I’m loathe to even participate in a GD thread where **BrainGlutton[/] as usual starts with a brief OP that lays out no argument, then says he won’t be making an argument because that isn’t his job, then starts doing his copy-and-paste news articles schtick.
But I’ll simply point this out:
Daniel Ellsberg, from what I can see, had a genuine moral issue with what was going on and felt a genuine moral need to reveal it. Further, the information he released was extremely relevant and showed the America people it was being lied to.
Additionally, before publishing it, Ellsberg actually went to people inside the Nixon Administration to try and get them to go public, since the papers were from the Johnson Administration he thought they may be willing to do so. However, they were not, only then did he go to the New York Times.
Bradley Manning never tried to do that, for one, so that immediately makes his behavior a little less respectable. Secondly, the equivalent of Ellsberg in this scenario is Bradley Manning, not Julian Assange. It almost is like you don’t understand the two incidents, because Assange is nothing like Ellsberg. Assange wasn’t an inside man with information, he just received information from an inside man.
The content of the information is also important. By and large the WikiLeaks information dump wasn’t a big deal, multiple respected foreign policy journalists have said much of the information simply wasn’t interesting. The one thing WikiLeaks released that proved to be of any importance was that helicopter attack video.
Additionally, while I don’t know what Ellsberg has done since then, at the time it doesn’t appear he did this to get attention. Assange has clearly done everything he’s done to get attention. Just like his press conference the other day where he castigated the U.S. Assange is basically an attention whore that is trolling for media hype, he’s on the balcony of the embassy blasting the U.S. for persecuting him while ignoring the fact he’s wanted on a warrant from Sweden and the U.S. has not done anything to him. There is no actual reliable evidence (and leaked diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks or something aren’t evidence) that the U.S. is going to do anything to Assange.
The guy is a loser who I sincerely hope ends up in Ecuador where he will quickly be forgotten.