The Other Side of the Wikileaks Conspiracy

We’re all familiar with Wikileaks and the ideas spinning around about the organization’s “front man” Julian Assange.  But there is another side to the conspiracy that suggests as usual, that the real story behind Wikileaks is far from what the public perceives.  And it even goes so far as to suggest that Assange himself is only a cog in a vast machine.  In simple terms, this conspiracy theory suggests that Wikileaks is actually working for the CIA itself.  But does this Wikileaks conspiracy theory hold water?

It sounds tremendously sensational.  The idea that a conspiracy to reveal government secrets could in fact be a psi-op to serve any number of ends is enough to make a casual observer’s head spin.  These theorists suggest that everything Wikileaks has published thus far has been relatively benign in the long run for US diplomats.  Aside from a few hardly newsworthy caricatures of world leaders, they suggest that the real point of the operation will come in the form of a future leak that will work to justify various military and political moves, including war with Iran.  The justification for the claim comes in the form of Assange’s fairly limited release of information and an alleged connection to the CIA.  Perhaps ironically, one of the women accusing Assange of sex crimes has also been labeled as working with the CIA by others.

While these theories largely stay out of the mainstream press and even blogs have not been giving them much attention, they have seen quite a bit of attention in Internet forums, chat-rooms, and other public communication media.  There has been a general consensus, however, that one of the biggest revelations of Wikileaks was that many countries throughout the Middle East view Iran as a massive threat.  Though it does contain a bit of embarrassing information, including the horrifying footage released earlier this summer of a helicopter shooting civilian targets, the conspiracy seems difficult to fathom.  The response?  Where’s the negative after effects of these released documents?

As with so many theories of its kind, this one has no definite “Aha!” moment that can be pointed to in order to either lend it credence or disprove it.  What will these future leaks contain, and who will they benefit in the long run?  The problem with conspiracy theories involving things like Wikileaks is that they are so fundamentally connected to a wide array of issues that are important to us all.  As such, any theory is likely to catch on long before it is researched to fulfill an agenda both for and against Wikileaks.  And so it falls to each of us to carefully put the information gathered in context rather than looking at each new piece of information as the sole truth we desire.  It should be worth noting, then, that the idea that Assange is working for the CIA arose long before any evidence was put forward related to the claim.  And if he is, it will have to be one of the most elaborate and confusingly obtuse conspiracies ever conceived.  In the end, the idea that Assange might be working with the CIA seems to be less than credible.