Julian Assange's Deal With the Devil

Julian Assange's Deal With the Devil
January 5, 2011
By ISRAEL SHAMIR

In Part One of my report last weekend here on the CounterPunch site I showed that the US was secretly funnelling money into Belarus to fund the unelected opposition. Previously, the claim had been routinely denied. Now we have sterling proof. It is engraved in a confidential cable from a US Embassy to the State Department. It is undeniable.

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The cables are raw data. Not as raw as Afghan Diaries, the previous coup of Wikileaks, but still quite raw. They are written in obscure state department lingo; much of the story is implied, as the cables were composed for colleagues and definitely not for strangers. They simply have to be explained, interpreted, annotated and then finally delivered to the reader. Dumping raw cables onto the web would not do: you’d never find the relevant cables and probably you wouldn’t be able to understand its significance even if you did find it.

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So here we are: in order to get valuable data to the people, Julian Assange had to make a deal with the devil: the mainstream media. It was most natural for him to deal with the liberal flank of the mainstream, for the hardliners would not even touch it. But since the liberal papers are also embedded, they freely distort the cables by attaching misleading headlines and misquoting from the text.

For me, a Guardian reader since I worked at the BBC in the mid-1970s, it is painful to say that the Guardian has become an impostor. This paper pretends to provide the thinking liberal and socialist people of England with true information; but at the moment of truth, the Guardian, like a good Blairite, will switch sides.

Next, the Guardian apparently decided to destroy Wikileaks after using it. The Moor did his job, the Moor may go. The Guardian’s embedded editors, understanding full well that the Wikileaks crew won’t be tamed or subverted, are preparing a book called The Rise and Fall of Wikileaks. It’s not quite released yet; they have still to arrange for the fall.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/shamir01052011.html