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.
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’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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.