TEA WITH JULIAN ASSANGE

Julian Assange, the notoriously elusive founder of Wikileaks, may not have hand-picked The Economist to receive an advance notice of its cache of more than 90,000 military documents about Afghanistan (that honour was given to the Guardian, New York Times and Der Spiegel). But he did have tea with the paper and discuss his motives.

The exchange is fascinating. In response to a question about the upshot of the big leak—government officials say new details could help the enemy; analysts suggest there's little that's new (The Economist calls the Afghan War Diary "long on detail and short of revelations")—Assange huffs:

Typical nonsense from analysts who can’t actually be bothered to read the material. How do they know there’s nothing new there. 91K reports—have they read 91k reports? Even our journalistic team are only reading detail.

An example he then offers, about the real reason for certain Canadian casualties (discovered by a Canadian newspaper from the leaked reports), indicates that there are indeed devils in the details.

Assange says the goal of Wikileaks is to "acheive political reforms through the release of this information." He ends up seeming noble, but perhaps also naive. Described by our colleagues at Democracy in America as "a brilliant autodidact" (he was Australia's most accomplished computer hacker before being arrested), he came up with the idea for Wikileaks in 2006, after designing cryptographic programs for human-rights workers. He seems to believe that once people have the right information, they'll draw the right conclusions (ie, his own conclusions, that the war in Afghanistan is not only going badly, but that America has engaged in crimes that deserve punishment). Unfortunately, the problem with data and statistics is that everyone ultimately interprets them differently. If logic was so universal, perhaps we would also be spared bloody, intransigent wars.