I’ve generally been impressed with Assange’s performance as a spokesman so far, e.g. in his recent interview linked to in my post titled “Is Julian Assange an anarchist?” and in his interview with Stephen Colbert. He personally comes across as extremely intelligent, quick, and forthright. It seems to me there would have been a fine line between, on the one hand, grabbing with both hands the pretrial leaking of the secret Swedish prosecution documents (presumably by a government agent somehow connected with the prosecution) and “acknowledg[ing] that it is different” from the leaks he publishes, and on the other hand, complaining and “whining” about it. It is just this kind of conspiratorial secret behavior by government agents that Wikileaks aims to subvert. From that standpoint, the decision to leak these Swedish prosecution documents was diabolically brilliant, even apart from whatever actual harm these documents might have caused to Assange’s right to a fair trial, assuming whoever made the decision was aware of and planned the awkward position it would place Assange in in responding to it. In retrospect, I agree that Assange (or rather his lawyer) misstepped in their response, and failed to control the narrative in this instance. Their response suggested they were blissfully unaware that their response could easily be seen and portrayed as “hypocritical,” which allowed the media to make hay of their response. A better and more aware response might have been to acknowledge that the leak of the Swedish prosecution documents was diabolically brilliant (but still diabolical), and right off the bat to anticipate and rebut the obvious charge that their objection to this leak was hypocritical. That way their rebuttal would have been part of the big story when it happened, rather than relegated to a lesser story at a later date.

Instead in this instance they fell right into the government’s “trap.” In the future they should try to think a few more moves ahead.

Assuming a conspiracy, as Assange does, there’s a fundamental difference between leaks by conspirators in furtherance of that conspiracy (the leak of the Swedish prosecution documents) and leaks by non-conspirators (Bradley Manning?) or disillusioned former conspirators exposing the conspiracy. Maybe that’s why in this instance Assange failed to timely grasp the danger that the media would portray him as the gander to the conspiracy’s goose.

Although he has a right to a fair trial, and pretrial publicity like this is unconscionable, Assange should have grabbed it with both hands, acknowledged that it is different, but then simply accepted it or enjoyed the challenge it presents. He gave his detractors too much ammo with his whining about it.