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Wikileaks Founder Advised To Avoid American Gov't
eldavojohn writes "Media darling Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, has been told by his lawyers to avoid the United States on the grounds that the US military would like to ask him a few questions about his source of the Collateral Murder video. Assange claims to be holding yet more video (of a US attack on a village that allegedly killed 140 civilians in May of 2009), as well as a quarter million sensitive cables relating to the current foreign war operations from the US State Department. Assange surfaced for the cameras in Brussels while speaking about the need for the freedom of information. Can he build a high enough profile to protect himself from danger?"
The best thing he can do is get as much press as possible, make as many speeches as possible, engage in as much public activity as possible, and stay in a group at all times (no late night strolls alone). If the general public and press don't know who he is, the U.S. government can just grab him and quietly throw him in a secret jail cell somewhere (or even render him to a country willing to get their hands dirty torturing him with more than a little waterboarding).
It would be nice to live in a world where whistleblowers were rewarded and praised for their efforts. But the truth is that whistleblowers almost always suffer for their sacrifice. At best, they lose their jobs and/or are harassed. At worst, they end up in a filthy jail cell with electrodes on their balls.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I understand the need to keep things secret, and I understand that in war shit happens...but that doesn't mean when things go awry, we the people shouldn't know about it. For the same reason why I think uncensored war footage should be shown on the nightly news, maybe if the average civilian actually saw what goes on in war, the public would be less likely to stand by idly while our government spends billions on killing people on the other side of the planet.
Just my $.02
Living With a Nerd
Because, he could probably be arrested and tried for espionage.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Maybe I missed that update, but last time I heard WikiLeaks never confirmed they had any sensitive cables, in fact, so far they have denied it.
Yes, except for the "spying" part.
Dilbert RSS feed
He has balls. Bigger balls than your balls and bigger balls than my balls. I guess the point I'm trying to put across is that he has big balls.
So, even if he fails, he has shown that one man is able to wander around the world in a particular way credibly announcing he has sensitive government information without being David Kelly'd. Sure, he has to be white and rich, but that's better than nothing. If there's one thing we can learn from Assange, it's that we're mostly a bunch of fucking cowards not to stand up to Goliath, and we are getting the government we deserve. So, that's two things. Two things we can learn.
By teasing over the alleged videos and documents, he's shifting the focus of attention to himself and how he's treated by the US.
So. Fucking. What?
His story is utterly, totally trivial next to the things that he's allegedly holding back.
So publish already, or shut up. Or publish, then shut up. Either way, just shut up, as Wikileaks itself is rapidly becoming a distraction from the real stories that it ostensibly exists to publish.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Unless you buy into conspiracy theories, they were killed by lone nutters. The assassination of someone with a high profile wil draw a lot of unwanted attention on the way the US conducts this sort of business, as well as an public outcry.
While the idea of Wikileaks is still quite popular; with more revelations about Wikileaks, Assange is no longer the media darling with everyone taking a more critical view of the man behind Wikileaks.
America's oldest whistleblowing website Cryptome which Wikileaks described as a 'venerabe anti secrecy organization' has collated the most details about what happens within Wikileaks. Cryptome has published all of Wikileaks founder Assange's chats over a few years as well as Wikileaks insider details about how they need $55,000 to run servers but as much as $200,000 is used by the men who run Wikileaks for business class travel, hotels etc.
Read Cryptome to see that despite its idealistic mission, at some level Wikileaks behaves like another secret Government department with a couple of people deciding what is public interest.
The majority of the 9/11 attackers were Saudi Arabian; why should Iraqis be attacking the Saudis? This is especially so considering that the last time Iraq even looked like it might invade Saudi Arabia, the United States attacked Iraq and made a successful push for UN-imposed sanctions.
Had the USA invaded Saudi Arabia, I would be less inclined to disagree with you.
Palm trees and 8
I lost all sympathy for him
Just as a matter of interest, how much sympathy do you feel for the good samaritans who were going to the aid of the wounded when the Americas shot and killed them?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Furthermore, I have no sympathy for Reuters' guys because Reuters has a history of being embarrassed in that region by having its "correspondents" not only embed themselves with guerrilla forces, but often hires people who are working both sides (ex: the egg on Reuters' face when it came out that its subcontractors in Lebanon were actually members of Hezbollah).
Well, how else are we to get both sides of the story? If journalists are only embedded on one side, then we're only getting half of the story, no? Journalism should be neutral, unless you're implying that we shouldn't hear their side unless it came directly from us. At that point, it is no longer journalism. Instead, it is full blown-out propaganda.
Best "String" Ever!
And you have the information to back up this "often" claim, besides the one example you claim?
I know a guy who worked for a number of years for Reuters as a communications tech in war zones all over the world, and he never "worked both sides" whatever that means to you but whose life was endangered on a number of occasions. He was paid for it and he accepted the possible consequences. However, he, along with I would suspect are the majority of Reuters employees, did not work for for Hezbollah, and didn't, as you appear to suggest, deserve a couple of 30mm shells for doing his job.
Since this is the Internet, though, people who disagree with you of course deserve death, I suppose.
Sadly, there was a time when this simply meant what it says. Now, the guy could end up getting water-boarded at some US secret prison in a third-world country - or New Jersey (shudder). Of course, the US doesn't torture people. Paying other people to do it is another matter.
Excuse me, there's a knock on the door ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Our US thuggery is fairly predictable. I'm sure the CIA or equivalent has already been given hit orders.
You've seen a few too many movies.
More than likely, Assange is having his lawyers try to get some kind of amnesty deal in turn for testimony and/or returning the materials. The only danger to Assange is that he be arrested, held and tried like any other person who breaks the law. He may even get off at trial due to Constitutional protection of freedom of the press.
Playing up the danger does get Wikileaks more press, so bonus points for good guerrilla PR for Assange.
-- $G
Even a future without you, one way or the other. Is Wikileaks structured--really, be honest--so that if you are forced to 'retire' that operationally it will be a blip on the radar? Is the project and it's resources designed to survive you?
Dude, where's my packet?
So the government is the only one who gets to edit for political impact? Both sides inevitably play the propaganda game. At least Wikileaks made the entire video(that they had) available. Only the shorter, more YouTube friendly version was edited, and they never once tried to hide the fact. That's a lot more honesty than you can expect from the US military.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Despite all the noise, the most sinister claims made about the US government are that
1) The self-confessed whistleblower, Manning, is being held "incommunicado" in Kuwait and
2) The military would like to question Assange.
Manning hasn't been disappeared, vaporized, liquidated, or what have you; there's not even an allegation that the UCMJ has been violated in his case. And there's nothing at all strange or nefarious about the military wanting to question someone who received classified material; they'd hardly be doing their job if they didn't. If I was Assange I'd certainly avoid the US, but ascribing evil intentions or actions to the US military or the government in general is at least premature.
Reuters was caught a few years ago editing photographs of a site that the Israeli Air Force had bombed in order to make it look worse than it was. When Reuters released pictures from the Israeli assault on the "peace flotilla", they edited out the weapons in the hands of the "peaceful" members of the flotilla and the wounded Israeli soldiers. There have been several other incidents of Reuters doing similar things, but I would have to work harder to track those stories down than I feel like at this time.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I believe Julian already has a high enough profile to protect him from danger. Whoa cometh to the US Government should anything happen to him. The international pressure would be enormous and intense at a time when the US is at an all time international relations low. As a US Citizen, I appreciate his valor in enforcing my government's transparency initiatives. If President Obama is going to promise greater transparency, then by golly, he should deliver on it and if it takes Julian to embarrass him by pointing out his political non-speak, so be it. Wikileaks is holding President Obama's feet to the fire over transparency initiatives and I am the happier for it!
I will feel sorry for the people on the other side of the planet just as soon as they start hunting down and killing the people on their side of the planet that are sending people to this side, to this country, to kill us.
The US and Britain have had a constant military presence in the middle east since the end of WWI. That's about 90 years. How many middle eastern nations have a military presence in the United States or UK?
I will feel sorry for them when they stop supporting people who say I should die because I don't believe in their religion of murder and conversion at the point of a sword, or barrel of a gun if you prefer.
And they will feel sorry for you when you stop sending armies over to kill them and take control of their oil resources. Especially when you stop supporting murderous local dictators and monarchs who conspire with Western powers to suppress democratic movements in exchange for piles of money.
The association of America and Democracy causes hatred and laughter across the region for a very good reason: we've been doing our best to destroy a nation's right to self determination for decades. Look at the Kurds for chrissake. One one side of the Iraq border, we give them monetary and military support in exchange for their political support inside Iraq. On the other side of the same border we supply the Turkish army with the weapons to kill Kurds and suppress Kurdish popular movements.
The reason you don't know any of this is because none of it is reported, but you just swallow the same bullshit lines over and over again. Yeah, a bunch of people halfway across the world just woke up one day and decided they hated freedom, so instead of attacking democracies on that side of the earth, they spent millions of dollars to attack the United States because they are "evil." But that's okay, we're "good" so in response to the murder of 3,000 of our citizens, let's start two wars and kill and maim a few hundred thousand Muslims on their home territory. Let's send the cradle of civilization back to the stone ages, since it's the only place in the region where women have something resembling equal rights. That should alleviate the tension between our two cultures!
You fucking moron.
Torture is usually worse than death for the victims family because it involves loss of honor even if the individual is left alive. Framing the individual for a bunch of crimes, or framing the individuals family members for all sorts of crimes is an example.
Besides they wont want to kill Julian anyway. They want to know what he knows and find out who his sources are not kill him. They need him alive and chances are they'd put him in a super max prison or a secret prison which has 23 hour lockdown and basically put him in a dark room for 23 hours a day until he goes crazy and talks. If you put someone into a room with no light, no sound, no sensory information at all, it's only a matter of time before they start talking to themselves and literally go crazy.
The soviets used to torture political dissidents by putting them into insane asylums. In these special political hospitals doctors and psychiatrists would scientifically torture them until they literally went insane or broke and spilled their secrets. This type of torture is worse than waterboarding, worse than physical pain, because it's psychological and on some level everyone is psychologically weak.
Our US thuggery is fairly predictable. I'm sure the CIA or equivalent has already been given hit orders.
You've seen a few too many movies.
Before attempting to dismiss other's fears as being mere fantasty, do a little research:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/license-kill-intelligence-chief-us-american-terrorist/story?id=9740491
This article demonstrates that not only do 'hit orders' exist, but they are not prohibited from using such orders against citizens who are constitutionally guaranteed to stand trial.
So while parent may have seen too many movies, you, dear friend, have seen too few congressional hearings.
Speaking as someone who donates to Wikileaks, if they have to use some of that money for travel and hotels in order to maintain the privacy of whistleblowers and to keep the organization's head moving so that he isn't thrown into a holding cell somewhere, then I am perfectly fine with my money going to those functions.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
"The military might of the US lies in its industrial output, not its secrets. Secrets only protect the US regime from its own population."
The military might of the US is primarily about two things: the quality and training of its troops, and its lead in military technology over adversaries. Industrial output means nothing, as our focus is on small numbers of advanced weaponry. We have 20 B-2 bombers. That's it. We'll have 187 F-22 fighters. That's it. Whether it's wise or not, the US is counting on technological superiority, not the sheer numbers of industrial output. Industrial output was WWII, when a war with a peer enemy would last for years and you had time to make more weapons. A war with China would be very short, one way or the other. So blithely allowing our most advanced technology to be leaked to China, or anyone for that matter, is stupidity on a grand scale.
Should the US rely on a few hyper-expensive, highly secretive weapons for its defense? That's another debate, and an important one. But as long as we have our current strategy, allowing those secrets to be given away would be self-defeating, no? "We're relying on our technology, but sure, here are the secrets to our latest weapons. Enjoy!".
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
All you people out there who think Wikileaks is just fine and dandy need to ask yourself a question.
Do you believe that government should have NO secrets at all?
Think before you answer.
This means troop movements, battle plans, agents of any kind, anywhere.
It means no more sealed federal records of any kind. If you did your sister in 7th grade, we will know about it.
IRS records (they are government records) are open for all to see, communications between you and your Congressional representative, communications between anyone in government about anything.
Want to know the location, passwords, procedures to gain access to nuclear, biological or conventional weapons? No problem. There should be no secrets...right?
We could know where Obama is, where he's going, when he'll get there, where the secret service is, how many there are and what their various plans are to protect the president.
Delicate negotiations with a company to make available some revolutionary technology to solve "global warming"? FTS! It's all public subject to the whims of anyone with the information.
Diplomats working behind the scenes to free civilians from captivity in some Islamic hell hole? Hell, we all should be in on that. Publish it!
ANYTHING and EVERYTHING would be open and available.
On the other hand, if you think that some of this stuff should be kept under wraps (your sister does I bet), then Wikileaks should make you sick. That's because Wikileaks thinks that anyone and everyone who thinks classified material of any kind should be public for whatever twisted reason, can publish it without repercussion.
There is no firewall. No protection. Nothing. If someone has access and thinks it should be public...there ya go. The best you can do is to rely on some unknown people who are accountable to nobody to decide not to publish something....for now anyway.
Is that really what you want?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
According to wikileaks, they don't have any embarrasing "international cables" but they do have other documents that expose war time/rights violations by the US Government/Army. http://cryptome.org/0001/wikileaks-maybe.htm
But there is dissention in the wikileaks contributor community, someone keeps sending documents to cryptome that exposes the real goals of wikileaks - to get julian flying international in style and to get money from major news outlets for major leaks. Supposedly Manning even expected to share in the cash for his videos.
The motives make the site less noble, but the leaks are still great stuff. Especially the ones which deal with countries taking out "loans" to pay off the interest on the "loans" that they can't pay back anymore. This protects the banks that gave out the loans (usually part of the Federal Reserve banking cartel) because they can show the original loan and the new loan as "assets" (because they are still getting interest payments.) That means that the bank can actually loan out more money because they have more "asset" value on the books! When the pyramid finally falls down, the banks find some other way to clean up, usually with assistance from the Fed and the US Congress to get more imaginary (inflationary) money to be released from the "Federal Reserve."
The way this inflation scam works is well explained in "The Creature from Jekyll Island." It explains the current economic boom/bust cycle like no economist ever would dream of - because the author doesn't believe that any monetary system with no back-end discipline can survive in the long term (which is a big part of economics - "managing" the economy) The basic idea it promotes is that of a disciplinary standard that prevents inflationary spending - such as the gold standard. But even if you could care less about the gold standard, it still well explains the issues inherent in our current system, how it is used by governments and how it's hard to accept the political realities of not going into continuous inflation, which is why inflationary systems keep popping up. Rome is his first example of an inflationary system corrupted, and Greece and the Byzantine Empire. The bezant was accepted from China to Brittany, from the Baltic Sea to Ethiopia, and kept a stable price for 800 years, with a strict, disciplinary banking system. We don't have that today, just a bunch of pomp and fluff designed to look respectable and disciplinary. Deserving of respect or an exemplar of discipline our current monetary system is not.
And you live in a fantasy world where the external policy of the USA is done for the good of ANYONE except for the American big-ass corporations and their friends.
Also, several of them weren't removed through war, despite actual wars being fought against their regimes.
A rather pointless list that.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
First off, your original list doesn't quite make sense. Force didn't/hasn't removed several people on your list, many historically famous butchers are conveniently missing (Americans?, Royalty?, the Church?), and in the case of Castro and the U.S.S.R., the threat of force nearly ended the world.
Despite all that, I do agree that force is sometimes necessary to stop more suffering. However, it's rarely the case that war couldn't have been prevented beforehand through a bit of moral thinking. Obviously, that means no military aid to nations with a bad track record, such as Israel or Colombia. This also means you don't exploit the rest of the world, creating a perfect vacuum for a warlord to rise to power. The Vietnam war was mainly caused by the grueling poverty imposed by French imperialism, for example. And you certainly don't shake hands with those warlords once they gain command. We could make a similar list here, rivaling yours, the difference being of course that we are partially responsible for the suffering caused by these monsters through our aid and military support. Often these support mechanisms directly cause the exact type of dictator you are using as justification of war, taking the Taliban, Hussein, Indonesia, and Batista, for example. Perhaps some of these dictatorial regimes could be avoided by more carefully choosing our relationships with the rest of the world. Simply boiling down foreign policy to "useless talking" and "invasion" is a gross oversimplification that makes you sound like a warmongering idiot.
The best way to avoid war is to not help cause it in the first place. For example, let's take the war in Iraq. Had we not supported Saddam militarily throughout the eighties, he wouldn't have had the capacity to to invade another country. We could have prevented all of this by simply not selling arms to a dictator. The U.S. not only sold Saddam weapons, but they also helped Saddam develop his chemical and biological weapons programs in their crusade against Iran. I would assume that to someone who expresses so much reverence for freedom, you would understand the concept of not aiding those who legally despise it, i.e. dictators. Explain to me then, why Saddam was a former ally? The U.S. was pretty quiet when Saddam was using chemical weapons on his own people and the Iranians, despite the fact that it is explicitly forbidden internationally as a war crime. We certainly knew about it, so where was the outrage then? After the first war Bush I suggested that the Iraqi people overthrow Saddam, but in an ironic twist of fate we gave absolutely no aid to the Iraqi people to achieve such a task, after heavily funding the mess in the first place through Saddam. Instead of helping the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam, we punished them with brutal sanctions we knew would do nothing to the Iraqi elite, but would have horrible consequences for the rest of Iraq. When half a million Iraqi children died due to sanctions, the fact that most of Iraq's water treatment facilities were intentionally destroyed, and there was a dramatic increase in infectious disease, people like you turn around and blame Saddam! Before you go off about the Oil for Food program, keep in mind that is wasn't initiated until 1996 - by which time the damage was done. The Pentagon admitted that one of their goals in the first Gulf war was to disable Iraqi society at large, rather than concentrate solely on military targets. They have also admitted that one of their goals was to make living conditions so unbearable to the Iraqis that they would overthrow Saddam out of desperation. In addition to destroying Iraq's underlying infrastructure, the U.S. fought to keep humanitarian goods, which had no military use, out of Iraq. Sounds pretty fucking sick and sadistic to me. If this is how you bring "democracy" to the rest of the world, you can definitely count me out. Explain to me again how this use of force was supposed to prevent human suffering and uphold freedom?
Usually if a person is making an argument the burden is on them to provide proof. That's the way it works. It's also a lot better because it keeps things grounded in fact, rather than ending up with a game of telephone where people go around repeating things they heard. You can see where the latter system leads by reading the many chain emails that go around. Consider that not everything is easy to find on Google. This is, because it was a well publicized Internet-based story that can be summarized in a few search terms that are relatively unusual in combination, but there are plenty of important things that don't fit that mold. Furthermore, there's a big difference between finding a web page mentioning something and finding a good discussion by a reliable source. So, there are a lot of reasons it's worthwhile to go ahead and cite a source if you know about an issue. Slashdot (indeed, the net and the world in general) would be a hell of a lot better if people did it as a matter of course.
Also consider that it makes a lot more sense practically for the person originally making a claim to cite his sources. What did you and the other replies say? Essentially that it's so easy to Google. Well that would seem to be a good argument that it would be really easy to cite a source. And what makes more sense, the one person making the claim doing this work once or the many people reading the claim replicating the same work?
Long story short, I think the GP was dead on for commenting that if you care enough to post about something like this (not necessarily common knowledge and possibly controversial), you ought to cite a source.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy