I’m worried about Julian Assange. This is not a maternal instinct, but rather, a pragmatic one. The increasingly hostile statements made by top state officials and their surrogates show a widespread condemnation of whistleblowers in the halls of government. President Obama set the tone early in his administration.
In the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the rhetoric goes well beyond condemnation of methodology and straight to advocating for his brutal murder.
We already know that Obama, Clinton, Sanders, and Trump have all said they would prosecute Assange. Clinton, to get more specific, wants him extradited from Ecuador, prosecuted for espionage, and his WikiLeaks removed from the Internet. Her desire to charge him with espionage is only a little ironic considering the Clinton Foundation’s Pay-to-Play system arguably warrants an espionage indictment, as does Clinton’s storing of Special Access Program intelligence on an unencrypted private server.
Meanwhile, over in the Trump Tower of Mordor, the business mogul’s draconian approach to just about everything includes a ruthless hatred of all journalists, and most certainly whistleblowers. Trump has indicated his treatment of an extradited Assange or Snowden would be severely harsh. Snowden, in particular, would be assassinated if Trump had his way. I can only shiver imagining how a President Trump would react to a major leak from the inner chambers of his new political empire.
The transition from authorities’ vows of prosecution to their use of surrogates who openly call for Assange’s assassination is highly disturbing, to say the least. Granted, Assange supposedly has his ‘thermonuclear’ device — a 1.4 GB cache of files containing the identity of spies, military secrets, and unredacted documents from Bank of America and BP that can be unencrypted and released upon his death or arrest — but with a large faction of the mainstream media acting as a bullhorn for state propaganda, any damage inflicted by Julian’s ‘insurance’ packet could likely be mitigated by some social engineering. Remember the Panama Papers? A couple months ago people were saying it was the biggest leak in human history. Have you heard even a nostalgic reference to it since?
All this wouldn’t be quite as surprising — or alarming — if the anti-democratic venom hadn’t trickled down into the daily talking points of media figures and network journalists (whom I affectionately refer to as the State Department’s paid interns). Voices from across the political spectrum have repeated the claim that Russia has ‘weaponized’ Wikileaks. Sometimes they pose the conspiracy theory as a question. “Has Russia weaponized Wikileaks to disrupt a U.S. election?” My question in response would be: has the U.S. media questionized State Department propaganda in order to deflect attention away from a rigged primary and a political power structure that is rotten to the core? It’s actually a brilliant little piece of state agitprop. They managed to turn the public’s attention away from one of the most egregious examples of election fraud in recent history and demonize both Russia and Wikileaks in one fell swoop.
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The anti-WikiLeaks propaganda wouldn’t feel so existential if I didn’t believe anti-whistleblower messaging is soon going to escalate into an actual long-term military campaign against leakers and hacktivists around the world. In the near future, don’t be surprised if there is some ‘event’ that catalyzes a mobilization of military campaigns against targets that are deemed ‘a danger to our democracy because of their unlawful disclosures of matters of national security.’ This would almost assuredly include symbolic targets like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden to achieve a “chilling effect.” We’ve already seen Intercept writer Barrett Brown receive prison time for essentially hyperlinking to leaked information in an article. Add to this the fact the Obama Administration has used the Espionage Act to prosecute twice as many defendants as all previous administrations combined, and you get a sense of how power structures are increasingly criminalizing the dissemination of information.
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For the empire, these leaks are a direct assault on the power and hegemony of the ‘deep state,’ the synergistic nexus of state diplomats and officials, defense contractors, financial institutions, surveillance courts, and the military-industrial complex that together forms the connective tissue holding together a globalist oligarchy.
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It will be a bipartisan war, and the battle lines will be drawn harshly. In the same vein as Bush’s “you’re either with us or against us” axis of evil, the umbrella of terrorism will expand to include any organizations that leak classified information, any group that publishes the information, and eventually, any journalist that links to a publication containing the information. Barrett Brown, currently serving 63 months for linking to a leak, may agree with me.
Whatever administration is in office will, of course, invoke national security as the pretext for the War on Leaks.
