The Left at war with itself over Mr Wikileaks

[Nom Chompsky]

Brilliant article...

Source: The Daily Mail

The current contortions on the Left over *Julian Assange are providing a gloriously comic spectacle of seasonal merriment — despite the damaging consequences of his actions.

For our most sanctimonious campaigners have managed to hoist themselves simultaneously on not just one, but multiple politically correct petards.

Until very recently, Assange was heading for canonisation as the Left’s all-time hero.

He was the man who had set about *damaging its number-one *global villain, America, through publishing on WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables between the U.S. and other governments.

Accordingly, The Guardian newspaper proudly trumpeted the fact that it had obtained access to these files, and set about publishing as many of them as it could.

The fact that Assange seemed to be motivated by an all-pervasive nihilistic rage did not trouble The Guardian.

So besotted was it by the prospect of humbling America that it wasn’t even troubled by the allegations against Assange of rape and sexual assault which suddenly emanated from — of all places — Sweden.

Assange was duly borne aloft as a hero from the hell of his Wandsworth Prison cell to altogether more agreeable ‘mansion arrest’ at Ellingham Hall, the Norfolk estate of former British Army officer and journalist Vaughan Smith, who provided hospitality as ‘an act of principle’.

And then something very strange indeed happened. On Saturday, The Guardian published explosive leaked revelations from the Swedish prosecution case against Assange.


These contained explicit details of the charges levelled by the two women who claimed he had subjected them to rape and sexual assaults, forcing them into unprotected intercourse, and even had sex with one while she slept.

The point was that it was The Guardian that was publishing these sordid claims — the kernel of the legal case against their supposed hero — and in great detail. *Suddenly the paper appeared to have joined the ranks of the witch-hunters.

And yesterday we learned further that a senior Guardian journalist, who worked closely with Assange and helped broker the deal that gave the paper privileged access to the WikiLeaks cables, now refuses to continue dealing with him.

To understand why there is such an ear-splitting screeching of brakes from The Guardian, it is necessary to consider the mind-bending contradictions of what passes for thinking on the Left.

For it believes certain things as articles of faith which cannot be denied. One is that America is a force for bad in the world and so can never be anything other than guilty. Another is that all men are potential rapists, and so can never be anything other than guilty.

The problem presented by Assange was that suddenly his actions appeared to advance both of these articles of politically correct faith — which were nevertheless in direct conflict with each other. He couldn’t be feted as a symbol of anti-Americanism if he fell foul of the feminists.

 

[Gory51]

Well I would say the Gurdian is reporting on newsworthy items. Two unrelated items.

Exposing the dirty secrets within the leaks is one thing. Exposing allegations about Julian Assange's rape charges is another.

Is that not what media are supposed to do? Report on matters and not take sides?

 

[tortured]

To start with I am not a Julian Assange fanboy. I support what WikiLeaks is about.

Having said that these rape charges, something just ain't right. Whats up with them saying they still want to be friends with him? I mean honestly, just the way it was said anyone must have thought something ain't right? And now there is a third woman. WTF? So Julian had time to be a serial "rapist" in his spare time?

For now I won't judge Julian, there is not enough to go on for me to make a decision. There does seem to be people pulling some strings to make things extremely difficult for him though. People are acting as if he is guilty. What happened to innocent until proven guilty?

 

[Lope]

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/295931-WikiLeaks-miscalculation/page2

 

[Alan]

To start with I am not a Julian Assange fanboy. I support what WikiLeaks is about.

Bringing down a democratic government and losing in Afghanistan.

How admirable.

And please don't make me quote Assange again with this "transparency" crap you insist is Assange agenda dispite his own statements to the contrary

 

[Fudzy]

Well it's understandable, the left have a much sterner view on rape and sexual molestation than the right so until he's cleared of the charges I'd imagine there would be some fence sitters.

 

[Alan]

Well it's understandable, the left have a much sterner view on rape and sexual molestation than the right so until he's cleared of the charges I'd imagine there would be some fence sitters.

Which is why Sweden the bastion of leftwing "enlightenment" has the highest rape rate in Europe and one of the lowest conviction rates in the developed world.


Much sterner indeed :erm:

 

[noxibox]

The Guardian is reporting on all aspects? Damn them.

And all that silly nonsense about the 'left'. What an absolutely brilliant article. It really is up to the usual Daily Mail standard.

 

[Nothxkbi]

Assange is a faggot. America are a bunch of faggots. Wikileaks are a clan of faggots.

I'm sitting on the beach this weekend with my fishing rod and forgetting about all this faggotry for a few hours.

 

[Alan]

The WikiLeaks founder is an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda.

In my most recent book, I reprint some words from a British Embassy cable, sent from Baghdad to the Foreign Office in 1976. The subject is Iraq's new leader. His quiet coup d'etat is reassuringly described as "the first smooth transfer of power since 1958." It is added, as though understatement were an official stylistic requirement in official prose, that although "strong-arm methods may be needed to steady the ship, Saddam will not flinch." Admittedly, these words were used before the "smooth transfer" had been extended to include Saddam's personally supervised execution of half the membership of the Baath Party. But Saddam already had a well-established addiction to violence and repression.*
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I came across this cable after it had been declassified a few years ago, and I reprinted it because it very accurately reflected the tone of what I'd been told by British diplomats when I was visiting Iraq at the time. And I ask myself: What if I had been able to get my hands on that report when it was first written? Not only would I have had a scoop to my name, but I could have argued that I was exposing a political mentality that—not for the first time in the history of the British Foreign Office—chose to drape tyranny in the language of cliché and euphemism.

But what else, aside from this high-minded ambition (or ambitious high-mindedness), ought I to have considered? A democratically elected British Parliament had enacted an Official Secrets Act, which I could be held to have broken. Would I bravely submit to prosecution for my principles? (I was later threatened with imprisonment for another breach of this repressive law, and it was one of the reasons I decided to emigrate to a country that had a First Amendment.) The moral "other half" of civil disobedience, as its historic heroes show, is that you stoically accept the consequences that come with it. Then there is diplomacy itself. One of civilization's oldest and best ideas is that all countries establish tiny sovereign enclaves in each other's capitals and invest these precious enclaves of peaceful resolution with special sorts of immunity. That this necessarily includes a high degree of privacy goes without saying. Even a single violation of this ancient tradition may have undesirable unintended consequences, and we rightly regard a serious breach of it with horror. We found out everything we would ever need to know about Ayatollah Khomeini and his ideology when he took diplomats as hostages.
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The cunning of Julian Assange's strategy is that he has made everyone complicit in his own private decision to try to sabotage U.S. foreign policy. Unless you consider yourself bound by the hysterically stupid decision of the Obama administration to forbid all federal employees from downloading or viewing the WikiLeaks papers, you will at the very least have indulged in a certain amount of guilty pleasure. In a couple of major instances, the disclosures are of great value to the regime-change die-hards among us. More Arab regimes want Washington to take on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and more urgently than anyone had guessed; I would very much rather know this now than 20 years later. Iran was able to acquire some missile capacity from North Korea; so would Saddam Hussein have been if we had left him in his so-called "box." We already know that his envoys were meeting North Korean missile dealers in Damascus before the threat of the coalition's intervention caused the vendors to return hastily to Pyongyang. The latest leaks complete an important part of an important case.

As for the public's right to know and the accountability of our covert or confidential agencies, it is only a short time since the entire American liberal consensus was witlessly applauding a clumsy and fruitless prosecution, directed entirely at the hopelessly overdramatized exposure of a relatively minor CIA official, married to a monster of conceit who makes Assange look bashful. It then turned out that Valerie Plame's job description had been made public by Robert Novak and Richard Armitage, who also had in common with Assange a rooted opposition to the administration's Iraq policy. Elements of the left and the right appear to have switched positions on full disclosure since then.

Attempts to prosecute Assange will, I predict, be either too little or too late, or both, or worse. There is a good reason the Espionage Act of 1917 has such a rusty and unused sound to it. It was a panic measure passed during a time of Wilsonian war hysteria, and none of its provisions will serve in the cyberworld. Meanwhile, the very word Interpol has been a laughing stock for decades in law-enforcement circles, and, though I find it easy to picture Assange as a cult leader indulging himself with acolytes, the sex charges against him don't appear to amount to rape and have a trumped-up feel to them. They also give him an excuse to recruit sympathy and stay out of sight instead of turning himself in.

And that, of course, prosecution or no prosecution, is what he really ought to do. If I had decided to shame the British authorities on Iraq in 1976, I would have accepted the challenge to see them in court or otherwise face the consequences. I couldn't have expected to help myself to secret documents, make myself a private arbiter of foreign policy, and disappear or retire on the proceeds. All you need to know about Assange is contained in the profile of him by the great John F. Burns and in his shockingly thuggish response to it. The man is plainly a micro-megalomaniac with few if any scruples and an undisguised agenda. As I wrote before, when he says that his aim is "to end two wars," one knows at once what he means by the "ending." In his fantasies he is probably some kind of guerrilla warrior, but in the real world he is a middle man and peddler who resents the civilization that nurtured him. This Monday, in two separate news reports, the New York Times described his little cabal as an "anti-secrecy" and "whistle-blowing" outfit. Such mush-headed approval at least can be withheld from the delightful Julian, even as we all help ourselves to his mart of ill-gotten goods

Trust Mr Hitchens to allay fears the left is not a complete bastion of lunacy

 

[Fudzy]

Anything that starts with "In my most recent book" should automatically tell you this guy is in for commercial gain.

 

[smokey]

Bringing down a democratic government and losing in Afghanistan.

1. It's hardly "bringing down" the government. A little bit of a fright is just what every government needs, status quo's are so medieval.

2. That's hilarious dude. What exactly could they hope to win in a country that is basically a desert with a population that is practially opium addicted from the age of 5 onwards? I mean Russia messed up there and it was on their backyard. Losing... they lost when they "invaded it".

 

[Alan]

Hey that's what the guy said is his objective. If that's what you support so be it regardless of what you think his actions actually have done.

Iraq was also lost when they were invaded by the way *cough*

 

[theratman]

1. It's hardly "bringing down" the government. A little bit of a fright is just what every government needs, status quo's are so medieval.

2. That's hilarious dude. What exactly could they hope to win in a country that is basically a desert with a population that is practially opium addicted from the age of 5 onwards? I mean Russia messed up there and it was on their backyard. Losing... they lost when they "invaded it".

Booking my ticket right now!