WikiLeaks: a True History

On 30 November 2010, a day after the Cablegate release, shares in Bank of America dived by 3 percent as rumours spread that it would be the target of WikiLeaks' next big release.

Interviewed in Malaysia a year earlier, Assange had told IDG News Service:

In the same interview, Assange revealed how WikiLeaks had learned from lack of media coverage in previous leaks:

He said WikiLeaks wanted to "get as much substantive information as possible into the historical record, keep it accessible, and provide incentives for people to turn it into something that will achieve political reform."

The Cablegate release had done just that. But now, with a green light from Senator Joe Lieberman (see previous chapter), Bank of America executives were keen to take proactive action against WikiLeaks. They did not know that - thanks to "disgruntled former employees" - WikiLeaks was no longer even in possession of their hard drive data.

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Virginia-based law firm Hunton & Williams (H&W) had an unprofitable data intelligence project called Team Themis, which was close to being folded in early December 2010 when suddenly they got an "urgent request" from "a major US bank" that was "seeking help against WikiLeaks".

Team Themis included staff from Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies, and HBGary Federal, whose CEO Aaron Barr rushed out a PowerPoint presentation that called for "disinformation", "cyber attacks" and a "media campaign" against WikiLeaks.

A former Navy Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) officer, Aaron Barr insisted that US civil rights lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald was a critical target:

In January 2011 a New York Times article confirmed that the Bank of America’s "counterespionage work" against WikiLeaks entailed constant briefings for top executives and the hiring of "several top law firms".

But in Febraury 2011 Aaron Barr went a step too far, boasting to the Financial Times that his firm HB Gary Federal was about to expose #Anonymous hackers. In retaliation, #Anonymous hacked into HB Gary’s email accounts and published 50,000 of their emails online. They also hacked Barr’s Twitter and other online accounts. Thus the secret Powerpoint slides of "Team Themis" (above) were publicly exposed. The emails also suggested that Team Themis had been set up at the request of the Chamber of Commerce to infiltrate ThinkProgress and other pro-Union groups.

As Glenn Greenwald noted, based on the poor quality of their research and seemingly illegal proposals, Team Themis at first looked like "just some self-promoting, fly-by-night entities of little significance". But "the firms involved here are large, legitimate and serious, and do substantial amounts of work for both the U.S. Government and the nation’s largest private corporations". HBGary claimed to have a cache of "zero-day exploits" - cyber attacks for which there is no existing remedy - and expertise in "computer network attack", "custom malware development" and "persistent software implants."

Greenwald said the episode highlighted "just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power".

Bank of America issued a "carefully worded statement". H & W refused to comment. Palantir publicly apologized "to progressive organizations in general, and Mr. Greenwald in particular, for any involvement that we may have had in these matters". HBGary distanced themselves from Aaron Barr, who resigned, and HBGary Federal was folded.

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While financial groups sought to cut off support for WikiLeaks, the US Department of Justice was still pursuing their own avenues of attack.

On 8 January 2011, Twitter revealed that the US Department of Justice had issued them with a court order, dated 14 December 2010 (PDF), for "all records" and "correspondence" relating to accounts "registered to or associated with WikiLeaks". Julian Assange and Bradley Manning were specifically named, along with Iceland MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum, and Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp, who had helped work on the Collateral Murder video.

Twitter advised affected users that they had ten days to oppose the request for information about their accounts.

Glenn Greenwald was shocked by the broad scope of the information sought by the Justice Department.

The New York Times reported that this was "the first public evidence" of Attorney General Eric Holder’s criminal investigation, which they expected would be "fraught with legal and political difficulties". Gonggrijp noted that the affected users only found out about the order "because Twitter did the right thing and successfully fought for a second court order so they were able to tell us". Citing concerns for his young family, Gonggrijp later terminated his public support for WikiLeaks.

The DoJ court order, which was widely misreported as a "subpoena", caused outrage on Twitter, with WikiLeaks warning that 637,000 followers were now being targeted by the US government "under section 2.B" of the order (user names and "destination IP addresses" of anyone receiving communications from the named individuals). Enraged followers threatened a class action lawsuit against the US government. Others were intimidated into unfollowing @wikileaks, but within a week the account had a net gain of 12,000 followers (hello again Streisand Effect).

Iceland’s Foreign Minister Oessur Skarphedinsson told German media it was not acceptable that US authorities had demanded such information. Iceland’s Interior Minister described the Justice Department’s efforts as "grave and odd":

In March 2011 a judge in the Eastern District of Virginia court upheld the Department of Justice’s demand for Twitter data, despite complaints by Appelbaum, Gonggrijp and Jonsdottir that it violated constitutional protections for free speech. Twitter Guidelines now state that private information about Twitter users will be released in response to "appropriate legal process such as a subpoena, court order [or] other valid legal process".

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After some deliberation, Jacob Applebaum decided to push ahead with his planned return to the USA on 10 January, but organised for representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to meet him at the airport. He then posted a long series of tweets about the constant harrassment he received when traveling through US airports.

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On 31 December 2010 Alternet published a list of eight "Smears and Misconceptions" that were already being regularly pushed by media organisations:

There were also easily dismissed claims that WikiLeaks had acquired their files by hacking. Sadly, even WikiLeaks' trusted media partners were guilty of indulging these deliberate smears and outright lies, with British newspaper the Guardian quickly becoming the most hostile organisation.

The very idea of media partnerships had first been conceived when Julian Assange met with Guardian journalist Nick Davies in a Brussels cafe. But on 17 December 2010, Davies published an article titled Ten Days In Sweden, which provided lurid details of the Swedish sex allegations directly from the Swedish police file on the Assange case. Davies said the file, which would normally have remained secret to protect the privacy of all parties concerned, just "happened to make its way quite legitimately into the hands of somebody I have come across in the past". He refused to identify his source, who almost certainly committed a crime by leaking the file.

Guy Rundle later read the full police report in Swedish and claimed "Davies has fundamentally distorted the record" with key details omitted and "distortingly oversimplified translation".

In the first week of January 2011, Bianca Jagger (who had helped pay Julian Assange’s bail) published a rebuttal of Nick Davies' rebuttal of her rebuttal of his original "Ten Days In Sweden" article. Davies, who acknowledged having fallen out with Assange months earlier, had rejected Jagger’s claims that his one-sided article, peppered with lurid sexual details, amounted to "trial by newspapers".

Jagger dismissed Davies' ludicrous claim that he was defending his source just like WikiLeaks defended theirs, noting "there is a profound difference between exposing the deeds of powerful governments, corporations and the rich and throwing mud at those who released the information". She also made an important point which would have profound repercussions for years to come:

Davies eventually washed his hands of any responsibility for the article that bore his name:

But the Guardian’s animosity to Assange continued. On 3 January 2011 the Guardian published an article that accused WikiLeaks of endangering the life of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the democratic opposition in Zimbabwe, by publishing a cable about him. The author James Richardson, a US Republican working for a "social media public affairs agency" (not disclosed to readers), argued that "WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder."

There was a major problem with this claim: it was the Guardian themselves who had selected the cable from the archive and chosen to publish it in early December. Nevertheless, the false claim was repeated in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Politico and other sites. It took over a week for the Guardian to publish a footnote:

But as Glenn Greenwald noted, the article - which should have been deleted - was not fundamentally altered. The misleading headline remained, along with repeated false claims blaming WikiLeaks for publishing the cable.

Guardian deputy editor Ian Katz belatedly explained that Richardson was "a first-time contributor to our comment website" and neither he nor the US-based editor who posted the article were aware of the "somewhat complicated process" used to publish the cables (never mind the process had been widely reported weeks earlier). Katz said the article was posted on a bank holiday after Christmas when the Guardian’s WikiLeaks editing team was not around. But the misleading article is still online, more than ten years later. As is the Wall Street Journal’s uncorrected version.

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On 11 January 2011 Julian Assange’s routine case management hearing at Belmarsh Magistrates Court was swamped with media and supporters. The Guardian’s live-blog of the event included continuing global fallout from the US cable publications and highlights from a 35-page skeleton outline of court arguments from Assange’s lawyers.

There were valid security concerns around Assange’s court appearance, especially following a recent mass shooting in Arizona where a US politician was shot. WikiLeaks published a statement condemning violent threats:

A website addresss, JulianAssangeMustDie.com, was traced to a rightwing US blogger (and deleted soon afterwards).

Meanwhile the economic threats from US officials continued to escalate. On 12 January 2011 WikiLeaks responded to Rep. Peter T. King’s calls for a US embargo of WikiLeaks.

King specifically wanted to target Knopf, a New York publisher who had recently agreed to pay Assange for an autobiography. Assange said the book royalties would "keep Wikileaks afloat". An article in the Atlantic ridiculed the madness of such a McCarthyist blacklist: "you could conceivably break the law merely by buying his book, or contributing to a WikiLeaks defense fund".

WikiLeaks was under massive pressure but clearly not going down without a fight. In a 12 January interview with John Pilger, Assange again mentioned the existence of "insurance files":

Was it a bluff? In years to come, WikiLeaks would repeatedly post such encrypted "insurance files" online. This lead to a lot of wild speculation about the contents, and much of that speculation eventually solidified into misguided belief. Uninformed critics still angrily disclaim how WikiLeaks "promised" to post something but never did.

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On 8 January 2011 WikiLeaks launched a new defense fund for Julian Assange, tweeting: "let us see Paypal try to close this one down too!" The following week saw more global protests. A rally in Sydney, Australia drew around a thousand supporters. This followed another huge Sydney protest on 14 December 2010, with another one planned for 6 February 2011. WikiLeaks supporters around the world were energised, outraged, and working together to support their heroes.

In February 2011 Snorre Valen, a member of the Norwegian parliament, nominated WikiLeaks for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Sydney Peace Foundation also announced that it would award a rare gold medal to WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange for his "exceptional courage and initiative in pursuit of human rights". The Peace Medal, distinct from the foundation’s annual Peace Prize, was previously only awarded to the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and Buddhist leader Daisaku Ikeda.

On 2 March 2011 a meeting was organised at Parliament House in Canberra, where Assange lawyers and prominent supporters addressed a group of Australian politicians and their staff. Those in attendance included future Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, a former lawyer and Chair of the Australian Republican Movement, who had successfully defended a former MI5 official’s publication of the tell-all book Spycatcher. Turnbull occasionally used the Assange case to score points against the ruling Rudd-Gillard Labour government, but he never challenged US treatment of WikiLeaks' Australian founder.

Meanwhile another senior Australian Liberal Party politician anonymously boasted that Julian Assange would be treated the same way as Galileo, who was found guilty of heresy and spent his life under house arrest for proving that the earth revolves around the sun.

Public protests for Assange and WikiLeaks always featured prominent support for Chelsea (then still "Bradley") Manning, who had now been jailed under turturous conditions at the Quantico brig for over five months. On 24 January, two Manning supporters (including regular visitor David House) were turned away from the facility after they attempted to deliver a petition of support with 42,000 signatures. On the following day, NBC reported that US military officials had placed Manning on suicide watch.

Manning later claimed that the guards had created a scene by issuing conflicting demands such as "turn left, don’t turn left". An investigation found that the Brig Commander had acted unlawfully, and he was replaced.

Manning was removed from suicide watch on January 21 but remained on POI (Prevention Of Injury) status, despite repeated calls from Army health professionals for this to be lifted. Manning’s lawyers filed a complaint explaining exactly what this status entailed:

On 24 January 2011, after blocking payments from Manning supporters for nearly a month, PayPal finally backed down and reinstated the account of Courage to Resist, a partner of the Bradley Manning Support Network. This followed a press release and a petition with over 10,000 signatures.

On the same day. Amnesty International issued a call for the USA to "alleviate the harsh pre-trial detention conditions of Bradley Manning." They ignored pleas to show similar support for Julian Assange.

Amnesty also refused to comment on the Swedish allegations, arguing only that "due process should be followed". Their strange lack of interest in the Assange case was to endure many years, with only very occasional and limited mentions.

On Sunday 13 March, P. J. Crowley, a spokesman for the Department of State, was forced to resign after he criticized Manning’s inhumane treatment as "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid." When President Obama was asked whether he agreed with Crowley, he said Pentagon officials had assured him that the conditions of Manning’s 10 months in pretrial solitary confinement were "appropriate and are meeting our basic standards".

A few days later, Britain’s foreign secretary William Hague was asked about Manning’s alleged torture by Welsh MP Ann Clwyd, who compared it to the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also issued a press release condeming the "cruel and unusual" treatment of Manning, whose status as a UK citizen was confirmed weeks later.

An "International Bradley Manning Support Day" was held on 20 March, with global protests in support of the alleged whistleblower. 80 year old Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg was arrested twice in two days after refusing to move from protests outside the Quantico base.

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Stratfor is a Texas-based security information business that relies on close communication with US intelligence agencies. Many Stratfor staff are former CIA agents. In early 2011, Stratfor’s Vice-President for Counterterrorism and Corporate Security was Fred Burton, a former Deputy Chief of the Department of State’s counterterrorism division for the Diplomatic Security Service.

On 26 January 2011, Burton sent an email to Stratfor staff revealing that the US government now had "a sealed indictment on Assange". He asked staff to protect this information and not publish it.

Burton’s email remained secret until February 2012, when Stratfor was hacked by #Anonymous and WikiLeaks published the files.

Burton’s hacked emails also stated: "Assange is going to make a nice bride in prison. Screw the terrorist. He’ll be eating cat food forever." Like Palantir and HBGary’s Aaron Barr, he recommended destroying WikiLeaks' financial base and infrastructure using "the same tools used to dismantle and track" terrorists.

Despite this further evidence of a US indictment, media commentators and senior government officials in Britain, Australia, and Sweden - many of whom must also have known about the sealed indictment - continued to pretend that Assange’s fears of extradition to the USA were entirely baseless.

In August 2012, Reuters falsely reported that the USA had "no current case" against Assange and State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland dismissed his extradition concerns as "wild assertions".

In November 2013 the Washington Post went even further, falsely reporting that Assange was "not under sealed indictment" based on comments from anonymous US officials.

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Also on 26 January 2011, the New York Times' executive editor Bill Keller published a ridiculously long article about his dealings with WikiLeaks during the previous year. The article was one of several New York Times essays that were compiled into a rushed-out book to help the cash-strapped newspaper (propped up by a $250 million loan from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, with print revenue down 26%) boost profits from massive public interest.

Keller was intent on establishing his own narrative of events, thus insulating his newspaper from allegations of irresponsible reporting. He dismissed Assange as "thin-skinned…​ arrogant…​ elusive, manipulative and volatile (and ultimately openly hostile to The Times and The Guardian)." But he also provided qualified support for WikiLeaks in the face of US government threats:

Five days later, 60 Minutes aired a lengthy interview with Assange where he claimed "our founding values are those of the U.S. revolution".

Assange insisted that WikiLeaks’s 2010 releases would in fact be "encouragement to every other publisher to publish fearlessly."

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Meanwhile, the world was in turmoil. Tunisia’s president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali fled his country in mid-January 2011 - despite winning 89% of the vote two years earlier - and became the first dictator to fall in a series of popular uprisings now called the Arab Spring. The widespread protests were at least partly triggered by WikiLeaks' Cablegate publications, which provided hard proof of endemic corruption across the Middle East.

The final days of January saw huge protests in Egypt, with US-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak repeatedly shutting down the Internet to stem the flow of information. On 28 January WikiLeaks released a first batch of new Egyptian cables. On 29 January activists began faxing the WikiLeaks cables into Egypt to bypass the Internet blockade. Mubarak resigned less than two weeks later.

Critics accused Assange of trying to take full credit for these revolutions, although he did no such thing. On 30 January 2011 WikiLeaks tweeted that Al Jazeera’s new satellite TV network was also a critical factor:

The Arab Spring saw many online activists joining the #Anonymous global collective to bring down government websites in the Middle East with massive Denial of Service (DDos) attacks. Western analysts could hardly complain when such activists helped bring down authoritarian government sites overseas, but it was a different story for those who had targetted US and British websites in the previous year.

On 28 January the FBI announced that it had executed over forty search warrants in response to DDoS attacks, while five people were arrested in the United Kingdom.

Anons reacted to these arrests by publishing an open letter to the UK government, ridiculing the harsh penalties - a maximum 10 years imprisonment and fines up to £5000 - for a crime that temporarily brought down websites but left no permament damage.

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By the start of February 2011, barely two thousand of the 250,000 leaked cables had been published. But like the New York Times (above) Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding were already rushing out a book: "Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy". An excerpt from the Preface by their boss Alan Rusbridger was published three days before the book’s release, mostly complaining about the difficulties of working with WikiLeaks' unconventional founder. The Guardian EIC approvingly quoted Slate columnist Jack Shafer:

Rusbridger said it was "an interesting matter for speculation" whether US media atttitudes would change if Assange was ever to be prosecuted. But it would be difficult to do that "without also putting five editors in the dock" and that would be "the media case of the century".

Nevertheless, and even though the Guardian was still publishing dozens of stories about the cables every week, Rusbridger made it clear that he had no further use for Assange:

Rusbridger might not have thought it was so funny if he knew that his brother-in-law’s book was also about to cause a far worse leak, with profound repercussions. One of the chapter headings in the book contained the passphrase to unlock the entire Cablegate archive. This was not a conventional password. Assange had personally written it down for Leigh, but even then he took an extra precaution (in cryptographic terms, an additional "salt"):

As the book repeatedly shows, Assange was far from impressed by Leigh’s technological expertise. Leigh could not even open a standard compressed file, and needed help to view the files even after the passphrase had unlocked them.

Leigh later complained that Assange told him the passphrase was only temporary. Assange vehemently denied this. It was in fact the secure server, which Leigh used to access the archive, that was temporary. A Guardian statement later made this clear:

Leigh himself even noted this in his book, as Kristinn Hrafnsson pointed out:

For years to come, however, Guardian journalists would accuse Assange of sloppy security while insisting their colleagues did nothing wrong. Tellingly, Leigh and Harding only published the lengthy passphrase in their book because it was an illuminating example of the extreme lengths Assange took to guarantee security.

For the time being, at any rate, nobody was going public with concerns about the Cablegate passphrase being published, because the compressed archive files remained secret. But there were plenty of other problems with the new Guardian book.

One of the book’s most explosive claims regarded a July 2010 dinner at London’s Moro restaurant, where journalists working on the Afghan War Diaries had gathered to discuss redactions. According to David Leigh, when discussion turned to protecting the names of the US military’s Afghan informants, Julian Assange said: “They’re informants, they deserve to die.” Assange vigorously denied ever saying this, but the alleged quote was repeated for years to come as proof of his alleged "disregard for human lives".

That dinner was attended by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Declan Walsh, who supported Leigh’s claim. But John Goetz, who also attended the dinner with his Der Spiegel colleague Marcel Rosenbach, insisted that Julian Assange had never said such a thing. Rosenbach could not remember Assange saying it, but could not be certain he never said it. The only other person at that dinner was Assange himself, who declared:

Who to believe? A clue comes from Australian journalist Mark Davis, who attended many of the Afghan War Diaries meetings as a privileged insider filming the documentary “Inside WikiLeaks”. Davis later ridiculed Guardian claims that Assange had a "cavalier attitude" to innocent lives.

Davis said the Guardian journalists frequently engaged in "gallows humour" which Assange avoided. And the Guardian wanted to rush publication before redactions were finished, forcing Julian to work all night doing the job himself.

Davis said the Guardian journalists did not care about redactions because they expected WikiLeaks to be blamed, not them or their media partners. He recalled a conversation between Nick Davies and David Leigh, when Assange was not present:

Mark Davis accused the Guardian and the New York Times of attempted “subterfuge…​ pushing Julian out to walk the plank”. If WikiLeaks published the cables first, before media partners ran their stories, Assange would be legally to blame for any repurcussions. But their plan failed due to technical issues: when the first Afghan War Log stories were published, WikiLeaks was offline. Neverthess, media partners' stories falsely stated that WikiLeaks had "published" the files, not them.

Davis' testimony was reinforced by another Australian journalist, Iain Overton, who worked with Assange on the Iraq War Logs months later.

In a July 2011 article, Alan Rusbridger, who was on a salary package around £400,000 at the time, casually remarked:

This was another common smear: WikiLeaks had lost staff, their submission system was broken, and they would never publish any major leaks again. But WikiLeaks was not quite dead yet.

The next major bombshell from the Guardian’s new book was that Julian Assange was an anti-Semite, or at least worked closely with an allegedly "notorious anti-Semite" named Israel Shamir, who just happened to have been born Jewish, lost family members in the Nazi Holocaust, and trained with the Israeli Defence Force. This was the first of many bizarre anti-Assange allegations from new Guardian journalist James Ball, who had covered the Iraq War Logs stories for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism before very briefly joining WikiLeaks in November 2010.

Although Ball joined the Guardian in February 2011, the 31 January 2011 Guardian article promoting the Guardian book refers to him only as an anonymous "insider" who claimed that Israel Shamir had "demanded copies of cables about 'the Jews'".

James Ball re-hashed this claim under his own name in a November 2011 Guardian article where he stated:

Shamir responded that it was Ball himself who had given him these cables.

James Ball, who had also previously worked as a researcher for Heather Brooke (via whom the Guardian supplied the Cablegate archive to the New York Times), further stated:

Shamir’s "years-long friendship with Assange" turned out to be at best a wild exaggeration. And if Shamir really had such access to the files, why would he have needed to ask anyone for them?

These "anti-Semite" claims, smearing Julian Assange and WikiLeaks by association with Shamir, were repeated and repeated again by Britain’s Private Eye magazine, with a tired Julian Assange denying that he made anti-Semitic remarks about a "Jewish conspiracy" in frustrated phone calls with editor Ian Hislop.

Jennifer Lipman from the Jewish Chronicle, who "worked with Julian Assange in the past" and "never heard him express any antisemitic sentiments", wanted an explanation. She noted that that Julian Assange had also been called "an agent of Mossad because the WikiLeaks cables did not provide enough evidence of Israeli government wrongdoing". Even the non-profit Index on Censorship, which had awarded Assange their new media prize in 2008, weighed in with questions.

WikiLeaks was eventually forced to issue a lengthy response which said in part:

WikiLeaks also noted that Shamir had been obliged, like all media partners, to sign a non-disclosure agreement before getting access to any files. And yet James Ball two months later criticised Assange for forcing staff to sign non-disclosure documents. Ball claimed that he "inadvertently" leaked a copy of his own non-disclosure agreement, which he had refused to sign, calling it "by orders of magnitude the most restrictive I have ever encountered". As usual with media critics, Assange was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. Without a hint of self-awareness, James Ball concluded that WikiLeaks, the world’s leading transparency organisation, "needs to get out of the gagging game."

James Ball further reported that Israel Shamir had given unredacted US cables to the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, who then used that information to crack down on dissenters. Again there was no proof for this allegation, just a photo of Shamir outside the steps of the Belarus Presidential Administation Building in Minsk on the day elections were being held, 19 December 2010. Shamir wrote an article explaining why he was in his mother’s home town of Minsk at the time, but nevertheless Julian Assange was falsely accused for years to come of endangering the lives of Belarussian dissidents.

It seems the new cables on Belarus were actually first published by "Russian Reporter", a magazine that was condemned by the Russia’s state-owned Moscow Times, who also called Shamir a "notorious anti-Semite". Human rights group Charter 97 then published articles about the cables, criticizing the Lukashenko regime. Belarus police brought down their website, raided their offices, and arrested them. But nobody was harmed as a direct result of the cables being published, as even US government officials later admitted.

There were massive protests after Lukashenko claimed victory in the elections. Opposition leader Andrei Sannikov was just one of dozens imprisoned. But a year later, Sannikov’s sister Irina, a spokesperson for the Free Belarus campaign, invited Julian Assange to host a Q & A session at the premiere screening of their film, "Europe’s Last Dictator". It was then more clear than ever that Assange had been helping Belarussian dissidents in the background, not helping get them killed. Nevertheless Britain’s New Statesman magazine complained that "to dignify Assange with a place on the podium at an event about Belarus is to mock the men and women who endure the brutality of Lukashenko". Obviously the author, a "freelancer from India" whose work had appeared in the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times, knew more about Belarussia than the dissidents who had invited Assange to speak.

It’s worth noting that the USA meddles a great deal in former Soviet bloc nations nations like Belarus. According to the New Statesman, Shamir expressed delight when US-backed agents were exposed. But as WikiLeaks cautioned:

Of course, the great benefit of WikiLeaks releases is that readers can view the source material for themselves and draw their own conclusions. It is also worth noting that UK public support would be critical to Julian Assange in the years ahead, and the people most likely to support WikiLeaks in 2011 were anti-war, anti-Establishment, left wing types. But the UK’s most "left wing" UK publications - the Guardian, New Statesman and Private Eye - were all quickly lining up to criticize the WikiLeaks founder. Right wing media organisations like the Telegraph or the Times gave Assange and WikiLeaks far less column space (almost all negative). By design or accident, the local audience most likely to support Assange was being actively discouraged from doing so.

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While this confected "anti-Semitism" debate raged, Stephen Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio had quietly bought the rights to both the Guardian’s "WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy" and Domscheit-Berg’s poor-selling book (now with an English version, still low sales). The untrustworthy movie that eventually resulted would predictably become a miserable flop ("the worst opening of the year so far for a movie opening in more than 1,500 theaters"). But Alan Rusbridger was gushing with excitement:

And David Leigh, who had recklessly published the Cablegate passphrase, was recklessly throwing around accusations of recklessness. He said Assange was a "reckless amateur" journalist who was "being reckless and opportunistic" by "palling up with" Russia and "giving material to very unsuitable people. He complained that WikiLeaks staff "like to see themselves as having some God-like virtue which enables them to behave in some pretty reckless and unethical ways."

Leigh’s co-author Luke Harding, who won Private Eye’s 2007 Plagiarist of the Year award, was denied entry back into Moscow after publishing numerous stories about US cables critical of Russia. But years later Assange was being widely slandered as "a Putin puppet" with Luke Harding publishing incriminating lies about Assange in the Guardian and seemingly fabricating key conspiracy theories.

Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook explained that Leigh and Harding’s "well-known animosity" towards Assange was "at least partly due to Assange refusing to let them write his official biography, a likely big moneymaker".

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After toppling leaders in Tunisia and Egypt, the Arab Spring protests spread into Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Kuwait, Morrocco, Oman, Sudan and even Saudi Arabia. By March 2011 the world’s focus was on oil-rich Libya, where eccentric leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi had been in power since 1969. In February alone WikiLeaks posted some 17 tweets mentioning Libya and released hundreds of US diplomatic cables about the North African nation.

One of the leaked cables revealed that Gaddafi, who claimed to be a pious Muslim, "relies heavily" on a "voluptuous blonde" Ukranian nurse, who later sought asylum in Norway.

Gaddafi claimed that Libyan protesters were "drugged" and/or linked to al-Qaeda, swearing that he would die a martyr rather than leave Libya. After the Libyan army opened fire on protesters in the rebellious city of Benghazi, many senior officials resigned or joined rebel groups, prompting a six months-long civil war.

NATO forces imposed a no-fly zone over the country in March, following a UN Resolution in February. US President Obama claimed the USA was only reluctantly getting involved:

Leaked emails from Hillary Clinton, published by WikiLeaks in 2016, later showed the US Secretary of State was the principal architect of the US-lead invasion. Assange branded her "the butcher of Libya" and claimed she used the invasion as a basis for her failed 2016 Presidential campaign. Over 1,700 of Clinton’s leaked emails mentioned Libya.

Assange critic Tom Watson instead blamed WikiLeaks for the invasion, describing it as the first WikiLeaks War:

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was finally overthrown on 23 August 2011. He was killed on 20 October 2011 by rebels who found him hiding in a tunnel in his hometown of Sirte. When Hillary Clinton was told of Gaddafi’s brutally violent death she happily quipped:

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NEXT CHAPTER: TEN

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The author of this book can be found on Twitter: @Jaraparilla

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