Against Assange

A collection of links showing the carelessness and endangerment inherent in the Wikileaks enterprise, and the flakeiness of Julian Assange:

The Wiki leak is more and less important than you think

Private lives are collateral damage in WikiLeaks' document dumps

WikiTargeted

That last link is to a story summarised in a Vox article.   This is worth extracting in full (and Graeme, your comments about this are bound to be deleted.  Don't even bother.):

Shamir, who has gone by six names over the course of his life, was born Izrail Schmerler, in Russia. He converted from Judaism to the Greek Orthodox Church later in life, and turned viciously on his former co-religionists. He has denied the Holocaust, called Jews “a virus in human form,” and, in 2010, published a book titled Breaking the Conspiracy of the Elders of Zion.

Shamir was also a longtime friend of Julian Assange, who tasked him with helping to disseminate WikiLeaks documents in his native Russia in early 2010.

“Shamir has a years-long friendship with Assange, and was privy to the contents of tens of thousands of US diplomatic cables months before WikiLeaks made public the full cache,” James Ball, a former WikiLeaks staffer, wrote at the Guardian the next year. “Shamir aroused the suspicion of several WikiLeaks staffers — myself included — when he asked for access to all cable material concerning ‘the Jews,’ a request which was refused.”

The first thing Shamir did with the documents was hand some off to Russian Reporter magazine, a Kremlin-friendly newsweekly. He then offered to sell access to them to the highest bidder, David Leigh and Luke Harding write in the book Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy.

But what he did next was exceptionally curious. Shamir traveled to Belarus, a country ruled by dictator Alexander Lukashenko and perhaps Putin’s staunchest ally in Europe. Shamir was a fan of Lukashenko; in a 2010 piece, he called Belarus “the Shangri-la of the post-Soviet development.”

In Belarus, Shamir shared State Department cables pertaining to the country with government officials — in unredacted, unedited form.

In January 2011, Belarusian state-run media began publishing what it said were US diplomatic cables from Shamir’s cache, alleging that Lukashenko’s opponents were funded abroad. According to several Belarusian dissidents who spoke to Tablet, the names in the cables were also used to identify lower-level dissidents.

“The extent to which WikiLeaks and Israel Shamir have endangered the lives of pro-democracy activists in Belarus will become chillingly clear as innocent men and women continue to disappear,” Kapil Komireddi, author of the Tablet piece, writes.

WikiLeaks issued a weak public disavowal of Shamir’s Belarusian caper in February 2011, saying “obviously it is not approved.” But according to Ball, the internal discourse on Shamir was somewhat different.

“Assange shamefully refused to investigate [the Belarus incident],” Ball recalled in his Guardian piece. “The two [Shamir and Assange] remain close.”

Next link:  a lengthy piece in The Atlantic, containing amongst other stuff a claim about Assange's attitude to release of names of Afghan informants:

I might further direct you to Assange’s own unique brand of journalism, when he could still be said to be practicing it. Releasing U.S. diplomatic communiqués that named foreigners living in conflict zones or authoritarian states and liaising with American officials was always going to require thorough vetting and redaction, lest those foreigners be put in harm’s way. Assange did not care—he wanted their names published, according to Luke Harding and David Leigh in WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. As they recount the story, when Guardian journalists working with WikiLeaks to disseminate its tranche of U.S. secrets tried to explain to Assange why it was morally reprehensible to publish the names of Afghans working with American troops, Assange replied: “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.” (Assange denied the account; the names, in the end, were not published in The Guardian, although some were by WikiLeaks in its own dump of the files.)**

It is very clear that Assange lied about matters during the Trump campaign:  hence lying about this is not hard to imagine.  (He claimed he would sue The Guardian, he never did.)