The Wikileaks Question

[lupercal]

Perhaps, there could be a wiki subforum here, like there is for the Franklin Scandel.

An excellent idea, for a host of excellent reasons, not least that this ludicrous thread has driven away two of my very favorite RI members and should have been shut down long before Percy showed up to make it even more inane. JMHO.

[JackRiddler]

.

Obvious, pointless flamewar:

Perhaps, there could be a wiki subforum here, like there is for the Franklin Scandel.

An excellent idea, for a host of excellent reasons, not least that this ludicrous thread has driven away two of my very favorite RI members and should have been shut down long before Percy showed up to make it even more inane. JMHO.

I suggest a Lone Wolf Subforum, where lupercal's nocturnal eyes can find refuge from being subjected to the interests of the dozen others who continue to add to this and a couple of the other Wikileaks threads.

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EDIT, HOURS LATER: Events on another thread seem to require me to make the obvious point that the above comment isn't directed at chump's harmless and irrelevant suggestion (I suspect people will continue posting where they like, same as it's always been) but at lupercal's implicit admission that, since he's exhausted all three groans in his register, he must demand that the kids stop playing on their own lawns.

[JackRiddler]

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William Blum weighs in:

Wikileaks, the United States, Sweden, and Devil's Island

December 16 ... I'm standing in the snow in front of the White House ... Standing with Veterans for Peace ... I'm only a veteran of standing in front of the White House; the first time was February 1965, handing out flyers against the war in Vietnam. I was working for the State Department at the time and my biggest fear was that someone from that noble institution would pass by and recognize me.

Five years later I was still protesting Vietnam, although long gone from the State Department. Then came Cambodia. And Laos. Soon, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Then Panama was the new great threat to America, to freedom and democracy and all things holy and decent, so it had to be bombed without mercy. Followed by the first war against the people of Iraq, and the 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia. Then the land of Afghanistan had rained down upon it depleted uranium, napalm, phosphorous bombs, and other witches' brews and weapons of the chemical dust; then Iraq again. And I've skipped a few. I think I hold the record for most times picketing the White House by a right-handed batter.

And through it all, the good, hard-working, righteous people of America have believed mightily that their country always means well; some even believe to this day that we never started a war, certainly nothing deserving of the appellation "war of aggression".

On that same snowy day last month Julian Assange of Wikileaks was freed from prison in London and told reporters that he was more concerned that the United States might try to extradite him than he was about being extradited to Sweden, where he presumably faces "sexual" charges. 1

That's a fear many political and drug prisoners in various countries have expressed in recent years. The United States is the new Devil's Island of the Western world. From the mid-19th century to the mid-20th, political prisoners were shipped to that god-forsaken strip of French land off the eastern coast of South America. One of the current residents of the new Devil's Island is Bradley Manning, the former US intelligence analyst suspected of leaking diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. Manning has been imprisoned for seven months, first in Kuwait, then at a military base in Virginia, and faces virtual life in prison if found guilty, of something. Without being tried or convicted of anything, he is allowed only very minimal contact with the outside world; or with people, daylight, or news; among the things he is denied are a pillow, sheets, and exercise; his sleep is restricted and frequently interrupted. See Glenn Greenwald's discussion of how Manning's treatment constitutes torture. 2

A friend of the young soldier says that many people are reluctant to talk about Manning's deteriorating physical and mental condition because of government harassment, including surveillance, seizure of their computer without a warrant, and even attempted bribes. "This has had such an intimidating effect that many are afraid to speak out on his behalf." 3 A developer of the transparency software used by Wikileaks was detained for several hours last summer by federal agents at a Newark, New Jersey airport, where he was questioned about his connection to Wikileaks and Assange as well as his opinions about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 4

This is but a tiny incident from the near-century buildup of the American police state, from the Red Scare of the 1920s to the McCarthyism of the 1950s to the crackdown against Central American protesters in the 1980s ... elevated by the War on Drugs ... now multiplied by the War on Terror. It's not the worst police state in history; not even the worst police state in the world today; but nonetheless a police state, and certainly the most pervasive police state ever — a Washington Post study has just revealed that there are 4,058 separate federal, state and local "counterterrorism" organizations spread across the United States, each with its own responsibilities and jurisdictions. 5 The police of America, of many types, generally get what and who they want. If the United States gets its hands on Julian Assange, under any legal pretext, fear for him; it might be the end of his life as a free person; the actual facts of what he's done or the actual wording of US laws will not matter; hell hath no fury like an empire scorned.

John Burns, chief foreign correspondent for The New York Times, after interviewing Assange, stated: "He is profoundly of the conviction that the United States is a force for evil in the world, that it's destructive of democracy." 6 Can anyone who believes that be entitled to a full measure of human rights on Devil's Island?

The Wikileaks documents may not produce any world-changing revelations, but every day they are adding to the steady, gradual erosion of people's belief in the US government's good intentions, which is necessary to overcome a lifetime of indoctrination. Many more individuals over the years would have been standing in front of the White House if they had had access to the plethora of information that floods people today; which is not to say that we would have succeeded in stopping any of the wars; that's a question of to what extent the United States is a democracy.

One further consequence of the release of the documents may be to put an end to the widespread belief that Sweden, or the Swedish government, is peaceful, progressive, neutral and independent. Stockholm's behavior in this matter and others has been as American-poodle-like as London's, as it lined itself up with an Assange-accuser who has been associated with right-wing anti-Castro Cubans, who are of course US-government-supported. This is the same Sweden that for some time in recent years was working with the CIA on its torture-rendition flights and has about 500 soldiers in Afghanistan. Sweden is the world's largest per capita arms exporter, and for years has taken part in US/NATO military exercises, some within its own territory. The left should get themselves a new hero-nation. Try Cuba.

There's also the old stereotype held by Americans of Scandinavians practicing a sophisticated and tolerant attitude toward sex, an image that was initiated, or enhanced, by the celebrated 1967 Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow), which had been banned for awhile in the United States. And now what do we have? Sweden sending Interpol on an international hunt for a man who apparently upset two women, perhaps for no more than sleeping with them both in the same week.

And while they're at it, American progressives should also lose their quaint belief that the BBC is somehow a liberal broadcaster. Americans are such suckers for British accents. The BBC's Today presenter, John Humphrys, asked Assange: "Are you a sexual predator?" Assange said the suggestion was "ridiculous", adding: "Of course not". Humphrys then asked Assange how many woman he had slept with. 7 Would even Fox News have descended to that level? I wish Assange had been raised in the streets of Brooklyn, as I was. He would then have known precisely how to reply to such a question: "You mean including your mother?"

Another group of people who should learn a lesson from all this are the knee-reflex conspiracists. Several of them have already written me snide letters informing me of my naiveté in not realizing that Israel is actually behind the release of the Wikileaks documents; which is why, they inform me, that nothing about Israel is mentioned. I had to inform them that I had already seen a few documents putting Israel in a bad light. I've since seen others, and Assange, in an interview with Al Jazeera on December 23, stated that only a meager number of files related to Israel had been published so far because the publications in the West that were given exclusive rights to publish the secret documents were reluctant to publish much sensitive information about Israel. (Imagine the flak Germany's Der Spiegel would get hit with.) "There are 3,700 files related to Israel and the source of 2,700 files is Israel," said Assange. "In the next six months we intend to publish more files." 8

Naturally, several other individuals have informed me that it's the CIA that is actually behind the document release.

http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer89.html

[Nordic]

I haven't read all of this thread, so for all I know, this has already been posted here, and if so, just ignore this.

But if it hasn't, a friend turned me on to this.

Assange's old blog:

http://web.archive.org/web/20071020051936/http://iq.org

I found it to be pretty fascinating reading.

[Nordic]

Did that just put a quiet end to this thread?

On reading the blog, I was struck by what (for lack of a better term) a "good guy" he seems to be.

So I dunno. I still say I don't know squat about what's really going on here, but I found this really illuminating about Assange the man.

[JackRiddler]

Did that just put a quiet end to this thread?

I doubt that!

On reading the blog, I was struck by what (for lack of a better term) a "good guy" he seems to be.

So I dunno. I still say I don't know squat about what's really going on here, but I found this really illuminating about Assange the man.

We had it here and it was quoted extensively back on page whatever of this monster (probably in the 20s). Reading his old blog came as a surprise to me, too. Up to then I wasn't automatically averse to the "creepy Assange" propaganda, I was willing to see him as a thrill-seeking narcissist (he obviously has both those qualities), but I thought it irrelevant to the Wikileaks affair or the leaks themselves. It made a big difference to see his thoughts and also his early rationales for Wikileaks, and where he was otherwise coming from already four years ago. Many of the posts (like the one about the corporations, called "United States of What?") would fit seamlessly into the RI mix.

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[Plutonia]

Here's more Assange - from Counterpunch:

Of Potholes and Foresight; The Road to Hanoi

By JULIAN ASSANGE
December 5, 2006

It seems like everyone I meet plans to follow the young Che Guavara, now that seduction of random latinos has been politically sanctified, and take off on their motorbike and adventure through the poverty and pleasures of South and Central America. And who can blame them? But there are other lands to explore.

Last year I rode my motorcycle from Ho Chi Min City (Saigon) to Hanoi, up the highway that borders the South China Sea.

On the road to Hanoi something caught my attention and that of every vehicle near me. We had to watch constantly and take action every few seconds or it would have killed us all.

The road to Hanoi is a Vietnamese economic artery but is nonetheless dominated by potholes, thousands the size of bomb craters. There are constant reminders of "The American War" all over Vietnam, and perhaps this was one of them, but in a more indirect way.

To a physicist a pothole has an interesting life. It starts out as a few loose stones. As wheels pass over, these stones grind together and against the under surface. Their edges are rounded off and the depression they are in also becomes rounder by their action. The stones become pestles to the hole's motor. Smaller stones and grit move between the spaces of larger stones and add to the grinding action. The hole enlarges, and deepens. Small stones are soon entirely worn away, but in the process liberate increasingly larger stones from the advancing edge of the hole. The increasing depth and surface capture more and more energy from passing wheels. The destruction of the road surface accelerates until the road is abandoned or the hole is filled.

Road decay is, like a dental decay, a run away process. Utility rapidly diminishes and costs of repair accelerate, and just like teeth it is more efficient to fill a pothole as soon as it is noticed.

But this measure of efficiency is not the metric of politics and it is a political feedback process that lays behind the filling in of potholes on almost every road on earth.

That process is driven by the behavior of politically influential road users who are themselves motivated to action by psychologically negative encounters with potholes.

When potholes are small, the resultant political pressures are not sufficient to overcome the forces of other interests groups who compete for labour and resources. Likewise, it is difficult to motivate people who have other passions and pains in their life to go to the dentist when their teeth do not ache. Both are caused by limitations in knowledge and its distillation: foresight.

Why is this surprising? It is surprising because we are used to looking at government spending through the lens of economic utility; a lens which claims the political process as a derivative. This vision claims that political forces compete for access to the treasury to further their own utility. Hence, military intelligence and public health compete with road maintenance for funding and so should attempt to minimize the latter's drain on the treasury. But that drain is minimized by filling in potholes immediately!

Foresight requires trustworthy information about the current state of the world, cognitive ability to draw predictive inferences and economic stability to give them a meaningful home. It's not only in Vietnam where secrecy, malfeasance and unequal access have eaten into the first requirement of foresight ("truth and lots of it").

Foresight can produce outcomes that leave all major interests groups better off. Likewise the lack of it, or doing the dumb thing, can harm almost everyone.

Computer scientists have long had a great phrase for the dependency of foresight on trustworthy information; "garbage in, garbage out".

In intelligence agency oversight we have "The Black Budget blues", but the phrase is probably most familiar to American readers as "The Fox News Effect".

Julian Assange is president of a NGO and Australia's most infamous former computer hacker. He was convicted of attacks on the US intelligence and publishing a magazine which inspired crimes against the Commonwealth. He is the co-author of Underground and can be reached at http://iq.org/

[crikkett]

Did that just put a quiet end to this thread?

I think we just took the day off.

Jack: who is William Blum?

[Joe Hillshoist]

Here's more Assange - from Counterpunch:

Of Potholes and Foresight; The Road to Hanoi

By JULIAN ASSANGE
December 5, 2006

It seems like everyone I meet plans to follow the young Che Guavara, now that seduction of random latinos has been politically sanctified, and take off on their motorbike and adventure through the poverty and pleasures of South and Central America. And who can blame them? But there are other lands to explore.

Last year I rode my motorcycle from Ho Chi Min City (Saigon) to Hanoi, up the highway that borders the South China Sea.

On the road to Hanoi something caught my attention and that of every vehicle near me. We had to watch constantly and take action every few seconds or it would have killed us all.

The road to Hanoi is a Vietnamese economic artery but is nonetheless dominated by potholes, thousands the size of bomb craters. There are constant reminders of "The American War" all over Vietnam, and perhaps this was one of them, but in a more indirect way.

To a physicist a pothole has an interesting life. It starts out as a few loose stones. As wheels pass over, these stones grind together and against the under surface. Their edges are rounded off and the depression they are in also becomes rounder by their action. The stones become pestles to the hole's motor. Smaller stones and grit move between the spaces of larger stones and add to the grinding action. The hole enlarges, and deepens. Small stones are soon entirely worn away, but in the process liberate increasingly larger stones from the advancing edge of the hole. The increasing depth and surface capture more and more energy from passing wheels. The destruction of the road surface accelerates until the road is abandoned or the hole is filled.

Road decay is, like a dental decay, a run away process. Utility rapidly diminishes and costs of repair accelerate, and just like teeth it is more efficient to fill a pothole as soon as it is noticed.

But this measure of efficiency is not the metric of politics and it is a political feedback process that lays behind the filling in of potholes on almost every road on earth.

That process is driven by the behavior of politically influential road users who are themselves motivated to action by psychologically negative encounters with potholes.

When potholes are small, the resultant political pressures are not sufficient to overcome the forces of other interests groups who compete for labour and resources. Likewise, it is difficult to motivate people who have other passions and pains in their life to go to the dentist when their teeth do not ache. Both are caused by limitations in knowledge and its distillation: foresight.

Why is this surprising? It is surprising because we are used to looking at government spending through the lens of economic utility; a lens which claims the political process as a derivative. This vision claims that political forces compete for access to the treasury to further their own utility. Hence, military intelligence and public health compete with road maintenance for funding and so should attempt to minimize the latter's drain on the treasury. But that drain is minimized by filling in potholes immediately!

Foresight requires trustworthy information about the current state of the world, cognitive ability to draw predictive inferences and economic stability to give them a meaningful home. It's not only in Vietnam where secrecy, malfeasance and unequal access have eaten into the first requirement of foresight ("truth and lots of it").

Foresight can produce outcomes that leave all major interests groups better off. Likewise the lack of it, or doing the dumb thing, can harm almost everyone.

Computer scientists have long had a great phrase for the dependency of foresight on trustworthy information; "garbage in, garbage out".

In intelligence agency oversight we have "The Black Budget blues", but the phrase is probably most familiar to American readers as "The Fox News Effect".

Julian Assange is president of a NGO and Australia's most infamous former computer hacker. He was convicted of attacks on the US intelligence and publishing a magazine which inspired crimes against the Commonwealth. He is the co-author of Underground and can be reached at http://iq.org/

Can't half tell he grew up round here somewhere. Fucking potholes.

[JackRiddler]

Did that just put a quiet end to this thread?

I think we just took the day off.

Jack: who is William Blum?

In his youth a State Department employee who quit in protest during the Vietnam war, he later authored the canonical open-source history of CIA covert operations since 1947. The CIA: A Forgotten History is a thick book of 50+ chronologically arranged chapters detailing attempted and successful CIA-sponsored coups d'etat, assassinations, mass murders, psyops, sabotages, corruptions, briberies, extortions, human experimentations and other acts of a covert war on civilization around the world. (Whether the CIA itself keeps a more complete version or has shredded it is an open question.) This has made him a demi-god to the scholarly left, on a level approaching Chomsky's. He puts out an irregular online newsletter called the Empire Report (and is too old fashioned to call it a blog!) and more recently authored a look at US foreign policy called Rogue State. Follow the link above to see his newsletters.

.

[Plutonia]

From Alternet:

8 Smears and Misconceptions About WikiLeaks Spread By the Media
By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd and Tana Ganeva, AlterNet
Posted on December 31, 2010, Printed on December 31, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/149369/

The corporate media's tendency to blare misinformation and outright fabrications has been particularly egregious in coverage of WikiLeaks. As Glenn Greenwald has argued, mainstream news outlets are parroting smears and falsehoods about the whistleblower site and its founder Julian Assange, helping to perpetuate a number of "zombie lies" -- misconceptions that refuse to die no matter how much they conflict with known reality, basic logic and well-publicized information.

Here are the bogus narratives that keep appearing in newspapers and on the airwaves.

1. Fearmongering that WikiLeaks revelations will result in deaths. So far there's no evidence that WikiLeaks' revelations have cost lives. In fact, right before the cables were released, Pentagon officials admitted there were no documented instances of people being killed because of information exposed by WikiLeaks' previous document releases (and unlike the diplomatic cables, the Afghanistan files were unredacted).

That's not to say that the exposure of secret government files can't somehow lead to someone, somewhere, someday, being hurt. But that's a pretty high bar to set, especially by a government engaged in multiple military operations -- many of them secret -- that lead to untold civilian casualties.

2. Spreading the lie that WikiLeaks posted all the cables. WikiLeaks has posted fewer than 2,000 of the 251,287 cables in its possession. The whistleblower released those documents in tandem with major news outlets including the Guardian, El Pais and Le Monde, and used most of the redactions employed by those papers to protect the identities of people whose lives could be endangered by exposure. The AP detailed this process in a December 3 article, but this did not stop officials and pundits from howling that WikiLeaks "indiscriminately" dumped all the cables online. Much of the media mindlessly repeated the claim.

Greenwald and others have battled to kill the myth that the whistleblower site threw up all the cables without taking any precautions to protect people, but it keeps coming up. Just this week NPR issued an apology for all the times contributors and guests have implied or outright voiced the falsehood that WikiLeaks blindly posted all the cables at once.

3. Falsely claiming that Assange has committed a crime regarding WikiLeaks. The State Department is working really hard to pin a crime on Julian Assange. The problem is that so far he doesn't appear to have broken any laws. Assange is not a U.S. citizen, he does not work for the U.S. government, and the documents WikiLeaks posted were procured by someone else. As Greenwald has repeatedly pointed out, it's not against the law to publish classified U.S. government information. If it were, hundreds of journalists would be in prison right now.

While the government tries to conjure up a legal justification for prosecuting Assange, the media is helping out by fanning the narrative that he's some criminal mastermind. Major outlets continue to host guests who accuse Assange of criminal behavior without quite specifying what his crime is. In a much derided CNN debate between Bush Homeland Security adviser Fran Townsend and Glenn Greenwald hosted by Jessica Yellin, Greenwald had to repeatedly bat away the assertion that Assange has "profited" from "criminal" acts.

The effort to tar Assange as a criminal -- spearheaded by government officials and helped along by the media -- may have a chilling effect on future whistleblowers.

4. Denying that WikiLeaks is a journalistic enterprise. Public officials and pundits continue to claim that WikiLeaks is not a journalistic outlet, even though it procured the scoop of a decade. But much of what WikiLeaks does is identical to the activities of other news sources. WikiLeaks receives secrets from anonymous sources, which it then reveals to the public -- news is nothing if not a checks and balances system for the government, a fundamental right of a free press. Secondly, it curates those secrets before revealing them -- a journalist selecting relevant and appropriate material from a confidential document is not that different from WikiLeaks redacting certain parts of the cables.

Because WikiLeaks’ actions fall under the First Amendment, all journalists should be outraged if the American government attempts to prosecute. If WikiLeaks is prosecuted for conducting a journalistic enterprise, what rights will be stripped from journalists in the future? One of the most respected journalistic institutions in the world, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is speaking out. Earlier this month, 20 faculty members drafted and signed a letter to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder saying that WikiLeaks' prosecution will set a “dangerous precedent for reporters in any publication or medium, potentially chilling investigative journalism and other First Amendment-protected activity ... Prosecution in the Wikileaks case would greatly damage American standing in free-press debates worldwide and would dishearten those journalists looking to this nation for inspiration.”

The Walkley Foundation, an institution of journalism in Assange’s home of Australia, put it more succinctly in its own letter of support for WikiLeaks: “To aggressively attempt to shut WikiLeaks down, to threaten to prosecute those who publish official leaks, and to pressure companies to cease doing commercial business with WikiLeaks, is a serious threat to democracy, which relies on a free and fearless press.”

5. Denying a link between Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks, despite Ellsberg's support of the site. In 1969, Daniel Ellsberg secretly photocopied classified documents that proved the Johnson administration had lied to the American public about the chances of winning the Vietnam War, which it knew from the beginning were slim to none. By 1970, Ellsberg had become disillusioned with the desperate situation and began circulating the documents, first to U.S. senators, then to the New York Times, which reported the contents in a groundbreaking series of articles that set in motion the end to the war...and the Nixon administration. By doing so, he helped end an unjust war carried out in the name of the American people. His actions are widely heralded.

In a parallel scenario, WikiLeaks is acting the part of the Times and other outlets that reported the Pentagon Papers -- releasing information of secret, and in many cases, unjust actions carried out in the name of the American people without our knowledge. Alleged leaker Bradley Manning is the Ellsberg in this situation; similarly, if chats between himself and Adrian Lamo printed in Wired are true, he unleashed the cables out of an overwhelming sense of justice, saying, "I want people to see the truth regardless of who they are because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."

Earlier this month, Ellsberg appeared on the Colbert Report and praised Manning. “If Bradley Manning did what he's accused of, then he's a hero of mine and I think he did a great service to this country,” said Ellsberg. “We're not in the mess we're in, in the world, because of too many leaks....I say there should be some secrets. But I also say we invaded Iraq illegally because of a lack of a Bradley Manning at that time.”

6. Accusing Assange of profiting from WikiLeaks. Newspapers this week led with reports that Assange has signed a lucrative book deal, information that inspired mainstream outlets like CNN to mock Assange for "profiting" from the cables despite his anti-corporate ideology. In the CNN interview mentioned above, Jessica Yellin asked Glenn Greenwald if he had "Any qualms about the fact that he is essentially profiting from classified information." Greenwald pointed out that Assange is hardly profiting from the leaked materials, but rather trying to make a dent in the legal fees he's accruing as governments around the world go after him. Greenwald also pointed out that trying to make money from journalism is pretty routine in the profession. Bob Woodward, for example, has written multiple books based on classified documents.

7. Calling Assange a terrorist. Last week Vice-President Joe Biden, part of an administration that's overseen the escalation of the disastrous war in Afghanistan, joined Mitch McConnell and Sarah Palin in calling Assange a "terrorist."

As far as we know, Assange's leaks haven't killed anyone. Nor has he threatened to perpetrate violence to promote a political agenda, the definition of terrorism. Nevertheless public officials continue to try to link Assange to terrorism in the public consciousness.

8. Minimizing the significance of the cables. Even though only a tiny fraction of the cables have been released, many critics promote the idea that they reveal "nothing new" and are therefore of no value. But even the cables released so far have contained important revelations about the U.S. and its allies.

Here are just a few of the stories revealed by the documents:

-- U.S. special forces working inside Pakistan

-- UK agreed to shield U.S. interests in Iraq probe

-- Secret bombings of Yemen

-- State Department role in the Honduran coup

-- U.S. pressured Spain to drop Bush torture probe

-- U.S. sought to retaliate against Europe over refusing to allow Monsanto GM crops

-- Drug Enforcement Agency goes global, beyond drugs

-- Shell's grip on the Nigerian state

The promise that the next release will target a U.S. bank, and that it will have an effect similar to the Enron disclosures, according to Assange, certainly portends that the trove of information we haven’t yet seen could be explosive. And that is incredibly valuable to the American public.

Smears that get a platform at this Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs, panel discussion. The sole brown dissenting voice is relegated to last minutes - though the lady-journalist makes some good points but she's foreign too. It's really worth taking the time to watch this - enjoy:

[Nordic]

Many of the posts (like the one about the corporations, called "United States of What?") would fit seamlessly into the RI mix.

Yeah, I really liked that one.

[JackRiddler]

From Alternet:

6. Accusing Assange of profiting from WikiLeaks. Newspapers this week led with reports that Assange has signed a lucrative book deal, information that inspired mainstream outlets like CNN to mock Assange for "profiting" from the cables despite his anti-corporate ideology. In the CNN interview mentioned above, Jessica Yellin asked Glenn Greenwald if he had "Any qualms about the fact that he is essentially profiting from classified information." Greenwald pointed out that Assange is hardly profiting from the leaked materials, but rather trying to make a dent in the legal fees he's accruing as governments around the world go after him. Greenwald also pointed out that trying to make money from journalism is pretty routine in the profession. Bob Woodward, for example, has written multiple books based on classified documents.

God, this is so old! It's been done against EVERYONE. This week they added the fact that he now pays himself a salary! (A medium one for someone doing this kind of work.)

Formula: Accuse Assange (or whoever's in the way of power) of not being Jesus. One may never challenge the status quo and is a total hypocrite unless one foregoes using any products of civilization and embodies Jesus in every way, which is also to say: is already dead. If anyone defends Assange (or whoever the target is) against this, accuse them of blindly worshipping Assange as though he were Jesus.

.

Because you'd have to be Jesus not to be a corrupt fucker from go who enthusiastically supports the status quo. This is all power lovers know of the moral universe: you're either a corrupt fucker or a naive hypocrite. If you're not exactly like them, or aspiring to be them, or keeping your place, then you're a loser / jealous / a fanatic who outrageously partakes in the same benefits of electricity, cars, and breathing on the same planet.

.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Because you'd have to be Jesus not to be a corrupt fucker from go who enthusiastically supports the status quo. This is all power lovers know of the moral universe: you're either a corrupt fucker or a naive hypocrite.

That belongs in the RI quotes thread.

[Metric Pringle]

Wow.

"Judith Miller took on the WikiLeaks founder during an appearance on Fox News Watch Saturday, arguing that Assange was a bad journalist "because he didn't care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out, or determine whether or not it hurt anyone.""

The irony is incredible. Her defence for the Iraq story -

""[M]y job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of the New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal," she said."

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/repo ... sange-bad/