Via Politico comes some archival phone-hacking commentary by Wikileaks leader Julian Assange. We’ll give the plot away early: Assange favors the practice.

The comments below date to 2009, a time when the Guardian newspaper was trying to get some respect for its scoops on News of the World’s illicit voice-mail snooping. The British establishment — cops, politicians, other newspapers — wasn’t paying much heed to the mounting evidence of wrongdoing.

Assange piled on:

So I feel that it was just disgraceful that the Guardian wasted its time on that issue, just disgraceful and all they ended up doing was producing a climate that increased the amount of regulation of actually even more important investigative journalism. I mean, the jumping up and down about the fact that News of the World had not actually just reprinted an AP newswire or stolen something from somewhere else or reprinted a press release, but they’d actually done original investigative work about people in this society that its readers were genuinely interested in.

In the same interview, Assange brags about how his organization had intercepted actual phone conversations of Peruvian politicians — not this wimpy voice-mail-hacking stuff. “In Peru we released . . . over 60 telephone intercepts of politicians speaking to businessmen. And that was the biggest political event in Peru this year, according to one of the Peruvian newspapers.”

In the future, Assange should be careful about allowing interviews. They tend to expose his shallow reasoning and his need for attention. He sets up a whopper of a false choice in discussing News of the World’s editorial horizons. As Assange sees it, reporters there could either regurgitate AP copy or break the law via phone hacking. The middle ground between those poles — say, original shoe-leather accountability reporting that complies with all laws — doesn’t seem to figure into Assange’s menu of options. A black-and-white world, of course, is more comforting to extremist thinkers.

And congratulations to Assange for dominating the Lima news cycle.

Two years after this Assange interview, the phone-hacking scandal came of age. The Milly Dowler news showed that News of the World wasn’t just hacking the voice-mail of celebrities and the royal family. It was victimizing everyday folks.

This is where Assange’s phone-hacking cheerleading collapses. He appears to favor the subterfuge becasue it’s a way of holding powerful people to account. He’s too arrogant to consider that the powerful people who need to be held to account are media organizations that employ illegal newsgathering techniques. They’re just as likely to veer into corruption as the folks they’re supposed to be monitoring.