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| Luke Daniel Harding and David Leigh
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Photo: Christian Jungeblodt © 2011
Written by British journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy tells the story of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and the alleged leak by Bradley Manning of classified material to the website in 2010. Accused of rape and sexual molestation, Assange can now be extradited to Sweden, which is probably only the first step to satisfying the US State Department, which has accused Assange of breaching national security. Prompted by the US government, many have come out against WikiLeaks, including MasterCard, Visa and Paypal, which have blocked donations using their services. The media’s silence on the affair is conspicuous and even the chief of the New York Times, which had published Wikileaks documents, has turned against the site. Leigh and Harding entered the fray with their book, prompting Assange to threaten to sue them for libel. The book, however, is important to understanding who Assange is and where he came from, from his early days as an activist in Australia, to the Berlin meetings of the Chaos Computer Club and the birth of his transnational group, which today struggles to survive as the WikiLeaks site was frozen and its activities subsequently suspended. Written in the style of an impassioned thriller, in collaboration with Ed Pilkington, Robert Booth and Charles Arthur, film rights to the book were bought by Steven Spielberg.
Luke Daniel Harding (1968) studied at Oxford University and worked at the Evening Argus and Daily Mail before joining The Guardian, in 1996, for which he has worked as a correspondent from New Delhi, Berlin and the war fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was also The Guardian’s correspondent in Russia, and became the first foreign journalist since the end of the Cold War to be expelled from the country, in 2011, for his unflattering coverage of Vladimir Putin’s political maneuvers. The expulsion created an international uproar, and Harding’s Russian visa has since been reinstated, albeit on a temporary basis.
David Leigh (1946) studied at King's College at Cambridge. An investigative reporter since 1970, before joining The Guardian he worked for the Scotsman, The Times and The Observer and was a Laurence Stern fellow at The Washington Post in 1980. In 1988 he published The Wilson Plot, on the alleged attempts of the British secret service to destabilize Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s government in the 1970s. Leigh’s documentary Jonathan of Arabia looked at the allegedly “overly close” ties between British Defence Minister Jonathan Aitken and the Saudis. His series of corruption exposés about international weapons giant BAE Systems won him the Paul Foot Prize. A professor of journalism at London’s City University, he was one of the recipients of the 2010 Daniel Pearl Award. |
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08/12/2011 ore 12:00
Jardin de l'Ange |
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