US diplomatic cables to be dropped by wikileaks; US doing pre-emptive damage control

[Callisto]

I know I'm going to get slammed for this (on this board anyway... but whatever) If that's not a terrorist, I don't know what is. Just hang him now, get it over with!

I'm not sure if I quite want to say that this is the single worst post this thread is going to ever see, since I'm sure one of you dingdongs is skilled enough to top it, but this will definitely be in the running for it. Holy crap on all accounts.

[kuronosan]

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

[Uzor]

It sounds like you're implying that being wrong about something in the past prevents you from ever being right about it.

The fact is that this is the sort of thing that only has to happen once, no matter how many times it was warned against.

That was not my point at all. What I mean is that stating one thing over and over (such as "You will die tomorrow!" or "This leaked information will lead to an attack on one of the spots!") does not you predicted it, or that it happened for the reason you stated. It is bound to happen some day, and it can be purely coincidental. They've said the wikileaks documents will lead to an attack on one of the places, or that these documents will lead to deaths, each and every time something new is released. It hasn't happened so far, and if, by coincidence, something does happen to someone or something tied to one of the documents, they will use Wikileaks as the reason. Not neccesarily because Wikileaks is to blame, but because they use it as a scapegoat to get rid of it - just like stating "You'll die tomorrow!" for 10 years and then stating "I told you so!" when it happens isn't a prediction, its a coincidence.

That is not to say an eventual accident IS a coincidence, it could very well be an aimed attack, but that still does not necessarily make Wikileaks responsible, as said terrorists could have figured it out themselves and had planned it for years.

[Odesseiron]

I'm not sure if I quite want to say that this is the single worst post this thread is going to ever see, since I'm sure one of you dingdongs is skilled enough to top it, but this will definitely be in the running for it. Holy crap on all accounts.

I always aim to please

I don't really have an opinion on the leaks themselves but this whole thing is fascinating to watch. The measures that are being taken to stop him, the unlikely places he's getting support, and the almost straight-from-a-movie way some of it is happening are just incredible.


In other news, archi you are a god damn hypocrite.

I can totally see this whole thing being the next "Social Network"

[Faris]

omg wiki-man-leaks arrested, its all over the news..its about time we got some new news yo, sick of iraq/palestine/afghan news.

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

when did you become so cool?

[Mistress Stowastiq]

I thought it was rather humorous when I heard one of the NPR spokespersons ask how WL is still updating twitter and promising to continue releasing dox tonight. I did not think people actually thought that Assange was sitting at twitter doing all of this himself but he was not joking when he asked.

[Krazy]

Comments from that Washington Times link are great.
"I just read that Assange is out to wreck the United States. According to several websites he also seems to be linked to one of the greatest America haters, Gyorgy Schwartz AKA George Soros. Having Soros and his website Moveon being linked to wikileaks would make sense. Soros, the megalomanic, is out to destroy the USA and reshape it as a third world country so he can be king of one world. Let's get rid of Assange, Soros and the treasonous New York Times."

[notorious bum]

I would honestly be surprised if Assange isn't shipped from Sweden to the U.S. in the upcoming weeks. Then somehow he gets stuck in prison for an undetermined amount of time while being penned the true terrorist he really is!

[Salodin]

I wonder how the information in these cables are gonna play a part in the upcoming election.

[Mistress Stowastiq]

Amy Goodman spoke of this while interviewing the very pissed off at everyone right now Glenn Greenwald. He wrote it before his arrest and it was to be released at midnight Australian time.


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-d...-1225967241332

Don't shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths

* Julian Assange
* From: The Australian
* December 08, 2010 12:00AM



WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.

IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win."

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.

These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia, was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.

If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, any of the US embassy cables or any of the stories about the things WikiLeaks has reported, consider how important it is for all media to be able to report these things freely.

WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain's The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.

Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be "taken out" by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be "hunted down like Osama bin Laden", a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a "transnational threat" and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister's office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.

And Australians should observe with no pride the disgraceful pandering to these sentiments by Julia Gillard and her government. The powers of the Australian government appear to be fully at the disposal of the US as to whether to cancel my Australian passport, or to spy on or harass WikiLeaks supporters. The Australian Attorney-General is doing everything he can to help a US investigation clearly directed at framing Australian citizens and shipping them to the US.

Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.

We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn't want the truth revealed, including information about its own diplomatic and political dealings.

Has there been any response from the Australian government to the numerous public threats of violence against me and other WikiLeaks personnel? One might have thought an Australian prime minister would be defending her citizens against such things, but there have only been wholly unsubstantiated claims of illegality. The Prime Minister and especially the Attorney-General are meant to carry out their duties with dignity and above the fray. Rest assured, these two mean to save their own skins. They will not.

Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with the State Department: "You'll risk lives! National security! You'll endanger troops!" Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can't be both. Which is it?

It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US, with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn't find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.

But our publications have been far from unimportant. The US diplomatic cables reveal some startling facts:

► The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.

► King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US to attack Iran.

► Officials in Jordan and Bahrain want Iran's nuclear program stopped by any means available.

► Britain's Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect "US interests".

► Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept from parliament.

► The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay. Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government". The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

Julian Assange is the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.

[archibaldcrane]

In other news, archi you are a god damn hypocrite.

lol wut?

[Olo401]

You wouldn't expect an old-guard hacker boi who lived through the imprisonment of Kevin Mitnick to let this go easy did you?

http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b1...g?t=1291743548

[Thoronas]

This made me laugh, Guardian just posted a press release from US State Department.

The United States is pleased to announce that it will host Unesco's World Press Freedom Day event in 2011, from 1-3 May in Washington, DC.

But wait it gets better.

The theme for next year's commemoration will be 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals' right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.

[archibaldcrane]

^That's hilarious.

Assange is essentially a reporter, a member of the press. And he doesn't even put his slant on the "news" - he publishes uncensored documents (except to protect sources) to educate his readership.

[Chreman]

I know right, who reads digg anymore?

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/a...user-cia-ties/

[Kuya]

A great point that i seem to have missed:

I don't know why Wikileaks would be guilty of espionage but all other newspapers which have possession of all 260,000 documents aren't. Not to mention all the "bad citizens" all over the country and the world which have published them and written about them. Wikileaks didn't "leak" the documents --- they published them on the internet in conjunction with these other newspapers, which also published them. The "leakers" are those who leaked the documents to Wikileaks and its partners. It's no different than the New York Times publishing the Pentagon Papers (and 15 other papers re-publishing in solidarity.) Ellsberg was the leaker and was tried in a separate case --- the paper was the publisher.

And when the government tried to stop them from publishing, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the paper. As Perlstein wrote in Nixonland:

Justice Brennan's decision argued that press reports that embarrass the government were precisely the reason the First Amendment was invented. Justice Black concurred. "Every moment's continuance of the injunctions against these newspapers amounts to a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment... [F]or the first time in the 182 years since the founding of the Republic, the federal courts are asked to hold that the First Amendment does not mean what it says."
I have my doubts that the NY Times is going to be a brave defender of the First Amendment this time. They seem to only be concerned with it these days when one of their reporters is called to task for being a willing propaganda conduit. (That's their current definition of freedom of the press --- to be free to print government lies without interference.) The fact that they kept one degree of separation from Wikileaks by partnering with the Guardian rather than Wikileaks itself, leads me to believe they may have anticipated this Lieberman move already.

Lieberman and his fellows seem to have the quaint idea that if only they can punish Julian Assange nobody will ever put secrets on the internet again, so they will try to do this differently. But the principles are the same. And the papers are all publishing these cables on the internet too. This is becoming a farce.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/...m-fighter.html

[Salodin]

I'm trying to find links to officials saying wikileaks to date hasn't put the US or any nation at risk. I'm sure theres a few officials who have said that, can any one list a few?

[Jeryhn]

I know I'm pretty slow to be jumping on the wikileaks bandwagon now. But I was confused as to why when I Google wiki leaks that the first link doesn't work (wikileaks.org). Was there website shut down by the US government and forced to move? Or do I just have the wrong URL?

The various hosts that Wikileaks has been moving to lately have been shuting down the website for various reasons. Its pretty much always on the move.

Just look at a news source you trust. They should be posting whatever information is available, and in the case of a layperson, disseminate the information for you in a way you'll understand.

Alternatively, try looking for mirrors.

[Max™]

This made me laugh, Guardian just posted a press release from US State Department.



But wait it gets better.

By Thor, the ironing!

[Shuvo]

I have mixed opinions about Assange, but I almost hope he gets caught just so I can see what's in the insurance file =3