If wikileaks was leaking CIA information instead of the State department, that’d be both better (revealing all the nasty shit we do) and worse (getting our agents and foreign friendlies who are not already known to foreign governments killed). This is why Plame was really bad, in addition to the violating-political-norms-of-domestic-politics angle.
Anyone who has expectations of secrecy when they tell the US government something they’re already committing suicide; we’ll quite happily sell out anyone if it’s in the national interest.
Your faith in the rhetoric of the national security state is touching.
And yet we won’t if it isn’t. Wikileaks doesn’t seem to make that distinction.
Your faith in the rhetoric of the national security state is touching.
Oh, Christ. I know as well as anyone that the US engages in Chicken Little levels of rhetoric regarding national security. I also know how journalism is supposed to work. Condemning Wikileaks doesn’t translate to blindly cheerleading for the USA.
That said, I find your lack of faith … disturbing.
Julian Assange’s response (I assume that’s him updating the Twitter feed giving his well-documented media whoring): blame the New York Times for making him look bad.
Sorry, NYT, It doesn’t matter how many sleazy hack jobs like Ravi Somaiya you hire, we’ve out published your Pentagon tabloid already.
Totally false that any WikiLeaks sources have been exposed or will be exposed. NYT drooling, senile, and evil.
He probably should have redacted…but respecting the privacy of secrets told? Fuck that.
Our government is anything but open. Whistleblowers are literally the only way we get information. Yes, Assange could be being a bit less cavalier and definitely could be working to keep names out of it better.
But does that call for locking him up or shutting him down? No. If you are preaching that, you aren’t seeing the reality here. This is literally one of the only times we will ever see into the internal workings of our government abroad. Currently, we only know what we find out decades later and what the government deigns to tell us.
Let play a guessing game to express the point here.
Our government, and others, doesn’t want these leaks to get out:
A) Because they care about the people involved
B) Because they don’t want their dirty secrets aired to the world and especially their people.
If you honestly think it’s A, you haven’t been paying attention.
And in which institutions like the NYT work with the government to actively lie to us (not just omit information), like in the case of the operative involved in the shooting in Pakistan.
Our government, and others, doesn’t want these leaks to get out:
A) Because they care about the people involved
B) Because they don’t want their dirty secrets aired to the world and especially their people.
If you honestly think it’s A, you haven’t been paying attention.
Well to be fair, those concerns aren’t mutually exclusive.
The media actively cooperates with governments on what stories they should tell us about, yes, agreed completely. It’s crazy, and even worse, it’s common place.
“No one has been harmed, but should anyone come to harm of course that would be a matter of deep regret - our goal is justice to innocents, not to harm them.” - Julian Assange
I can see why you’d think that Julian Assange would be responsible for those comments, given the imaginary responses from him you store in your head (see above). But given that he’s developed a surprisingly calm, level headed approach to the media in recent years (see above) those comments would suggest he’s lost the plot considerably, if he made them. Given that they are attributed to “the group”, probably not.
Honest question, what post would you be honestly questioning if wikileaks was choosing what it found to be revealing and only selectively releasing that?
Uhh… any post that said regardless of the content all secrets are evil… This is a question to a real person here, not some theoretical fight you seem to be hoping for.
I’m not hoping for a fight, I just got the impression you were asking an ‘honest question’ hoping to be able to jump on the expected answer.
Wikileaks got access to all diplomatic cables, what kind of group would they be if they decided which to keep secret and which to release? I don’t see how they ever had any choice, it was always going to be “release all” or “release none”.
“Oh, we’re sorry if releasing this in its entirety kills anyone. Unintended but really, it’s all for your good”.
It’s not like we had a chance to tell wikileaks whether or not to release it. They forced these cables on everyone. Imagine if every honest thought in your head or private conversation with a friend got transmitted to everyone immediately without your intervention - “Oh, she’s fat”, “She’s clumsy”. These cables are like internal thoughts, private conversations. Do the public need to know some of them because the government is hiding something? Maybe. Does the public need to know everything? Not at all.
Noone is forcing you to read them. These cables are not private thoughts but the works of government. Yes, the public needs to know everything. Informed consent requires the public know everything. All the cables should be released with no redactions. Truth is good.
