Sex, spies and WikiLeaks

WIKILEAK mastermind Julian Assange should have read the Swedish novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo more closely before having sex with two of his Nordic admirers.

As readers of the best-selling author Stieg Larsson and fans of his most famous character, the tattooed Lisbeth Salander, well know, it pays to think at least twice before going to bed with a Scandinavian. Assange is being held in a London lock-up awaiting an extradition hearing on two charges of rape stemming from curious cases which have been reopened in Sweden at the behest of a Swedish politician. Going from the translated court documents, the charges don't seem to hang on accusations of non-consensual sex but whether a condom was used in one instance and whether a condom broke during intercourse, in the other. In their desire to legislate for protected sex, even among consenting couples, the Swedish authorities do seem to have trivialised the issues. That is probably the least of the worries for Assange, a self-proclaimed master of the universe who believes he is fighting for global freedom, but it does leave Leftist feminists in a dilemma over whether they should support him or their offended and now outed groupies-in-arms. It would seem that his two sexual partners, both initially enthusiastic participants, became most aggrieved when they discovered that their lover was celebrating Sweden's sexual liberation with more gusto than they had hoped. Of course, Assange strenuously denies the allegations. What has been almost totally lost in this story is the fact that the Australian tech-head was not the actual master-spy, he was not the world's ultimate cyber-leaker, he was merely the conduit for a seriously unbalanced homosexual American military clerk named Bradley Manning who apparently decided to wreak his revenge on the US defence force for his perceived unhappiness by downloading all the cable traffic he could access while lip-synching to Lady Gaga. Manning is in US custody and will face serious military charges which will see him spend serious time in a military prison. He is not the darling of self-important media-savvy barristers in the UK and Australia. Former Communist, now Green Senator-elect Lee Rhiannon, did not focus the adoration of her deluded followers on Manning during a demonstration in Sydney on Friday but the money pouring into Left-wing groups like the hypocritical GetUp should be used to provide support to Manning, not Assange, if the Left were true to any sort of principle. Larsson, the novelist, would have had a lot of fun with Manning shimmying through his novels but he would probably have turned his pen to pricking the self-importance of Assange and his supporters. The Fairfax newspapers, which negotiated with Assange for access to the purloined US cables, have, through their carefully orchestrated releases, played to their natural anti-US prejudices and their bias against the Right-wing of the ALP. In doing so, they have had to assume that their readers are totally unaware of the long and very public affection numerous Labor politicians have displayed toward the US over the past half century. Fairfax has had to ignore the deep and very genuine interest in the US held by our current Ambassador to Washington, the former Opposition leader Kim Beazley, and the lengthy association such figures as former NSW Premier Bob Carr and former ALP national president Steve Loosely have had with North America. Painting NSW Senator Mark Arbib as a US spy merely because he followed in the Labor Right tradition of maintaining close ties with US representatives is sheer humbug. But the Left loves conspiracy theories, even when they overturn some of the formulaic conspiracies theories - such as Israel being the principal aggressor in the Middle East - something which they have long held to be true. Courtesy of WikiLeaks, the Left and the rest of the world has now been provided with evidence that the greatest destabilising force in the Middle East remains the ayatollahs in Tehran who seem happily prepared to make martyrs of the Iranian population if they can. Whether any of the Manning material that is still being held on Assange's computers and by Fairfax actually has the capacity to endanger the lives of Western soldiers or weaken anti-terrorist forces remains to be seen. The over-reacting by US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Prime Minister Julia Gillard smacks more of a defence against the public humiliation of having gossipy diplomatic cables revealed to contain nothing of huge importance that would not have been known by any diligent reader of this newspaper, or others published by News, the owners of The Sunday Telegraph. It had been written here and elsewhere early in former Prime Minister (and current Foreign Minister) Kevin Rudd's abruptly foreshortened term that he had seriously offended India when he snubbed the world's biggest democracy shortly after taking office. It was also no secret that he was viewed as a control freak and that for all his diplomatic pretensions he actually had the skills of a third-grade consular official. The Chinese would have been acutely aware of his views, even before he was telling journalists that he regarded them as ratf***ers during a Copenhagen briefing, and there is little doubt that his thoughts on the French and German contribution to the Afghan conflict were not widely known to the Europeans. But even for Rudd, the jibe that the European contribution was akin to "organising folk-dancing festivals" is more than a little cruel, overlooking the significantly higher death tolls suffered by those forces than our own. That Fairfax journalists had to learn about these matters from the leaked US diplomatic cables should have the company's board questioning their editors. Unless something completely new emerges, the WikiLeak controversy won't generate anything more than an inner-urban warm wet moment. The Chinese won't regard Rudd any less - that would be almost impossible. The Indians could not be more offended than they are now, and the Americans will continue to be bemused at the ALP Right's obsession with their history. A leaked Larsson manuscript will trump a WikiLeaked cable every time.