Open transparent Government has been promised to people since the birth of modern day democracy. What you have with mass communication and with 24 hour news across 365 days of the year, is a new appetite for news with gusto. What has been served up in WikiLeaks – a whistle –blowing website is a slow burn of secret classified information gathered in international settings. It’s founder and editor in-Chief Julian Assange has been called an international criminal by the land of the free’s Commander –in – Chief President Obama.
A simple process of releasing 400,000 secret US military files detailing its operations in Iraq in October after the release of an earlier video on its website showing attacks on civilians by a US warplane.
Soon followed the release of 90,000 classified military records, which gave an insight into the military strategy in Afghanistan. This was too much for the former US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin who called for Mr Assange to be “pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders”. Anybody who does not fit into their ‘open speech world’ is Taliban or al-Qaeda; here we can see how a rightwing politician tries to win the hearts and minds of the US voters who dreams of becoming the first woman President of the USA.
Opinion is split on the merits of such actions by WikiLeaks and what is clear is that it confirms what people have always suspected of the duplicate roles Nation States play, one at home and one with their international partners or allies in the World. One such case was that of the some of Saudi states private attitude towards the regime in Iran.
“We, all as citizens of the state, should know about the policies of the government towards other countries. We should not be told one thing and with our votes, and in our name they act differently behind closed doors.The unjustified war against Iraq should never be repeated with the same lame excuses gathering pace now towards Iran and Yemen.
The might of the US Corporate has been unleashed on the WikiLeaks and its frontman. The servers hosting the website have been attacked and closed down by the mighty Corporations such as Amazon and fund raising channels such as PayPal closed down for the same reason. Reaction to such events has been swift with a backlash from a group calling itself Anonymous who have attacked VISA and MasterCard websites for their role in refusing to accept donations for WikiLeaks website. This has invariably led to the drying up of funding and future planned release of information.
The founder Julian Assange has been arrested and refused bail in London. He is waiting extradition to Sweden for alleged rape and other related crimes. A charge that he refuses, his supporters such as the English socialite Jamima Khan and journalist John Pilger are in the front line supporting him.
It is worth noting that WikiLeaks was able to verify and publish documents itself before October 2010. However, for its most recent leaks it has adopted a new tactic . It is partnering with news organisations such as the Guardian in the UK; Der Spiegel in Germany and the New York Times in the USA. This is designed to help check and distribute the material in a much faster and seamless fashion.
There has been a evolutionary step change in the way WikiLeaks may operate in the future. Some of its fonder members have left to set up another organisation called OpenLeaks. In a statement yesterday they said, “We felt that WikiLeaks was developing in the wrong direction,” Mr Domscheit-Berg the second in command at WikiLeaks told the press. “There’s too much concentration of power in one organisation; too much responsibility; too many bottlenecks; too many resource constraints”.
The future it would seem is to set up networks amongst NGOs and such like to help distribute the information.
This seems a long way from the way the bottlenecks of WikiLeaks, and would leave the information dissemination to third parties on whether to publish the sensitive information in the future. Who will provide the necessary legal advice and information? A number of other questions remain unanswered and this may spell the death of the WikiLeaks project and handing victory to the Corporate and big Government.
We all owe a debt to Julian Assange as we know thanks to him and his team that our governments seem to be perusing policies in our name that will leave us all as citizens, in “great danger.” We cannot but distance ourselves from the likes of large Corporations that have dealt a bitter blow to the free movement of information and dealt a blow to the freedom of speech.
Copyright Semra Eren Nijhar – All rights reserved
Semra Eren-Nijhar 