Daniel Domscheit-Berg has published a sort of book, a breathless “Assange in robe and slippers” tale of the kind usually written by former valets bearing a grudge. The author, a man whose only claim to fame is a short period as an employee of Assange, claims that Assange mistreated his cat and ate up all the candy. Julian took him up after ten years on the dole, and he immediately pocketed Julian’s lifework and ran away with it because… you guessed it, it would be safer in his hands. He delivered all Wikileaks emails and backups into the hands of the enemy and now he sits like a spider in his shiny new shop inviting trustful potential leakers into his parlour.
Another Wikileaks turncoat is young James Ball, a computer journalist in his early twenties who worked for a few months with Julian. The poor lad was offered ten months' steady pay by The Guardian and he accepted it gratefully. In neo-liberal England, there are so few chances for a young man to find employment that he will betray even his own father and mother to get at it. James carried off the entire personal correspondence of the Wikileaks team and walked it straight over to The Guardian.
Bill Keller confesses that before publishing, his “colleagues were invited to a windowless room at the State Department, where they encountered an unsmiling crowd. Representatives from the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon gathered around a conference table. Others, who never identified themselves, lined the walls.” Keller reveals that US authorities actually vetted the NY Times “news” release and that corresponding orders were conveyed to the London outlet.
It was for this very reason that Julian Assange refused to give the stuff to the NY Times in the first place – because of their vetting procedure, and because of their ability “to make pretty good lemonade out of the bitterest lemons” in Keller’s words, to wit, to misinterpret data for their own advantage. It may have been naïve of Julian to believe that the Brits, in contrast, would play fair, but he could not have counted on two hired guns as mean, ruthless, and indiscriminate as any character lifted from the Threepenny Opera: David Leigh and Luke Harding.
These two young mercenaries separated themselves from the crowd by breaching their non-disclosure agreements and delivering the cables that were entrusted to them into the hands of the Americans. They followed up this triumph by cranking out another dull exposé on Wikileaks, which is now heavily promoted on the Guardian website. The book has the tone of Gollum reminiscing about the hobbit he strangled in order to get hold of the Ring: I deserve it. He just found it, and anyway he was just a stray homeless tramp who had no idea what it was worth.
These two young orcs cooked up more than hobbits. They are members of the Guardian gang that is responsible for cooking up the Wikileaks cables so that they are suitable for general consumption. But The Guardian adds more than a pinch of salt to their unwholesome pottage: they add misleading headlines (knowing that the majority of their readers do not read beyond the headlines), they censor, redact, and finally they frame the cables with the prose necessary to twist them to The Guardian’s political agenda...
