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Project Willow wrote:Don't worry SLAD, Nathan is like a dog chasing its tail, telling him his tail is not a rabbit just ruins his fun.
I'll give it a try though and state that people post items on this discussion board to foster discussion, not to prop some tacitly held political consensus.
(on edit: well, a lot of the time )
I wrote:...I would like to know if it's possible to browse any of the old stuff uploaded to wikileaks. Like police reports, college fraternity documents, internal white papers by autocratic regimes, etc. You know, the "everyday" stuff, like memoranda not released to the public on symbols commonly used by pedophile organizations, or white power groups, etc. Right now the only things I can navigate to from the front page are the war logs and war diaries. With google I can get to the "cables" that just broke, and that's it... this could be obnoxious corporate-style "branding" gone into PR 'scandal' overdrive.
JackRiddler wrote:...to ask a question in light of the certainty with which some declare Wikileaks to be a psychological operation of one kind or another.
If Wikileaks were genuine, what it would like?
In other words, what would it look like if Wikileaks is an independent group of anti-statist hackers who came together over years in an ad-hoc fashion, who are not working for an undisclosed intelligence operation, who are committed to undermining the rule of secrecy in international politics, who have gotten their hands on caches of classified documents, and who are releasing these to the public?
My answer is that it would look like what we are seeing.
However, if they are not genuine, it would also look like what we are seeing.
sunny wrote:WTH? He's got more faces than Lon Chaney.
nathan28 wrote:BTW, being a conspiracy theorist is, as us gov't cognitive infiltrators" are here to "nudge" (thanks Cass Sunstein!) those who will listen, not a political position, so how it generates "political" consensus is beyond my circular-reasoning-only intellect.
A First Take on the Cables
Josh Marshall | November 29, 2010, 3:10PM
We've given explicit marching orders to our editors and reporters not to get distracted by the 'meta' part of the wikileaks story and just focus on the details unearthed. So let me take the opportunity to perhaps contradict those marching orders and share some initial thoughts on the meta front.
First, we're covering all the details we can find. So that puts some real limits on how much we can credibly criticize the way these cables came to light. I'm also not sure we would have made different decisions than, say, The New York Times, if we'd been given the opportunity to report out the cables in advance of their release. And of course we here at TPM like every other news organization routinely file FOIA requests on the reasoning that it's in the public interest to get as much as possible of the inner workings of government exposed to the public.
But what Wikileaks is doing is categorically different. Many readers have written in to say -- without knowing quite how to put their finger on it -- that the indiscriminate nature of the release, just everything they could get their hands on -- seems more like an attack on the US government itself than an effort to inform American citizens about what their government is doing on their behalf. And even though I'm in the business of unearthing and sharing information, my gut says they're right.
That wasn't the case with some of the earlier revelations about Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm thinking particularly about the video footage of the helicopter shooting unarmed Iraqis that Wikileaks released earlier. That's the sort of information no government ever wants to see released. It is damaging. But it's also truth and something citizens need to evaluate what their government is doing in their name. And truth about important facts outweighs nebulous claims 'damage'. Mainly governments -- all governments -- just don't want their wrongdoing aired in public and they all use the inherent powers of the state to make sure it doesn't happen. But this indiscriminate mass release seems less like journalism than a form of informational anarchism, which has the collateral effect of revealing a lot of interesting and illuminating details about American foreign policy (on Iran especially) but has the basic aim of making it impossible to run a State Department or Foreign Ministry.
It makes sense if you think of the US government or its foreign policy apparatus as being basically a corrupt enterprise or one involved in systematic wrongdoing across the board. But if you don't, it seems much more questionable.
Another way of looking at this is that different parties involved have different legitimate equities at stake. The government has every right to keep its internal communications from appearing on a web a year or two after they take place. And in some cases, though classification is notoriously overused, they have plenty of reason to resort to classification. And journalists are mainly, though not absolutely, in the business of sharing information with readers. The government's right to be upset; journalists are write to share it with their readers. As David Kurtz just said in a discussion he and I were just having, you don't need to have a universal theory of right and wrong on this one. Still, I don't recognize what Wikileaks is doing here as some righteous act of government transparency. It's more like an attack, albeit one with consequences which can easily be overstated.
I realize in writing this that I'm trying to draw lines more clearly and brightly than the facts may bear. And as I've said, we're eagerly gobbling up the information. So I put these comments forward not as a definitive read but more as an initial reaction meant to give you a sense of my first take and get your reactions to help me refine my own.
nathan28 wrote:that gets bookended onto his podcasts has some really awesome psychedelic-garage-punk and I'm happy to discover it
DrVolin wrote:Jack, you downplay the obvious alternative that Wikileaks is genuine and a conduit for disinfo, spin, and limited hangouts (wikipipeline).
Wintler, a good advertising agency or a broadway producer would have no trouble orchestrating this minor bit of political theatre.
These megaleaks, as you call them that, we haven’t seen any of those from the private sector.
No, not at the same scale for the military.
Will we?
Yes. We have one related to a bank coming up, that’s a megaleak. It’s not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it’s either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it.
Is it a U.S. bank?
Yes, it’s a U.S. bank.
One that still exists?
Yes, a big U.S. bank.
The biggest U.S. bank?
No comment.
When will it happen?
Early next year. I won’t say more.
"While we refuse to pass judgment on Assange's character, and his motivations, it appears that he may have finally figured out that to enact change in a country, you have to go not after the politicians or even the military industrial complex. After all both of those are puppets for the moneyed interests. One has to go after the very heart of the financial oligarchy. Money always has made the world go round, never more so than in the US currently. Perhaps Assange can redeem himself of all attacks on his persona if he does succeed in disclosing something that is beyond mere watercooler talk and actually leads to at least one major prosecution. After all, the US' own regulatory and enforcement mechanisms are corrupt beyond repair, and completely unable to do so on their own...
smiths wrote:Perhaps Assange can redeem himself of all attacks on his persona if he does succeed in disclosing something that is beyond mere watercooler talk and actually leads to at least one major prosecution.
EastFinchleyite
30 November 2010 12:39AM
The single thing that stands out for me is before Wikileaks published these confidential emails, reports, and other documents, access to them was restricted to only 3 million other US personnel.
3 million.
The only people who didn't know what was going on was the general public; the poor sods like me who have to pay for this incompetence.
If it wasn't so tragic it would be a good laugh.
Second thoughts; it's both tragic and funny.
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