Daft As A Brush

Although  I am pleased that Jemima Khan has finally seen the light over the WikiLeaks founder - Julian Assange - having read her article in The New Statesmen I have to say I think the woman is, more broadly speaking, as daft as a brush.

How can anyone write such drivel about Los Angeles and the Sundance Film Festival - instead of just getting to the real point of her piece.

But having said that there's nothing to be gained by throwing the baby out with the bathwater - so here's what Jemima had to say about Assange - a journey which has taken her apparently from 'admiration to demoralisation'.   

Jemima Khan on Julian Assange: how the Wikileaks founder alienated his allies

I passed through Los Angeles recently on my way to the Sundance Film Festival. I don’t know the place well, but it always feels to me as if it is in limbo and has never grown into a proper city: a municipal playground, populated by restless kidults. Here, people dine at seven and sleep by nine, ferried around in cars, sipping sodas, suspended in a make-believe world, poised in that fake calm between a toddler’s fall and ensuing screams.

Its transient, unevolved quality may have something to do with it being a temporary home to a disproportionate number of famous people. There’s a theory about fame: the moment it strikes, it arrests development. Michael Jackson remained suspended in childhood, enjoying sleepovers and funfairs; Winona Ryder an errant teen who dabbled in shoplifting and experimented with pills; George Clooney, a 30-year-old commitment-phobe, never quite ready yet to settle down.

Every plan in LA is SBO (“subject to better offer”). Fame infantilises and grants relative impunity. Those that seek it, out of an exaggerated need for admiration or attention, are often the least well equipped to deal with criticism.

Julian Assange was the reason I ended up at Sundance, the showcase for international independent film-makers. I was there to attend the premiere of Alex Gibney’s documentary about WikiLeaks, We Steal Secrets, which I executive produced and which Assange denounced before seeing. He objected to the title; WikiLeaks tweeted that it was “an unethical and biased title in the context of pending criminal trials. It is the prosecution’s claim and it is false.”

However, as I had previously pointed out to Assange, the title was derived from a comment in the film by Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA, who told Gibney that the US government was in the business of “stealing secrets” from other countries. It was used specifically to highlight the irony of the situation of Bradley Manning, the US army private alleged to be the source of the American intelligence cables leaked to Assange. Manning may be put to death by his own government for doing the very thing to which Hayden so candidly admits.

The film wasn’t in the competition at Sundance, as Gibney is a well-known film-maker and it already has a distributor, but that didn’t stop the WikiLeaks account from tweeting: “Anti-#WikiLeaks doc ‘We Steal Secrets’ steals no prizes at Sundance as film is rejected in all 31 categories”.

The problem with Camp Assange is that, in the words of George W Bush, it sees the world as being “with us or against us”. When I told Assange I was part of the We Steal Secrets team, I suggested that he view it not in terms of being pro- or anti-him, but rather as a film that would be fair and would represent the truth. It would address, directly, the claims of his critics, which needed to be included so that the film could be seen as balanced and could reach people beyond the WikiLeaks congregation. He replied: “If it’s a fair film, it will be pro-Julian Assange.” Beware the celebrity who refers to himself in the third person.

It became clear to me that Assange would be willing to co-operate only with an amanuensis and not an independent film-maker such as Gibney, whose nuanced work includes Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room, Client 9: the Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer and Taxi to the Dark Side, for which he won an Oscar. In many ways, the film’s narrative arc mirrors my own journey with Assange, from admiration to demoralisation.

I supported Assange before I ever met him. I knew of his work when he was arrested on allegations of sexual assault in late 2010 and held in solitary confinement and I decided to stand bail for him because I believed that through WikiLeaks he was speaking truth to power and had made many enemies. Although I had concerns about what was rumoured to be a nonchalant attitude towards redactions in the documents he leaked, as well as some doubts about the release of certain cables – for example, the list of infrastructure sites vital to US national security – I felt more passionately that democracy needs strong, free media.

Accountability and democratic choice, I deeply believe, are guaranteed by rigorous scrutiny only. As Manning wrote, “without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public”.

As editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Assange had created a transparency mechanism to hold governments and corporations to account. I abhor lies and WikiLeaks exposed the most dangerous lies of all – those told to us by our elected governments. WikiLeaks exposed corruption, war crimes, torture and cover-ups. It showed that we were lied to about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; that the US military had deliberately hidden information about systematic torture and civilian casualties, which were much higher than reported. It revealed that Bush and Obama had sanctioned the mass handover of Iraqi prisoners of war from US troops to the Iraqi authorities, knowing they would be tortured.

It revealed that America’s ally Pakistan was playing a double game, taking US aid and collaborating with the Taliban. It revealed the existence of a secret American assassination squad, with a terrible record of killing women and children in Afghanistan, and it exposed America’s covert war in Yemen. It laid bare criminal behaviour and corruption by tyrants in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, which in turn helped to fuel the popular anger against repression that gave rise to the Arab spring.

Meanwhile, the man accused of leaking the cables, Bradley Manning, was arrested and placed in solitary confinement in an American prison. He was put on suicide watch – against the protests of prison doctors – with his clothes and blankets taken away from him, the cell lights always on. He was cold and deprived of sleep and forced to stand naked at roll-call.

There were also calls by American politicians and pundits for the punishment (execution, even) of Assange, the man who had exposed US war crimes – but not for those who sanctioned or perpetrated them. The US justice department mounted an investigation into whether it could use the Espionage Act to put him in jail. A grand jury was convened to consider whether Assange as well as other members of WikiLeaks should be charged with a crime. Rumours emerged of a sealed indictment against him.

Under political pressure, Visa and MasterCard stopped processing donations to the WikiLeaks fund, even though, as the former WikiLeaks employee James Ball (who is now a Guardian journalist) points out in We Steal Secrets, they would happily process payments for the Ku Klux Klan. No charges have yet been filed, but I remain convinced that if Assange is prosecuted for espionage the future of investigative journalism everywhere would be in jeopardy.

As Bill Leonard, the classification tsar for the Bush administration, says in our film: “The Espionage Act is primarily intended to address situations where individuals pass national defence information over to the enemy in order to allow the enemy to harm us. It would be unprecedented if the Espionage Act was being used to attack individuals who did not do anything more than the New York Times or the Washington Post does every day.”

There is no evidence that US national security was damaged in any way by the leaks, nor indeed that democracy has ever been harmed by an increase in the public’s knowledge and understanding. If Assange is prosecuted in the US for espionage, I suspect even his most disenchanted former supporters will take to the barricades in his defence.

The list of alienated and disaffected allies is long: some say they fell out over redactions, some over broken deals, some over money, some over ownership and control. The roll-call includes Assange’s earliest WikiLeaks collaborators, Daniel Domscheit-Berg and “The Architect”, the anonymous technical whizz behind much of the WikiLeaks platform. It also features the journalists with whom he worked on the leaked cables: Nick Davies, David Leigh and Luke Harding of the Guardian; the New York Times team; James Ball; and the Freedom of Information campaigner Heather Brooke. Then there are his former lawyer Mark Stephens; Jamie Byng of Canongate Books, who paid him a reported £500,000 advance for a ghostwritten autobiography for which Assange withdrew his co-operation before publication; the Channel 4 team that made a documentary about him which resulted in his unsuccessful complaint to Ofcom that it was unfair and had invaded his privacy; and his former WikiLeaks team in Iceland.

The problem is that WikiLeaks – whose mission statement was “to produce . . . a more just society . . . based upon truth” – has been guilty of the same obfuscation and misinformation as those it sought to expose, while its supporters are expected to follow, unquestioningly, in blinkered, cultish devotion.