[Peace-discuss] Which side are you on, Obama or Assange?

[C. G. Estabrook]

Patrick Cockburn: The virtue of speaking truth to power

Opponents of Assange, like those of my father, downplay his revelations while 
demanding his arrest for high crimes

Wednesday, 29 December 2010

One of the more satisfactory aspects of being a journalist is the discovery that 
the powerful are hyper-sensitive to any revelation about their activities. The 
degree of venom and hysteria expressed by the US government in attacking Julian 
Assange and WikiLeaks reflects this acute sense of vulnerability.

My father, Claud Cockburn, discovered this in 1933 when he left The Times and 
set up a radical newsletter called The Week, which was a sort of early precursor 
of Private Eye. His calculation was that there was plenty of information freely 
circulating in political and diplomatic circles that was hidden from the general 
public...

As with WikiLeaks, much of the official criticism of my father's publication of 
classified information in the 1930s was irrational. At one and the same time, 
angry officials wrote that he was reliant on gossip and his stories were 
inaccurate, but also that no effort was to be spared in discovering his sources. 
Opponents of Mr Assange produce similarly contradictory arguments, downplaying 
the importance of what he has revealed but simultaneously demanding his arrest 
for high crimes.

There is something more at work here than political establishments trying to 
protect their access to information as an instrument of authority. The true 
origin of their rage seems to be the way in which the publication of classified 
papers, whether they expose real secrets or not, undermines the ability of 
political elites to present themselves as the all-powerful guardians of secret 
knowledge essential to their country's well-being.

I am sorry my father died in 1981, long before his MI5 files were released. He 
had always held that the saying that God was on the side of the big battalions 
was propaganda put out by big battalion commanders to demoralise their 
opponents. He would have been delighted that his guerrilla-publication had 
provoked such rage within the government and so much effort uselessly expended 
by the security services.

He might also have considered that today there is a certain justice in the US 
government inadvertently providing so much information to the world at a time 
when international media coverage of much of the globe is ebbing. Press, radio 
and TV have all been punished financially by competition from the internet, 
robbing them of the resources for foreign reporting. Suddenly WikiLeaks exposes 
a myriad of stories from Argentina to Kyrgyzstan to Korea which the media would 
have liked to write about.

WikiLeaks' publication of diplomatic cables and frontline military reports does 
not disclose many real secrets, but this should not obscure the vast importance 
of its revelations. It discloses to everybody, as my father had sought to do in 
the 1930s, facts and opinions that were previously only known to a few. Over the 
last six months its revelations have painted a unique picture of the world from 
the American point of view at a moment when US political, economic and military 
leadership is under stress as never before.

The embarrassment of the US government is not that it has lost any real secrets 
but that it can no longer pretend that it does not know about the often criminal 
actions of its own forces, or the unsavoury actions of its allies.

Full article at 
<http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/patrick-cockburn-the-virtue-of-speaking-truth-to-power-2171018.html>.