SUBSCRIBE NOW WELCOME BACK. Do you want to continue reading where you left off? New Republic subscribers can pick up where they left off no matter which device they were previously using. SUBSCRIBE NOW

Go Home Ellsberg, Assange, Manning: The Pathetic Search for Heroes

THE SPINE JULY 29, 2010

Ellsberg, Assange, Manning: The Pathetic Search for Heroes

BY MARTIN PERETZ

I'm in Spain and my copy of the Daniel Ellsberg edition of the Pentagon Papers is in Cambridge. So I do not have access to what I recall as the five volume edition he gave us. He had inscribed in the first volume his "personal thanks for your help in ending the Vietnam War." Unlike Ellsberg, I never was for the Vietnam war. I was against it from the beginning...and worked (not so modestly) to end it. Still, I recognize the importance of Ellsberg's turning. After all, he had been in the small Washington entourage of Robert McNamara and later in the Vietnam circle of Edwin Landsdale. He was an obsessive, of course. And an obsessive on both sides of the issue.

The sudden arrival of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and his documents immediately reminded me of Ellsberg, who in very short order also arrived from wherever he was and whatever he was doing to inform us that Assange also reminded him of himself. And, of course, Pfc. Bradley Manning was hovering in the background with his leak of a rocket attack in Afghanistan. While drawing distinctions, Ellsberg relates the two others to himself.

Assange and, to a lesser extent, Manning are already heroes. So here is roughly my view of them...or at least of Assange. Well, it's not exactly my view but that of Tunku Varadarajan who writes brilliantly and regularly for the Daily Beast.

When asked at a London press conference whether he thought his leaks would compromise national security, Assange’s “visibly annoyed” response (per this report) stripped bare the adamantly adversarial quality of his mind-set: “You often hear that something may be a threat to U.S. national security. This must be shot down, whenever this statement is made.”

For the security of the numerous Afghan informants who work with U.S. troops, he cares not a jot. As The Times of London has pointed out, hundreds of names of such local collaborators in the war effort can be found in the documents in the WikiLeaks archive, including details of their villages. How does Assange justify putting these people at mortal risk? Predictably, he does not, taking refuge behind a weasel-worded insistence that he and his team had edited the material so that there was “harm minimization,” a morally teasing phrase that might, so ironically, be part of the Pentagon’s own lexicon. So are we to assume that the Afghan informants whose names were left in the WikiLeaks texts amount, in Assange’s reckoning, to an acceptable quantum of collateral damage in his Quixotic war against the warmongers?

What does Assange want? Does he really want the free world to cringe under constant threat from al Qaeda? If we fail to defeat this threat, what does Assange think will happen? Do we have any sense that he cares? Or is it the case, frighteningly, that Assange doesn’t really “want” anything, in a programmatic, civilizational sense, and that these explosive episodes of “gotcha” leaks are an end in themselves, a personal moral terminus, a sort of self-righteous, self-congratulatory onanism?

I believe that the outbursts of unfiltered history will be a big problem for the president. To be sure, there are people in his entourage who are thrilled by what will end up being an enormous embarrassment for Obama. He cannot be seen to be surrendering the whole category of military secrets. More important, he cannot and should not give up the argument about tactics and strategy impelled on us by the terrorists in whose defense the lawyers have accepted the aseptic definition of asymmetrical war.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Show all 14 comments

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

14 comments

I'm less concerned with Assange's geopolitical calculations. But his complete disregard for the lives of the afghanis he outed is absolutely evil.

- miceelf

July 29, 2010 at 7:08pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

micelf, I'm just wondering how much detail did they black out? And of course, everything Peretz says is right. One can only hope that the enemies they're after don't have computers and don't speak English.

- MOLLYSIMON

July 29, 2010 at 7:22pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

personally, I would love to see a CIA hit team take the son of a bitch out. Pity we don't have the balls of the Mossad. Does anyone imagine during WW2 we would have let any neutral party from any country compromise our security? And Molly, Pakistan has a long history of English, they won't have a hard time disseminating the material.

- blackton

July 29, 2010 at 9:02pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

blackton, you (and Peretz) should read the June 7 profile of Assange in The New Yorker. Did no one in Washington read that profile? I am surprised Assange stayed in any place long enough for the interviews. The very model of a post-modern transcends-all-borders citizen of nowhere in particular with a transnational coterie of enablers. Assange might want to watch out for the Pakistanis :)

- K2K

July 29, 2010 at 9:33pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

blackton "personally, I would love to see a CIA hit team take the son of a bitch out. Pity we don't have the balls of the Mossad. Does anyone imagine during WW2 we would have let any neutral party from any country compromise our security?" Well said.

- jdyer

July 29, 2010 at 10:05pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian "No Secrets: Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency" by Raffi Khatchadourian Or, you can listen to today's podcast with Khatchadourian, Jeffrey Toobin, and Steve Coll http://www.newyorker.com/online/2010/08/02/100802on_audio_politicalscene The CIA or MI6 should have tried to hire him for cyber-warfare. Guess no one bothered paying attention to the plot of "Live Free or Die Hard". Peretz is wrong about the "sudden arrival of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and his documents". The Pentagon, CIA, everyone, had minimum seven weeks public notice from Assange. THAT should be of great concern - that they did not know what had been leaked even when warned in advance? And no one can shut down WikiLeaks network of servers?

- K2K

July 30, 2010 at 12:00am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Assange is sort of like Ben Kingsley at the end of "Sneakers" but with more distracting hair

- AlSmith80

July 30, 2010 at 2:34am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

"We'll punish WikiLeaks informers: Taliban" "The Taliban in Afghanistan has threatened to behead informers who have been revealed following the explosive disclosure by WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks has put out over 90,000 uncensored intelligence documents, causing a security scare. Countries which have their forces fighting in Afghanistan are pouring over the documents to see the extent of the damage. The Taliban on Thursday night responded for the first time since the WikiLeaks expose of the names and locations of anti-Taliban informers, Daily Mail reported on Friday. The terror group said, "We know how to punish them", a reference to beheading that is a punishment for those whom they consider traitors. The reaction came as officials in Britain said they were worried for those who had helped the British military in Afghanistan. British officials in Kabul on Thursday said the publication was "in the best case compromising informants and in the worst, putting their lives at risk". "We are still involved in assessment but it will certainly discourage individuals from being prepared to co-operate with us," an official was quoted as saying in the Daily Mail. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called the expose "extremely irresponsible and shocking". He said: "Their (NATO force soldiers) lives will be in danger now. This is a very serious issue." Colonel Richard Kemp, former head of British forces in Afghanistan, said: "This is potentially damaging to operational security. Publishing this information online increases the enormous dangers our soldiers face. "There are few things more valuable to the enemy than gaining insight into our plans. The Taliban will be poring over every one of the leaked documents with a fine toothcomb."" http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/579884.aspx The wikileakers should be prosecuted for murder if any of the Afghans mentioned in the documents are killed.

- jdyer

July 30, 2010 at 6:08am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

There's got to be a legal basis to charge Assange with murder if the informers or their family members get murdered. An extradition must be pursued if, God forbid, that happens. The irresponsibility of it all is just mind-boggling.

- scrubby

July 30, 2010 at 8:28pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

“Morality” has taken the place of ideology as a justification for people’s actions. Of course these people are far from moral. They suffer from delusions of moral grandeur, it’s a disease and should be treated as such; it is a kind a kind of moralites. They are a type of moralholics and they tend to do more harm than good. Of course, like alcohol abuse those afflicted with moralites are still responsible for their actions.

- jdyer

July 30, 2010 at 9:56pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

Assange might not care a bit about who gets tortured and/or murdered by the Taliban because he has revealed their identities. But has it not occurred to him that he has alsoLUzeX revealed his own identity, and may end up paying dearly for his betrayal? There likely will be a lot of Afghans who will seek revenge. Assange should consider himself a marked man. I don't expect too many tears will be shed for him.

- dubrovnov

July 31, 2010 at 2:31am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

What did Burton K. Wheeler do for his country and President? "In early December 1941 a military officer gave Wheeler a copy of the top secret American war plan for fighting Germany, and Wheeler gave it to the Chicago Tribune, which published the secrets in a desperate effort to weaken the American military so much that Roosevelt would avoid war. Pearl Harbor came a few days later and Wheeler went quiet."

- LawrenceGulotta

July 31, 2010 at 10:27am

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

"One Picture Is Worth 90,000 "Secret Documents" Published By WikiLeaks." http://transmontanus.blogspot.com/

- jdyer

July 31, 2010 at 8:26pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11146

- noga1

July 31, 2010 at 8:40pm

You must be a subscriber to post comments. Subscribe today.

SHARE HIGHLIGHT

0 CHARACTERS SELECTED

TWEET THIS

POST TO TUMBLR

SHARE ON FACEBOOK

Close