mitigate the damage after the fact is an example.

Assange and some of his current cohort of WikiLeaks collaborators have stronger and less mainstream goals. By providing a set of processes and technologies that would protect leakers, they expect that the essential needs for secrecy of organizations like political parties, governments and corporations will lead them to react in ever more coercive and authoritarian ways to stop such leaks from happening, thereby producing more leaks, more crackdowns and eventual collapse. Or perhaps more pointedly, in a competitive environment of such organizations, if one like the United States is hindered by leaks of this sort, it will lose in competition to others that are not subject to such leaks.

2. Protection of privacy and confidentiality

There are good justifications in the abstract for government information to be kept secret or private: for example, personal information about citizens or corporations they govern that deserve protection, or human resource matters in their function as employers. More importantly, a government’s role as collective agent of its citizens provides justifications for secrecy or privacy or confidentiality in three prominent areas: cabinet discussions to ensure frank exchanges before collective decisions and actions; diplomatic information for ensuring successful negotiations by keeping strategies and tactics hidden; and national security topics, especially when it comes to tactics and operational matters.

Each area provides scope for interested government officials to keep things secret to further their self-interest at the expense of the public interest. We can all think of examples.

3. Balancing confidentiality and freedom of information

Traditionally we’ve worked out various ways to balance these two conflicting principles in order to best advance the interests that are at their core. For example, we anonymize personal information held by governments so that it can be released and used for salutary purposes like fighting diseases or designing social programs, and we set up exceptions to normal practices of secrecy to blow a whistle on abuse.

I think we should look past the anarchic tendencies and anti-Americanism of Assange and the current crew behind WikiLeaks to the likelihood or not of their technologies and processes heralding a new era in the way confidentiality and freedom of information are balanced.

We’re currently seeing attempts to put a chill on those who would provide or use such infrastructure that are similar to the attempts to shut down file sharing of music and videos. The jury is still out on whether the “anti-piracy” efforts of the Recording Industry Association of America will succeed. While I think that Assange is likely to be successfully prosecuted for something soon, and the apparent source of the big leaks from the American government will likely be put away as well, it is notable that the technology is fairly easy to replicate and the source was not revealed through a fault in the WikiLeaks protocols. Napster begat many file-sharing services as the ideas behind its technology have been impossible to expunge.

My sense is there will be a cat-and-mouse game of technological and process innovations between the good and bad guys, however they are defined. Each step will likely reshape how large organizations and those who control them attempt to deal with secrecy in their internal deliberations and communications oriented toward external actions in the face of possible leaks. Just as long ago we saw qualitative changes result from the great unwashed getting access to books, and more recently we’ve seen changes result from the great unwashed being able to talk if not back to power at least to one another about the powerful, so might we see significant change when access to authoritative information from the state and other large organizations is routinely available to those who have the resources to pay attention to it and sift through it.

Some of this is old – I’ve heard from people who noted that certain appointments would not be marked in their minister’s paper agenda book once they were likely to be subject to legal proceedings. Some of it is applicable in the private sector – a former Microsoft employee was claiming today that internal communications changed at Microsoft once their legal travails began, with executives no longer having their staff make minutes of all meetings or writing memos frankly. But from my perspective, the lasting importance of this batch of WikiLeaks isn’t how many U.S. ambassadors are reassigned, but how our notions of how governments deal with the information in their control will change.

The technology of WikiLeaks may not be as important as the printing press, but the releases of information these last few months may be as important as the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Joe Murray is president of JMA Consulting in Toronto.

From: Gareth Morley | December 6

It isn’t just unrealistic or excessively optimistic to think leaks will lead to a utopia of more transparent government. That would imply that if the laws of human nature or fundamental particle physics were different, transparent government would be possible. But transparency in that sense is not just impossible in the actually existing universe that arose from the Big Bang 11 billion years ago. It is impossible in every universe Leibniz’s God could imagine. It is a priori impossible.

The reason is basic philosophy of language. Utterances don’t have a meaning independent of context, and a critical part of context is the expected audience. A State Department bureaucrat confidentially telling a more senior official “Berlusconi is vain and unintelligent” is not saying the same thing as the same State Department official issuing a press release to the Italian media with the same phrase. The former is a banal expression of an opinion shared by most people with a belief one way or the other. The latter would be a serious intervention in Italian political affairs, and a serious breach of the NATO Treaty and the UN Charter.

Expectations about audience can turn out to be wrong, and people used to one kind of technology find out that emails are not a close substitute for phone calls. But if a message leaks out beyond its intended audience, this can’t lead to a practice of more open government. The practice that led to the initial expectation has just failed – which means some new way of confining the message to the intended audience becomes necessary. A public official who said the same things publicly that he or she says privately would not be unusually open, but rather grossly irresponsible.

Of course, secrecy can be misused and it would be good to get a picture of how government works. Rules like keeping diplomatic cables under wraps for 20 years are an excellent compromise. (I’d like to see the same for internal communication within the Supreme Court of Canada, but the actual rule is omertà to the grave.) Assange is trying to destroy such compromises in his ultraleft war against the U.S. government. He doesn’t want more openness: he wants the U.S. government to restrict the internal sharing of information so that it becomes less effective. This could easily lead to another September 11. He has probably already killed people by revealing information about people collaborating with NATO in Afghanistan or elsewhere. Certainly, Flanagan was wrong to call for extralegal assassination and properly apologized, but Assange deserves the full weight of the law.

Gareth Morley is a litigator with the British Columbia Ministry of Attorney General. All opinions expressed are his alone, and do not reflect the views of the Ministry of Attorney General.

From: Joe Murray | December 6

I agree that the technology won’t result in a utopia of transparent government. It will change what gets recorded how and by whom and whom it will be shared with.

I think what’s changing is that there are now large troves of electronic stores of sensitive information which thousands have access to and which can now be leaked anonymously. It’s not clear how this will play out, but I believe that it will change what’s feasible to expect. I have my beefs with aspects of our current ways that governments deal with data in their care. I’m not trying to grind those axes as much as understand an unexpected new phenomenon.

I agree with the thrust of Gareth’s view that it’s juvenile to think that everything that WikiLeaks is releasing should be public as a matter of course.

From: Patrick Balena | December 7

1. What surprised me is that the U.S. government made no effort at all to dispute the authenticity of the leaked documents.

2. The most interesting matter so far to arise concerning Canada is a document from the American embassy in Berlin earlier this year, concerning Germany’s “training battalions” in Afghanistan. Canada has, of course, just been committed to a similar arrangement:

3. (C) To help justify the need for more troops, [German Defence Minister] zu Guttenberg said he had forced the Bundeswehr to do a complete review of all the existing positions in Afghanistan, which had confirmed that some could be eliminated in light of the new ISAF counterinsurgency strategy. He said a restructuring of the current Bundeswehr presence, combined with the troop increase, would boost the number of soldiers involved in the training of the Afghan National Army (ANA) from 280 to 1,400. The restructuring includes turning the battalion-size quick reaction force based in Mazar into a "protection and training" battalion. A second such battalion will be created in Kunduz by augmenting the existing infantry company there with new troops. Zu Guttenberg reiterated that Germany strongly supports COMISAF's focus on protection of the population and partnering with the Afghan national security forces (ANSF), and that the German "trainers" (i.e., the two new maneuver battalions) will operate in the field with the ANSF.

The Berlin cable makes quite clear that the “training battalion” scheme is a pure sham concocted for domestic political consumption in allied countries. Note the scare-quotes in the cable around the word “trainers.”

3. I have no problems with the ethics of this leak. The United States is the world’s strongest power by far. Its power is employed far out of proportion to its accountability to those around the world who are subject to that power. No effective institutions currently exist to promise the world such accountability, now or in the future. The entire world therefore has a legitimate direct interest in this leaked information. The U.S. interest in secrecy, although also legitimate, is nevertheless purely subjective on its part, and can be freely dismissed by any non-American.

Patrick Balena lives in Vancouver.

From: Daniel Schwartz | December 7

Gareth’s post about WikiLeaks, stating, “ This could easily lead to another September 11,” brings to mind an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in October, co-written by a former FBI agent and a former Federal Aviation Administration special agent, that began, “If WikiLeaks had been around in 2001, could the events of 9/11 have been prevented? The idea is worth considering.”

On a related matter, Henry asks, “ I would describe Ellsberg as a whistle-blower who deserved our respect. Can we say the same of Assange?” A problem with the question is that Assange is not the Daniel Ellsberg in this story. That part was apparently played by U.S. Private Bradley Manning, who is in custody.

Daniel Schwartz is a producer with CBC News.

From: Ian Malcolm | December 7

As others have noticed, there’s not a lot we’ve learned from the leaks that we didn’t already know or suspect. That’s because the leaks are from the government of a relatively open society with relatively free media. There’s an asymmetry between where the leaks are coming from and where transparency is really needed: China, the Middle East and Russia.

Ian Malcolm is an editor with the European office of Harvard University Press in London, England.

From: Henry Milner | December 7

It seems to me that the issue ultimately comes down to the following: If you believe that, on balance, U.S. foreign policy is a force for evil rather than good, then Assange is a hero, since he makes it harder for the U.S. to carry out it’s foreign policy. However, in so believing, you are accepting the corollary: namely that the targets of American foreign policy – Russia, China, Iran, the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, North Korea, etc., and especially those impervious to leaking – be placed in a better position to carry out their policies.

From: Philip Resnick | December 7

Henry, why are we forced to choose one form of hero over another? Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist, paid the supreme price for trying to expose some of the dirty dealings in Putin’s Russia. The jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo will not be attending the Norwegian peace award ceremony this week, courtesy of that bastion of human rights which is the People’s Republic of China. Are they not heroic figures for most of us? One does not have to see the world in Manichean terms in order to find virtue in WikiLeaks’ exposing of what goes on among one of the great powers of the world. To follow your logic is to return to the simple-minded thinking that dominated the Cold War era – those who are not for us are against us. Thanks, but no thanks.

From: Joe Murray | December 7

The technology of WikiLeaks can be turned against other powers with more repressive regimes.

I don’t know if we have enough evidence to determine whether Assange is actually holding off on releasing big troves of military or diplomatic material from those powers. My guess is that he just lucked out with American stuff first.

But the press from the U.S. leaks will create more people interested in leaking from inside more repressive regimes as well. His theory, such as it is, would predict more impact from links in stronger and more informationally repressive regimes and eventually more leaks there, but the merit of that conjecture remains to be seen.

From: Ian Malcolm | December 7

I think Philip’s position that criticizing the United States does not mean supporting the autocratic regimes that oppose it is right to a large extent. However, the people who support Assange most strongly do seem to think that the United States is uniquely evil, and to some extent what the United States loses here autocratic regimes gain. And ironically the United States is exposed to all this because it’s already more open than the others. It reminds me of the Guardian cartoonists who are happy to portray the pope as the devil and George Bush as an ape, but who admit they would never similarly portray an Islamic religious leader out of fear of death. If the pope and Bush executed cartoonists, the indirect message is, they would get more respectful treatment. And I think there’s an element of the same dynamic here. Assange is picking on a target not at all undeserving of criticism, but not exactly the most deserving of criticism either. And it would be nice if more people talked about the asymmetry.

Joe says, “The technology of WikiLeaks can be turned against other powers with more repressive regimes.” Yes, but at considerably greater risk to the person doing the leaking. Assange would have been locked up or killed long ago if he were in China or Russia.

From: Gareth Morley | December 7

Philip’s position would be more persuasive if WikiLeaks confined its revelations to evidence of bad behaviour. But that’s not what Assange is doing. He is revealing diplomatic cables, including ones where China and the United States are engaged in sensitive negotiations about how to deal with the implosion of the Kim dynasty peacefully.

Liu Xiaobo advocates a market economy, multiparty elections and a reasoned deal with national minorities. I haven’t seen where he says Chinese diplomatic cables must all be published on the Internet. He’s a liberal reformist; Assange is an anarchist wrecker.

From: Frances Abele | December 7

Philip got us started again in several ways, but one aspect of his original post has sunk from sight. That’s Tom Flanagan’s association of murder with “feeling manly.” This is chilling, but also an insult to the actually manly men who don’t think of (or joke about) violence as a solution.

Frances Abele is a professor in the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University in Ottawa and Academic Director of the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation.

From: Gareth Morley | December 7

Frances has an important point. Geeky rightwingers trying to prove manliness through hawkish punditry are ridiculous, but they are also dangerous, as the Iraq war showed.

From: Ian Malcolm | December 7

Great point by Frances. He might have been feeling manly, but he was looking psychotic, and it’s awful when the latter condition passes for the former.

From: Patrick Balena | December 7

Ian writes that “there’s not a lot we’ve learned from the leaks that we didn’t already know or suspect. That’s because the leaks are from the government of a relatively open society with relatively free media. There’s an asymmetry between where the leaks are coming from and where transparency is really needed: China, the Middle East and Russia.” But suspicion is one thing, confirmation is another. As I remarked earlier, the U.S. government has not disputed the authenticity of the material. And much of the leaked material closely concerns the intimate relations between the United States and governments that lack transparency, and thus serves to provide some of the “symmetry” that you say you’re looking for.

Nor is it a question of whether the United States is uniquely evil. It’s that the United States is uniquely powerful, which is unquestionable. Because of the pervasive and ongoing global impact of U.S. power, people around the world have a natural right to make use of any information that comes their way concerning the manner in which U.S. power is exercised.

One may desire to see American power placed under heavy check without feeling any particular moral revulsion towards the American regime. In like fashion, for instance, it was possible to want Napoleon’s power checked, even though that French regime was less morally repugnant than that of many of his opponents in Europe. Global balance of power may be desirable irrespective of moral factors. Indeed, this was the bedrock of British foreign policy for many generations – a foreign policy which made possible the free development of Europe, and perhaps of the whole Western world.

In reply to Henry: your corollary is obviously invalid. It is perfectly possible to oppose both the United States and Al Qaeda. The embarrassment of the United States does not necessarily serve Al Qaeda. The world requires no hegemonic power to resist international terrorism. Only in a major war, fought with unlimited aims, might your corollary hold true. No such wars are being fought in the world today.

From: Philip Resnick | December 7

One last thought on the role that WikiLeaks is playing. There is a famous episode in Book 4 of Augustine’s City of God, where a pirate is brought before Alexander and accused of wreaking havoc on the seas. Writes Augustine,

Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.”

What is happening at the moment, above and beyond the daily revelations of the goings-on behind the closed doors of the chancelleries of the world, is a quite extraordinary challenge to the claim of the state to have an exclusive monopoly, not only over legitimate force, but over the secrets related to the exercise of state power. It is that secrecy that has come under attack, and in a manner which makes not only American power-holders, but those around the world (I agree with Joe Murray on this point) apoplectic.

The claim is usually made that liberal democratic states enjoy legitimacy through electoral suffrage, and that is true enough, up to a point. But that same state, on more occasions than we like to acknowledge, oversteps its bounds, and acts quite repressively toward its own population. Today’s report by the Ontario Ombudsman on the abuse of police power during the G20 summit comes to mind. It is the very notion of unchallenged state legitimacy that is being undermined by WikiLeaks internationally, much like the pirate that challenged Alexander’s mastery of the Mediterranean. The pirate was no doubt done away with (though his Somali descendants have come back to haunt the seas!). Julian Assange has now been detained, and will probably be kept out of commission in the weeks and months to come. But WikiLeaks – or its clones – doesn’t look as though it is about to go away. And the question of the legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of state secrecy isn’t about to go away either, in the era of the Internet. As Yeats remarked in a very different context, “A terrible beauty is born.”

From: Patrick Balena | December 7

Ian wrote, “Assange would have been locked up or killed long ago if he were in China or Russia.” On the other hand, once a leaker had made good his or her exit from Russian or PRC territory, he or she would be less subject to international legal and political harassment of the kind that has targeted Assange. The Americans have more global “reach” than Russia or the PRC to hunt a fugitive, close his bank accounts, block his servers and so forth.

A leaker of PRC documents, for example, would probably soon find a sanctuary in some Western or Western-sponsored country. He or she would, of course, need to take precautions against assassination. But Assange may need to take such precautions anyhow. Canada’s Flanagan is a joke, but no doubt there are people in the Pentagon who feel the same way, and who have the actual power to order the hit, or “accident,” or whatever. Finally, let’s not forget that Private Manning, assuming he was the actual leaker, is already taken prisoner.

From: Ian Malcolm | December 8

“A terrible beauty is born,” and all the professors on the list who admire Assange duly release transcripts of tenure meetings, allow students to attend any faculty meetings they want, put their discussions about salaries and prospective candidates for employment on YouTube, and generally get to work building the brave new world in their own corridors of power first. Or perhaps not.

I assume all of us think that there ought to be oases of privacy in our own worlds of work, and I don’t think government is so different that it ought to have no such oases.

From: Patrick Balena | December 8

Ian, our professors’ executive secrecy is not the secrecy of those who exercise real and unanswerable executive power over much of the world. All executive bodies, from the Oval Office right down to my condominium council, require a certain level of secrecy. But there is a critical threshold being passed, in terms of scale and impact, which makes the WikiLeaked U.S. cables very different from a breach of other confidences.

Some may argue that the greater scale and importance of its activity means that United States should be entitled to a commensurate secrecy, but that argument would only hold if you accept the U.S. government as your rightful global sovereign. Gareth, for instance, seems more upset about the U.S. document leak than I imagine he would ever be over any insult to the Crown. It’s even driven him to adopt Stalinist language (“wreckers”) to give adequate vent to his feelings. Book Assange under “58” and extraordinarily render him to the Archipelago!

From: Ian Malcolm | December 9

Patrick writes, “Some may argue that the greater scale and importance of its activity means that United States should be entitled to a commensurate secrecy.” I don’t think anyone is saying the United States should have more rights to secrecy than anyone else. And most would concede that American officials should be exposed to much more much more international public scrutiny and criticism than less powerful officials. But that does not mean that Americans should not be afforded the usual rights to privacy.

And I think the argument I made about professors’ never wanting to give up their own rights to private conversations remains strong. You couldn’t get work done or behave in a non-robotic way if there weren’t protections for private conversations. American diplomats no less than professors have important and worthwhile work to do.

From: Reg Whitaker | December 9

Without taking sides in this debate on the ethics of WikiLeaks, I find it interesting that Daniel Ellsberg, whose leaking of the Pentagon Papers is often contrasted favourably to Assange’s actions, apparently does not share this view. Quite the contrary. He writes “That’s just a cover for people who don’t want to admit that they oppose any and all exposure of even the most misguided, secretive foreign policy. The truth is that every attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”

From: Gareth Morley | December 13

Patrick suggests I was channelling some Stalin-era Comintern hack when I referred to Assange as an anarchist wrecker. I wasn’t really – not consciously at least – but it got me thinking what said hack would say about WikiLeaks, were he the victim of some bizarre time machine malfunction. The best I could come up with goes something like this:

Messrs Assange et al engage in a “left” form of the undisciplined metaphysical-idealist utopianism typical of the petty bourgeois strata from which they arise. Deprived of a proletarian orientation or a dialectical worldview, they fetishize “openness,” rendering impossible diplomatic relations between the socialist countries and the imperialist world – thereby harming the cause of peace and coexistence. The result is they are objectively in the same camp as the most reactionary anti-peace, anti-Soviet forces. It is the duty of all class-conscious proletarians and progressive intellectuals to denounce Assange’s ultraleft Trotskyite-fascist stunts.

Fortunately, no one writes like that any more – which just goes to show that not everything wrong with political discourse is the fault of the Internet. But at bottom, the Stalinist hack would be right and Assange’s defenders are wrong. Every genuine progressive cause – mitigating global warming, solving the Israel/Palestine disaster, containing nuclear proliferation, bringing stability and development to the poorest nations – requires diplomacy and international negotiation.

For ten years, the international activist “left” has been defined by its desire to physically prevent leaders of nation-states from meeting together. Of course, I am not referring to sensible NGOs with concrete causes, but that is the objective mission of the travelling antiglobalization circus which became prominent when it disrupted the Seattle WTO Ministerial in 1999. Of course, they have not quite succeeded, but they have made any summit an incredibly expensive and disruptive process.

Now the goal will be to reveal confidential diplomatic cables – not because they reveal anything that could reasonably be described as wrongful behaviour, but simply to make diplomacy more difficult.

The latest dump was possible because of a radical experiment in openness by the U.S. government after 9/11. As a result of a desire to share information to avoid the “silos” that facilitated that attack, a low-ranking soldier had electronic access to French diplomats’ cables on the workings of the Sarkozy government. (Since they are marked “confidential” rather than “secret,” these cables will end up in the public domain anyway.) Of course, this experiment is now going to be over. Assange is happy about this, because he has specifically said he wants the U.S. government to become less open, thereby exacerbating the contradiction.

From: Patrick Balena | December 13

The “progressive causes” Gareth mentions – “mitigating global warming, solving the Israel/Palestine disaster, containing nuclear proliferation, bringing stability and development to the poorest nations” – may require diplomacy and international negotiation. But do they require secret diplomacy featuring frequent widespread deceit on the part of the negotiating governments? Do those progressive causes require the unilateral action of an unchecked major power, unaccountable to any of those whom it acts upon? How many of the lies revealed in the WikiLeaks cables are really related to the advancement of progressive causes?

For example, does the naked lie to the German public regarding their “training battalions” in Afghanistan, which are actually intended to be full-fledged combat battalions, advance any of Gareth’s progressive causes? Do the plots of Lebanese cabinet ministers to invite foreign attacks on their own country promote “stability and development” in long-suffering Lebanon? How does American secret complicity in Saudi Arabia’s use of airpower in Yemen, bombing which even American advisers deem excessive, contribute to any sort of “progressive” cause? Before the leaks, Obama couldn’t even trade a whole squadron of stealth fighters for a few cancelled Israeli housing permits. So how on Earth could anyone possibly blame WikiLeaks for Obama’s lack of stomach to deal with Netanyahu?

I might concede Gareth’s earlier point about the Chinese feelers on the Korean question. But on balance, his assertions don’t pass his own “progressive causes” test. Again, I would argue that only if you think the world is best served by the unaccountable realpolitik of its greatest power can you accuse WikiLeaks of any disservice to humanity in releasing those cables. Does the United States really form the sacred vanguard of some globalist “progressive” revolution, to deserve such trust as Gareth would place in its central committee?