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Why WikiLeaks Is Worth Defending
SomePgmr writes "By now, anyone with even a passing interest in the WikiLeaks phenomenon is familiar with most of the elements of its fall from grace: the rift between founder Julian Assange and early supporters over his autocratic and/or erratic behavior, the Swedish rape allegations that led to his seeking sanctuary in Ecuador, a recent childish hoax the organization perpetrated, and so on. Critics paint a picture of an organization that exists only in name, with a leadership vacuum and an increasingly fractured group of adherents. Despite its many flaws, however, there is still something worthwhile in what WikiLeaks has done, and theoretically continues to do. The bottom line is that we need something like a 'stateless news organization,' and so far it is the best candidate we have."
soo, you'll stand up for the USA, even if the USA has become corrupt and every bit as criminal as the nazis were during WW2? you spineless piece of shit haven't you got any integrity worth anything?
Freedom to post whatever you want in a public forum is important in our world today. Wikileaks seems to self destructing and isn't necessary in the grand scheme of things.
Yes, Godwin, no and maybe!
It's a reckless, amoral organization, that doesn't care who it hurts, doesn't care if it gets blood on its hand, and could care less about the fate of the people who supply its documents. What the world needs, and still has plenty of, are people of good moral character, who will fight for what's right, who will take stands, and who will take risks. I have way more respect for the three young women of Pussy Riot and what they have accomplished than anything Wikileaks has done.
even if the USA has become corrupt and every bit as criminal as the nazis were during WW2?
I guess I missed the part where the US has annexed sovereign states by force, or systematically imprisoned, impressed into forced labor, and murdered millions of people based solely on their ethnicity.
Although, our economy would probably be in a lot better shape if we had someone like Albert Speer. That man did wonders for Germany's wartime economy.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Feel free to compare the United States to any other nations they express a serious interest in from a military, economic, or overall political standpoint. Try living in both nations for five years apiece. Then report back on your findings, provided you have the spine to actually try this for yourself.
And the point of this is what?
Funny, until the "anti-American" bit, I could have sworn you were talking about the US government. Amend it to "anti-American people", and you still could be.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Just a coincidence or a witch hunt, amazing how things fall apart when you are Enemy of the State.
#1 Reason - Pentagon Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers .
When the USA keeps secrets, the entire world suffers. Sad, but true. There probably isn't a single country that the USA hasn't screwed over in one way or another, including herself.
To the rest of the world, it is the government, not the people making these dangerous decisions. It has happened with both political parties. JFK lied and every President since has too. The military has kept many secrets.
But not Assange. He's not WikiLeaks. Simple as that. He betrayed them with this massive stunt.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
If you are the kind of person who's easily swayed by the media's depiction of Assange, then yes, you most definitely need wikileaks
I corrected that for you.
(PS Valerie Plame ring a bell?)
"When they start leaking the secrets of our enemies as well, I'll consider getting behind that."
Wikileaks cables reveal China 'ready to abandon North Korea ...
www.guardian.co.uk News World news China
WikiLeaks Spurs On Protests By Releasing New Egypt Corruption ...
articles.businessinsider.com/.../30066985_1_police-brutalit...
Wikileaks Goes After The Saudi Royal Family - Business Insider
articles.businessinsider.com/.../29970450_1_saudi-prince-sa...
and so on....
Why we need WikiLeaks: Remember the article on the Australian tax authority the other day where they want expansive powers to snoop on businesses on the off-chance they might be paying less taxes than the government would like?
OK, then, we the citizens need powers to snoop on government bureaucrats on the off-chance they're doing something illegal. If they're not doing anything wrong, they should have nothing to fear.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I guess I missed the part where the US has annexed sovereign states by force, or systematically imprisoned, impressed into forced labor, and murdered millions of people based solely on their ethnicity.
That was during the 18th and 19th century (you know, the Indians, slavery, annexation of Hawaii, etc.) so it's understandable why you missed it.
As far as world domination goes, the US has far surpassed the Germans, and even the British -- that's why there are hundreds of military bases all over the world, and why there's one set of rules for countries in the imperial fold (e.g. Israel's nukes) and those outside (e.g. Iran's legal nuclear program).
True, the U.S. empire is "softer" than the German one -- it doesn't need mass extermination camps, it merely needs to imprison over 2 million of its own citizens, and apply surveillance over the rest, in order to keep the lid on things. That plus mass narcotization of its population via consumerism, entertainment and actual pharmaceuticals has proven a more effective form of centralization of power than the crude 20th century models.
The point is Godwin's law.
More importantly, comparing the USA today with Nazis during WW2 is like saying the Nazis weren't all that bad, and that the genocide of millions of people is comparable to modern Western civilization.
The USA isn't perfect by any means, and there have been innocent lives lost due to unnecessary wars. But Nazi Germany? Get real. This is more like "hindsight is 20/20" than "the USA is specifically targeting millions of a particular race for death due solely to their race". And the USA promotes freedoms that are nearly as good as, if not often much better, than most other nations today.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Anti-American Agenda, what is that? Is that like Alcoholic Anonymous Association?
Hi, my name is Julian Assange and I used to drink a lot, I mean I used to be pro-American, but I've been sober for 5 years now, so sorry, for all my 'anti-american agenda'.
WTF does that mean? Is it un-American to point out that the government is now essentially tyrannical? How is it un-American to be politically active, to bring to light all the transgressions of the powerful elite running the system?
Is telling truth to power a bad thing somehow? How about telling truth to majority .
You can't handle the truth.
I would but last time I did the comment section was closed when I got back.
Really? Are you saying that your history class literally failed to cover the Mexican American War, slavery, and the systemic genocide of the native population? These were standard topics in American History when I was growing.
You don't get it, don't you? Lets say, you have some important information to reveal. If they make the Republicans look bad, put it into the NY Times! If they make the Democrats look bad, put it in the Wall Street Journal! If they make the lower classes look bad, put it into !Forbes. If they make the upper class look bad, put it in the Daily News!
You see the pattern? Whenever you find a larger group in the U.S. who likes the information to be known, you will find a news outlet to publish it. Only if no news outlet in the U.S. will publish it, because it makes nearly everyone look bad, where do you go? - Tada! Whichever news outlet will publish it, to the U.S. as a whole it will look as if it has an anti-american agenda - just because it publishes the stuff, no other news outlet will publish, because they fear the anger of nearly all groups in the U.S.
No, a news outlet like WikiLeaks will always look as if it was anti-american. If the news was somehow neutral or pro-american, it would have been published in the U.S. already. So your "anti-american agenda" just turns into "I don't like the information to be known, because they make me look bad."
I guess I missed the part where the US has annexed sovereign states by force, or systematically imprisoned, impressed into forced labor, and murdered millions of people based solely on their ethnicity.
Then you must be Rip Van Winkle. There is an element of truth in your assertion, in that - since the 19th century, as others have pointed out - the USA has not seen fit to annex other nations in the sense of adding them to its own territory. Instead, it finds it more convenient to invade them, destroy their existing political systems, and set up puppet "Quisling" regimes. But dead people are dead however they got that way, and wherever the US armed forces have gone there seem to be an awful lot of "excess deaths". Maybe the liberated brown people simply die of excessive joy at their newly-conferred rights and freedoms.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The disturbing thing is that you see a few people in every Wikileaks story saying that we have no right to know what our government is doing. We are the government! We have every right to know, and I firmly believe that politicians should be hounded by investigative reporters like paparazzi hound vapid celebrities. However, as a society, we are more interested in who Tom Cruise is currently dating (or if he's secretly gay) than we are how much money a state Senator is embezzling. Even when we do get any kind of investigative reporting, it's usually just sex scandals. Wikipedia even keeps a list of them.
Wikileaks isn't exactly my ideal candidate, but it's one of the few organizations that's willing to actually shine a light at something important. Everyone else is either too scared or compensated not to do so.
"As far as world domination goes, the US has far surpassed the Germans, and even the British -- that's why there are hundreds of military bases all over the world, and why there's one set of rules for countries in the imperial fold (e.g. Israel's nukes) and those outside (e.g. Iran's legal nuclear program)."
The difference is one of consent. Poland did not consent to German military bases. Nations benefit heavily from American military bases on their soil, that's why they're there. The only exception I can think of where a nation doesn't want an American military base on their soil is Cuba, and even there Guantanamo was put there pursuant to (at the time) Cuba's consent.
The problem with most ideological stances, is that they only work if the ideolody is applied to everyone else
Hence, Wikileaks stands for openness and public scrutiny of everything and everyone except Wikileaks. How much money has Wikileaks received in donations, and how much of it went in to Assange's pockets? Maybe an insider could post the answer on Wikileaks. No, wait...
No, wait... Indeed. They already posted financial transparency reports on Wikileaks by the Wau Holland Foundation, in the form of a press release no less.
Freedom of Information is a great idea, until you realise that all governments and companies need to undertake certain discussing in private in able to function effectively.
While that is true in the general sense, there is also the fact that governments describing themselves as democratic (let alone shining examples of that) should be as diplomatic and as open as possible. And at least our Western governments have not been all that great about that lately, ranging from ACTA, to war crimes (Abu Grahib, "Collateral Murder"-the-full-version-and-not-the-Wikileaks-edit), to unsavoury governmental-corporation incest (STRATFOR, News Corp), to ...
Wikileaks (even if it remained as effective as in its heydays) would never be able to get its hands on every piece of confidential information nor be able to publish it. Just like the fact that we beat ACTA doesn't mean that the IP-crazies are suddenly completely stopped in their tracks. Or just like the fact that we get to vote doesn't mean that corruption doesn't exist nor that we live in an ideal representative democracy.
However, society always has been and presumably always will be a melting pot influenced by everything that happens. Wikileaks, beating ACTA and voting are all part of that. In the grand scheme of things, I see them as counteracting forces against wrongfully denied freedom-of-information requests, warrantless wiretapping, trying to get IP-legislation enacted under the guise of free trade agreements without public oversight, ... I don't see that in the sense of fighting fire with fire or an eye for an eye, but as opposite influences that affect society as a whole and how it will continue to evolve.
And the problem appears to be that without actions that "open up" things, the natural reaction of many people in power appears to be to keep much more secret than is warranted or than is a good idea. Reasons could be because that is the way of the least resistance, or because those people at large probably often genuinely believe that they do know best, and that public debate would only slow down things and/or muddy the facts.
That behaviour however has to be counteracted and compensated for in some way to keep a democratic society healthy, and as far as I'm concerned Wikileaks is one expression of that in its own unconventional and loose-cannon way. I don't think Wikileaks is dangerous to a healthy society though. It will obviously cause at least inconveniences and may even lead to deaths or other catastraphies, and there are many more desirable ways to achieve the same goals (such as freedom-of-information requests, and the normally automatic public oversight over creating any kind of legislation). However, I think Wikileaks' wide general public support (or at least sympathy) is mainly a reaction to the failure of exactly these more convention means of openness in democratic governance.
Donate free food here
Your point of view typically comes from the extreme left wing which is responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths. You have those like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, etc., etc. who not only have war time body counts, but much of the count comes from 'peace time' genocide of undesirables in the population.
That's a straw man argument. Killing people is bad. War is bad. Lying about motives for war (i.e. Casus belli like the threat of WMD) is evil.
Of the five you name only three are considered "left", two were prototypical for the exact opposite. Better example would be the Khmer Rouge (but then again they were supported by the UN, including the USA after the Vietnamese had driven them from power)
Information is power; If a government is forced to be wide open then they lose power. Open information should replace or be added to the 2nd Amendment. The whole point of the 2nd Amendment was to act as a brake on out of control government. But at this point in history a bunch of guys running around with 9mm pistols isn't going to change a thing. But open information can change everything. Corrupt contracts become a whole lot harder if the whole process becomes open. Things like ACTA become impossible if every step of the lobbyists become open and accountable. When I am talking open I mean really really open. Things like the DHS would be wide open. The only time I would think the government should be allowed to be even slightly closed would be open investigations which would require a judge to say, OK this is closed for 30 days. Then wiretaps and whatnot would be effective. But the second the investigation ends the records are instantly open.
All finance should be open right down to the paperclips. Wasteful spending can't happen if everyone can take a peek into their area of expertise and say, "Whoa there cowboy. You don't buy laptops for $2000 and a service plan of another $1000 per year." Or "That isn't the right concrete for an overpass. It will fall down in 10 years."
Think of the steps that had to be taken in private in order to create the Dick Murtha Airport.
Keep in mind that there are Nordic countries where they publish income tax records onto the internet. They do record who looks though. So you can see your neighbour's taxes but they can see that you are a nosy bastard. The result has been some fantastically rich people somehow claiming around $100,000 in income being busted by people finding this and then it becoming front page news.
How many times have the police gotten out of control where the whole thing was dealt with "internally"? Open government would end this.
And when that consent was withdrawn, they did not leave...
I am John Hurt.
Julian himself is an arrogant fool. Did he ACTUALLY think he'd get away with releasing truckloads of U.S. intelligence info? And when it was pointed out to him that he may well have killed people who were working with us, he said that anyone working with the U.S. deserved to die (yeah, he did. it was in an interview broadcast by the BBC).
An exact quote, preferably with a source, would be preferable. Then we would have some idea what it was, exactly, that Assange said.
Maybe it was something like, "Anyone who participates in what the Nuremberg Tribunal described as the supreme war crime - unprovoked aggressive war - deserves to die". After all, the USA and its allies hanged a lot of Germans and Japanese for exactly that crime. And if they shot them before they had a chance of a trial, no one shed any tears.
"The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed World War II, called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_aggression
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Irwin Schiff went to prison for not paying his taxes. I don't fault him for that. Civil disobedience, is after all, a noble act of defiance. However, as such, you have to be prepared to suffer the consequences. The US Government is what the US Citizens decide it should be. Who's fault is it that the American people are too lazy to fight for what they want? Oh, too busy working to put food on the table. What crap! The average person watches some 20 hours a week with their eyes glued to the TV watching vacuous nonsense.
Imagine what one could accomplish spending half those hours engaged in some aspect of civics. Oh, that's right, no one remembers that along with their rights, they have certain duties and responsibilities.
I wonder how different the US would look if Martin Luther King had sat back and watched Real World.
Doesn't anybody remember the leak describing how they were going to destroy wikileaks? They've been doing it.
Wikileaks is being made a negative example of what free press gets for doing it's duty to mankind. It needs to be a positive example and that is enough reason to defend Wikileaks. Furthermore, the illegal and high disregard for the meaning of law (by using twisted technical letters of the law) HARMS everybody going forward not only the press but it terms of how far officials can acceptably abuse the system without repercussions further regresses us back towards despotism.
The CIA deals with this kind of stuff, they plant seeds of discontent within any organization they are fighting-- USSR or now tiny groups where they still have cold-war level budgets but no empire to use them against. Assange probably has relatives who are informants against him. You don't know history if you think the CIA isn't capable of doing a huge amount against such a tiny relatively powerless group. Hell, the classic attack against idealistic movements is to make their leaders into self-serving pigs who put themselves before the cause they lead; nothing causes more internal conflict, demoralization, AND harms recruiting outside support. In this age of celebrity "press" and the US culture of making everybody into some kind of celebrity it practically happens all by itself. They could make a 110% dedicated idealist look like a self-serving celebrity without really trying. Any dedicated activist will leverage the celebrity culture to promote their cause despite knowing it will not help their personal life (surely he didn't think more sex was worth being the single biggest target of the US... If he wasn't well known, he'd be just another one of the RECORD number of journalists the USA "accidentally" killed.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Just like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba which the US has occupied since a "treaty" in 1903... and they won't leave in spite of Cuban government requests.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
You only need food, shelter, water and a hole to excrete your waste into. All of which can be provided in a concrete cell, which does exist. Living life only worrying about your utmost needs is a recipe for disaster. You may not need Wikileaks, but we would really like some of the corruption going on to stop... Pointing out the disparity between what we believe about our rulers and what is actually going on is important. We may not need Wikileaks precisely, but we do need the service they provide.
The American control of the panama canal. When Panama told the USA to leave they sent in the army and changed the government.
Scooter Libby and Karl Rove walk the Earth freely. Why are they not rotting in a jail cell? Ah, yes, presidential pardons.
You misspelled Richard Armitage. And really who cares about a spook being outed?
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
These were standard topics in American History when I was growing.
Yes, those are all standard topics, but what is not a standard topic is the conflict you omitted: The American invasion, conquest, and pacification of the Philippine Islands, which may have killed more people than all those you mentioned combined. This conflict has mostly been dropped down the memory hole, and few Americans have even heard of it. The Nazi's got many of their ideas for their death camps by looking at the concentration camps that the USA ran in the Philippines, although the British concentration camps in South Africa were an even bigger influence.
We need a new movement.
The first phase of government transparency was the Freedom of Information Act, followed by similar acts at the state level.
The next phase needs to be cameras installed in every government official's office, running all the time, and accessible via web (defense excepted).
Backroom deals, sweetheart contracts, all that stuff: either capture on camera or prevent it from happening or make it much more difficult.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
and even there Guantanamo was put there pursuant to (at the time) Cuba's consent.
More like an offer they couldn't refuse. It was one of the conditions of removing the occupying force.
You seem to forget that the US government has instilled dictators in multiple countries (some of which had representative governments!), and that the US supported Saddam for years. In fact, here's a YouTube video of Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand. The "fighting oppression" and "liberation" lines the US has used over the years is just PR bullshit.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
http://www.nnn.se/nordic/assange/suspicious.pdf
Who cares about a spook being outed? The spook and her family. Outing Plame was a lot more reckless than anything Wikileaks ever did.
Anarchists never rule
Julian himself is an arrogant fool. Did he ACTUALLY think he'd get away with releasing truckloads of U.S. intelligence info? And when it was pointed out to him that he may well have killed people who were working with us, he said that anyone working with the U.S. deserved to die (yeah, he did. it was in an interview broadcast by the BBC).
An exact quote, preferably with a source, would be preferable. Then we would have some idea what it was, exactly, that Assange said.
Maybe it was something like, "Anyone who participates in what the Nuremberg Tribunal described as the supreme war crime - unprovoked aggressive war - deserves to die". . . .
It would be better of it was that, I suppose, but chances are you'll be sorely disappointed.
The treachery of Julian Assange
As soon as WikiLeaks received the State Department cables, Assange announced that the opponents of dictatorial regimes and movements were fair game. That the targets of the Taliban, for instance, were fighting a clerical-fascist force, which threatened every good liberal value, did not concern him. They had spoken to US diplomats. They had collaborated with the great Satan. Their safety was not his concern.
David Leigh and Luke Harding's history of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to Moro's, a classy Spanish restaurant in central London. A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. "Well, they're informants," Assange replied. "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths. They persuaded Assange to remove names before publishing the State Department Afghanistan cables. But Assange's disillusioned associates suggest that the failure to expose "informants" niggled in his mind. . . .
James Ball joined and thought that in his own small way he was making the world a better place. He realised that WikiLeaks was not what it seemed when an associate of Assange – a stocky man with a greying moustache, who called himself "Adam" – asked if he could pull out everything the State Department documents "had on the Jews". Ball discovered that "Adam" was Israel Shamir, a dangerous crank who uses six different names as he agitates among the antisemitic groups of the far right and far left. As well as signing up to the conspiracy theories of fascism, Shamir was happy to collaborate with Belarus's decayed Brezhnevian dictatorship. Leftwing tyranny, rightwing tyranny, as long as it was anti-western and anti-Israel, Shamir did not care.
Nor did Assange. He made Shamir WikiLeaks's representative in Russia and eastern Europe. Shamir praised the Belarusian dictatorship. He compared the pro-democracy protesters beaten and imprisoned by the KGB to football hooligans. On 19 December 2010, the Belarus-Telegraf, a state newspaper, said that WikiLeaks had allowed the dictatorship to identify the "organisers, instigators and rioters, including foreign ones" who had protested against rigged elections.
Taliban prepare to punish WikiLeaks Afghan informers
. . . The threat echoes similar warnings made after the release in July of 92,000 intelligence reports and field assessments on the Afghan war.
Those documents named informants who had revealed the names, locations and details of Taliban commanders and their operations.
Hamid Karzai at the time condemned the disclosure of in
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Spanish-American War, heard of it? Since when are treaties signed under duress (or by a puppet government) counted as "willingly"?