Daniel Ellsberg was a hero. How is Julian Assange not a hero?

Well he wrote a widely alluded to paper in 1961, discussing what would eventually be known as the Ellsberg paradox.

ETA: Simplicio: Agreed. Or rather while I don’t necessarily fault the government for withholding the footage, I can say that its release had was a bona fide exposure of malfeasance.

nevermind

Sounds like a good movie. Now that we know what more of the world really thinks about Iran getting nukes, maybe Israel will be more inclined to bomb the shit out of them.:eek:

And Noam Chomsky is an undisputed genius in linguistics. Still, there are those who consider him a nut/idiot/whatever.

Julian Assange makes first public statement since seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.

If your statement represents your genuine belief then you obviously don’t know what the word “implies” means.

Wikipedia is an extremely shitty source to use.

Please explain in your words rather than relying on a source that’s useful as toilet paper but not much else.

Actually, a friend of mine who’s linguist and the head of the Middle Eastern studies department of a major East Coast University would dispute that.

Beyond that, such a claim shows a dramatic misunderstanding of the human condition.

A prominent Nobel Prize Winner wrote some rather long essays describing the difference between “Aryan Physics” and “Jewish Physics” while, without a single exception, the head of the History department of every Ivy League school in 1910 believed in Eugenics.

It’s very easy for extremely smart people to believe stupid things. For example the Ayatollah Khomeini.

This, BTW, is why Ecuador gave Assange asylum:

I see the Pentagon Papers and the Wikileaks releases as pretty much the same sort of actions.

So the question is: was Ellsberg’s crime a heroic act of criminal/civil disobedience? He had an obligation under the law and contract not to release the information. He did anyway. It lead to the end of the war. He suffered somewhat for it, but not the criminal penalties he could have been subjected to. He did expose waging war under false circumstances, which is a war crime and was instrumental in hastening an end. So that is a mitigating circumstance. He was not prosecuted.

Assange is not a US citizen and not subject to US laws and a journalist too boot. Pursuing him is just nuts and venal. Assuming that the vague sex abuse charges are either valid or invalid doesn’t change that. The US looks like an idiot for pursuing Assange. Not only do we have no jurisdiction, but publishing this info is not a crime under the first amendment.

Come on, man. He’s got a lot of cutting and posting to do. That’s real work. Next you’ll be asking him to cut and paste answers, too.

Really, what I find interesting is that Ibn Warraq considers Wikipedia–which has no dead tree version, by definition–useful as toilet paper. Truly surreal.

Mocking Chomsky, mocking Wikipedia, despising Assange–the thread here seems to be that Ibn Warraq hates the messenger, or people who tell him what he does not want to hear.

I don’t know, I just thought it was interesting.

These days, on here, I consider someone that goes “moan moan Wikipedia is a crap source” instead of debating the point pretty much pointless to discuss anything with. They get ignored. If all you can do is moan about the source then the reality usually is that you’ve got nothing yourself.

That article completely leaves out what might be the most important factor: that a government friendly to Hugo Chavez is doing something to poke the imperialist United States in the eye.

It ain’t exactly like Ecuador is a paradise for freedom of the press.

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.

Yeah, it’s breezy work compared to the snarky drive-bys that you and I labor so hard to contribute.

Your problem with Bradley Manning is that he didn’t tell his military superiors in advance that he was going to release video of the U.S. army murdering people? Um, OK.

Boy, I bet he felt like a chump when we were greeted as liberators, uncovered stockpiles of WMD, and the war was over in a matter of weeks and completely paid for itself!

Someone that embarrassingly wrong on every count should have the decency never open his mouth again, let alone be taken seriously by anyone with a functioning brain…

Wrong Bush and wrong date. Wrong war. Other than that, spot on!

I shall never open my mouth again.

Nevermind.