Savages

You know, in the interest of fairness I wanted to take a minute and remind everyone that the Neanderthals on the right are by no means the only ones willing to claim that there are varying degrees of rape -- that some rape is really rape while other rape is, I don't know, like a warm bath on a cool autumn evening.

There are those on the left just as comfortable engaging in inexcusable and repulsive semantics when it comes time to defend someone they happen to think is serving the greater good.

To wit, Michael Moore, who, along with the equally offensive Oliver Stone, penned a long-winded op-ed in yesterday's New York Times that once again attempted to cast the rape case against the almost farcically pious Julian Assange as a conspiracy to quash free speech.

Adrian Chen over at Gawker shows Moore, Stone and their ilk the appropriate respect.

"That Assange is holed up in the embassy after seeking asylum in Ecuador to avoid two-year-old Swedish rape and sexual molestation accusations, not a U.S. government investigation, proved no obstacle: His supporters are now seized by one of their periodic spasms of delusional op-ed writing, blogging and tweeting in the hopes of throwing up a screen of bullshit thick enough to hide the fact that this is a very straightforward case of a dude allegedly being a sex creep...

Julian Assange's sex crimes case has nothing to do with free speech, or Wikileaks. Swedish prosecutors are not handling this case differently because it's Julian Assange. In fact slavish supporters like Michael Moore and Oliver Stone are the ones holding Assange to a different standard, one where it's OK to bend and break international law to aid an accused rapist's flight from justice, as long as he embarrassed the U.S. government once. "

By the way, the opening line of the op-ed, in which Moore and Stone immediately assert their hallowed cultural position as filmmakers, sounds far too much like another recent case of a bunch of pompous members of the self-appointed liberal intelligentsia rushing in to defend an Important Man from the ignorant heathens unjustly gathering at his doorstep and calling him a rapist.

Picture of the Day

I'm not sure there's ever been an image that's more flawlessly summed up everything that is Glenn Greenwald.

The choice of writing only from among his stable of four or five rotating topics. The indignant defense of Julian Assange. The involuntary lashing out at the evil, imperial U.S. for its unlawful and immoral persecution of the world's most saintly individual. The implication that everyone should agree with him and let Assange off the hook for trying to run off to a South American country -- sound familiar? -- and the almost certain implication that those who disagree and think that Assange is a coward who's evading the justice system because he arrogantly doesn't think he should have to face its potential judgment are jingoistic barbarians. The four -- four -- Aspergerian updates.

It's just all so -- Glenny.

I realize I'm violating my current policy of not even bothering to click the link whenever I see a Greenwald byline, but I'm glad I did this time. This kind of comedy gold is priceless.

Street Walker

Credit where credit is due: While certainly not missing the opportunity to ascend a couple of his favorite soapboxes, Glenn Greenwald's takedown of newly minted CNN starlet Erin Burnett in yesterday's Salon was pretty spot-on.

Here's the pertinent point about both Burnett and her partner-in-crime on the Wall Street beat, Alison Kosik:

"Needless to say, Burnett and Kosik consider themselves to be opinion-free, objective 'reporters.' Indeed, this is what Burnett said in the Vantiy Fair interview when asked if she sympathizes too much with the Wall Street plutocrats on whom she purports to report: 'My job isn’t to give an opinion but to try and explain what’s happening.' But just like Andrew Ross Sorkin and his protection of and subservience to his 'CEO-of-a-major-bank' friend, these people are oozing bias and opinion from every pore of their being. They are so devoted to and immersed in the insular oligarchical world of which they are desperate to be a part that they know and care about nothing else. Expecting them to provide objective, critical assessments of business elites is like expecting a heroin addict to rat out his dealer."

What he's griping about, correctly to some extent, is that Burnett, Kosik and those like them are naturally going to dismiss and denigrate the Occupy Wall Street movement in its entirety because they're inherently biased against it. They've been granted a backstage pass and it's therefore to be expected that they'll be the first ones on their knees blowing the band. What's more, they don't even realize how prejudiced and untrustworthy they are when it comes to reporting on the economy because all they breathe is rarefied air -- it's literally all they know.

The only problem with Greenwald's argument, of course, is that most journalists bring certain biases with them to their stories -- and not only is Greenwald himself not immune to this, he's one of the worst offenders. Case in point: He draws an immediate connection in the above piece between slanted Wall Street reporting and what he calls the servile stenography that national security correspondents engage in when they report on anyone who supposedly challenges the official word of government officials. He of course uses this line of thinking to explain why anyone working for a mainstream news outlet would have a problem with Julian Assange and Wikileaks. While Greenwald's right to say that access to power, any kind of power, can potentially corrupt your ability to be objective, he's wrong if he assumes that only a subservience to authority would cause someone to rail against Wikileaks. Believe me, I don't have access to a damn thing and I still don't like Julian Assange, nor do I entirely trust his creation or the unchecked influence both of them wield.

Still, the overall point Greenwald makes about the questionable trustworthiness of "insider" correspondents is worth giving credence to. If you can get past his predictably and condescendingly casting himself as journalistic integrity's last man standing, the piece is worth a read.

And by the way, Greenwald isn't the only one taking Erin Burnett apart piece by piece. The Baltimore Sun's absolute evisceration of her as "self-satisfied, smug, privileged and feeling not one whit of (the) pain" of those protesting on Wall Street or those they purport to be standing up for in this country is required reading.

Post-Mortem

Two more quick points to make about the killing of Osama bin Laden and the reaction we've seen to it -- and you might say that one comes from the left side of my brain and the other from the right.

Partisanship Over Patriotism

I've really come to the unfortunate conclusion -- and I'm not sure anyone would argue with this anymore -- that there's nothing that could bring the far ends of the political spectrum together in agreement, particularly those on the right. Watching and listening to the reaction of people like Rush Limbaugh (who barely let on just how sickeningly sarcastic he was being in his "congratulation" of President Obama) and Sarah Palin (who didn't mention Obama at all but thanked George W. Bush) to this event, you get the very distinct impression that it would literally take an alien invasion to get the supposedly hyper-patriotic right to discard its partisan pettiness and simply stand behind the leader of the United States as fellow Americans. It's depressing in ways I can't properly describe to believe that were 9/11 to have occurred, say, yesterday, as opposed to ten years ago, many on the right's blind, seething hatred of Barack Obama would countermand any urge to at least temporarily put our differences aside in the name of the greater good. If something really awful happened to this country again, I simply don't think we'd see the kind of unity we saw in the days, weeks and months following September 11th, 2001.

These people believe that, no matter what, they're right and Obama is wrong. That's the irony of all the hypocrisy and all the contradictory statements we've heard from conservatives over the past two years: They're not contradictory at all; there's always been one very steady underlying message, and that's that President Obama is wrong. No matter what -- he's wrong.

Plugging the Leaks

It's astonishing when you think how long U.S. intelligence managed to keep the possible location of Osama bin Laden and the raid that would eventually kill him a secret. Really -- astonishing. And what this does is blow a gaping hole in the argument by the servile sycophants of Wikileaks and Julian Assange that there should be no state secrets whatsoever. Imagine for a moment what would likely have happened were Assange to have somehow gotten word of either the location of Bin Laden's compound or the pending assault on it. Answer: the latter never would have happened and Bin Laden would probably still be on the run right now, just somewhere other than where he was shot dead. I've always been of the opinion that Wikileaks can do some unqualified good, but its very ethos -- its overriding raison d'etre -- involves the exposure of everything. Those who've vehemently defended the site and its founder's ongoing mission seem to also operate under the delusion that if all secrets are exposed, there will be no place to hide and therefore the world will be a safer place. (These same people also tend to believe that any entity that isn't telling you every single thing about it is, by nature of its secrecy, nefarious.) That's a wonderful little pipe dream, but while not everything left in the shadows is evil there are some secrets that can indeed be looked at as weapons: The person who has one puts everyone else at a disadvantage. Unless you can wipe out what everybody's hiding, you're always going to need to be hiding at least a few things yourself, for your own good.

The United States covers up a lot of really awful behavior, it's true. But not all of it is awful; some is absolutely necessary. The raid that killed Osama bin Laden just proved it.

Private Security

I've made my thoughts on Julian Assange and Wikileaks abundantly clear both here and at the Huffington Post. As expected, at HuffPo, those views drew plenty of righteous indignation from the peanut gallery and got me labeled a reactionary asshole, but I stand by them: While I think that Assange has done some good and has the potential to do more, he's in possession of far too much power to be at the whim of one man, particularly one as arrogantly messianic -- as devoid of an ounce of humility -- as he is. He and his supporters seem to believe he can do no wrong and can divulge no secret that deserves to be kept simply because there are no secrets that deserve to be kept.

They're wrong on both counts.

The self-serving crusade of Julian Assange and of course the plight of his little familiar, U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning, have been the cool-kid left's favorite cause célèbres for months now. Barely a couple of days can go by without Glenn Greenwald or Jane Hamsher piously raging against the inherently nefarious government that would dare to keep classified information classified, the jackbooted thugs that would try to arrest Assange and that currently keep Manning confined to a tiny cell, and the monstrous philistines like myself who can't see or don't care about the injustice of it all.

Enter reasonable people like Oliver Willis, Nicole from Political Ruminations, and Matt Osborne. In fact, Matt just posted something over at his site that's a must read -- because not only is it admirably rational and does it come from a source whose credentials are just about unimpeachable, it's fearless in its willingness to thumb its nose at the Greenwalds and Hamshers of the world. And quite frankly, there need to be more progressives doing that sort of thing.

From "Manning Is Not Special":

"Manning has not been convicted — yet — but there is nothing especially harsh or unusual about his conditions. The Rosenbergs were isolated. Aldrich Ames was isolated. There is no 'plan' to drive Bradley Manning insane. He’s a prisoner accused of giving away his country’s secrets. Such prisoners are held in solitary confinement as standard counterintelligence protocol. Who wants a caught spy to tell the other side what you have sweated out of him in the interrogation room? Who wants him to be free to do more damage?

To whom Manning gave secrets, why, and whether Julian Assange asked him first are really not important questions here. When the military court convenes (and the delay is because his defense asked for it), the only question that will get answered is did Bradley Manning break the law? And the almost-certain answer is 'yes.'

Giving away American secrets is against the law; the penalties are stiff. Manning knew that, but chose to give secrets away — and then got caught by bragging about it to strangers on the internet. That there are no other prisoners in Quantico accused of espionage is a happy accident: most American service members take their oaths as seriously as I did, and do. Manning didn’t. A justice system will adjudicate what that means, not Glenn Greenwald...

I know, I know. Manning is the bright new shining beacon of progressive fire, dogs, and lakes. But we know he is guilty of one thing, which is being an absolute dumbass and bragging to strangers on the internet while still in uniform."

That sound you hear isn't the professional left's collective head exploding -- it's just me applauding.

Thanks, Matt.

The Leak of Extraordinarily Ungentleman-like

Oh, the irony.

The New York Times: Details of Swedish Case Against Julian Assange Leaked/12.18.10

Leak Soup

I'm really busy at the moment but I wanted to direct you all to Cesca's damn good take on why Michael Moore's amusingly hyper-righteous posturing on Julian Assange -- namely helping to post the guy's bail -- is something that should make sane Americans at least a little queasy.

And while I'm on the subject, can we please just dust off and nuke Berkeley from orbit once and for all? It's the only way to be sure.

Quote of the Day

"If I had decided to shame the British authorities on Iraq in 1976, I would have accepted the challenge to see them in court or otherwise face the consequences. I couldn't have expected to help myself to secret documents, make myself a private arbiter of foreign policy, and disappear or retire on the proceeds. All you need to know about Assange is contained in the profile of him by the great John F. Burns and in his shockingly thuggish response to it. The man is plainly a micro-megalomaniac with few if any scruples and an undisguised agenda. As I wrote before, when he says that his aim is 'to end two wars,' one knows at once what he means by the 'ending.' In his fantasies he is probably some kind of guerrilla warrior, but in the real world he is a middle man and peddler who resents the civilization that nurtured him. This Monday, in two separate news reports, the New York Times described his little cabal as an 'anti-secrecy' and 'whistle-blowing' outfit. Such mush-headed approval at least can be withheld from the delightful Julian, even as we all help ourselves to his mart of ill-gotten goods."

-- Christopher Hitchens on Julian Assange

Hitchens's piece in Slate ran late yesterday; this morning Julian Assange is in fact under arrest after turning himself in to police in London. Although hitting him with admittedly trumped-up sex crime charges is even more guileful than charging Al Capone with tax evasion.

Quote of the Day

"(Assange) loves to have just all-open society. Sound familiar? I know Assange is being represented by the attorney who does the pro bono work for George Soros's Open Society Insitute."

-- Glenn Beck, unsurprisingly finding a place for Julian Assange right next to Evil Puppetmaster George Soros on his chalkboard of conspiratorial batshittery

You can almost see the faces of Beck's septuagenarian minions going slack with awe as the connection is revealed. "See that, Mavis, I knew it!"

Quote of the Day

"I think you're underestimating how cynical Americans are about our government already. So unless in these WikiLeaks we are going to learn that the aliens from Area 51 killed Kennedy, stop with the drama."

-- Jon Stewart, attempting to put at least a tiny pinhole in the gargantuan ego of Julian Assange

Quote of the Day

"Admire Assange or revile him, he is the prophet of a coming age of involuntary transparency. Having exposed military misconduct on a grand scale, he is now gunning for corporate America. Does Assange have unpublished, damaging documents on pharmaceutical companies? Yes, he says. Finance? Yes, many more than the single bank scandal we’ve been discussing. Energy? Plenty, on everything from BP to an Albanian oil firm that he says attempted to sabotage its competitors’ wells. Like informational IEDs, these damaging revelations can be detonated at will."

-- From a new cover story in Forbes magazine which claims that Julian Assange and Wikileaks' next target for exposure will be American mega-banks and global corporate interests, beginning in the early part of next year

I'm not the biggest fan of Julian Assange; I think he's an arrogant prick whose pious overtures are largely self-serving, and I think he's got a hard-on for sticking it to the U.S. specifically. But I'll definitely say this: It's one thing to take aim at governments; they operate under a certain set of rules and they're generally cognizant of the consequences of their actions. The easiest way to wind up face-down in a shallow grave somewhere, though, is to "meddle with the primal forces of nature" and take on the truly powerful in this world -- the people who don't see red or blue or colorful flags, only green. It's a noble fight, but it's one almost guaranteed to get him killed.

Mr. Popularity

And now, a selection of commentary from the readers of the Huffington Post, in response to my column, God of War.

To truly appreciate the impact of the following, may I suggest listening to this as you read:



"I won't get in to detail here: But this invigorated screed distorting, caricaturing and demonizing Assange is predictable. It a familiar tactic in the conflicts going on in the battleground of the media. The U. S. military has been losing badly and obviously in Iraq and AfPak for nearly ten years. Now it and its mouthpieces are trying to make the farcical claim that Assange's exposures will harm its war efforts. Excuse me while I take leave to laugh at the laughable."

-- henryberry

"wonder why Huff Post is posting so much right wing nonsense lately. I just got through reading about all of Condolessa Rices's good qualities. What is happening?"

-- cheryl tobin

"What kind of person belittles revelations of mass crimes against humanity?"

-- blueskybigstar

"Who's blood exactly is on his hands? There's lots on yours, but I don't but his seem squeaky clean."

-- The Questioner

"War what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!' Endless corporate greed & endless corporate war are twin monsters devouring humanity. ANYTHING that can stop such madness, such evil, such insanity is a blessing for all of humanity!"

-- exoevolution

"I would have never redacted any documents released by WikiIeaks. Iraqi and Afghan victims have the right to know the names of their murderers and torturers."

-- fairwayhill

"The real Gods of War don't like the competition, eh? Puh-leaze! How many corpses must be tucked neatly behind the states secrets before they burst forth and cover the world in hatred and enmity?"

-- j0em0mma

"i have to disclose that i only read about half of this author's poem.. about his deep affection for authority and by extension his heartfelt responsibility to chime in on behalf of the extraordinarily powerful... when a reader encounters really tremendously bad writing or analysis or thesis or vision, etc.. why continue? we cannot read everything.. some of the outright propaganda must find its way to the 'unfinished' pile... i have read some CRAP. all the way through... but, much as with the article in question,.. if the vehicle has long since smashed through the guardrail and is plummeting plummeting plummeting so far as reason, logic, morality, self-worth, and dignity are concerned.. WHY read on as the obviously confused or threatened author plummets toward the conclusion of a VERY badly premised piece? gravity seldom reconsiders."

-- woodshoe

"More PROPAGANDA. The pentagon has killed more innocent people than Assange ever will."

-- fuzzychickens

"Your approach is right out of propaganda 101: shoot the messenger. Are you using this to put on the resume you're sending to F a u xnews?"

-- postrealitysyndrome

"'innocent soldiers' lol. what an oxymoron."

-- Danish5666

"The mentality displayed by the author of this piece is the real threat to more lives being lost and senseless wars continuing. It's people with this sort of mindset which led us into the Iraq war in the first place."

-- lonngfello

"In short, your piece is another hit job."

-- Dr. Jonathan David Farley

"'God of War'? Assange's goal is peace. If there is 'collateral damage' in the prosecution of war, then there must logically be EQUAL 'collateral damage' in the shutdown of that same war and prosecution of peace."

-- gmb007

"I bet Chez Pazienza had an apoplectic seizure after reading Greenwald's piece today. I'd love to see his little establishmentarian head explode."

-- The Baffler

"I know the first paragraph isn't really the point of the article, but thank you, Chez. It's about time someone said it."

-- Gogetter

God of War: Addendum

I have a minor confession to make: I had actually planned on writing about Julian Assange a couple of months back, when Wikileaks released the tens of thousands of documents on the war in Afghanistan that drew so much national attention. In fact, I'd begun putting together an extended essay on Assange and was well into it when something happened that really kind of threw me for a loop because it was something I hadn't experienced since starting this little experiment of mine almost five years ago: the piece just got away from me. As I kept working on it, I realized that there was so much that I wanted to say -- so many oversized themes I wanted to touch on -- that my thoughts just started to splinter and go off in every direction. I've gotten pretty good about editing myself and reining in my superfluous ideas and unruly tangents as I write, but between the scale of what I was trying to get off my chest and the fact that a hectic work schedule was turning my brain to tapioca, I just couldn't make the whole thing coalesce.

So I gave up. I just put the piece aside and figured that maybe I could break it up over time, cherry pick bits of it for use in other, more concise posts -- which is kind of what I did when I wrote God of War a couple of nights ago.

But I want to go ahead and publish part of the original piece that I know will never see the light of day otherwise -- the sort of introductory anecdote that would've eventually wound up being the framework of the essay -- because I think it'll give you an idea of what led me to want to write about Assange and Wikileaks in the first place.

What interested me in the story from the very beginning was the fact that both Julian Assange and those in the left-leaning media who devoted reams of copy to the documents he leaked seemed to be genuinely shocked and incensed at what the U.S. military was capable of in its prosecution of the war in Afghanistan. I've always figured the Pentagon lies its ass off when doing so suits its needs; this should surprise absolutely no one, and maybe it's understandable that someone would want to make a point of pulling back the curtain on the blatant untrue statements the government has made with regard to our ongoing conflicts. But what struck me more was the venom aimed at the actions undertaken by the military that weren't lied about, they just weren't exactly shouted from the rooftops. I'm talking about special forces units being used to target and quietly take out insurgents -- what critics dramatically called "hit squads" -- and classified operations aimed at eliminating the enemy which occasionally wound up accidentally eliminating innocents. The outrage generated by this sort of thing kind of amused me because of one simple fact: Killing people is what war is all about; inadvertently killing people you don't want to see killed is an unavoidable byproduct of it.

I'm not by any means saying that taking innocent life is excusable, only that in war people die -- in fact, it's the only fucking thing you can be sure of when you go to war. This is what should ostensibly make armed conflict an absolute last resort. The only way to be indignant about an enemy being shot through the head or a wayward bomb destroying some poor innocent guy's home is to be someone who's against war altogether -- and as I said yesterday, maybe with all we now know, we have no other choice than to say that any war is unequivocally immoral. But if you don't believe that -- if you think that sometimes fighting is justified -- then you simply can't say that the "normal" horrors of war rise to the level of, say, war crimes.

And that's what really stuck in my head -- the notion that much of what Julian Assange was asserting has happened in Afghanistan qualifies as war crimes.

And that's what made me write this:

"True Blood" (Unpublished)

When I was a kid, my father would occasionally talk to me about Vietnam.

He was in the Navy during the early years of the war -- the commander of an underwater demolitions team, which meant that he was always more of a bad-ass than I could ever hope to be. Like a lot of Vietnam vets, he largely kept his "war stories" to himself, but every once in a while the mood would strike him and he'd open up about some of his experiences, his exploits, his thoughts and feelings about what it was like to trudge through the fires of hell and somehow come out the other side with all of his limbs and, seemingly, all of his faculties still intact. I never doubted that despite what I hoped was a solid upbringing under his wise tutelage, I wouldn't have survived ten fucking minutes on the ground in that place. That sentiment continues to this day. It generally takes all of a few minutes of being pinned down in a bombed out school house in Modern Warfare 2 for me to start whining about my lack of air support; actually dodging bullets in some Third World hellhole seems incomprehensible. Maybe this is part of the reason I have so much respect for the people who see fit to join our military: the luxury any of us has to be a mere civilian if he or she chooses -- to say nothing of some middle-aged, video game-playing doof -- is essentially provided and protected by them.

Of the few times my father really went into detail about the kind of combat that he believed was required to not only survive Vietnam but to ostensibly make some kind of headway toward winning the war (an admittedly laughable notion in hindsight), one particular story stands out. It was something he and his unit had heard, but which no one could verify. It involved a special forces unit that may or may not have actually existed, a high-value target, and a bunch of ten-inch-nails.

Basically, the campfire tale went something like this: A special forces team was dispatched to extract information from a Viet Cong commander which the military believed would be vital to the American war effort. The commander was encamped deep within the thick jungle and was protected 24/7 by a regularly rotating guard which patrolled the area around him in a series of concentric circles. Understanding that sheer, overwhelming terror was the most effective weapon on a mission like this -- and was certainly one of the most potent in the special forces arsenal -- the small strike team used stealth tactics to move in silently and kill one of the guards, then after doing so, they tacked him to a tree using a ten-inch-nail. Through the head.

This was the first night.

They repeated this over and over again each night, wiping out the security detail one by one while simultaneously ratcheting up the fear in those who remained -- particularly in the commander, who after a while became paranoid to the point of madness. When the time came to finally take what they'd come for -- that high-value target -- the special forces team slipped in, grabbed him, and shuttled their frightened prey to a remote location to be interrogated. And how long did it take to get the information they needed out of him? As long as it took to pull a ten-inch-nail out of a backpack and place it on the table in front of him.

Is this a true tale? Did it really happen, or was it just a ghost story told by men fighting a desperate and losing battle day after day to help them cope -- to convince themselves that they weren't the only ones being ruthlessly hunted down and picked off by an unseen enemy?

Who knows.

But a couple of recent events have caused me to ponder another question quite a bit lately: If this phantom unit did actually exist -- if it was out there right now killing enemy soldiers and combatants in Iraq or Afghanistan and staking their dead bodies to trees -- would you consider the actions of these men to rise to the level of war crimes, regardless of the rationale for such extremely prejudicial tactics?

I think it's safe to assume that Julian Assange would say yes.

God of War

I'm getting to the point where whatever Glenn Greenwald says, I feel an instinctive need to stand against it, simply on principle. It's not that he doesn't occasionally make some excellent and even necessary arguments from the left; it's that he's just so self-righteous in his outrage, so petulant in his demands, and so destructive to his overall cause by refusing to give even an inch in his quixotic quest to see the Progressive Utopian States of America come to fruition in our lifetime that it's tough to consistently take his side. All that aloof disapproval just becomes exhausting after awhile. Throw Sirota and Hamsher into the mix and you've got the intractable left's own version of the Supremes -- only more diva-ish.

With that in mind, I had to fight the urge to automatically say that Julian Assange deserves to be put up against a wall somewhere after reading Greenwald's impassioned and completely expected defense of him yesterday morning in Salon. It was always a given that Greenwald, and really much of the institutional left, would hail Assange as a hero given that the Wikileaks founder has made it his mission to be a perpetual thorn in the side of the U.S. government by exposing all of its supposed dirty little war secrets; you knew from the very beginning that parallels would be drawn between him and Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the infamous Pentagon Papers which proved that the Johnson administration had essentially lied through its teeth in Vietnam. So to see the left tag anyone in the established media who dares to treat this modern day Horatius at the Bridge with anything other than respect as "Nixonian" is just the next logical step.

Now understand, I damn well get the irony of the American press suddenly choosing to grow a spine when interviewing Assange, even though it all but carried pom-poms to the White House and Pentagon briefings during the lead up to the war in Iraq. I also have no doubt that more than a few of the accusations that have been leveled at Julian Assange since Wikileaks became the epochal cultural force that it is were and are a direct effort to discredit him and his work. But that said, Assange's attitude when it comes to being asked tough questions about his motives and his methods -- and the potential unintended consequences of both -- has always been one of arrogant indifference. He's fully aware that what he's doing might get innocent people killed, but he's said flat-out that he's willing to accept responsibility for that because in the end, he believes, the greater good is served by the world understanding that it's being lied to about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Assange isn't just some guy who's got a hard-on for the truth and who hates the notion of state secrets; he wants to expose and bring to justice the people he believes are immoral criminals, the people who started the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and who continue to prosecute them in one form or another.

Once again, there's irony -- this time in the fact that taking a few lives in the name of the supposed greater good was the justification the Bush administration used to take us to war in the first place. And before you summarily dismiss the implied comparison, think about this: Julian Assange now holds a staggering amount of power -- the ability to literally decide who lives and who may very well die, and which countries will face the kind of scandal that can potentially topple governments. It's almost too much privilege to be at the whim of one person. Which is why there's nothing wrong with attempting to hold Assange accountable, regardless of how pissy he may get about being asked to justify his actions or face an adversarial press. Anyone who refers to the unfortunate and unintended deaths that may occur as a result of those actions as "collateral damage" -- and Assange has, in those very words -- is operating on at least somewhat the same level as the governments which are often rightly criticized for making such blithe distinctions.

But there's another thing worth exploring here: The question of whether, in the internet age, the age of seemingly absolute media transparence, war can survive. Not just the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but any war. Now that it's almost impossible to hide the reality of what armed conflict is -- how brutal and devastating it is to those on both sides of the gun, how innocence and morality are often the very first casualties of it -- will there ever be such thing as a truly "just" war again? Julian Assange and those who laud his efforts and who believe he's entirely justified in indiscriminately spitting sensitive information into the ether -- not even filtering it through, say, a responsible press, as Ellsberg once did, but just putting it all out there and letting the chips fall where they may -- these people likely wish to see the entire concept of war become a relic of the past, a modern day impossibility, made so by the inability to keep anything a secret anymore. The problem with this, of course, is that sometimes war really is necessary; there will always be people or situations which leave you no other option but to fight. And those fights will always be ugly. Innocent people will die. Once moral people, their psyches turned inside out, will kill without cause. Governments and generals will make decisions that seem unspeakably ghastly. Because war truly is hell.

And as is the case with Assange, there will be nothing wrong with holding those who take us into battle and who put our men and women in the line of fire accountable. The issue then may be how much naiveté is displayed by those who choose to be insurgent whistleblowers to the battlefield horrors and propagandizing at home that go hand in hand with a lengthy war. Would you really believe that innocents aren't dying? That the military isn't engaging in tactics that many might see as underhanded? That the government isn't hiding some of the facts about both? Admittedly, there's an argument to be made that people like Julian Assange exist only because the press isn't doing its job; this is as true on many levels as it is unfortunate, because, once again, Assange isn't doing what he does to satisfy some lofty commitment to the truth -- he's doing it to serve his own agenda, which asserts that war, particularly in the modern age, is inherently immoral. He wears his personal bête noire proudly and pompously on his sleeve, and engages in his own kind of war in the service of its destruction, which he finds entirely justifiable.

But as with the governments which accept a certain number of casualties as the cost of doing business, Assange excuses his actions and the authority he feels he's entitled to wield by claiming that the cause he's fighting for is just. He washes the blood off his hands with one of the strongest cleansers imaginable: intellectual rationalization.

And those who blindly support him in his crusade, simply because it happens to gel with their own anti-war beliefs, can't seem to see the ultimate irony in that.