Post by rmarks1 on Apr 11, 2019 11:14:09 GMT -5
A sad day for Freedom of the Press. In this day and age when "democratic" governments wield more power than ever, Assange exposed their inner workings for all to see.
Bob
Regardless of how you feel about Assange as a person, there's no question that WikiLeaks, founded in 2006, has been central to starting a salutary era of forced transparency, a time when state and corporate actors have much more trouble keeping secrets. Forced transparency is bigger than WikiLeaks, of course. It's one of the defining dynamics of our time, riding the same technological wave that gave us Napster and other innovations that disperse power and information in all sorts of unauthorized ways. But let's give credit and praise where it's due. The world is better for the fact that it's harder than ever for governments to keep their own secrets.
Early exposés by the organization included documents from the Church of Scientology and East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit. In 2010, the organization came into its own by publishing a trove of documents given to it by Chelsea Manning, then an Army intelligence analyst. Among the things that came to light:
graphic video of a U.S. Apache helicopter killing Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists;
90,000-plus pages of military memos, now known as the Afghan War Diaries, that showed that the Taliban and the Pakistani government were in regular contact and that civilian casualties were far greater than the U.S. officially acknowledged;
400,000 pages of documents about the war in Iraq, including revelation of 15,000 unreported civilian deaths and brutal reprisals by Iraqi forces;
diplomatic cables that showed a wide gulf between the U.S.'s public positions and private analysis.
In 2016, of course, WikiLeaks also released hacked emails from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, which unmasked various bad-faith dealings within the Democratic Party establishment.
There are legitimate questions about WikiLeaks' relationship with the Russian government, but it's the worst sort of whataboutism to argue that WikiLeaks' revelatons about the United States government should not be taken seriously until it releases equally damaging material about, say, the Putin regime. The information it has shared about the United States is widely understood to be accurate; calls for some sort of geopolitical balance doesn't make the group's revelations about our leaders any less true.
reason.com/blog/2019/04/11/julian-assange-and-wikileaks-deserve-our
Early exposés by the organization included documents from the Church of Scientology and East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit. In 2010, the organization came into its own by publishing a trove of documents given to it by Chelsea Manning, then an Army intelligence analyst. Among the things that came to light:
graphic video of a U.S. Apache helicopter killing Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists;
90,000-plus pages of military memos, now known as the Afghan War Diaries, that showed that the Taliban and the Pakistani government were in regular contact and that civilian casualties were far greater than the U.S. officially acknowledged;
400,000 pages of documents about the war in Iraq, including revelation of 15,000 unreported civilian deaths and brutal reprisals by Iraqi forces;
diplomatic cables that showed a wide gulf between the U.S.'s public positions and private analysis.
In 2016, of course, WikiLeaks also released hacked emails from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, which unmasked various bad-faith dealings within the Democratic Party establishment.
There are legitimate questions about WikiLeaks' relationship with the Russian government, but it's the worst sort of whataboutism to argue that WikiLeaks' revelatons about the United States government should not be taken seriously until it releases equally damaging material about, say, the Putin regime. The information it has shared about the United States is widely understood to be accurate; calls for some sort of geopolitical balance doesn't make the group's revelations about our leaders any less true.
reason.com/blog/2019/04/11/julian-assange-and-wikileaks-deserve-our
Bob