Guest
“... is Assange the new bête noir of the Australian government? Presumably he is. My feeling about Julian Assange is that he should be celebrated. He is someone who has gone off in pursuit of truth. That's all. He's like Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers, which showed the dark side of the Vietnam War (it was all the dark side really) and Assange; what he's been trying to do is to get papers which will show the unseen side of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. From a journalistic point of view, you have to remember that these wars have not been reported. They have gone UNREPORTED. Why is that? The last wars that were reported in any way objectively... the last one was Vietnam, where reporters were on the ground as free agents and could report what they saw. A number of them died in that process, but they got the news out as they saw it. In Iraq and Afghanistan, reporters are embedded, and they spout the line of whoever embeds them with their troops. They see the war from the perspective of those who are giving them safety and comfort, and with whom they are bedded down. This is not the way that journalists should operate and it's not the way that the public will ever learn the truth. So we have to accept that we are not getting information about those wars. The French theoretician Jean Baudrillard spoke of the first Gulf War and said that it was an electronic confection, put on almost as a form of entertainment, and through it you could no longer contact or touch the reality of war. Iran and Afghanistan are the same, and the major powers are stage-managing their conflicts now, so that the public back home never worry about them; turn off The News and turn on The Simpsons. The problem is someone like Julian Assange comes along and through releasing all sorts of government information, shows what the facts actually are, and the true danger is that the public may learn them. That's why they're so terrified of him. “ Full transcript:
