Who has the moral authority to hold Jake accountable? He exposed the truth. By contrast, Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld gave us Gulf of Tonkin II, the meretricious congressmen gave the executive branch all the power it wanted, we know that we invaded a country based on lies, 100,000s have died, and noone has been held accountable. What's the rule here? You kill 1 it's a tragegy, but if you kill 1,000,000 it's a statistic?
1. Why are these mutually exclusive? I think it's possible to believe that both Iraq/Afghanistan and Wikileaks' release of these documents without checking to see if they put people's lives at risk are irresponsible.
2. If exposing the truth is always the best alternative, one wonders why Assange & co are so secretive about their own operations & movement. Clearly they have good reasons, for example Wikileaks tries to maintain the secrecy of their sources so they don't end up on jail. If they really exposed Afghan sources in these documents, the outcome for them will most likely be far worse than jail.
Personally I think WL is important and has great potential, but I wouldn't automatically consider them the good guys in every situation. It's more complicated than that.
From what I understand WL offered the US government the chance to clear names of informants. They refused. They obviously wanted to pressure wikileaks not to release the information.
I never claimed that they are incompatible. I merely claimed that those who invade a sovereign country that posed no threat, leading to 100,000s of deaths (5,000 of which U.S. soldiers) have no moral authority and cannot claim that their irresponsibility is even remotely comparable to the irresponsibility of revealing possible informants' names.
I concur. Additionally I think it's interesting how blame is being specifically ascribed to Jake and Julian, the most visible speakers for wilileaks, when the number of people contributing, editing, managing, and supporting wikileaks is in the hundreds.
I feel it might be part of an urge people have to latch on to concrete and explicable causes for events they feel an emotional repulsion to, ie:
"You, specific human being (Obama, Bush, Jake, Jesus, what have you) are to blame for the evils in the world."
as opposed to
"You, complex social phenomenon that may or may not be capable of being influenced by any individual action, are to blame for the evils of the world."
"Who has the moral authority to hold Jake accountable? He exposed the truth. By contrast, Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld gave us Gulf of Tonkin II, the meretricious congressmen gave the executive branch all the power it wanted, we know that we invaded a country based on lies, 100,000s have died, and noone has been held accountable. What's the rule here? You kill 1 it's a tragegy, but if you kill 1,000,000 it's a statistic?"
So you claim nobody has the "moral authority" to hold the people from wikileaks accountable, yet you want to hold Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld accountable (it's interesting you would use only republicans as examples btw) for their actions?
If I intentionally gave out your address to criminals and told them when you wouldn't be home (and they robbed your house), would you hold me accountable? I'm just "exposing the truth"
This information has the possibility of getting thousands killed. On a side note, I'm hoping I can get jake's full address and phone number so I can give it out to some people. I'm sure he won't mind. I'm just "exposing the truth"
When the Americans kill civilians ("Collateral Murder"), Wikileaks gets blamed for being biased. When the Taliban kill civilians, Wikileaks gets blamed, even when they tried to contact the White House so they could remove information about informants.
Perhaps I'm just out of touch, but I normally would put most of the responsibility for these things on the warring parties. Blaming a third party that doesn't have an army, a militia, or guns seems self-serving or disingenuous, depending on who's doing it.
You wouldn't really expect the White House and Pentagon to sit and watch as a bunch of "kids" are revealing their dirty laundry !? All the classified "dirty laundry" -- not security related stuff, like nuclear launch codes, but rather "shameful" acts.
They are very good at propaganda and so went full steam with it. A couple of themes emerged from that effort.
1) "Obama knows about these problems and is already handling it". This is a great use of propaganda. It both makes the leaked documents "un-interesting" and it makes Obama look good. I've heard this one on the radio and in a couple of other sources. It is often regurgitated verbatim without any supporting evidence how Obama has improved the situation.
2) "This will hurt our troops". This is also a great propaganda line because it plays on the existing framework of "support our troops". Nobody wants to hurt the son or husband of their neighbor in their small town. Wikileaks is not exposing cover-ups and mis-management of resources, death of civilians, it is "hurting our soldiers". This appeals to the middle America. "Those Wikileaks kids might as well just shoot our boys in the back" kind of feeling.
3) Now, in the Defcon case. They just hope to scare any hackers or anyone thinking of contributing or collaborating with Wikileaks. The implication is that "you might also get a visit from FBI" or "You might get randomly search everytime you fly. Are you prepared to make that choice?" Again that is very effective.
Now I am not saying that there is necessarily a unified, centrally controlled propaganda campaign, it could be just an emergent behavior from a bunch of govt. agencies.
Your argument is absolutely ridiculous. This has nothing to do with republicans vs democrats. As far as I know, LBJ and McNamara were democrats. And so are Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, who voted for the war in order to avoid jeopardizing their chances of getting to the oval office. What exact part of "meretricious congressmen" didn't you understand?
Assange has never claimed that there are no legitimate secrets. He's not exposing cyphers nor nuclear secrets. The truth that he's exposing is one that the Afghans know well, but that the American public does not know. The purpose of WikiLeaks is to promote transparency and accountability by exposing truths that catalyze reform. This means, essentially, to close the feedback loop so that the electorate can make wise decisions every four years. If the electorate has no clue what is going on, you have no republic, you have a farce.
What reform is attained by exposing someone's phone or address? That's right. None. If you can't understand that privacy and transparency aren't incompatible, then you must be seriously intellectually challenged. In other words, you have no point, and you have no argument.
"What reform is attained by exposing someone's phone or address? That's right. None. If you can't understand that privacy and transparency aren't incompatible, then you must be seriously intellectually challenged. In other words, you have no point, and you have no argument."
When you are exposing potential informants and spies to known murderers, lots.
Either you're too naive or not cynical enough. Assange is on a power trip, but WL is necessary and has been useful so far, so I forgive him. He has a large ego and wants to deliver impact. Exposing informants is peanuts. Why would he do it intentionally? He has already caused one government to collapse (in Kenya). If you had such power, would you use it for the little things, or for the big things? Too bad for the informants, it would have been better if no names had ever been exposed.
"Seriously. You're complaining about Wikileaks doing it (debatable) when Cheney makes this seem like so 2006"
Seriously. When has two wrongs ever made a right? Also, the topic isn't Cheney, it's Wikileaks.
Do republicans that don't run the country anymore always have to be brought up when left leaning organizations or politicians are criticized for their actions?
I think a more apt example would be if you knew of the address of a meth lab. Meth labs are often heavily defended. You give the address of the meth lab to the police, knowing that when busting it some police officers may lose their lives.
Would you be accountable for the deaths of the officers?
"Perhaps I'm just out of touch, but I normally would put most of the responsibility for these things on the warring parties. Blaming a third party that doesn't have an army, a militia, or guns seems self-serving or disingenuous, depending on who's doing it."
I'm not blaming Wikileaks for those things. As you say, they don't have an army. What they do have is a very large audience. Just like with a militia (or owning a gun), you need to be responsible. Giving out the names of potential informants and spies is not being responsible.
If there was even a chance that people could die as a result of this information, they shouldn't have gone public. Because they did, it leads me to believe that they are being driven by an anti-war political agenda.
To me, the information given is not worth the number of lives that will be lost as a result.
"To me, the information given is not worth the number of lives that will be lost as a result."
Fair enough; that's an honest disagreement. My perspective on the matter is simply that whatever the number of deaths that Wikileaks will hypothetically be responsible for, the American government and Taliban are each responsible for a hundred times as many. I do a little introspection and realized that I'm not all that outraged about the actions of the American government with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq[0], so I can't bring myself to be upset about something that is a drop in the bucket (not to mention indirect, rather than direct, responsibility) in comparison.
Clarification: I am not suggesting that you either disagree or agree with the position I present here. I'm just presenting it.
[0] To spell it out: Afghanistan started their war by knowingly allowing al Qaeda to plan and train for the September 11 attacks in Afghanistan. The American invasion is therefore a retaliation, and not a war of aggression, so fair enough. My feelings on the war in Iraq are that it was a waste of time, effort, lives, and money, and was driven by the American and British governments knowingly and intentionally deceiving their publics. If the country I live in had tagged along for the ride, I would be rather upset about the situation, but if some foreign government wants to self-harm it's not my problem.
"I do a little introspection and realized that I'm not all that outraged about the actions of the American government with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq."
If you don't live in Russia nor China, what makes you think that the U.S. won't converge towards tyranny at some point in the future and start using their fantastic military machine to invade countries at will, building an empire that neither Napoleon nor Hitler could even dream of? If that sounds impossible, let us not forget that Germany in the 1920s was quite different from Germany in the 1930s.
I remember the huge demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq in Europe in early 2003. Hundreds of thousands of people protesting in Barcelona. The biggest protests since Vietnam. And, then, one year later, the Madrid metro bombings "forcefully" convince the vastly anti-war Spanish electorare that it was intolerable to have a handful of troops in Iraq. Just because you don't live in the U.S. nor the U.K. do not rule out the possibility that you might suffer the consequences of the reckless invasion of Iraq.
"Fair enough; that's an honest disagreement. My perspective on the matter is simply that whatever the number of deaths that Wikileaks will hypothetically be responsible for, the American government and Taliban are each responsible for a hundred times as many."
This makes Wikileaks just as bad as the people they are trying to "expose". It really makes me question many of their past articles.
Why release a video of American soldiers killing innocent people when they themselves don't have the decency to respect human life? They don't know or care about how many people could die as a result of this information. It could be 0, 10, or 1000.
