Assange: what it means to be a suspect

This has led to a familiar scenario in which official claims of success are regularly met by cries of outrage, not just from the surviving villagers and relatives, but from President Karzai himself. The Pentagon then announces an official investigation, likely to take months. The protracted nature of this process, the fact that it is conducted by the Pentagon, and the 24:7 news cycle ensure that the final report, if and when it emerges, will have no impact on the conduct of the war.

The fact that some victims are official suspects, because it blurs the issue of innocence, blurs the justification of collateral damage. It lulls the media into accepting without question the secret status of operational "rules of engagement", and explains why no one asks if these rules might be different had the innocent victims been allied troops, aid workers or American contractors. This is an acid test of the morality of "collateral damage" because it forces us to confront, among other things, racial and ethnic prejudice in deciding whose lives we will sacrifice to pursue political goals.

None of this has any bearing on the merits of the charge against Julian Assange. It does, however, have everything to do with the need for care to keep this allegation of sexual abuse separate from the credibility and importance of Wikileaks' revelations of the abuse of rights, as well as its reports of corruption and deception of the public in the area of foreign policy. Whatever the fate of Assange, it highlights the need for an internet-based organization to provide anonymity for whistleblowers, and to help counter the ability of government to shape public opinion to its own ends.

It is easy to forget how vulnerable the corporate media may be to this pressure. In 2009 David Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for an article in The New York Times which reported that the Defence Department had recruited over 75 retired military officers, some with secret ties to major defense contractors, to appear on major news outlets as military analysts to comment on the Iraq war and to press the case in its favour.

In Barstow's words the Bush administration had used its control over access and information “to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse - an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside major TV and radio networks.” After initially denying it had done anything unethical the Pentagon later conceded the program had been a mistake.

The somewhat Orwellian nature of this symbiosis between government and corporate media is highlighted by the failure of the networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox) to either mention Barstow's name in their news reports, or talk about his investigation. Despite this, Barstow himself came to believe that the revelations had led to improvements in the networks' practices.

This concern is critical now that US Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell claims Assange is a "high-tech terrorist", prominent Republican leader Newt Gingrich thinks he should be treated "as an enemy combatant" - presumably to be locked up indefinitely - and Sarah Palin brands him "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands." Assange now has the double soubriquet of suspect rapist and suspect terrorist; when one recalls that the US President is not prepared to outlaw the CIA practice of "rendition", it is not hard to understand a certain degree of paranoia on his part.

Although public opinion forced Prime Minister Gillard to modify her initial, irresponsible, claim that Assange had acted illegally, her approach is governed by the same foreign policy considerations the Howard Government relied on when dealing with David Hicks, another citizen whose personal fate had to take second place to the national interest imperatives of the "US alliance".

For readers interested in Julian Assange's vision of and justification for the Wikileaks enterprise, it is hard to go past his Lateline interview with Tony Jones of 29 July (vodcast from ABC Lateline Archives) The questions are thoughtful and probing, forcing Assange to answer his most severe critics. Of particular interest is his response to US claims that the leaks put allied lives at risk.