I think the scale of these leaks matters. I can respect someone who leaks selective documents to expose illegal/harmful activity but Manning and Snowden both dumped out huge troves of documents they couldn't possibly have reviewed and without regard to the harm it might cause. These are activists, not heroes, and they deserve to be punished.
Why do you imagine that an activist, especially one whose activism is in revealing the damaging, even deadly, misdeeds of governments and related authorities, deserves to be punished? Would you rather not know that those authorities have done bad things?
As for the scale of the leaks, that's a consequence of the scale of incriminating material, which is not a fault of any leaker or publisher.
How about Catherine Herridge and Cheryl Atkinson? Are they activists too? Before you defame Snowden and Assange, you might want to listen to their testimony before the House judiciary committee.
Sorry but scale is irrelevant, except for the fact that Snowden and Assange aired more dirty laundry that we're not supposed to see. The fact that the deep state is going after Herridge and Atkinson proves my point.
Some parts of what Assange let out weren’t “dirty laundry.” They were human beings who helped American soldiers on the ground and they suffered for it. For Assange to hide behind the First Amendment, he should have redacted the names of Iraqis and Afghans who wanted nothing more than a better life.
If you click on the links provided in the article, Assange denies having said “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”. He also “claims that all the documents released through his organisation had been checked for named informants and that 15,000 such documents had been held back”. The Times of London claims to have “found the names of dozens of Afghans credited with providing detailed intelligence to U.S. forces. Their villages are given for identification and also, in many cases, their fathers' names”. So, who are you going to believe?
If sloppy redaction resulted in Afghans being put at risk that is inexcusable. Engaging in a 20-year war and LYING about its prosecution to Americans funding it, resulting in hundreds of thousands of Afghan deaths is criminal. How come Assange is the only one in jail?
Whether or not Manning and Snowden were heroic (I happen to think Snowden was), they violated agreements they made to maintain secrecy as a part of their jobs, meaning they technically acted outside of free speech rights. Assange shared information as a member of the public. Maybe you disagree with what he did, but can you cite a clear, neutral principle that justifies his prosecution and not that of investigative journalism generally? Clearly publication of classified information has, in the past, been an important part of the democratic process holding state actors accountable. Moreover, if the state can silence and jail anyone who publishes information that the state claims is secret (in practice, then, anything inconvenient), then it has executed a complete end-run around public accountability.
I think your put your finger on what perturbs me about Assange, and why I am in two kinds about him being free to resume his Wikileaks. It is the scale, and the fact the documents are revealed with little accompanying narrative or analysis that makes one wonder about due diligence and whether a rogue activist hacker is the equivalent of a journalist. I guess he's not so much a journalist as someone who facilitates both whistle-blowing and journalism?
For a second I thought I had mistakenly opened "The Nation." The lead anecdote sure makes me glad there weren't cockpit voice recordings during the Battle of Britain or the fight in the South Pacific. Are we to think that fog-of-war tragedies pose the same moral problem as the Guatemalan STD experiments? And the idea of "whistleblower" is being stretched pretty thin: a clinician's firsthand account of unethical pseudo-medicine is good, basic "60 Minutes" whistleblower stuff, but it's not national security. Conflating them just undermines the credibility here. I nearly gave up on this site after the sensitive-artists-of-Guantanamo piece run last Sep. 11, and I don't know if it can bear much more 9-11 revisionism.
I agree, except for the end bit with exasperation claim 'I'm almost leaving.' I'm fine with reading a wide array, even things I find wrong-headed, as long as comments continue on. They often keep my hopes alive!
I’m surprised (and a little disappointed) that only one comment so far points out the hypocrisy between America covering up the accidental civilian deaths in our own wars, while simultaneously demanding that Israel commit suicide as punishment for accidental civilian deaths in its defense against an enemy that wants to exterminate its people. That our best friend, and the only democracy in the Middle East should suffer endless massacres all for a few votes in Michigan is despicable.
I'm on the fence about Julian Assange. In my mind, if he simply published information that was received by him, and no prosecution is warranted. However, if he participated in gaining that information then he's essentially a spy.
I'm glad that we were able to view the information provided by Chelsea Manning. But that said, she deserves to be in prison. If you are in the military and you take an oath, you can't reveal classified information. If she wanted to be a whistleblower she could have gone to members of Congress, by going to WikiLeaks she made herself into a spy and committed treason.
First off, nobody in Afghanistan or Iraq actually gives a flying F about being nice in war. Look at who actually won. Only western liberals actually care about ensuring America lose every conflict it enters. What actually matters is enforcing the law, something the demented liberals refused to do and left both countries as smoldering wrecks because of it.
This piece is literally crying about Gitmo while Afghan women are being stoned to death. It’s absurd.
Secondly, wouldn’t he be able to explain himself in an open court? He is innocent until proven guilty. But because he’s obviously guilty, he doesn’t want to be tried. Ditto Snowden, who would have stood trial had he not run away to Daddy Vladimir’s protection after he betrayed his own Motherland.
Assange should ask for leniency because he is only an Australian. Manning and Snowden should have faced Capital punishment, but Obama was OK with the US losing.
Manning and Snowden both signed documents to protect classified information so they did break the law while fully knowing they shouldn't. However, I get very queasy when they go after journalists because this administration in particular seems bent on crushing any and all dissent. I fully support trying those who gave Assange the information, because they are the ones who actually broke the law and they knew they agreed to protect the classified information. I don't believe they should be trying Assange.
I see your point, and even a couple years ago I would probably have agreed with you. I just think after seeing the gross corruption of our government, that we should err on the side of the 1st amendment.
I certainly understand your POV. But I think in part, maybe large part, journalism has facilitated that corruption. Knowingly and willfully aided and abetted the corruption. The Twitter files left no doubt of that. So I would like to see the issues aired in the bright light others have addressed in their comments. Just the bright light of a courtroom. We really do need to iron out this publisher kerfuffle anyway. As for fixing the overall corruption I think that is what we should vote to ensure. Assuming we can have uncorrupted elections. Otherwise the Republic, and those who hold its values dear, are doomed.
Who are journalists? How can one distinguish between journalists & propagandists? Let's ask NPR, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, Der Vashington Beobachter Post und Der Deu York Sturmer Zeitung!
Great question. I had a long discourse once with our very own commenter Shane Gericke about journalistic standards that I found very edifying. It started when I said some form of journalistic accountability was needed and he countered that would not be possible because of risk of 1st Amendment infringement. IOW once a government entity is involved Ist Amendment freedom cannot be assured. That is paraphrasing but the conversation continued. My takeaway is that I lived the first 50 or so years of my life in a golden age of journalism. Journalism sucked before and it certainly sucks now. But the golden age came about because of the way newspapers developed in the 1900s, culminating with very powerful editors who had strict standards of journalistic integrity. That carried forward to television news and even to the early days of cable news. The internet killed it though because it destroyed advertising revenue, which destroyed budgets, which destroyed the Golden Age of journalism. But the moral of the story, at least for me, is that one arose before and one can arise again. And ideally it will come from journalists themselves or in response to demands by consumers of journalism not from government imposition.
Assange obviously has an ax to grind with the US government, but not with authoritarian governments around the world. He doesn’t care about repression or about the safety of people fighting against the Taliban or similar regimes. His purpose is simply and clearly to hurt the US in order to satisfy his obsession. Why shouldn’t he be put on trial, a fair trial where he would be able to defend and explain his actions?
If you would read the rest of the thread, you would notice the distinction between whistleblowers (and those who publish their material) and dumpers of classified material. Whistleblowers provide specific evidence of wrongdoing, while dumpers (like Assange, Manning and Snowden) indiscriminately release huge amounts of data (sometimes millions of pages), which they could not even have possibly read, with a simple and clear purpose: harm they target, which in this case is the US. Assange never even bothered to publish materials exposing any nasty regime in the world. Clear enough for you?
You're implying that revealing truth that the authorities want to stay hidden doesn't qualify as whistle-blowing. Is that what you believe? Revealing the identity of covert operatives isn't justifiable, but revealing government actions that put the lie to the official narrative certainly is.
Let me repeat this very slowly for you. When a “freedom hero” dumps millions of pages of secret documents, he obviously didn’t read them all to tell if the content is about wrongdoing by the government or it’s just secrets that need to stay secret from our enemies. When Snowden pointed out that the US government is spying illegally on Americans, he was an whistleblower. When he revealed that the US has the capacity and does listen to the calls of Angela Merkel and especially Putin (and a million other such facts), he was a traitor who revealed secrets. If you’re still unable to grasp the difference, any discussion is useless.
"And in 2016, Wikileaks was happy to publish Hillary Clinton’s emails, but reportedly refused to publish documents about the Russian government offered to them around the same time. "
Yeah, actually click through the links on that slander, because the TLDR is "it's really unlikely that the latter documents were genuine."
The former certainly were, and to this day it's a huge embarrassment to America that Democrats were able to make the fact that their bad behavior was publicized a bigger "scandal" than their bad behavior.
I am generally not sympathetic to Assange. In part because if you play badass you have to be aware of potential repercussions. But ruffling Clinton feathers may well be the key to the entire get Assange effort. Maybe his concerns for his future are justified.
Manning was a known to his coworkers as a malcontent/ psychopath. His CO unfortunately ignored the warnings. Providing a nonselective massive dump of classified documents for analysis by Americas enemies is not the act of a whistleblower. He/she is a traitor. Period. Try reading Paul Fussell’s Wartime on fuckups in WW 2 to understand the difference between a soldier explaining war and a traitor .
I can prescribe the perfect punishment for Julian Assange: He should be stood up in front of every camera in America ...
... and the Presidential Medal of Freedom hung around his neck. Ditto Edward Snowden. I believe it was Jefferson who opined that,"When the people are afraid of their government, you have tyranny. When the government is afraid of the people, you have freedom." All it takes is reading a little history to understand that power with no accountability always leads to tyranny, and that's where America is today. If we are going to recover a little freedom, there's no antidote to tyranny quite as effective as shining Justice Brandeis' "bright sunlight" on it occasionally. The November election might suggest another.
It is absolutely fine for the Free Press to publish this article and the author’s argument is worth considering. But the author is badly mistaken. Indiscriminately dumping thousands of stolen and largely unreviewed documents onto the Internet is not journalism or even publishing. It is irresponsibility, even if it turns out that there happen to be some valuable revelations among those documents. You cannot compare Assange and Wikileaks to Catherine Herridge or the New York Times. They are journalists doing actual journalism, making knowledgeable and considered choices about the information they disseminate. Assange is just an Internet troll, throwing information onto the Internet because in a digital world he can.
I agree Assange is NOT a journalist. Therefore journalism is not at risk here. Just ask yourself: was his work product thoughtfully published like Woodward & Bernstein’s Watergate reporting? No it was not. It was an indiscriminate data dump.
"Indiscriminately dumping thousands of stolen and largely unreviewed documents onto the Internet is not journalism or even publishing".
I think the intent was for individual readers to review the material themselves, sans "journalists" opinion. Facts are facts. Some of us don't need, much less want to be told what they mean.
No thumbs up for this article. Whistleblowers provide specific information with knowledge they have personally. Hackers grab whatever they can and dump it without bothering to go through all the data. Assange wanted dirt on the US and didn’t care who got hurt in the process. Lock him up.
Scrolling down the comments here, yours was the closest to articulate what I was thinking..
I don't like Assange and I wasn't sure why. You just reminded me. Assange casually didn't care about the possible consequences of such a sensitive data dump and who he might be hurting - I think he was more interested in the notoriety.
Julian Assange is, without doubt, a better journalist than most of the big names at brand-name news outlets. He's also a flawed human being, but journalism is full of assholes. Reporting and whistleblowing should be judged on its own merits, not according to the quirks of its creators. And Wikileaks has done good work; politicians targeted it and Assange because they're embarrassed.
Either we have free speech or we don't. Which is it? Assange (like Snowden) is an object lesson. Are we not witnessing a push to silence the voice of free peoples across the globe? (And we know who's doing it.) Why do we think subscription journalism has millions of Americans staring into their computer screens this morning? Have there not been calls to shut Substack down? Cast Assange in any light then consider the Maddowsphere and the billionaire/surveillance state CIC cutouts surrounding our lives. The Assange prosecution is a gun held to the head of free speech and journalism world wide. Fight the tyranny while you still can!! FREE ASSANGE NOW!!
Question for you. Suppose someone is a pacifist. Against the military industrial complex and the money and time spent on it. You learn thru a childhood friend they have secret information on a new system that will gave our military a huge advantage in the next conflict the US could be involved it. The government has spent billions on its development. Do you “Fight The Power” and release this information? It is “free speech” after all.
I have no problem with a strong American military. In fact I prefer it. Snitching on the military for the sake of just snitching on the military could lead to a lot of senseless deaths. (Possibly ones own.) One knot in the problem is when the word death becomes plural and abstract. Now make it far far away vs. being an actual faceless piss your pants scared participant in a conflagration. Now put the horror in the hands of the modern "national security" spin doctor. Having an opinion about the guy with his ass on fire is different than having your ass on fire. Especially when there is an industry built on telling one what ones opinion is. A lot of our present problem, and the point of much discussion on Substack is the claim too and weaponization of moral virtue by poseur ideologues who have no grasp of the attendant reality. Example: People shouting "from the river to the sea" who can't tell us the names of the river and the sea. (War spelled backwards is raw.)
Today we're all asking where the lines of moral demarcation are. And that seems to be the question of our age. For citizens of the American Republic those lines are drawn to protect the freedom of the individual and the individuals ability to speak truth to power. (As compared to having ones head on a spike atop the castle wall.) My personal opinion: Beyond the lines of human moral demarcation there is only dire consequence and the abandonment of personal moral responsibility to those seeking profit and power at the expense of their fellow man always leads to cataclysm.
Free speech? Should Chelsea Manning have exposed the indiscriminate murder of journalists by a gunship? Or, should it have been framed as "mistakes happen now go back to sleep". How about My Lei? Watergate? Should Ed Snowden have reported on our government spying on private citizens? Assange? All involved paid and continue to pay a heavy personal price to bring us the truth. Want to see fascism in action? Watch the DNC response during the Taibbi/Shellenberger Twitter File Congressional Hearing. Is there not a major assault on free speech and the free citizens of the world? (Give James Lindsay/NEW DISCOURSES a little time in his discussion of George Soros.) Chaos serves tyranny. Choose: A crisis to bitch slap crisis no solutions forth coming totalitarianism or a meaningful life inside a healthy solutions based truth/fact based American reality. Both are on the table right now.
That’s not an answer to the question…..and the little dust up in Korea with the Chinese might beg to differ. While it did not develop into out right war, the Cuban missile crisis came damn close.
Biden may be "thinking" of dropping the case against Assange but he won't. Biden can't even drop his own trousers to take a shit. Biden knows better than anyone else that the deep state is a real thing and that is also a terrible, mean, and nasty thing. Hillary Cunton was wrong when she called her compatriots "Deplorables" because she was one of them. The entire Washington class are deplorable, despicable and worthy of nothing but being receptacles for national bile, hatred, scorn and condemnation.
President Biden is doing everything he can to assure Donald Trump’s election: buying votes with student debt forgiveness, pestering Israel to limit the defense of its existence, and doing everything possible to make us buy electric cars we don’t want. Now this. Nothing could ever make me vote for Trump. But our president is making it easier to contemplate it.
Yes, but then it was acceptable to think (pray? Dream? Hallucinate?) that Trump would actually be an adult in office and not a two-year old whose diaper was always in need of changing.
Boiled down to its essentials, Assange is being prosecuted for daring to release the truth about the scummy things that scummy people in our scummy government are doing. Scummy things that directly hurt the American people, impinge on our rights and erode our democratic institutions. Justice Brandeis famously observed that "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." Light makes the cockroaches scatter and hide. It also makes them very angry. And vengeful. Assange dared to shine that light.
Yes. I think so. But I do not assume his conviction. The quote about the war effort is interesting. As an Australian citizen can he be convicted for interfering in the US war effort? My guess is it will come down whether or not he was involved in the theft of the information he published. That evidence could get pretty technical so I think that once he is extradited the charges will be dropped for fear of disclosing other state secrets. FWIW I am not a fan of novel prosecutions or prosecutors who create them.
I think the scale of these leaks matters. I can respect someone who leaks selective documents to expose illegal/harmful activity but Manning and Snowden both dumped out huge troves of documents they couldn't possibly have reviewed and without regard to the harm it might cause. These are activists, not heroes, and they deserve to be punished.
Why do you imagine that an activist, especially one whose activism is in revealing the damaging, even deadly, misdeeds of governments and related authorities, deserves to be punished? Would you rather not know that those authorities have done bad things?
As for the scale of the leaks, that's a consequence of the scale of incriminating material, which is not a fault of any leaker or publisher.
"These are activists, not heroes"
How about Catherine Herridge and Cheryl Atkinson? Are they activists too? Before you defame Snowden and Assange, you might want to listen to their testimony before the House judiciary committee.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/04/11/catherine_herridge_to_house_judiciary_committee_if_confidential_sources_arent_protected_investigative_journalism_is_dead.html
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/04/11/sharyl_attkisson_to_house_judiciary_committee_what_happens_if_journalists_cant_protect_confidential_sources.html
To compare Atkison and Herridge to Assange, Manning Snowden is a stretch. As Jeff said, the scale of the leaks puts them in different worlds
Sorry but scale is irrelevant, except for the fact that Snowden and Assange aired more dirty laundry that we're not supposed to see. The fact that the deep state is going after Herridge and Atkinson proves my point.
Some parts of what Assange let out weren’t “dirty laundry.” They were human beings who helped American soldiers on the ground and they suffered for it. For Assange to hide behind the First Amendment, he should have redacted the names of Iraqis and Afghans who wanted nothing more than a better life.
If you click on the links provided in the article, Assange denies having said “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”. He also “claims that all the documents released through his organisation had been checked for named informants and that 15,000 such documents had been held back”. The Times of London claims to have “found the names of dozens of Afghans credited with providing detailed intelligence to U.S. forces. Their villages are given for identification and also, in many cases, their fathers' names”. So, who are you going to believe?
If sloppy redaction resulted in Afghans being put at risk that is inexcusable. Engaging in a 20-year war and LYING about its prosecution to Americans funding it, resulting in hundreds of thousands of Afghan deaths is criminal. How come Assange is the only one in jail?
Wrong. The fact they leaked docs they couldn’t possibly have reviewed is a big problem.
This article is about the prosecution of Assange, who published leaked documents, not Manning or Snowden, who leaked them.
And yet it lumps them all together as "heroic whistleblowers."
Whether or not Manning and Snowden were heroic (I happen to think Snowden was), they violated agreements they made to maintain secrecy as a part of their jobs, meaning they technically acted outside of free speech rights. Assange shared information as a member of the public. Maybe you disagree with what he did, but can you cite a clear, neutral principle that justifies his prosecution and not that of investigative journalism generally? Clearly publication of classified information has, in the past, been an important part of the democratic process holding state actors accountable. Moreover, if the state can silence and jail anyone who publishes information that the state claims is secret (in practice, then, anything inconvenient), then it has executed a complete end-run around public accountability.
I think your put your finger on what perturbs me about Assange, and why I am in two kinds about him being free to resume his Wikileaks. It is the scale, and the fact the documents are revealed with little accompanying narrative or analysis that makes one wonder about due diligence and whether a rogue activist hacker is the equivalent of a journalist. I guess he's not so much a journalist as someone who facilitates both whistle-blowing and journalism?
For a second I thought I had mistakenly opened "The Nation." The lead anecdote sure makes me glad there weren't cockpit voice recordings during the Battle of Britain or the fight in the South Pacific. Are we to think that fog-of-war tragedies pose the same moral problem as the Guatemalan STD experiments? And the idea of "whistleblower" is being stretched pretty thin: a clinician's firsthand account of unethical pseudo-medicine is good, basic "60 Minutes" whistleblower stuff, but it's not national security. Conflating them just undermines the credibility here. I nearly gave up on this site after the sensitive-artists-of-Guantanamo piece run last Sep. 11, and I don't know if it can bear much more 9-11 revisionism.
I completely agree with you. This also just reminds me of the people freaking out over Israel defending itself. War is ugly.
Exactly why I was thinking. Who let this guy in The free Press. And Snowden? Worst traitor in American history.
I agree, except for the end bit with exasperation claim 'I'm almost leaving.' I'm fine with reading a wide array, even things I find wrong-headed, as long as comments continue on. They often keep my hopes alive!
I’m surprised (and a little disappointed) that only one comment so far points out the hypocrisy between America covering up the accidental civilian deaths in our own wars, while simultaneously demanding that Israel commit suicide as punishment for accidental civilian deaths in its defense against an enemy that wants to exterminate its people. That our best friend, and the only democracy in the Middle East should suffer endless massacres all for a few votes in Michigan is despicable.
I'm on the fence about Julian Assange. In my mind, if he simply published information that was received by him, and no prosecution is warranted. However, if he participated in gaining that information then he's essentially a spy.
I'm glad that we were able to view the information provided by Chelsea Manning. But that said, she deserves to be in prison. If you are in the military and you take an oath, you can't reveal classified information. If she wanted to be a whistleblower she could have gone to members of Congress, by going to WikiLeaks she made herself into a spy and committed treason.
"She?"
I know. How pathetic to call that thing a she.
When lunatics are turned loose, the opprobrium should attach more to the one who unlocked the door than to the patient.
It
Them or They maybe
Ungrammatical number.
Not a she
First off, nobody in Afghanistan or Iraq actually gives a flying F about being nice in war. Look at who actually won. Only western liberals actually care about ensuring America lose every conflict it enters. What actually matters is enforcing the law, something the demented liberals refused to do and left both countries as smoldering wrecks because of it.
This piece is literally crying about Gitmo while Afghan women are being stoned to death. It’s absurd.
Secondly, wouldn’t he be able to explain himself in an open court? He is innocent until proven guilty. But because he’s obviously guilty, he doesn’t want to be tried. Ditto Snowden, who would have stood trial had he not run away to Daddy Vladimir’s protection after he betrayed his own Motherland.
Assange should ask for leniency because he is only an Australian. Manning and Snowden should have faced Capital punishment, but Obama was OK with the US losing.
Manning and Snowden both signed documents to protect classified information so they did break the law while fully knowing they shouldn't. However, I get very queasy when they go after journalists because this administration in particular seems bent on crushing any and all dissent. I fully support trying those who gave Assange the information, because they are the ones who actually broke the law and they knew they agreed to protect the classified information. I don't believe they should be trying Assange.
He is not a journalist. Journalists write material. He dumped material.
I see your point, and even a couple years ago I would probably have agreed with you. I just think after seeing the gross corruption of our government, that we should err on the side of the 1st amendment.
I certainly understand your POV. But I think in part, maybe large part, journalism has facilitated that corruption. Knowingly and willfully aided and abetted the corruption. The Twitter files left no doubt of that. So I would like to see the issues aired in the bright light others have addressed in their comments. Just the bright light of a courtroom. We really do need to iron out this publisher kerfuffle anyway. As for fixing the overall corruption I think that is what we should vote to ensure. Assuming we can have uncorrupted elections. Otherwise the Republic, and those who hold its values dear, are doomed.
Who are journalists? How can one distinguish between journalists & propagandists? Let's ask NPR, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, Der Vashington Beobachter Post und Der Deu York Sturmer Zeitung!
Great question. I had a long discourse once with our very own commenter Shane Gericke about journalistic standards that I found very edifying. It started when I said some form of journalistic accountability was needed and he countered that would not be possible because of risk of 1st Amendment infringement. IOW once a government entity is involved Ist Amendment freedom cannot be assured. That is paraphrasing but the conversation continued. My takeaway is that I lived the first 50 or so years of my life in a golden age of journalism. Journalism sucked before and it certainly sucks now. But the golden age came about because of the way newspapers developed in the 1900s, culminating with very powerful editors who had strict standards of journalistic integrity. That carried forward to television news and even to the early days of cable news. The internet killed it though because it destroyed advertising revenue, which destroyed budgets, which destroyed the Golden Age of journalism. But the moral of the story, at least for me, is that one arose before and one can arise again. And ideally it will come from journalists themselves or in response to demands by consumers of journalism not from government imposition.
Assange obviously has an ax to grind with the US government, but not with authoritarian governments around the world. He doesn’t care about repression or about the safety of people fighting against the Taliban or similar regimes. His purpose is simply and clearly to hurt the US in order to satisfy his obsession. Why shouldn’t he be put on trial, a fair trial where he would be able to defend and explain his actions?
How is it that you know "his purpose is simply and clearly" to do anything other than publish material provided by whistle-blowers?
If you would read the rest of the thread, you would notice the distinction between whistleblowers (and those who publish their material) and dumpers of classified material. Whistleblowers provide specific evidence of wrongdoing, while dumpers (like Assange, Manning and Snowden) indiscriminately release huge amounts of data (sometimes millions of pages), which they could not even have possibly read, with a simple and clear purpose: harm they target, which in this case is the US. Assange never even bothered to publish materials exposing any nasty regime in the world. Clear enough for you?
You're implying that revealing truth that the authorities want to stay hidden doesn't qualify as whistle-blowing. Is that what you believe? Revealing the identity of covert operatives isn't justifiable, but revealing government actions that put the lie to the official narrative certainly is.
Let me repeat this very slowly for you. When a “freedom hero” dumps millions of pages of secret documents, he obviously didn’t read them all to tell if the content is about wrongdoing by the government or it’s just secrets that need to stay secret from our enemies. When Snowden pointed out that the US government is spying illegally on Americans, he was an whistleblower. When he revealed that the US has the capacity and does listen to the calls of Angela Merkel and especially Putin (and a million other such facts), he was a traitor who revealed secrets. If you’re still unable to grasp the difference, any discussion is useless.
Whoa! American bombers killed journalists! What does Biden, who preaches to Israel about civilian casualties, have to say about that?
"And in 2016, Wikileaks was happy to publish Hillary Clinton’s emails, but reportedly refused to publish documents about the Russian government offered to them around the same time. "
Yeah, actually click through the links on that slander, because the TLDR is "it's really unlikely that the latter documents were genuine."
The former certainly were, and to this day it's a huge embarrassment to America that Democrats were able to make the fact that their bad behavior was publicized a bigger "scandal" than their bad behavior.
I am generally not sympathetic to Assange. In part because if you play badass you have to be aware of potential repercussions. But ruffling Clinton feathers may well be the key to the entire get Assange effort. Maybe his concerns for his future are justified.
Hence my admiration
Manning was a known to his coworkers as a malcontent/ psychopath. His CO unfortunately ignored the warnings. Providing a nonselective massive dump of classified documents for analysis by Americas enemies is not the act of a whistleblower. He/she is a traitor. Period. Try reading Paul Fussell’s Wartime on fuckups in WW 2 to understand the difference between a soldier explaining war and a traitor .
I can prescribe the perfect punishment for Julian Assange: He should be stood up in front of every camera in America ...
... and the Presidential Medal of Freedom hung around his neck. Ditto Edward Snowden. I believe it was Jefferson who opined that,"When the people are afraid of their government, you have tyranny. When the government is afraid of the people, you have freedom." All it takes is reading a little history to understand that power with no accountability always leads to tyranny, and that's where America is today. If we are going to recover a little freedom, there's no antidote to tyranny quite as effective as shining Justice Brandeis' "bright sunlight" on it occasionally. The November election might suggest another.
This. Absolutely
"I can prescribe the perfect punishment for Julian Assange: He should be stood up in front of every camera in America ..."
Unfortunately that will never happen. The Blob will stick Assange in a hole somewhere until he either goes mad or commits "suicide".
It is absolutely fine for the Free Press to publish this article and the author’s argument is worth considering. But the author is badly mistaken. Indiscriminately dumping thousands of stolen and largely unreviewed documents onto the Internet is not journalism or even publishing. It is irresponsibility, even if it turns out that there happen to be some valuable revelations among those documents. You cannot compare Assange and Wikileaks to Catherine Herridge or the New York Times. They are journalists doing actual journalism, making knowledgeable and considered choices about the information they disseminate. Assange is just an Internet troll, throwing information onto the Internet because in a digital world he can.
This.
I agree Assange is NOT a journalist. Therefore journalism is not at risk here. Just ask yourself: was his work product thoughtfully published like Woodward & Bernstein’s Watergate reporting? No it was not. It was an indiscriminate data dump.
IF you can trust the government. IF oversight isn't totally absent. Wanna buy a bridge? /s
"Indiscriminately dumping thousands of stolen and largely unreviewed documents onto the Internet is not journalism or even publishing".
I think the intent was for individual readers to review the material themselves, sans "journalists" opinion. Facts are facts. Some of us don't need, much less want to be told what they mean.
No thumbs up for this article. Whistleblowers provide specific information with knowledge they have personally. Hackers grab whatever they can and dump it without bothering to go through all the data. Assange wanted dirt on the US and didn’t care who got hurt in the process. Lock him up.
Scrolling down the comments here, yours was the closest to articulate what I was thinking..
I don't like Assange and I wasn't sure why. You just reminded me. Assange casually didn't care about the possible consequences of such a sensitive data dump and who he might be hurting - I think he was more interested in the notoriety.
Julian Assange is, without doubt, a better journalist than most of the big names at brand-name news outlets. He's also a flawed human being, but journalism is full of assholes. Reporting and whistleblowing should be judged on its own merits, not according to the quirks of its creators. And Wikileaks has done good work; politicians targeted it and Assange because they're embarrassed.
Either we have free speech or we don't. Which is it? Assange (like Snowden) is an object lesson. Are we not witnessing a push to silence the voice of free peoples across the globe? (And we know who's doing it.) Why do we think subscription journalism has millions of Americans staring into their computer screens this morning? Have there not been calls to shut Substack down? Cast Assange in any light then consider the Maddowsphere and the billionaire/surveillance state CIC cutouts surrounding our lives. The Assange prosecution is a gun held to the head of free speech and journalism world wide. Fight the tyranny while you still can!! FREE ASSANGE NOW!!
Last train to Freedomville!! All aboard!!
Question for you. Suppose someone is a pacifist. Against the military industrial complex and the money and time spent on it. You learn thru a childhood friend they have secret information on a new system that will gave our military a huge advantage in the next conflict the US could be involved it. The government has spent billions on its development. Do you “Fight The Power” and release this information? It is “free speech” after all.
I have no problem with a strong American military. In fact I prefer it. Snitching on the military for the sake of just snitching on the military could lead to a lot of senseless deaths. (Possibly ones own.) One knot in the problem is when the word death becomes plural and abstract. Now make it far far away vs. being an actual faceless piss your pants scared participant in a conflagration. Now put the horror in the hands of the modern "national security" spin doctor. Having an opinion about the guy with his ass on fire is different than having your ass on fire. Especially when there is an industry built on telling one what ones opinion is. A lot of our present problem, and the point of much discussion on Substack is the claim too and weaponization of moral virtue by poseur ideologues who have no grasp of the attendant reality. Example: People shouting "from the river to the sea" who can't tell us the names of the river and the sea. (War spelled backwards is raw.)
Today we're all asking where the lines of moral demarcation are. And that seems to be the question of our age. For citizens of the American Republic those lines are drawn to protect the freedom of the individual and the individuals ability to speak truth to power. (As compared to having ones head on a spike atop the castle wall.) My personal opinion: Beyond the lines of human moral demarcation there is only dire consequence and the abandonment of personal moral responsibility to those seeking profit and power at the expense of their fellow man always leads to cataclysm.
Free speech? Should Chelsea Manning have exposed the indiscriminate murder of journalists by a gunship? Or, should it have been framed as "mistakes happen now go back to sleep". How about My Lei? Watergate? Should Ed Snowden have reported on our government spying on private citizens? Assange? All involved paid and continue to pay a heavy personal price to bring us the truth. Want to see fascism in action? Watch the DNC response during the Taibbi/Shellenberger Twitter File Congressional Hearing. Is there not a major assault on free speech and the free citizens of the world? (Give James Lindsay/NEW DISCOURSES a little time in his discussion of George Soros.) Chaos serves tyranny. Choose: A crisis to bitch slap crisis no solutions forth coming totalitarianism or a meaningful life inside a healthy solutions based truth/fact based American reality. Both are on the table right now.
Got Constitution?
Since WWII, the U.S. doesn't even bother to engage in war with anyone unless we have a huge advantage.
That’s not an answer to the question…..and the little dust up in Korea with the Chinese might beg to differ. While it did not develop into out right war, the Cuban missile crisis came damn close.
Biden may be "thinking" of dropping the case against Assange but he won't. Biden can't even drop his own trousers to take a shit. Biden knows better than anyone else that the deep state is a real thing and that is also a terrible, mean, and nasty thing. Hillary Cunton was wrong when she called her compatriots "Deplorables" because she was one of them. The entire Washington class are deplorable, despicable and worthy of nothing but being receptacles for national bile, hatred, scorn and condemnation.
Well, he did soil the Resolute Desk.
He shat his depends while visiting the communist cardinal of Rome.
It’s Bradley Manning. Bradley, Bradley, Bradley. That little pervert is the actual hacker.
President Biden is doing everything he can to assure Donald Trump’s election: buying votes with student debt forgiveness, pestering Israel to limit the defense of its existence, and doing everything possible to make us buy electric cars we don’t want. Now this. Nothing could ever make me vote for Trump. But our president is making it easier to contemplate it.
So many of us are in the same position, Lance. A great many voters (Trump and Hillary) felt the same way in 2016 as well.
Yes, but then it was acceptable to think (pray? Dream? Hallucinate?) that Trump would actually be an adult in office and not a two-year old whose diaper was always in need of changing.
Neither is an adult: Biden by senility and Trump by temperament. That's why 70% of voters want someone else.
Boiled down to its essentials, Assange is being prosecuted for daring to release the truth about the scummy things that scummy people in our scummy government are doing. Scummy things that directly hurt the American people, impinge on our rights and erode our democratic institutions. Justice Brandeis famously observed that "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." Light makes the cockroaches scatter and hide. It also makes them very angry. And vengeful. Assange dared to shine that light.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252479067/WikiLeaks-founder-Assange-put-lives-at-risk-by-disclosing-names-in-documents-court-hears
An interesting article, February 2020.
He did. But if he broke laws in doing so his prosecution is justified.
A little used law when our own president is actively subverting our laws?
Yes. I think so. But I do not assume his conviction. The quote about the war effort is interesting. As an Australian citizen can he be convicted for interfering in the US war effort? My guess is it will come down whether or not he was involved in the theft of the information he published. That evidence could get pretty technical so I think that once he is extradited the charges will be dropped for fear of disclosing other state secrets. FWIW I am not a fan of novel prosecutions or prosecutors who create them.