Why WikiLeaks Must Be Protected - GoFuckYourself.com

u-Bob · 08-21-2010, 01:58 PM

August 19, 2010
source: http://www.lewrockwell.com/pilger/pilger87.1.html

Quote:

On 26 July, Wikileaks released thousands of secret US military files on the war in Afghanistan. Cover-ups, a secret assassination unit and the killing of civilians are documented. In file after file, the brutalities echo the colonial past. From Malaya and Vietnam to Bloody Sunday and Basra, little has changed. The difference is that today there is an extraordinary way of knowing how faraway societies are routinely ravaged in our name. Wikileaks has acquired records of six years of civilian killing for both Afghanistan and Iraq, of which those published in the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times are a fraction.

There is understandably hysteria on high, with demands that the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is "hunted down" and "rendered." In Washington, I interviewed a senior Defense Department official and asked, "Can you give a guarantee that the editors of Wikileaks and the editor in chief, who is not American, will not be subjected to the kind of manhunt that we read about in the media?" He replied, "It?s not my position to give guarantees on anything." He referred me to the "ongoing criminal investigation" of a US soldier, Bradley Manning, an alleged whistleblower. In a nation that claims its constitution protects truth-tellers, the Obama administration is pursuing and prosecuting more whistleblowers than any of its modern predecessors. A Pentagon document states bluntly that US intelligence intends to "fatally marginalize" Wikileaks. The preferred tactic is smear, with corporate journalists ever ready to play their part.

On 31 July, the American celebrity reporter Christiane Amanapour interviewed Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the ABC network. She invited Gates to describe to her viewers his "anger" at Wikileaks. She echoed the Pentagon line that "this leak has blood on its hands," thereby cueing Gates to find Wikileaks "guilty" of "moral culpability." Such hypocrisy coming from a regime drenched in the blood of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq ? as its own files make clear ? is apparently not for journalistic inquiry. This is hardly surprising now that a new and fearless form of public accountability, which Wikileaks represents, threatens not only the war-makers but their apologists.

Their current propaganda is that Wikileaks is "irresponsible." Earlier this year, before it released the cockpit video of an American Apache gunship killing 19 civilians in Iraq, including journalists and children, Wikileaks sent people to Baghdad to find the families of the victims in order to prepare them. Prior to the release of last month?s Afghan War Logs, Wikileaks wrote to the White House asking that it identify names that might draw reprisals. There was no reply. More than 15,000 files were withheld and these, says Assange, will not be released until they have been scrutinized "line by line" so that names of those at risk can be deleted.

The pressure on Assange himself seems unrelenting. In his homeland, Australia, the shadow foreign minister, Julie Bishop, has said that if her right-wing coalition wins the general election on 21 August, "appropriate action" will be taken "if an Australian citizen has deliberately undertake an activity that could put at risk the lives of Australian forces in Afghanistan or undermine our operations in any way." The Australian role in Afghanistan, effectively mercenary in the service of Washington, has produced two striking results: the massacre of five children in a village in Oruzgan province and the overwhelming disapproval of the majority of Australians.

Last May, following the release of the Apache footage, Assange had his Australian passport temporarily confiscated when he returned home. The Labor government in Canberra denies it has received requests from Washington to detain him and spy on the Wikileaks network. The Cameron government also denies this. They would, wouldn?t they? Assange, who came to London last month to work on exposing the war logs, has had to leave Britain hastily for, as puts it, "safer climes."

On 16 August, the Guardian, citing Daniel Ellsberg, described the great Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu as "the preeminent hero of the nuclear age." Vanunu, who alerted the world to Israel?s secret nuclear weapons, was kidnapped by the Israelis and incarcerated for 18 years after he was left unprotected by the London Sunday Times, which had published the documents he supplied. In 1983, another heroic whistleblower, Sarah Tisdall, a Foreign Office clerical officer, sent documents to the Guardian that disclosed how the Thatcher government planned to spin the arrival of American cruise missiles in Britain. The Guardian complied with a court order to hand over the documents, and Tisdall went to prison.

In one sense, the Wikileaks revelations shame the dominant section of journalism devoted merely to taking down what cynical and malign power tells it. This is state stenography, not journalism. Look on the Wikileaks site and read a Ministry of Defense document that describes the "threat" of real journalism. And so it should be a threat. Having published skillfully the Wikileaks exposé of a fraudulent war, the Guardian should now give its most powerful and unreserved editorial support to the protection of Julian Assange and his colleagues, whose truth-telling is as important as any in my lifetime.

I like Julian Assange?s dust-dry wit. When I asked him if it was more difficult to publish secret information in Britain, he replied, "When we look at Official Secrets Act labeled documents we see that they state it is offense to retain the information and an offense to destroy the information. So the only possible outcome we have is to publish the information."

cambaby · 08-21-2010, 02:20 PM

No one fucking cares about Wikileaks, really.

Ethersync · 08-21-2010, 02:34 PM

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Originally Posted by cambaby

No one fucking cares about Wikileaks, really.

You sure seem to.

cambaby · 08-21-2010, 02:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ethersync

You sure seem to.

All I care about is that little twerp ends up in a ditch somewhere.

Guns arent the only thing that kills people, so does information, and the stuff he released got innocent people killed, isnt that the very thing he is "protesting" about?

Ethersync · 08-21-2010, 03:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cambaby

All I care about is that little twerp ends up in a ditch somewhere.

Guns arent the only thing that kills people, so does information, and the stuff he released got innocent people killed, isnt that the very thing he is "protesting" about?

Who died?

damnage · 08-21-2010, 05:12 PM

Overall I think it's a load of shite, even though it needs to be protected.

directfiesta · 08-21-2010, 05:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cambaby

All I care about is that little twerp ends up in a ditch somewhere.

Guns arent the only thing that kills people, so does information,

.. and both are protected by the constitution ...

Care to give your guns away ?

grumpy · 08-22-2010, 02:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by directfiesta

.. and both are protected by the constitution ...

Care to give your guns away ?

i heard a rumor that guns are just toys for boys

_Richard_ · 08-22-2010, 08:56 AM

funny the people singing about freedom and 'honour' of our soldiers are the same people wanting these guys 'dead in ditches'

classy.

ottopottomouse · 08-22-2010, 09:04 AM

The site is still just as biased as any mainstream media outlet so I personally don't think it should be protected from anything.

Ethersync · 08-22-2010, 09:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ottopottomouse

The site is still just as biased as any mainstream media outlet so I personally don't think it should be protected from anything.

Mainstream media is protected.

And how is Wikileaks biased? They don't editorialize the news. They publish mostly raw data. Tons of it.

ottopottomouse · 08-22-2010, 09:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ethersync

Mainstream media is protected.

And how is Wikileaks biased? They don't editorialize the news. They publish mostly raw data. Tons of it.

That helicopter video came out massively edited with a huge load of hindsight applied.

08-21-2010, 05:12 PM	#6
damnage Confirmed User Industry Role: Join Date: Aug 2008 Location: Bottom of dung heap Posts: 512	Overall I think it's a load of shite, even though it needs to be protected. __________________ Email: Jaypas {:at:] hot mail {:dot:} com

08-22-2010, 09:04 AM	#10
ottopottomouse She is ugly, bad luck. Industry Role: Join Date: Jan 2010 Posts: 13,177	The site is still just as biased as any mainstream media outlet so I personally don't think it should be protected from anything. __________________ ↑ see post ↑ 13101

08-21-2010, 02:20 PM	#2
cambaby So Fucking Banned Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: CR Posts: 3,141	No one fucking cares about Wikileaks, really.

08-22-2010, 08:56 AM	#9
_Richard_ Too lazy to set a custom title Industry Role: Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Earth Posts: 30,989	funny the people singing about freedom and 'honour' of our soldiers are the same people wanting these guys 'dead in ditches' classy.