...because without such understanding no human being can meaningfully choose to support anything.
I have no strong feelings about Julian Assange one way or the other but that's because I, like a lot of you, like reading somebody else's mail. Most of us get boring stuff but when you've got somebody in the US embassy calling Rudd a compulsive control freak who runs foreign policy like a chop shop, that's fun.
The purpose of a leak is to cause some embarrassment, and Assange gets a gold leaf with clusters in that category. He has managed to leave a trail of red faces around the world and none of them are going to feel bad about seeing him spend a few years in the slammer.
He has now been arrested on the basis of alleged sexual offences against two women, one of whom claims consensual sex but without the condom she asked for. The other alleges she was "deliberately molested" in a way designed to "violate her sexual integrity".
Phillip Knightley, a veteran Australian journalist based in London who broke the Kim Philby spy scandal story in the mid-1960s, suspects there has been some "grooming" by intelligence agencies to discredit Assange. "The technique they used is to take one weak part of [the subject's] personality and exaggerate it. For example, someone who is having domestic difficulties is 'bashing his wife'. They exaggerate the material to make them look even more doubtful."
"Assange was set up. One woman has fled to Israel. The other one I think has been used. The whole thing smells of a professional operation. It probably does not involve the CIA," Knightley says, "but could involve some proxy organisation like Swedish intelligence."
"What matters is that people who admire him [Assange] now wonder whether he has got ill judgment. If he shows ill judgment, that will colour people's view of the material he is releasing and his motives for doing so. But this has changed the game. People have seen how secret government operates and it will never be the same again."
