Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s Inside WikiLeaks has been billed as a “tell-all” exposé of the supposed “whistleblower” website. Given the darkness in which the history of the site is shrouded, such a volume would be welcome. But Domscheit-Berg’s book in fact tells very little of substance and virtually nothing that is verifiable. Far from providing anything like an [...]
Many questions have been raised about Julian Assange’s and WikiLeaks’s association with the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Israel Shamir. Defenders of Assange have suggested, however, that even if Shamir has indeed done “work” for WikiLeaks, it might well have been Shamir that proposed his services. Hence, the association would not imply that Assange was aware of the [...]
In a major development that has been largely ignored or misrepresented in the American media, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has obtained access to the full stash of over 250,000 classified American diplomatic cables previously obtained by WikiLeaks. The paper has been posting a steady stream of cables to its own website independently of the self-styled [...]
251,287. That’s the number of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks claims to have obtained. 1,897. That’s the number of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables that, according to WikiLeaks’s own count, have thus far been published on its website. But whereas WikiLeaks has withheld the documents from the public, five handpicked old media organizations have enjoyed [...]
An update to my earlier report (“Tax Deductible WikiLeaks”) on WikiLeaks’s German fundraiser, the Wau Holland Foundation. In response to articles in the German press suggesting that the foundation could have its “charitable” status revoked on account of its connections to WikiLeaks, the relevant authorities have issued a denial specifying that they see “no grounds” for examining [...]
From the amount of media attention he is presently receiving, it would appear that Julian Assange must be the “man of the year.” But the sole source for almost everything that the public knows – or thinks it knows – about the reputed founder of WikiLeaks is none other than Julian Assange himself. One element [...]
Last weekend, PayPal announced that it was freezing the PayPal account used by WikiLeaks. In a statement, PayPal explained that WikiLeaks was in violation of the company’s acceptable use policy, which “states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.” But [...]
During the darkest days of al-Qaeda/Baathist terror and sectarian violence in Iraq in 2006-2007, the American and European media were replete with predictions that the country was sliding into a full-fledged civil war or indeed had already done so. Supposedly scientific studies, like the 2006 Lancet study estimating that some 650,000 Iraqis had died as [...]
Even news outlets and commentators that are critical of its posting of tens of thousands of U.S. military reports on the war in Afghanistan are prepared to confer upon WikiLeaks the honorific of a “whistleblower organization.” But is that what it is? On closer inspection, the “whistleblower organization” appears in fact to be little more [...]
If we are to judge by its “Collateral Murder” video and campaign, WikiLeaks is not the website — and perhaps not the organization — that it once was. I use the word “campaign” in the sense, more exactly, of a propaganda campaign. For WikiLeaks’s “Collateral Murder” bears all the markings of precisely that. Once upon [...]
