[Reader-list] Defining Secrecy

[Dia Da Costa]

hello,
i found this interview with julian assange interesting and it gives insight
into his perspective on secrecy, censorship, and change.
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/232
part two of this interview will be a series of questions from contemporary
artists answered by assange. should be interesting as well.
dia da costa



On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 12:07 PM, A. Mani <a.mani.cms at gmail.com> wrote:

> (From http <http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24886>
> ://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24886<http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24886>)
>

>
> Disclosure and Deceit: Secrecy as the Manipulation of History, not its
> Concealment
>
> by Dr. T. P. Wilkinson
>
>
> Global Research, May 21, 2011
>
>
> The declassification of official secrets is often seen as either a
> challenge or a prerequisite for obtaining accurate data on the history
> of political and economic events. Yet at the same time high government
> intelligence officials have said that their policy is one of
> 'plausible deniability'. Official US government policy for example is
> never to acknowledge or deny the presence of nuclear weapons anywhere
> its forces are deployed, especially its naval forces. The British have
> their ‘Official Secrets’ Act. When the Wikileaks site was launched in
> 2007 and attained notoriety for publication of infamous actions by US
> forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, this platform was heralded and
> condemned for its disclosures and exposures.
>
> Julian Assange is quoted as saying that when he receives documents
> classified under the UK Official Secrets Act he responds in accordance
> with the letter of the law – since it is forbidden to withhold or
> destroy, his only option is to publish. The question remains for
> historians, investigators, and educated citizens: what is the real
> value of disclosures or declassification? Given the practice of
> plausible deniablity, does disclosure or declassification constitute
> proof, and if so by what criteria? Both facts and non-facts can be
> concealed or disclosed.
>
> Information is not self-defining Ultimately there remain two
> questions: does the secret document (now public) really constitute the
> 'secret'? What is the 'secret' for which we use the document to
> actually refer? Is secrecy the difference between the known and
> unknown, or the known and untold?
>
> Some benefit can be found by borrowing theological concepts. We can
> distinguish between a mystery revealed and a supernatural truth which,
> by its very nature, lies above the finite intelligence. But a secret
> is something unknowable either by accident or on account of
> accessibility. I believe that the popularised form of disclosure
> embodied in Wikileaks should force us to distinguish between those
> beliefs we have about the nature of official action and the conduct of
> people working within those institutions and the data produced.
> Wikileaks is clearly a platform for publishing data but much of the
> response to these documents is more based on mystery than on secrecy.
> That is to say that the disclosures are treated as revelation in the
> religious sense – and not as discovery in the sense of scientia –
> knowledge. Why is this so? Wikileaks is described as a continuation of
> the ethical and social responsibility of journalism as an instrument
> to educate and inform the public – based on the principle that an
> informed public is essential to a democracy and self-governance. By
> collecting, collating and disclosing documents 'leaked’ to it,
> Wikileaks also attacks what Assange calls the invisible government,
> the people and institutions who rule by concealing their activities
> from the people – and brings to light their wrongdoing.
>
> There are two traditions involved here that partially overlap. In the
> US the prime examples are the 'muckraking journalism’ originating in
> the so-called Progressive Era, spanning from 1890s to 1920s, and more
> recently the publication of the Pentagon Papers through Daniel
> Ellsberg. While liberals treat both of these examples favourably,
> their histories, however, are far more ambivalent than sentimentally
> presented. To understand this ambivalence, itself a sort of plausible
> deniability, it is necessary to sketch the history of journalism in
> the US – the emergence of an unnamed but essential political actor –
> and some of the goals of US foreign policy since the end of the 19th
> century. This very brief sketch offers what I call the preponderance
> of facticity – as opposed to an unimpeachable explanation for the
> overt and covert actions of the US.
>
> First of all it is necessary to acknowledge that in 1886 the US
> Supreme Court endowed the modern business corporation with all the
> properties of citizenship in the US – a ruling reiterated with more
> vehemence this year by another Supreme Court decision. As of 1886,
> business corporations in the US had more civil rights than freed
> slaves or women. By the end of the First World War, the business
> corporation had eclipsed the natural person as a political actor in
> the US. By 1924 US immigration law and the actions of the FBI had
> succeeded in damming the flow of European radicalism and suppressing
> domestic challenges to corporate supremacy. Thus by the time Franklin
> Roosevelt was elected, the US had been fully constituted as a
> corporatist state. US government policy was thereafter made mainly by
> and for business corporations and their representatives. Second,
> professional journalism emerged from the conflict between partisan
> media tied to social movements and those tied to business. The first
> journalism school was founded in 1908 at the University of Missouri
> with money from newspaper baron Joseph Pulitzer. As in all other
> emerging professions at that time, it was claimed that uniform
> training within an academic curriculum would produce writers who were
> neutral, objective, and dispassionate – that is to say somehow
> scientific in their writing.
>
> A professional journalist would not allow his or her writing to be
> corrupted by bribery or political allegiances. These professional
> journalists would work for commercial enterprises but be trained to
> produce value-free texts for publication.. The US has always refused
> to call itself an empire or to acknowledge that its expansion from the
> very beginning was imperial. The dogma of manifest destiny sought to
> resolve this contradiction by stipulating that domestic conquest was
> not imperial. Control of the Western hemisphere has always been
> defined as national security, not of asserting US domination.
> Likewise, it is impossible to understand the actions of the US
> government in Asia since 1910 without acknowledging that the US is an
> empire and recognising its imperial interests in the Asia–Pacific
> region. It is also impossible to understand the period called the Cold
> War without knowing that the US invaded the Soviet Union in 1918 with
> 13,000 troops along with some 40,000 British troops and thousands of
> troops recruited by the ‘West’ to support the Tsarist armies and
> fascist Siberian Republic. It is essential to bear these over-arching
> contextual points in mind when considering the value of classified US
> documents and their disclosure, whether by Wikileaks or Bob Woodward.
> It is essential to bear these points in mind because the value or the
> ambivalence of ‘leaks’ or declassification depends entirely on whether
> the data is viewed as ‘revelation’ or as mere scientific data to be
> interpreted.
>
> Revelation and heresy For the most part the disclosures by Wikileaks
> have been and continue to be treated as ‘revelation’ and the
> disclosure itself as heresy. This is particularly the case in the
> batches of State Department cables containing diplomatic jargon and
> liturgy. The ‘revelation’ comprises the emotional response to
> scripture generated by members of the US foreign service and the
> confirmation this scripture appears to give to opinions held about the
> US – whether justified or not. Just as reading books and even the
> bible was a capital offence for those without ecclesiastical license
> in the high Middle Ages, the response of the US government is
> comprehensible. It is bound to assert that Wikileaks is criminal
> activity and to compel punishment. Yet there is another reason why the
> US government reaction is so intense. As argued above, the primary
> political actor in the US polity is the business corporation. In
> Europe and North America at least it is understood: (1) that the
> ultimate values for state action are those which serve the interests
> of private property; and (2) that the business corporation is the
> representative form of private property.
>
> This in turn means that information rights are in fact property rights
> manifest as patents, copyrights, and trade or industrial secrets.
> Since the state is the guardian of the corporation, it argues that the
> disclosure of government documents should only be allowed where the
> government itself has surrendered some of its privacy rights. This is
> quite different from the arguments for feudal diplomatic privilege,
> even though business corporations have superseded princely states. The
> argument for state secrecy now is that the democratic state
> constituted by business corporations is obliged to protect the rights
> and privileges of those citizens as embodied in their private property
> rights – rights deemed to be even more absolute than those
> historically attributed to natural persons, if for no other reason
> than that corporations enjoy limited liability and immortality, unlike
> natural persons. When the US government says it is necessary for other
> states to treat Assange as an outlaw and Wikileaks as a criminal
> activity, it is appealing on one hand to the global corporate
> citizenry and on the other, asserting its role – not unlike the Roman
> Catholic Church of the Middle Ages – as the sole arbiter of those
> rights and privileges subsumed by Democracy in the world. Many of
> those who lack a religious commitment to the American way of life have
> still recognised the appeal to privacy and ultimately to private
> property which are now deemed the highest values in the world – so
> that trade, the commerce in private property, takes precedence over
> every other human activity and supersedes even human rights, not to
> mention civil rights.
>
> Ellsberg In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New
> York Times, which began their publication. This leak was treated as a
> landmark, although it would take several years before the US withdrew
> its forces from Vietnam and many more before hostilities were formally
> ended. What then was the significance of the ‘leak’? The documents
> generally point to the failures of the military, omitting the role of
> the CIA almost entirely. Today it is still largely unknown that
> Ellsberg was working with the CIA in counter-insurgency programs in
> Vietnam. Did the Pentagon Papers thus serve the interests of plausible
> deniability – a disclosure of secrets designed not to reveal truth,
> but to conceal a larger truth by revealing smaller ones? On the other
> hand, the collection of essays, Dirty Work, edited by Philip Agee and
> Lou Wolf, showed how the identity of CIA officers could be deciphered
> from their official biographies, especially as published in the
> Foreign Service List and other government registers. This type of
> disclosure allows the competent researcher to recognise ‘real’ Foreign
> Service officers as opposed to CIA officers operating under diplomatic
> cover. Agee and his colleague Lou Wolf maintained that disclosure of
> CIA activities was not a matter of lifting secrets but of recognising
> the context in which disparate information has to be viewed to allow
> its interpretation.
>
> To put it trivially: in order to find something you have to know the
> thing for which you are searching. In order to be meaningful,
> disclosures of intelligence information must explain that intelligence
> information seeks to deceive the US public. For example, the CIA and
> those in the multi-agency task forces under its control produced an
> enormous amount of reports and documentation to show what was being
> done to fulfil the official US policy objectives in Vietnam. One of
> these programs was called Rural Development. This CIA program was run
> ostensibly by the USAID and the State Department to support the
> economic and social development of the countryside. This policy was
> articulated in Washington to fit with the dominant ‘development’
> paradigm – to package the US policy as aid and not military
> occupation. And yet, as Douglas Valentine shows in his book The
> Phoenix Program, Rural Development was a cover for counterinsurgency
> from the beginning. The Phoenix Program only became known in the US
> after 1971, and then only superficially. The information released to
> the US Congress and reported in the major media outlets lacked
> sufficient context to allow interpretation. There was so little
> context that the same people who worked in the Phoenix program in
> Vietnam as 20-year-olds have been able to continue careers operating
> the same kinds of programmes in other countries with almost no
> scrutiny.
>
> Two people come to mind: John Negroponte, who is alleged to have
> provided support to death squads in Honduras during the US war against
> Nicaragua and later served as ambassador to occupied Iraq, began his
> foreign service career in Vietnam with one of the agencies
> instrumental in Phoenix. The other person died recently: Richard
> Holbrooke began his career with USAID in Vietnam, went on to advise
> the Indonesian dictatorship, went to manage the ‘diplomatic’ part of
> the US war in Yugoslavia and finally served as a kind of pro-consul
> for Central Asia with responsibility for the counterinsurgency in
> Afghanistan. As the secret weapon in US imperial policy, the
> counterinsurgency or rural development or ‘surge’ policies of the US
> government never include an examination of the professionals who
> managed them. It used to be said among some critics that one could
> follow General Vernon Walters’ travel itinerary and predict military
> coups. But that was not something ‘leaked’ and it did not appear in
> the mainstream media analysis.
>
> The illusion of objective neutrality So if much of what we see
> ‘leaked’ is gossip in the service of plausible deniability, what
> separates the important gossip from the trivial? I suggest it is a
> return to consciously interested, humanistic values in historical
> research. We have to abandon the idea that the perfect form of
> knowledge is embodied in the privilege of corporate ownership of
> ideas, and domination of the state. We also have to abandon the
> illusion of objective neutrality inherited from Positivism and
> Progressivism, with its exclusionary professionalism. Until such time
> as human beings can be restored to the centre of social, political and
> economic history we have to recognise the full consequences of the
> enfranchisement of the business corporation and the subordination of
> the individual to role of a mere consumer. If we take the business
> corporation, an irresponsible and immortal entity, endowed with
> absolute property rights and absolved of any liability for its actions
> or those of its officers and agents, as the subject of history it has
> become, then we have to disclose more than diplomatic cables. We have
> to analyse its actions just as historians have tried to understand the
> behaviour of princes and dynasties in the past. This is too rarely
> done and when often only in a superficial way. I would like to provide
> an example, a sketch if you will, of one such historical analysis,
> taking the business corporation and not the natural person as the
> focus of action.
>
> In 1945, George Orwell referred to the threat of nuclear war between
> the West and the Soviet Union as a ‘cold war’. He made no reference to
> the 1918 invasion of the Soviet Union by British troops. In 1947, US
> Secretary of State Bernard Baruch gave a speech in South Carolina
> saying ‘Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold
> war’. The speech had been written by a rich newspaperman named Herbert
> Swope. In 1947, George Kennan published his containment essay, ‘The
> Sources of Soviet Conduct’, in Foreign Affairs under the name ‘X’. In
> it he describes a supposed innate expansionist tendency of the Soviet
> Union – also no mention of the US invasion or the devastation of WWII,
> which virtually destroyed the Soviet Union’s manpower and industrial
> base. In April 1950, NSC 68 is published – classified top secret until
> 1975 – outlining the necessity for the US to massively rearm to assert
> and maintain its role as the world’s superpower. At the end of summer
> 1950, war breaks out in Korea. President Truman declared an emergency
> and gets UN Security Council approval for a war that lasts three
> years, killing at least 3 million Koreans – most of whom die as a
> result of US Air Force saturation bombing of Korea north of the 38th
> parallel. Truman proclaims that US intervention will be used to
> prevent the expansion of the Soviet Union or as Ronald Reagan put it
> then – Russian aggression. After being utterly routed by the army of
> North Korea, the US bombs its way to the Yalu only to be thrown back
> to the 38th parallel by China. In 1954, the US organises the overthrow
> of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala and begins its aid and covert
> intervention in Vietnam beginning a war that only ends in 1976.
> Meanwhile Britain suppresses the Malaysian independence movement.
> Between 1960 and 1968, nationalist governments have been overthrown in
> Indonesia, Congo, Ghana, Brazil. Cuba is the great surprise amidst the
> literally hundreds of nationalist, anti-colonial movements and
> governments suppressed by the US.
>
> William Blum has catalogued the enormous number of overt and covert
> interventions by the US in his book Killing Hope. The amazing thing
> about much of what Blum compiled is that it was not ‘secret’. It was
> simply not reported or misreported. Blum makes clear – what should be
> obvious – that the Soviet Union was not a party to a single war or
> coup from 1945 to 1989 and that the US government knew this. Much of
> this early action took place when John Foster Dulles was US Secretary
> of State and his brother was head of the CIA. The Dulles brothers were
> intimately connected to corporations they represented in their
> capacity as ‘white shoe’ lawyers in New York. In fact the founder of
> the OSS, the CIA’s predecessor, William Donovan, was also a corporate
> lawyer both before and after his service in the OSS. In other words
> the people who have commanded these foreign policy instruments have
> almost without exception been the direct representatives of major US
> business corporations. In each case the public pretext has been the
> threat of communism or Soviet expansion. Yet the only consistent
> quality all of these actions had was the suppression of governments
> that restricted the activities of US or UK corporations. Of course,
> communism has long been merely a term for any opposition to the
> unrestricted rights of business corporations.
>
> One could say people like Donovan or Dulles were seconded to
> government office. However, the direct financial benefit that someone
> like Dulles obtained when he succeeded in deposing Arbenz in Guatemala
> came from his shareholding in United Fruit, the instigator and
> financial backer of the CIA co-ordinated coup. Perhaps the more
> accurate interpretation of this secret activity is that the business
> corporation, which previously employed law firms and Pinkertons, had
> shifted the burden of implementing corporate foreign policy to the
> taxpayer and the state. Now the interest of the US in Latin America
> has been well researched and documented. But the persistence of the
> Vietnam War and the silence about the Korean War have only been
> matched by the virtual absence of debate about the overthrow of
> Sukarno and the Philippine insurgency. The Philippines became a
> footnote in the controversy about US torture methods in Iraq and
> elsewhere as it was shown that the ‘water cure’ was applied rigorously
> by American troops when suppressing the Philippine independence
> movement at the beginning of the 20th century.
>
> Lack of context not knowledge The study of each of these Asian
> countries – and one can add the so-called Golden Triangle; and I would
> argue Afghanistan now – has been clouded not by lack of evidence or
> documentation but by lack of context. If the supposed threat posed by
> communism, especially Soviet communism is taken at face value – as
> also reiterated in innumerable official documents both originally
> public and originally confidential – then the US actions in Asia seem
> like mere religious fanaticism. The government officials and military
> and those who work with them are so indoctrinated that they will do
> anything to oppose communism in whatever form. Thus even respected
> scholars of these wars will focus on the delusions or information
> deficits or ideological blinders of the actors. This leads to a
> confused and incoherent perception of US relations in Asia and the
> Pacific. The virtual absence of any coherent criticism of the
> Afghanistan War, let alone the so-called War on Terror, is symptomatic
> not of inadequate information, leaked or otherwise. It is a result of
> failure to establish the context necessary for evaluating the data
> available. It should not surprise anyone that ‘counter-terror’
> practices by US Forces are ‘discovered’ in Afghanistan or Iraq, if the
> professional careers of the theatre and field commanders (in and out
> of uniform) are seriously examined.
>
> Virtually all those responsible for fighting the war in Central Asia
> come from Special Operations/CIA backgrounds. That is what they have
> been trained to do. If we shift our attention for a moment to the
> economic basis of this region, it has been said that the war against
> drugs is also being fought there. However, this is counterfactual.
> Since the 1840s the region from Afghanistan to Indochina has been part
> of what was originally the British opium industry. China tried to
> suppress the opium trade twice leading to war with Britain – wars
> China lost. The bulk of the Hong Kong banking sector developed out of
> the British opium trade protected by the British army and Royal Navy.
> Throughout World War II and especially the Vietnam War the opium trade
> expanded to become an important economic sector in Southern Asia –
> under the protection of the secret services of the US, primarily the
> CIA. Respected scholars have documented this history to the present
> day. However it does not appear to play any role in interpreting the
> policies of the US government whether publicly or confidentially
> documented. Is it because, as a senior UN official reported last year,
> major parts of the global financial sector – headquartered in New York
> and London – were saved by billions in drug money in 2008? Does the
> fact that Japan exploited both Korea and Vietnam to provide cheap food
> for its industrial labour force have any bearing on the US decision to
> invade those countries when its official Asia policy was to rebuild
> Japan as an Asian platform for US corporations – before China became
> re-accessible (deemed lost to the Communists in 1948)? Did the
> importance of Korean tungsten for the US steel industry contribute to
> the willingness of people like Preston Goodfellow, a CIA officer in
> Korea, to introduce a right-wing Korean to rule as a dictator of the
> US occupied zone? Is there continuity between Admiral Dewey’s refusal
> to recognise the Philippine Republic after Spain’s defeat – because
> the 1898 treaty with Spain ceded the archipelago to the US – and the
> refusal of General Hodge to recognise the Korean People’s Republic in
> Seoul when he led the occupation of Korea in 1945? As John Pilger
> suggests, were the million people massacred by Suharto with US and UK
> support a small price to pay for controlling the richest archipelago
> in the Pacific? Was the Pol Pot regime not itself a creation of the US
> war against Vietnam – by other means?
>
> Is it an accident that while the US was firmly anchored in Subic Bay,
> armed and funded Jakarta, occupied Japan and half of Korea, that the
> US was prepared to bomb the Vietnamese nationalists ‘into the Stone
> Age’? It only makes sense if the US is understood as an empire and its
> corporate interests are taken seriously when researching the history
> of the US attempts to create and hold an Asian empire. The resistance
> to this perception can be explained and it is not because of an
> impenetrable veil of secrecy. It is not because of the accidentally or
> inaccessibly unknown. Rather it is because US policy and practice in
> the world remains a ‘mystery’, a supernatural truth, one that of its
> very nature lies above the finite intelligence. The quasi-divine
> status of the universal democracy for which the USA is supposed to
> stand is an obstacle of faith.
>
> Engineering consent In the twentieth century two conflicting
> tendencies can be identified. The first was the emergence of mass
> democratic movements. The second was the emergence of the
> international business corporation. When the Great War ended in 1918,
> the struggle between these two forces crystallised in the mass
> audience or consumer on one hand and the mass production and
> communication on the other. As Edward Bernays put it: ‘This is an age
> of mass production. In the mass production of materials a broad
> technique has been developed and applied to their distribution. In
> this age too there must be a technique for the mass distribution of
> ideas.’ In his book, Propaganda, he wrote ‘The conscious and
> intelligent manipulation of organised habits and opinions of the
> masses…’ was necessary in a democracy, calling that ‘invisible
> government’.
>
> Like his contemporary Walter Lippmann, a journalist, he believed that
> democracy was a technique for ‘engineering the consent’ of the masses
> to those policies and practices adopted by the country’s elite – the
> rulers of its great business corporations. By the 1980s the state
> throughout the West – and after 1989 in the former Soviet bloc – was
> being defined only by ‘business criteria’, e.g. efficiency,
> profitability, cost minimisation, shareholder value, consumer
> satisfaction, etc. Political and social criteria such as participatory
> rights or income equity or equality, provision of basic needs such as
> education, work, housing, nutrition, healthcare on a universal basis
> had been transformed from citizenship to consumerism. The individual
> lost status in return for means tested access to the ‘market’. In
> order for the state to function like a business it had to adopt both
> the organisational and ethical forms of the business corporation – a
> non-democratic system, usually dictatorial, at best operating as an
> expert system. As an extension of the property-holding entities upon
> which it was to be remodelled, the state converted its power into
> secretive, jealous, and rigid hierarchies driven by the highest
> ethical value of the corporation – profit.
>
> Journalists and ‘corporate stenographers’ While historical research
> should not be merely deductive, it is dependent on documents. The
> veracity of those documents depends among other things on
> authenticity, judgements as to the status, knowledge or competence of
> the author, the preponderance of reported data corresponding to data
> reported elsewhere or in other media. A public document is tested
> against a private or confidential document – hence the great interest
> in memoirs, diaries and private correspondence. There is an assumption
> that the private document is more sincere or even reliable than public
> documents. This is merely axiomatic since there is no way to determine
> from a document itself whether its author lied, distorted or concealed
> in his private correspondence, too. Discrepancies can be explained in
> part by accepting that every author is a limited informant or
> interpreter. The assumptions about the integrity of the author shape
> the historical evaluation. In contemporary history – especially since
> the emergence of industrial-scale communications – the journalist has
> become the model and nexus of data collection, author, analyst, and
> investigator. Here the journalist is most like a scholar. The
> journalist is also a vicarious observer.
>
> The journalist is supposed to share precisely those attributes of the
> people to whom or about whom he reports. This has given us the
> plethora of reality TV, talk shows, embedded reporters, and the
> revolving door between media journalists and corporate/state press
> officers. In the latter the journalist straddles the chasm between
> salesman and consumer. This is the role that the Creel Committee and
> the public relations industry learned to exploit. The journalist
> George Creel called his memoir of the Committee on Public Information
> he chaired – formed by Woodrow Wilson to sell US entry into World War
> I – How We Advertised America. The campaign was successful in gaining
> mass support for a policy designed to assure that Britain and France
> would be able to repay the billions borrowed from J. P. Morgan & Co.
> to finance their war against Germany and seize the Mesopotamian
> oilfields from the Ottoman Empire. Industrial communications
> techniques were applied to sell the political product of the dominant
> financial and industrial corporations of the day. The professional
> journalist, freed from any social movement or popular ideology, had
> already become a mercenary for corporate mass media.
>
> The profession eased access to secure employment and to the rich and
> powerful. The journalists’ job was to produce ideas for mass
> distribution – either for the state or for the business corporation.
> Supporting private enterprise was at the very least a recognition that
> one’s job depended on the media owner. Editorial independence meant
> writers and editors could write whatever they pleased as long as it
> sold and did not challenge the economic or political foundation of the
> media enterprise itself. In sum the notion of the independent,
> truth-finding, investigative journalist is naïve at best. We must be
> careful to distinguish between journalists and what John Pilger has
> called ‘corporate stenographers’. This does not mean that no
> journalists supply us with useful information or provide us access to
> meaningful data. It means that journalism, as institution, as praxis,
> is flawed – because it too is subordinated to the business corporation
> and its immoral imperatives. Wikileaks takes as its frame of reference
> the journalism as it emerged in the Positivist – Progressive Era – a
> profession ripe with contradictions, as I have attempted to
> illustrate.
>
> Were Wikileaks to fulfil that Positivist–Progressive model, it would
> still risk overwhelming us with the apparently objective and unbiased
> data – facts deemed to stand for themselves. Without a historical
> framework – and I believe such a framework must also be humanist – the
> mass of data produced or collated by such a platform as Wikileaks may
> sate but not nourish us. We have to be responsible for our
> interpretation. We can only be responsible however when we are aware
> of the foundations and framework for the data we analyse. The
> deliberate choice of framework forces us to be conscious of our own
> values and commitments. This stands in contrast to a hypothetically
> neutral, objective, or non-partisan foundation that risks decaying
> into opportunism – and a flood of deceit from which no mountain of
> disclosure can save us.
>
>
> _______________________________________________________________________________________
>
>
>
> Best
>
> A. Mani
>
>
> --
> A. Mani
> ASL, CLC,  AMS, CMS
> http://www.logicamani.co.cc
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