Some Reasons Why Wikileaks Isn't a "CIA/NWO/Zionist/Pro-War Propaganda Operation"
Anok Black
First, using a venue that is deeply critical of the US government would damage the government's credibility more so than it would justify the government's desired war. Put another way: the costs associated with using Wikileaks (i.e. delegitimizing yourself in general) vastly outweigh the benefits (i.e. building support for your next war). So it would be positively irrational to use Wikileaks in this manner, were you an operative of the State considering how to best spread propaganda. (This reasoning applies to the Wikileaks-as-Zionist claim as well. The US government is committed to defending and funding the Israeli government, so that if the latter used Wikileaks for propaganda purposes, it would defeat its own interests insofar as the US government is delegitimized.)
Consider, for instance, all the people receiving the "pro-war justifications" from the leaks; these people would also be visiting Wikileaks's website and seeing the Collateral Murder video and all the Iraq war logs inter alia, material which demonstrates the State's lies and murders in plain view. To have millions of people viewing this material alongside your implicit pro-war propaganda would defeat your purpose. The last thing you would want to do, if you were the State or the CIA or some other shadowy organization, is work through, and call attention to, Wikileaks, as a way of manipulating the masses in your favor.
Indeed this is why we find the feds trying their best to prevent active duty soldiers from visiting Wikileaks (http://is.gd/id2xV) -- they likely realize that the material discredits the US government and its wars, if anything, despite any concomitant pro-war justifications that could be extracted and appropriately spun. On the hypothesis that Wikileaks is being used to justify war, the feds' behavior is completely inexplicable. On that hypothesis we would expect them not to hinder the troops' access to Wikileaks.
Second, such a conspiracy just wouldn't succeed anyway. It would be ineffective. Why? Because it's a safe bet that the average supporter of Wikileaks has some broadly anti-establishment or anti-war inclinations in the first place. None of us, I take it, are so dogmatically committed to Wikileaks that we would believe anything a particular leak says up to the point of supporting a war. Wikileaks supporters would probably leave by the droves if Assange (or one of the leaks) were to start spreading justifications for wars (even if done very subtly). To use Wikileaks as a means to spread propaganda would be to assume that its supporters aren't discerning enough to detect such propaganda. A foolish assumption.
Third, there's a great deal of empirical evidence that suggests Assange is an anti-authoritarian at heart, a genuine contrarian, rather than a "CIA asset". For starters, there are still archives of his personal blog dating back to 2006: http://web.archive.org/web/20061021194534/http://iq.org/. There are also his personal essays on government conspiracy: http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf. The ideas expressed in these essays and blog entries are the last thing a "CIA asset" would want to promulgate. Of course, there's always the possibility that Assange could be a highly skilled CIA asset, such that these "personal" writings are all a clever tactic to gain the trust of other anti-authoritarians.
But (and this is the fourth reason): Wikileaks is not Julian Assange. Wikileaks involves the collective efforts of hundreds of anonymous hackers and journalists, so that it would be nearly impossible to hijack it for the purpose of spreading pro-state or pro-war propaganda. Even if your shadowy organization managed to sneak in some propaganda via an "artificial leak", it would be dwarfed by the thousands of other leaks exposing government corruption, murder, and lies -- owing to the decentralized nature of whistle blowing. So why Julian Assange? Well, in its infancy, Wikileaks received a lot of criticism for not having a more "public" identity. Julian Assange simply filled this need. Not to mention, he's insanely smart. He's exactly the sort of guy you would want representing your organization. He's the surface image. He's the one responsible for receiving a lot of undue credit -- and a lot of undue criticism, for that matter -- in exchange for the organization's innerworkings being kept relatively unscathed and out of sight.
The wikileaks-as-stealthy-pro-war-propaganda idea is problematic for those reasons. The more plausible explanation is that, well, the Iranian and Pakistani governments and all the others mentioned in the leaks really are corrupt and bent on destruction. From the fact that the US government would like to go to war with these governments, it does not follow that these governments aren't evil. And it certainly does not follow that we should support these governments since we happen to share an enemy with them (namely, the US government). An enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend. They are governments, after all; they are all corrupt, and they all have blood on their hands. So we shouldn't be shocked to see their corruption surfacing in the leaks.
So, if a leak happens to expose the corruption of a foreign government, it's unreasonable to infer from this fact that the CIA/NWO (or whomever) is using Wikileaks to justify another war. When there is a better reason to be skeptical of Wikileaks, then we should be skeptical. But for now, there is no evidence strong enough to warrant the sort of skepticism displayed by certain anti-war activists and Alex Jones fans, the people alleging that Assange is a "CIA asset" and asserting that the leaked cables were intended to justify war with Iran/Pakistan. We should support Wikileaks as much as possible, with measured skepticism where appropriate.
Anok Black is an anarchist anti-war activist and student in California, currently finishing a PhD in analytic philosophy. Find him on facebook http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000805691468."
Dec. 5, 2010