Wikileaks

[Black Aeronaut]

I've been remaining quiet on this matter largely due to my ignorance about it - very little news reaches you when your primary focus is whether or not the North Koreans are gonna say 'fuck it all' and start launching missiles at you just because you're there.

First off: I'm not exactly all warm and fuzzy about wikileaks, and that's without even taking the sex charges into account. (My view on the matter: if you're gonna call other people out onto the carpet then you had better be damn well beyond reproach yourself, or if you're into religion: "He that hath no sin cast the first stone.")

Okay, so they're calling out shady dealings of the Black portions of the US Government. Big whoop. Let me know when we can actually do something about it. These people are so well backed that even if you could blow everything into the wide open it would still amount to nothing more than hearsay and circumstantial evidence.

What I am really worried about is if this ass-clown finds that he's honestly not doing much to hurt the US (except maybe it's image... meanwhile he's going around doing the same favor to other countries that would benefit from the US being discredited) that he's going to start doing more rash things... like pulling a Geraldo Riviera and start publicizing movements of US forces.

Sorry, I know it sounds paranoid of me, but you're only paranoid if there isn't someone out to get you. I'm a US Serviceman and to some people out there that means there's a target painted on my forehead. Please do not forget that.

[robkelk]

In a somewhat related bit, there's today's XKCD... which says something about who you should trust to do what.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Jinx999]

There are things that need to be leaked, things like evidence of crimes. Wikileaks does have an important role here
However I don't think the publishing of the diplomatic correspondance helps anybody decent. It doesn't contain any pressing information that I know about - and just hurts international diplomacy. Frank apprasials of anyone are going to hurt feelings. It's hard enough to talk some sense into Kin Jong Il and his clown posse without them being in a snit about being called a bunch of clowns. It'd also be a disaster if diplomats starting couching all their internal communications in mealy mouthed doubletalk. Accurate and clear information is a must for every government.

[Dartz]

It depends on what's published. If those diplomatic correspondances show that the Vatican rebuffed Irish government enquiries into the church sex-abuse scandal.... and that the Government here didn't really care to press them on the matter to hide their own responsibility... Or that a man was/is a member of an illegal and dangerous organisation, despite their stringent denials. And that they had advanced knowledge of planning a large-scale robbery... despite more denials on their part. And that they're currently running for office in the Dáil.

Then I'd say they do help quite a few decent people.

All this information is coming from diplomatic cables. I'm reading that last one right now.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Bob Schroeck]

I happen to think the revelation linked to by Epsilon in message 10 was an important one to make. Those are criminals, both the native men and the Americans who excused their behavior because to do otherwise would have been "inconvenient".
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Ayiekie]

Julian Assange isn't really the left-wing anti-US bogeyman some here seem to think. He's an "information wants to be free" libertarian type; Wikileaks also hosted (but did not originally leak) all those emails of climate scientists that caused the bullshit uproar last year. He's also noted his next target will be a leak from a major bank showing its illegal business. I have no doubt he'd release a leak from, say, Germany were he to come into possession of it.

Moreover, it's worth noting (because god knows the media doesn't) that the diplomatic cables released on Wikileaks were a) only a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of cables that were leaked (most have yet to be revealed), and b) were limited to those that were published first by newspapers, and included the redactions those newspapers had applied. He did not just undiscriminatingly dump all the files he had, as most people seem to think (and as many of his supporters would have done).

[Dartz]

http://www.salon.com/news...12/14/manning/index.html

Bernard Manning is being held in solitary for 23 hours a day... denied even a bedsheet and pillow. He hasn't been convicted of a crime (yet?). The suggestion is that this may be a tactic to encourage him to testify against Assange, that Assange solicited the information leak from him, which would make it espionage.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Werehawk]

Well the tinfoil hat brigade has already rendered it's verdict on wikileaks.

It's a U.S. Intelligence plot...Indeed I tell you it's a plot...

http://www.engdahl.oilgeo..._Con_Job/us_con_job.html
--Werehawk--
My mom's brief take on upcoming Guatemalan Elections "In last throes of preelection activities. Much loudspeaker vote pleading."

[Rod.H]

Of cause they will think that for Assange has apparently done some work for DARPA, not to mention the other stuff he's done. Then again they still would say that if wikileaks released some documents covering a bunch of above top secret black projects or Area-51. I mean just look at the hoo-ha over the MJ-12 papers, are they fake, the real deal, or just misinterpreted.

[Sweno]

ahh the joys of conspiracy theories.

Any proof to the contrary is obviously planted, and lack of evidence for your case is a coverup.

But you know the REAL deal.

They keep cropping up because they satisfy 2 basic attributes of humanity:

1) The desire for agency (things happen for understandable reasons)

2) The fact that we are so good at finding patterns, we see them when they are not there.
-Terry
-----
"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy

[Dartz]

Irony. Full details of allegations against Assange leaked. Assange's lawyers reported to be furious.

http://www.theregister.co...ver_leaked_police_files/

http://www.guardian.co.uk...17/julian-assange-sweden
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Logan Darklighter]

Speaking of conspiracy theories and the inadvertent debunking of same - Mike Totten finds the Wikileaks silver lining. Aside from the low comedy contained therein, I mean.

Gideon Rachman at the Financial Times says WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange deserves a medal rather than prison. “He and WikiLeaks have done America a massive favour,” he writes, “by inadvertently debunking decades-old conspiracy theories about its foreign policy.”

He’s right. And I suspect Rachman’s tongue is firmly planted in cheek when he says Assange should be rewarded. If the United States wanted all that information made public, the government hardly needed his help getting it out there.

Anyway, Rachman points out that many rightists in China and Russia, and leftists in Europe and Latin America, assume that whatever American foreign-policy officials say in public is a lie. I’d add that Arabs on both the “left” and the “right” do, too. Not all of them, surely, but perhaps a majority. I’ve met people in the Middle East who actually like parts of the American rationale for the war in Iraq — that the promotion of democracy in the Arab world might leech out its toxins — they just don’t believe the U.S. was actually serious.

And let’s not forget the most ridiculous theories of all. Surely somewhere in all these leaked files there’d be references to a war for oil in Iraq if the war was, in fact, about oil. Likewise, if 9/11 was an inside job — or a joint Mossad–al-Qaeda job — there should be at least some suggestive evidence in all those classified documents. If the U.S. government lied, rather than guessed wrong, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, or if NATO invaded Afghanistan to install a pipeline, this information would have to be written down somewhere. The State and Defense department bureaucracies are far too vast to have no records of what they’re up to.

Conspiracy theories, though, as someone once said, are history for stupid people. Those who actually believe this stuff — whether about American foreign policy, the president’s birth certificate, or whatever — think the historical record is part of the con job, that anyone who debunks the conspiracy is either deluded or in on it.

So Assange is accused of working for the CIA.

Rachman points out other silly theories that are debunked, or at the very least unsupported, by the leaked cables. “The Americans say, in public, that they would like to build a strong relationship with China based on mutual interests,” he writes, “but that they are worried that some Chinese economic policies are damaging American workers. This turns out to be what they are saying in private, as well. In a cable predicting a more turbulent phase in US-Chinese relations, Jon Huntsman, the US ambassador, insists: ‘We need to find ways to keep the relationship positive,’ while ensuring that American workers benefit more. Many Chinese nationalists and netizens have developed elaborate theories about American plots to thwart China’s rise. There is not a hint of this in WikiLeaks.”

Julian Assange is stridently anti-American. He is not trying to boost the government’s credibility by leaking thousands of cables, and he almost certainly would refuse a medal if one were offered. He should not have done what he did for a number of reasons, and the least rational among our species won’t be persuaded of anything by this material, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t still feel a little bit satisfied.

[Bob Schroeck]

Interesting development a couple days ago: According to the House Judiciary Chairman, Wikileaks did not commit any crime.

(Fair warning:  The linked site leans well into tinfoil-hat territory in its other articles, but this one seems to be fairly straightforward.  When time allows, I'll try to dig up some stories on other outlets that confirm what it says.)

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.