Hare in BU Today on Assange and WikiLeaks

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Amb. Paul Hare, Senior Lecturer at Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently interviewed about Julian Assange and the impact that WikiLeaks had on the 2016 United States presidential election. Hare argues that Assange and the organization shouldn’t be seen as heroic.

Hare was interviewed for a January 13, 2017 article in BU Today entitled “Why Julian Assange and WikiLeaks Aren’t Heroes.

From the text of the article:

If you’re a transparency activist, you should treat every country the same. I would have more sympathy if they were evenhanded. But as far as I know, WikiLeaks has never made any suggestion that they would like to show what the Russians do, because of course the link between Assange and Russia seems to be pretty close. He actually ran a show for Russian TV, which is Russian government funded.

Then, when his own behavior is questioned—sexual assault—by WikiLeaks employees, he rushes into a diplomatic mission. The only reason that people have not run in to arrest him is because of long-standing diplomatic protections, which gives the inviolability [of embassy grounds] to protect this separateness of diplomacy. But then, come the US election, he starts doing other things, handling stolen property, Democratic National Committee emails. That is not what an embassy is supposed to do. What you’re doing is something very dangerous to the world system.

[Fixing] corruption doesn’t necessarily mean you go completely transparent. On Syria, would it be helpful for every minutia of what [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov and [United States Secretary of State John] Kerry have said to each other over the last two years to be published? Probably not. If foreign ministers or ambassadors think what they say [is] the next day going to be all over the internet, that’s going to be a major blow to seeking peaceful solutions.

You can read the entire article here.

Ambassador Hare teaches classes at Boston University on Diplomatic Practice, Arms Control, Intercultural Communication and on Cuba in Transition. In Spring 2016 he will offer a new class on Public Diplomacy. His novel, “Moncada – A Cuban Story”, set in modern Cuba, was published in May 2010. His book “Making Diplomacy Work; Intelligent Innovation for the Modern World.’ was published in early 2015. Learn more about him here.