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you've made this argument before, loquitor, and it puzzles me because it seems to militate for inertia, whether intentionally or not---couldn't you say the same of absolutely anyone, in any institutional context? couldn't you say the same of the state department functionaries who decide on the limits of what is and is not secret? who are they to decide? and the department of defense functionaries who do the same and who participate(d) in the covering-up of what are arguably war crimes? who are they? why should anonymous functionaries in semi-clandestine spaces be in a position to conceal information?
assange somewhere or another talked about the wikileaks collective as being modeled on the bourbaki collective of mathematicians in france, the people who tried to ground philosophy by way of set theory (a really interesting failure, btw)...he claimed that he made himself the face of wikileaks in order to cut down on the number of arbitrary claims from people who purport(ed) to represent the group. so i don't buy any of the character assassination attempts, nor do i buy their correlate, which is to try to discredit what wikileaks is doing by impugning assange's character. i don't think assange as a person is more than a spokesmodel for wikileaks, really.
and i don't think that the issue is state secrecy per se...it's the functioning of the oligarchy itself in secret below the public surfaces of the state, protected by the paranoid expansion of state secrets put into place by those lovely bush people. so it's the mode of operation of empire itself, it's administrative and political conditions of possibility. secrecy is just an instrument.
btw i think we agree about the swedish charges. it's good to agree about something, yes?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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