Last of the Assange Fans Sees the Light
The Times (London), February 8, 2013
Assange is no hero. He’s just another Max Clifford
Jemima Khan so believed in the cause of WikiLeaks, of opening up state secrets to the public gaze, that she put up bail for Julian Assange, a man accused of rape and sexual assault. Now, in an article for the New Statesman she writes of her disillusionment, warning that he risks going from Jason Bourne to L. Ron Hubbard.
Mr Assange is an example of the crusading campaigner who equates righteousness with media attention. He hijacked a noble cause as a means of self-aggrandisement. Indeed, at his 40th birthday party he auctioned photographs of himself to the assembled celebrity admirers. Many people, not just Ms Khan, were so eager for him to be the person they wanted him to be that they failed or refused to see what he was: a morally questionable man exploiting idealistic supporters to advance his own fame.
Some cling to the fiction that Mr Assange “changed the game”. Did he? As a result of his actions governments across the world have been frightened into ever greater internet surveillance. If a campaigner’s ultimate aim is to change the law, WikiLeaks has failed.
WikiLeaks was at its best before Mr Assange took the credit for it, when it was a team publishing on the internet material that journalists couldn’t report in their own countries. The “megaleaks” of thousands of documents – the Afghan and Iraq war logs and the US diplomatic cables – were certainly powerful. But the credit belongs to Bradley Manning, the US soldier detained since 2010, who risked his life to make them public. It’s clear from his chat logs that educating the public was his goal, not granting Mr Assange a proprietorial licence to cajole journalists into writing sycophantic profiles. For that reason I was happy to break his monopoly and leak his most precious leak – the diplomatic cables.
“WikiLeaks exposed corruption, war crimes, torture and cover-ups,” Jemima Khan writes. No it didn’t. It was exposed by Private Manning and the reporters who spent weeks digging through the data to make sense of it and produce stories that stacked up. Mr Assange’s contribution was to organise – or rather get his young interns and lackeys to organise – the huge press conference in which he starred as saviour.
Mr Assange is, at best, a middle man of the Max Clifford variety, brokering deals between source and newspaper. Except that Private Manning got only incarceration and a potential life sentence. Far from advancing the cause of openness worldwide, Mr Assange has gravely undermined it by so shamelessly making it all about himself.
