Wikileaks Suspends Publishing Of Cables Due To "Financial Blockade"

lee1 writes "Wikileaks has had to cease publishing classified files due to what the organization calls a 'blockade by US-based finance companies' that, according to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has 'destroyed 95% of our revenue.' Assange also opined that 'A handful of US finance companies cannot be allowed to decide how the whole world votes with its pocket.' According to Assange the group was taking 'pre-litigation action' against the financial blockade in Iceland, Denmark, the UK, Brussels, the United States, and Australia. They have also filed an anti-trust complaint with the European Commission."

Comments

Re:Wikileaks done in by its own leak

[anagama]

The other take on that is that it will probably save thousands upon thousands of lives. Thanks to Wikileaks, Obama's request for immunity from crimes for US troops was rejected and his desire to prolong the Iraq war thwarted, aided in part by release of a cable showing US war crimes.

That cable was released by WikiLeaks in May, 2011, and, as McClatchy put it at the time, "provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi." The U.S. then lied and claimed the civilians were killed by the airstrike. Although this incident had been previously documented by the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, the high-profile release of the cable by WikiLeaks generated substantial attention (and disgust) in Iraq, which made it politically unpalatable for the Iraqi government to grant the legal immunity the Obama adminstration was seeking. Indeed, it was widely reported at the time the cable was released that it made it much more difficult for Iraq to allow U.S. troops to remain beyond the deadline under any conditions.

In other words, whoever leaked that cable cast light on a heinous American war crime and, by doing so, likely played some significant role in thwarting an agreement between the Obama and Maliki governments to keep U.S. troops in Iraq and thus helped end this stage of the Iraq war (h/t Trevor Timm).

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/23/wikileaks_cables_and_the_iraq_war/singleton/

Re:Wikileaks done in by its own leak

[EnergyScholar]

This author must dispute two statements of fact in the above post:

• Incorrect statement one: "That leak put many people in harm's way, including a lot of people trying to help overthrow oppressive regimes or criminal enterprises." On what basis do you make that claim, besdies the fact that Fox news repeated it a lot? The un-redacted cables had already been widely distributed between five different journalistic outlets. This means, of course, that various intelligence agencies had also got hold of them. Thus, anyone with Intelligence Community (IC) connections, which includes large criminal organizations, ALREADY able to get to the un-redacted cables. When the un-redacted cables were generally released this only allowed regular people with no IC connections to ALSO look at them. As an example, if you were an Afghani feeding intelligence about the Taliban to the US government, and you happened to be mentioned in a Cable, you had no way to determine whether or not your name was mentioned, because you could only see the redacted cables, even though the Pakistani Intelligence Agencies, which has been thoroughly infiltrated by the Taliban, DOES have access to the cables. The release of the un-redacted cables allows you to see that you are, or are not, mentioned in the cables, and take appropriate action. The un-redacted were ALREADY available to all the big players.
• What big problems of credibility exist? Has Wikileaks ever lied, or provided demonstrably false information? On what basis do you make that assertion, besides hearing it on Fox news? Sounds to me like you are parroting Fox News ...

FYI: the un-redacted cable release came from a confluence of several events:

1. Wikileaks posted an original, encrypted version of the cable on the wikileaks site and pointed a Guardian reporter at it
2. Wikileaks privately told the Guardian reporter the secret password to decrypt the file
3. Someone else grabbed a copy of the encrypted file and it floated around on the 'net
4. The Guardian published the secret password in a book
5. The combination of the encrypted un-redacted cables file, and the guardian-published key, allowed anyone to get the entire set of cables

Re:Wait a second....

[dkleinsc]

The 'financial blockade' predates the threat to publish stuff about Bank of America. When the leaks about Iraq were published, the US government, with Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) leading the way, worked with PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and other financial institutions to cut off funding that went through any US-based corporation.

Note that Wikileaks had not (and still hasn't) done anything illegal in the United States: Publishing classified information that was handed to you is protected under the First Amendment, as decided in the Pentagon Papers case.

Re:Wikileaks done in by its own leak

[Enderandrew]

Except it did.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703428604575419580947722558.html?KEYWORDS=julian+assange+rights+groups

Amnesty International went after Assange in 2010, a year after that award when they learned how he put civilians in danger. And yet in every interview on the matter, Assange insists he did nothing wrong. In this article, he blasts others for being lazy, when he was the lazy one who didn't bother redacting names. And if you bother taking two seconds to Google such matters, you'll find several quotes where he says he won't redact civilian names unless people give him $200,000.