Julian Assange is doing more harm than good with his website

Is Julian Assange a villain or a hero? If you are Hillary Clinton — or Sarah Palin — there is no doubt that it’s the former. If you are young, left wing and anti-establishment, Assange is not just a hero, but a superhero

The more you study Assange and his website, the more you realise that he is neither simply a hero nor simply a villain, but sometimes one or sometimes the other. To understand that we have to know that he is what today’s instant celebrity needs to be: a computer nerd. He turned his programming skills to hacking early on. Some years later, he developed a cryptographic system for use by human-rights workers.

WikiLeaks was launched four years ago. The idea was simple and anarchic: create a virtual drop box in e-space, where anyone, anywhere could leave information about people and organisations which might be embarrassing for them. In brief, WikiLeaks is that dream thing: a whistle-blower’s website which allows the whistle-blower to give out information while retaining his anonymity.

Does this disturb the world order? Of course it does, because the world runs on a carefully constructed set of rules and regulations, especially when it comes to government. A maze of bureaucracy is deliberately created to ensure that transparency is kept to a minimum. Enlightened governments are now trying to change that by measures such as our own Right To Information Act, but obviously you are not going to get its equivalent in China or Pakistan or African sham-democracies.

Surprisingly, in its four years of existence, no one took much notice of WikiLeaks. The website, and its founder, came to international public attention only with leaks of American diplomatic and military cables. Ironically, these disclosures are WikiLeaks’ least useful discoveries.

I say ‘least useful’ for a very simple reason: the huge cache of American WikiLeaks dumps has evoked a most contrarian reaction. Political commentators, academic analysts and foreign policy experts everywhere, including the US, have been unanimous in saying that the secret cables have revealed that the conduct of foreign policy by the US State Department and its embassies is surprisingly sophisticated and intelligent. I am sure Assange didn’t expect this to happen: what he wanted to do was expose American duplicity and skullduggery. None was found.

What the leaks might do is unravel years of behind-the-scenes diplomacy aimed at neutralising the powers of the world’s rogue nations. China, for example, seemed ready to jettison North Korea as its ally and work for the unification of Korea, quite the opposite of its stated position. Similarly Saudi Arabia’s king, while publicly being on the side of Iran, wanted the US “to cut off the head of the snake” by bombing its nuclear facilities. In the same way, Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh secretly told the US to continue the bombing of al Qaeda hideouts in his country, and promised “we will continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours”.

Who is embarrassed by these leaks? Not the US, for sure. Those red in the face will be the Chinese leadership, the Saudi royal family and the Yemeni president. The likely fall out? China will re-affirm its friendship with North Korea, Saudi Arabia will make stronger overtures to Iran and Yemen will ask the US to stop bombing al Qaeda sites. Whose victory is this, if not  of the Dark Forces?

This is the main problem with WikiLeaks and Assange. Like anyone brought up in a free state, his first target is the US, simply because it is the world’s most powerful democracy. This single- and simple-minded approach of biting the hand that feeds you will always do more harm than good. Instead, if Assange is selective in his targets, WikiLeaks has the potential of doing immense good by exposing deception, corruption and state violence wherever it occurs. There have been examples in its four years, but not enough. For example in December 2006, it exposed Somalia’s Sheikh Hassan Dali’s order to assassinate officials, or a year later, the exposure of corruption of former Kenyan leader Daniel Arap Moi’s family, or the Petrogate oil scandal in Peru or the dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. One reason for this is obvious: it is far easier to get information from open societies rather than closed ones, but shouldn’t Assange and his team actively pursue what is difficult to get but what would be much more worthwhile?

How useful WikiLeaks would be in exposing scams in India, or the Pakistan governments’ corruption and duplicitous collaboration in terrorism, or the human misery behind China’s progress, or the hypocrisy of fanatical religious leaders everywhere with their double-standards and double-lives….! The world could do with such a WikiLeaks, a WikiLeaks which knew where the moral high ground was, and staked its territorial claim to it. Is Assange the right man for this? Sadly, no. More is the pity.

— The writer is a commentator on social affairs