You can't handle the truth

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, looks like a small bird. It's hard to define what kind but safe to say that it's any variant of anything fluffy and white and he's often more in flight that his aviary equivalent. Started as a sort of Wikipedia for secret Government documents, Wikileaks has suddenly become a international platform for truth seeking, with Mr Assange, the man finding and uploading these things governments don't want you to see, single handedly, becoming a one man Right to Information Act.

Like his ghostly (in addition to bird-like) appearance, he is indeed such a globe-trotting phantom, that flamboyant world-travelling assassin Carlos The Jackal expressed jealousy from his prison cell in South America.

Mr Assange has no family, he never travels with any suitcase, never checks into hotels and often carries a boarding pass very different from the plane he boards last minute. He has been seen at the same time at a yoga retreat in New Zealand and a dinner in Kabul. Most people who've interviewed him say it's hard to tell where he appears from and when he leaves. Like a meeting of our cabinet ministers. His press conferences are more stage-managed than Tiger Woods and the revelations often far more embarrassing. As a journalist puts it, "He's a little guy. He shows up. Holds up the incriminating documents that make Presidents nervous and then runs". I suppose if a man is going to take on the ISI and the Pentagon the same day, this lifestyle is an occupational hazard.u00a0

Over the last couple of years, as WikiLeaks, has embarrassed nations and grown in popularity on a massive global scale, Mr Assange, a little Australian man who allegedly works with his team out of a room in Reykjavik with black curtains and broadband, has became a sort ofu00a0 Robin Hood for the information age.u00a0

The reason Mr Assange is such a darling to western liberal cosmopolitan thought is that he plays into the very basic conceit that is the foundation of young people, by which I mean cynics, by which I mean, in today's world, everyone. The conceit is this: That if a government or army or any authority is saying something is true, about 99 per cent of the time, it's a lie. Young people felt this way in the '60s and took to the streets singing songs and smoking dope and protesting. In the 21st century, Wikileaks has moved flower power online.

The two highest profile exposes involved video and audio of US Apache Helicopters in Baghdad that accidentally shot at innocent people in an alley and the one from last week where secret documents revealed that the ISI is taking CIA money meant for killing Taliban and giving it to the Taliban to attack the CIA ("Brilliant" as Oscar Wilde would say with irony).u00a0

Even before you see this first video, you probably are aware that in war innocent people die, collateral damage in army speak. What surprises you is the casual nature with which the helicopter pilots chat ("Neutralized", says one. "Nice" says the other).u00a0 The fact that the ISI plays a double game again is something my three year-old cousin knows, but clearly the smartest intelligence agency in the world is yet to catch on. When you see it in documents and memos, you think, ok, the ISI aren't just happy playing the double game, they want to see how far you can push it by actually putting it down on paper, stamping and signing it.u00a0u00a0

Yes, the Internet is probably our greatest invention, even bigger than say electricity or the telephone or the airplane. And democracy on it gives everyone the right to know everything, (Facebook's privacy settings were exposed recently when someone put founder Mark Zuckerberg's ATM pin on his wall).u00a0 Yet for years, the world, through Monarchies and Governments and Armies and Security Agencies, created walls within walls of who needs to know what. And why. The public being last to know anything. The logic being, the average person is not smart enough or calm enough to not panic or get enraged when he knows this secret.

In Assange's world, you are. And he believes you probably already know it. His job is to appear suddenly somewhere in the world and remind you. And tell you the secret you already knew is of flaws, only human. And then disappear into thin air.

Anuvab Pal is a Mumbai-based playwright and screenwriter. His plays in Mumbai include Chaos Theory and screenplays for Loins of Punjab Presents (co-written) and The President is Coming. He is currently working on a book on the Bollywood film Disco Dancer for Harper Collins, out later this year.u00a0Reach him at www.anuvabpal.com