What Happened to Wikileaks?

In August of 2006, the Probo Koala, a ship chartered by the multinational commodities firm Trafigura, sailed into the Port of Abidjan in the African nation of Ivory Coast with 500 tons of toxic waste onboard. Over the next three weeks, the waste—a noxious brew of fuel, caustic soda, and hydrogen sulfide—was illegally dumped in municipal landfills and alongside roads in Abidjan. The resulting public health emergency saw 26,000 people treated for symptoms of poisoning. As many as 17 Ivorians died. Trafigura denied any responsibility.

The "Minton Report" was the result of an internal Trafigura investigation into the incident. It proved that the company had known the waste was hazardous when it was transported to Africa and dumped in Abidjan. The contents of the report were obtained by the BBC, The Guardian, and other news outlets, but lawyers for Trafigura threatened legal action if they reported on the findings. The company won an injunction against The Guardian, and forced the BBC to remove an exposé about the incident from its website.

Undaunted, Wikileaks published the Minton Report, revealing to the world the true extent of Trafigura's criminal negligence. The firm paid millions of dollars in compensation to victims, and Wikileaks gained an early reputation for bringing corporate wrongdoing to the light of day.

Fifteen years later, for better or worse—mostly for worse, as I will argue—Wikileaks is inseparable from its founder, Julian Assange. He has used his platform to publish secret documentation of corporate and government malfeasance, but he has also wielded Wikileaks as a weapon against his political—and personal—enemies. Wikileaks exemplifies the freedom of the press, but it has also been used as a propaganda instrument of repressive governments. Has Wikileaks been a force for good in the world? Well, yes in the case of the Probo Koala. But in many other cases, no.

Wikileaks' other high-profile document dumps include a tranche of embarrassing U.S. diplomatic cables, U.S. military field reports of civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the so called "Collateral Murder" footage of a 2007 U.S. airstrike on a team of Reuters journalists mistaken for insurgents in Baghdad. In 2016, Wikileaks also released emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta and from the Democratic National Committee. The emails, which had been hacked by Russia, revealed the DNC's hidden preference for Clinton over rival candidate Bernie Sanders.

(It's a common misconception that Wikileaks published Edward Snowden's cache of top secret documents pertaining to Western government surveillance of both foreign and domestic nationals, but this isn't the case—Snowden released his carefully-curated documents to The New York Times and The Guardian directly, not to Wikileaks.)

"Assange's remarks were irredeemably loathsome, shameful and gross."

Wikileaks' descent into ignominy truly begins in 2016, when it published emails from the DNC and from Clinton's campaign manager, Podesta. The emails revealed the DNC's preference for Clinton over rival candidate Bernie Sanders, and intensified divisions within the party. The emails had been hacked and released to Wikileaks as part of a secret Russian campaign to discredit and defeat Clinton (a campaign which, yes, did exist and, no, was not a hoax.)

The publication of the DNC emails was probably in the public interest—John Podesta's emails significantly less so. But Julian Assange's behavior during this period shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that the disclosures were part of his own personal campaign against Hillary Clinton. "She certainly should not become president of the United States," he declared in February of 2016. He went on to promote various lurid right-wing conspiracy theories about Clinton, most notably surrounding the murder of Seth Rich.

Rich, a DNC staffer, was shot dead in a disreputable neighborhood of Washington, D.C. in July of 2016. Police suspected that the murder was a botched robbery. Assange, in multiple interviews, heavily implied that Rich was Wikileaks' source for the DNC emails, coyly referring to him as an "alleged Wikileaks source" and "someone who's potentially connected to our publication." Even as evidence mounted that the emails had been hacked by Russia, Assange continued to deny Russian involvement and insisted the leak was an "inside job."

The Guardian rightfully denounced Assange's "ruthless exploitation of [Rich's] death for political purposes," and the open government advocacy group The Sunlight Foundation referred to Assange's insinuations as "disgusting." (In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that The Standard has been a financial supporter of The Sunlight Foundation in the past.) I'll go further and say that Assange's remarks were irredeemably loathsome, shameful and gross. Far from an impartial journalist, Assange revealed himself to be just another biased media figure—and a promulgator of harmful conspiracy theories.

So what is Assange's bias? It appears to not be for anything, but rather against the United States in general and the Democratic party establishment in particular, as personified in 2016 by Hillary Clinton. Assange is much like Glenn Greenwald in this respect—in both cases, their anti-U.S. derangement causes them to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the worst actors on the world stage, from Donald Trump to Russia's Vladimir Putin to Syria's Bashar al-Assad.

This is well-evidenced in the case of Syria, where, in the course of that country's long-running civil war, the Assad regime perpetrated multiple chemical weapons attacks on rebel-held civilian areas. Only, some on the far-left contend that these chemical attacks were "false flags," somehow orchestrated by the United States to justify military intervention in Syria. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) debunked this nonsense, but nonetheless, Wikileaks undermined the OPCW's conclusion by publishing a raft of documents from disgruntled former employees of the OPCW with alternative facts that indicated no chemical attack had taken place at all in the town of Douma (where a chemical attack most certainly did take place.)

However, Assange chose not to publish a key document that proved the OPCW was correct all along. Instead, he actively worked to obfuscate Syrian war crimes.

RELATED: How Russia Played the Left on Syria

You may be noticing a trend—that Assange's agenda often seems to run parallel to Russian state interests. Assange, who does not dispute that he has been paid by the Russian government in the past, but won't say how much, came to Putin's vigorous defense when the Panama Papers exposed a Russian international money-laundering operation. Assange tweeted like a lunatic that the "Putin attack" was "funded by USAID and Soros." Putin then gleefully followed up with the same talking points: "Wikileaks has showed us that official people and official organs of the U.S. are behind this," he said.

Fundamentally, Wikileaks is a tool of transparency, and a tool is inherently neither good nor bad. Rather, it's how the tool is used that determines its moral value. Wikileaks is at its best when it is exposing genuine corruption and holding powerful corporate and government interests accountable to the people, but it is diminished when it is used as a tool of selective transparency to advance Julian Assange's petty political agenda. It would be better off disassociating itself from Assange and returning to its roots. But until this happens, Wikileaks and Assange will continue to have about the same sickening, poisonous effect on our discourse that the Probo Koala's toxic waste had on the people of Abidjan.