EDIT: Quoting from Assange's indictment:
"After agreeing to receive classified documents from Manning and aiding, abetting, and causing Manning to provide classified documents, the superseding indictment charges that Assange then published on WikiLeaks classified documents that contained the unredacted names of human sources who provided information to United States forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to U.S. State Department diplomats around the world. These human sources included local Afghans and Iraqis, journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates, and political dissidents from repressive regimes. According to the superseding indictment, Assange’s actions risked serious harm to United States national security to the benefit of our adversaries and put the unredacted named human sources at a grave and imminent risk of serious physical harm and/or arbitrary detention."
While that may actually be true, I’m curious why you would trust that statement from the US Government (the “indictment”) while ignoring the other (that’s “classified”).
If you trust that there’s doubt as to why things were classified and that they may have been hiding things, why would you also trust that they claim people have been endangered? Again, not saying it’s not true, just that blindly taking the word of US prosecutors seems short sighted.
If this was a tradeoff between "not expose abuses by the US government" and "name these civillians", I think your point would be reasonable. But there was no tradeoff. Wikileaks was just lazy about it.
Due to the limited time window for release, the choice was either to release as-is or to never release at all.
Calling Wikileaks lazy is myopic. They didn't have the resources to redact the documents in the time window they had to work with, and they asked for help. The US govt knew exactly what would happen if they refused to help. It was a calculated move to maximise collateral damage and help drive the narrative that you now subscribe to. They didn't give a single fuck about the collateral damage, their response was focused on discrediting and prosecuting the source of the leak to send a message to anyone else considering exposing their wrongdoings.
The US govt acted like a bunch of insidious cartoon villains, and gaslighting its citizens about how this situation played out.
Which, specifically? I have heard that claim before. Would you mind linking to the specific leaks that endangered civilians? WikiLeaks is online and searchable, but I have not seen them.
Maybe those were helping (unknowingly) US troops to kill other people...
The situation to me seems to be only a few steps removed from something along of the lines of $government outright taking some civilian hostages and threatening to execute one of them every time someone reports on any of $government's wrongdoings. In a scenario like that, would you also say that the act of reporting is immoral because it endangers civilians - and hence cheer on $government's long hand punishing the reporter?
Can you point us to any evidence of this, other than e.g. a general or politician making vague claims with no specifics?
I'm not saying that no one in the various nations that USA has invaded haven't been hurt by those invasions, but can any of that be directly attributed to leaks?
There's also a statement from the spokesman for the Taliban saying they will go after the people named: https://www.newsweek.com/taliban-says-it-will-target-names-e...
...WikiLeaks had tried to comply with a private White House request to redact the names of informants before publication, but the US authorities had refused to assist.
Thanks, Obama. Whatever, let's forget about that. The main point is, this material was released a decade ago. If anyone in USA military or intel had learned of a collaborator harmed as a result of the leaks, they would have crowed about it ad nauseam. Instead, crickets. Therefore, this didn't happen. Linking decade-old fear-mongering about "risks" supports the point rather than contradicting it.
As addressed in sibling thread, it has been a decade. The USA military-industrial complex is highly motivated to manufacture more reasons to silence Assange. If this had happened once in that decade, we would have heard about it.
Kosovo for one would disagree with you
This is objectively wrong. Operation unified response in Haiti in 2010, Operation Continuing Promise in the Caribbean and Latin America in 2011. Then Enduring Promise back in Latin America in 2018. Operation Tomodachi after the Japan earthquake in 2011.
Then of course there is the Cold War which lead to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the chance for political self determination of over a dozen countries.
Your convenient 60 year boundary just excludes the Korean War which led to the prosperous and democratic country of South Korea.
The issue is that laws not ethics matter now. So IMO the rape accusations have nothing to do with the ethics of his job.
What is the difference between Russia where journalists are killed and "the west" where journalists are tortured and pushed into suicide.
If you're going to disclose government secrets of wrong doing, you're going to want to ensure your OpSec is tight, that the information can't be traced to you.
At this stage, you'd have be a little bit mentally unhinged to want to go up against a state-level actor directly.
> Of course it is "more useful" to commit an injustice than to be victim of it; for the sake of the thinking dialogue with myself, this point of utility must be abandoned.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Wahrheit und Politik"
> Natürlich ist es "nützlicher", Unrecht zu tun als Unrecht zu leiden; um des denkenden Dialogs mit mir selbst willen muss gerade dieser Nützlichkeitsstandpunkt aufgegeben werden.
But, again, it doesn't really explain what the motives are, here. Do the people who comprise these state-level actors really want a world where the crimes of their colleagues and bosses go completely unexposed. I can't see how that would lead to good things for themselves and their families.
Motives are surely many and varied. For some it's as simple as saving face and a job, others are way more driven to turned a blind eye, help, or mastermind the bad.
Where does it begin? Well, some schools of developmental psychology claim that even the time spent in the womb predisposes us to certain adult-life outcomes.
Do some people who live in Alexandria, Virginia work for the national security community? Clearly, but 85% is tin foil hat territory.
I’d like to understand more about the Assange situation, because this guy is not trustworthy.
But, is it that turtle all the way down? I mean, the cops who broke the law to "get their hands on him" - why? The diplomatic backroom dealing - why? The politicians who should know better - what do they gain?
So basically the charges seem to be pretty much predicated on the idea that Assange was a participant in the illegal obtaining of this information.
From the indictment statement [1]:
> The superseding indictment alleges that beginning in late 2009, Assange and WikiLeaks actively solicited United States classified information, including by publishing a list of “Most Wanted Leaks” that sought, among other things, classified documents. Manning responded to Assange’s solicitations by using access granted to her as an intelligence analyst to search for United States classified documents, and provided to Assange and WikiLeaks databases containing approximately 90,000 Afghanistan war-related significant activity reports, 400,000 Iraq war-related significant activities reports, 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs, and 250,000 U.S. Department of State cables.
> The superseding indictment alleges that Manning and Assange engaged in real-time discussions regarding Manning’s transmission of classified records to Assange. The discussions also reflect that Assange actively encouraged Manning to provide more information and agreed to crack a password hash stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a United States government network used for classified documents and communications. Assange is also charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to crack that password hash.
Additionally, the claim that he would not get a for trial in the US is utterly farcical. The claim that you would wind up with a rigged jury is provided without any evidence whatsoever.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wikileaks-founder-julian-assa...
He's being tortured but at least he'll get a fair trial.
1. The claim that Assange is being tortured is being made by a single individual as their personal opinion, and 2. The claims of torture are from actions taken by the governments of the UK and Sweden
The actions of foreign countries have no bearing on if he would get a fair trial in the US; the two ideas are not correlated at all.
2. You seem to be indicating that actions by the UK, Sweden, and Ecuador are happening completely independent of any coordination with or influence from the US government. I don’t believe that you believe that.
No one claims this. Please read the article.
If you believe the claims of the UN Special Rapporteur are without merit, please provide your evidence and/or reasoning.
The only thing the US has done is try to get him extradited to prosecute him. I suppose the argument can be made that he's not afraid of trial, but rather of being incarcerated for his crimes.
Also the second paragraph:
> And third, he is to be extradited to a country that holds people like him in prison conditions that Amnesty International has described as torture.
> [...] could be tortured to death in the United States.
Sorry, but these are just melodrama.