Hail Julian Assange, international man of mystery, brave anti-war crusader, ultimate cyber-hero and now, according to his cultish followers, victim of a smear campaign orchestrated by the CIA, the Pentagon and other dark, oppressive forces.
On Friday, Assange, who recently posted 90,000 unexpurgated United States military reports from Afghanistan on his WikiLeaks.org website, was revealed by the Stockholm newspaper Expressen to be the subject of a Swedish arrest warrant on suspicion of rape.
Less than 24 hours after the rape allegation emerged, Swedish prosecutors withdrew the warrant, citing a lack of evidence, while maintaining that Assange, an Australian, remained accused of sexual molestation after separate complaints from two women.
Confused? Concerned you may be reading a synopsis of a Stieg Larsson novel? You don't need to be. According to Assange's myriad supporters, he is clearly the target of a conspiracy orchestrated by an American government through agents within the Swedish legal system.
Assange has flatly denied the allegations, stating that he had never had non-consensual sex with anyone anywhere. He is, of course, entitled to be regarded as innocent unless and until he is convicted in court of a crime. Judging how the Swedish authorities have handled matters thus far, a large dollop of scepticism is justified.
Interestingly, however, Assange and his loyal band are using this strange episode to fuel the myth that envelops him. WikiLeaks has broadcast seven messages about the story on Twitter, beginning with: "We were warned to expect ‘dirty tricks'. Now we have the first one".
The second Twitter message communicated the information that "Expressen is a tabloid" and stated that the story was "hugely distracting" — the classic tactic of trying to discredit information by attacking the source and suggesting that it is part of a smear campaign to divert attention from truth, justice, world poverty etc.
This approach worked for John Edwards, the sleazeball former US presidential candidate, who scared off the mainstream media for more than a year by denouncing the National Enquirer as "tabloid trash". It later turned out the Enquirer's reports of his lying, infidelity and illegitimate child were all spot on.
Among the WikiLeaks groupies — an online crowd that seems to swell by the day — Assange didn't even need to attempt to distract. For people who question every aspect of the American government and military, they are surprisingly eager to suspend all critical judgment in this instance.
Assange, 39, has carefully cultivated his persona of being a fearless renegade and elusive target of shadowy forces. Profiles of him mention how his parents met at a Vietnam-era anti-war rally, how he attended dozens of schools as a child, used to sleep rough in Melbourne and now flits from country to country with little more than a laptop.
Man of mystery
Even the august New Yorker portrayed him as an almost supernatural figure "with his spectral white hair, pallid skin, cool eyes, and expansive forehead — like a rail-thin being who has rocketed to Earth to deliver humanity some hidden truth". When Assange chose to dye his "spectral white hair", it sparked an internet frenzy.
What Assange is up to is more prosaic. He hit the big time with his video entitled "Collateral Murder" that used footage, shot from a US helicopter, of the killing of alleged insurgents and two Iraqi employees of Reuters, to accuse the American military of a war crime.
Oddly enough, it was Stephen Colbert, ostensibly a comedian, who skewered him. "There are armed men in the group. They did find a rocket-propelled grenade among the group. The Reuters photographers who were regrettably killed were not identified as photographers.
"And you have edited this tape, and you have given it a title called ‘Collateral Murder'. That's not leaking. That's a pure editorial." Assange admitted that he was seeking to manipulate and create "maximum political impact".
Next, Assange released his trove of more than 90,000 Afghan war documents (another 15,000 are supposedly still to come). This time, he took a different approach, releasing what had been leaked to him, allegedly by a disgruntled American soldier, without any editing at all.
The documents contained the names of numerous Afghans who had helped British and American forces. Just in case the Taliban have a problem locating them, they also included grid locations and villages along with the names.
Assange is invariably afforded the glamorous title "whistle-blower" — as indeed, it seems, is everyone who leaks something or receives a leak these days.
In fact, he is a highly political campaigner, and his message that he wants only to protect the vulnerable is undermined by the possibility that ordinary Afghans may already have died because of WikiLeaks.
