Thursday, February 03, 2011 – by Staff Report.

“In a shocking revelation contained in the latest Wikileaks document dump, previously secret information indicates that Al Qaeda now has the nuclear bomb and intends to use it. The documents, which were fed to Wikileaks from anonymous whistle-blowers and passed along to The Daily Telegraph for publication, show that a leading atomic regulator privately warned that the world stands on the brink of a nuclear 9/11.

Al Qaeda, which has sourced nuclear material and recruited rogue scientists to build so-called ‘dirty bombs,’ is on the brink of not only producing but deploying atomic weapons in order to advance the goals of Muslim extremists against the West. Further, various Jihadi groups are also close to producing biological and chemical weapons that could kill thousands in terrorist attacks.” ~ Examiner

Dominant Social Theme: Assange is a blond stranger come to save the world.

Free-Market Analysis: Months ago, long before others began arguing the case, the Daily Bell made the groundbreaking argument that WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in particular were a kind of psyops. Recent revelations have only help confirm our view. In this article, we will offer a retrospective using the above article as a jumping off point for our opinion.

Assange apparently only took over WikiLeaks about four years ago. Assange and WikiLeaks seem to have been selected as a composite vehicle that would provide maximum credibility; he has been positioned and promoted in a classic psyops pattern. Assange, in trouble as a youth, is likely a creation of Western intelligence agencies, at least in his current incarnation. He is a cynical regurgitation of various dominant and sub dominant social themes.

Nothing that WikiLeaks has released thus far has proven especially inimical to Western interests; that is not to the interests of the Western power elite that seeks ever-closer worldwide governance. The leaks are mostly innocuous and seem to reaffirm the positives of Western and American diplomacy (as they are calculatedly presented to the outside world). Even the most recent leaks regarding US complicity in the Egyptian unrest seems to place the US on the side of the angels, trying to expand democracy in an authoritarian environment.

As far as dirty bombs go, we’ve written in the past that building and exploding such devices is not a simple process. Even a “small” dirty bomb is a fairly large project and “nuclear suitcases” turn out be very large, clumsy and weighty devices as well. Thus, Assange’s revelations, stripped of context, do nothing but reinforce fear of Muslim extremism, which is a valuable elite promotion, allowing for further authoritarian measures directed at Western middle classes. Of course we are not alone in our cynicism. Infowars carried a piece on this latest “news” recently, excerpted as follows:

The corporate media today is chock full of stories about the latest round of supposed diplomatic documents purloined by a low level Army intelligence analyst. According to the documents, the CIA asset al-Qaeda has managed to acquire “workable and efficient” biological and chemical weapons and the West stands on the brink of a “nuclear 9/11.” It is said the documents detail a 2009 NATO meeting where security chiefs briefed member states that al-CIA-duh was readying “dirty radioactive IEDs” to be used against British troops in Afghanistan.

Dirty bombs were debunked years ago and it is surprising the folks behind the fake diplomatic cables are attempting to pawn this fantasy off on us again as they did in 2002 when former Chicago gangbanger Jose Padilla was arrested and paraded in the corporate media as the face of al-Qaeda in America.

Once again, Pakistan figures prominently in this scary fairy tale. “Senior British defense officials have raised ‘deep concerns’ that a rogue scientist in the Pakistani nuclear program ‘could gradually smuggle enough material out to make a weapon,” according to a document detailing official talks in London in February 2009,” the Daily Telegraph reported yesterday. Left out of the equation is the fact Pakistan would not have nuclear weapons if not for the United States.

One need only examine the WikiLeaks narrative to see that it has not generally been especially damaging to the West. Assange continually speaks of releasing additional documents, but the actual release of these documents is sporadic at best. The latest data dump, such at is, merely reconfirms the Western mainstream narrative regarding Al Qaeda and its evil intentions, even though there is little evidence that Al Qaeda – whatever it may be – is able to mount substantive attacks against the US.

Then there is Assange’s personal situation. He has just been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, has received a million-dollar book contract and there is a major Hollywood movie in the works. He is swarmed by the media at his every appearance and his utterances are treated as major news. What exactly has he done to deserve such attention? In our view, he is a manufactured entity, a physical manifestation of a sub dominant social theme.

There are other individuals and websites that do much of what Assange does with less fanfare and more effectiveness. Only Assange seems to attract the attention due to a major celebrity. The media build-up is no coincidence. It is a startling sight, one that reveals how efficiently such public personas can be created. Future generations, reading the history books will not be aware of the context, and thus will take the Assange meme at face value. Apparently it has been ever thus (or certainly for at least the past century).

And yet the flaws in the narrative are palpable. Assange received some 2,000 names of tax evaders recently, but what the news stories did not mention was that the leaker had previously leaked names and had been incarcerated for it. The leaking and the leaker were treated as a new phenomenon, adding weight to the story. But it is possible that even the names had been disseminated previously. This makes the entire episode into a kind of public relations stunt, which is certainly contrary to the perspective that WikiLeaks projects of a serious endeavor. The complicity of the mainstream news media is both startling and disturbing.

WikiLeaks is NOT a serious endeavor in our view. Assange is a six-foot-four-inch, blond front man for an endeavor that has not seemingly released a single “leak” of substance that has not previously been known or that does not reinforce larger elite narratives. Even the terrible video of Afghan helicopter shootings of civilians and reporters was essentially public record. And Assange’s insistence on working with such news disseminators as the New York Times and the UK Guardian has unfortunately added much-needed “alternative news” credibility to these endeavors.

Just today a new leak has appeared. WikiLeaks has leaked a US cable regarding a “US and China military-standoff over space missiles.” According to a UK Telegraph report, “The United States threatened to take military action against China during a secret star wars arms race.” This too is entirely in keeping with a meme that reinforces the seriousness and expertise of the US’s military-industrial complex.

Yet the idea that the US and China are engaged in a high-stakes outer-space “Cold War” is probably an exaggeration on several levels. At the very least it gives additional heft and weight to the US military-industrial complex at a time when budget cuts are threatening to rationalize some of the more expensive “white elephant” endeavors.

WikiLeaks is very obviously not what it seems. One compares Assange’s growing public presence favorably to Bill Clinton’s and others. The methodologies are the same. The power elite provides various credibility-building favors: prizes, books, movies. Can it all be a coincidence? Over and over, these favors are doled out to a chosen few as credibility builders. After a while it becomes nearly ludicrous. One can perceive the utility of an individual to the elite based on his or her Nobel nominations, especially in the political sphere.

The power elite, having finally absorbed the message that the Internet is palpably powerful phenomenon has apparently decided to create an entity that can redirect the truth-telling of the Internet into supporting its messaging. By building up Assange, the elite profits from his credibility and co-ops that of the Internet itself. Assange is thus, potentially, a very important person in the scheme of things.

Conclusion: Assange is situated at the center of important elite memes: the Internet itself; transparency as a way of making global government more tolerable and even appealing; and the “outsider” as a force for good, remaking centralized authority into an intimate and responsive endeavor. Assange, despite his libertarian musings, seems not to want to reduce the size of government so much as to make it more efficient and viable. The more this narrative unfolds, the more confident we are of this analysis. Our wish, of course (in this case) is to be proven wrong.