On edit, I see that this is a zombie thread and that Measure for Measure might not have known of Manning’s treatment post incarceration, so I will retract my previous post.
Either there is government transparency or there isn’t.
Conveniently, for the Government, there is transparency on matters that they want the public to know about and 0 transparency on matters that they do not want the public to know about.
Sometimes those matters that they want to remain hidden have valid, logical reasons why they should remain secret (for a while at least, there should, at the base minimum be a moratorium on ALL secret government information), and sometimes they are kept hidden because they are cover ups of wrong doing.
I am glad for occasional leaks like this. Unfortunately it’s the only way to keep the government on it’s toes. If it can hide wrong doing and nefarious purposes with impunity, then what are our other options?
Partial transparency is NO transparency, when the very people responsible for the wrong doing are the same people with the power to hide it.
Leaving aside the argument over Daniel Ellsberg and Assange, classifying Robert Novak as a “toady” of the Bush administration is asinine.
Is Novak a conservative?
Yes, however he was, amongst prominent Washington journalists, probably the earliest and harshest critic of the War against Iraq, just as he opposed intervention in Bosnia and the first Gulf War.
Did you ever read his column on Joe Wilson, mentioning his wife?
It hardly presented Wilson and his wife as villains.
I agree that this is further evidence that Ellsberg should either have long ago departed this earth or still be holed up in a prison somewhere never to be heard from. Good point.
Awesome post. This is exactly what I was thinking, only you phrased it much better than I would have. It deserves to be re-posted.
You’re arguing that he should have been executed or thrown in prison due to his beliefs about Bradley Manning and Julian Assange? :dubious:
Please explain.
Huh? No. For his crime, of course. We screwed up.
Are you saying you were one of the Plumbers? 
Wait, are there people that in all seriousness think that what Daniel Ellsberg did was somehow… wrong?
He uncovered blatant lies by the government to it’s people, lies which directly led to the death of thousands. How in the hell is he not exactly that kind of American we should all be applauding?
Would people here, being in his shoes, seriously collude in that kind of government cover up? Seriously?
If that’s not evidence for our need for MORE governmental transparency I don’t know what is.
Well, apparently magellan01 and Ibn Warraq would; probably some others, too.
Please explain such a personal attack on me because it’s more than a little uncalled for.
Where have I suggested that Ellsberg did anything wrong?
I merely challenged your citation of wikipedia, which is horrifically unreliable, and asked you to explain in your own words why you thought Ellsberg was “a hero”.
Did you not bother reading the whole thread and seeing my exchanged with magellan01?
I haven’t made any comments about Assange so I’m not sure why you’re accusing me of “despising Assange.”
As for wikipedia, yes, it’s a shitty source which encourages intellectual laziness which serious people see not as more a link to sources than as an adequate source.
Beyond that, being “the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit” means that most of it’s articles on “controversial subjects”, such as Ellsberg, should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
There’s a reason so many college professors don’t allow their students to use it as sources anymore than they’d let students use Foxnews.
As for Chomsky, what makes you think he’s not highly unreliable.
He’s the guy who manufactured quotes which he falsely attributed to Harry Truman in one of his books, argued that Israel should model itself after Lebanon because Muslims and Christians in Lebanon lived “in peace and harmony”, claimed that the Cambodian Holocaust was hoax perpetrated by the US government to cover up their own war crimes, that the Khmer Rouge was no worse than the French resistance, argued that the US supported the Khurds because the Khurds are “white” whereas Arabs are “brown”. And that’s ignoring his statements regarding the slaughter of Muslims in Bosnia or the war in Vietnam.
Please explain why I should view someone with such wild views as unreliable.
This is worth highlighting, Ellsberg, from what I can tell at least at the time of his actions was not doing it for his own fame or for wealth. I’m sure Ellsberg has written books and given interviews and done public speaking and enriched himself after the fact. But it does say something that he wasn’t out there actively trying to drum up money for himself while he was doing his leaking. Assange ran WikiLeaks with very clear goals: get lots of attention so the site gets lots of donations. To get attention they would need secrets to be leaked onto WikiLeak’s secure servers. Assange was one of the few people at WikiLeaks to benefit financially from all the donations, using it to fund his travel and etc. I believe Assange was also the only or one of the only persons affiliated with WikiLeaks to draw a salary.
So in a very real sense, Assange’s personal income is based on how much shit he stirs up.
Someone like Martin Luther King broke unjust laws for a good reason. Someone like that, you should want those laws changed and that person to escape punishment as much as possible.
Someone like John Brown broke just laws (laws against insurrection, murder) for a good reason (fighting against the larger framework of slavery.) While you can sympathize with where Brown’s heart was, you can’t really approve or condone his actual actions and his punishment was just.
Individuals like Ellsberg also broke just laws (laws against leaking classified information) but for a really good reason. So that puts him somewhere in between MLK and Brown to me. I feel the same for Manning, except Manning’s motivation at least in part appears to be more about his own psychological / emotional instability than anything else which muddies the issue a bit.
I can’t say I’d want any law Ellsberg or Manning broke to be changed or undone, but they aren’t “as deserving” of punishment as say John Brown (who murdered innocent people for an overall righteous cause.) I guess I’d fall somewhere along the lines of thinking Manning deserves a lengthy prison sentence but not life or anything, and that is what Ellsberg should have received.
I cannot understand how anything in that interview informs on the question you raised in the op.
In this thread I have read some decent arguments for why Ellsberg’s actions should be considered heroic. Do you have any reason to put forth why Assange should be considered as anything but a self-serving twit? If not then this thread is pretty dead (other than its hijack into whether or not Ellsberg’s actions were heroic) as there is no one willing to argue that Assange did anything heroic at all.
Actually, Assange is a hero. He spoke truth to power. These cavils about him doing it to make money … if there were ever a Dumbest Plan In The World for getting rich, it would be, “Let’s set up a website and publish the secrets of extremely powerful, wealthy and important people and let the bucks roll in. Nothing could go wrong!”
So his secrets embarrassed US officials … so what? They did reveal lies about some of the military actions we have engaged in. But that’s not heroic enough for you, is it? It’s heroic enough for me.
Didn’t some of the WikiLeaks documents include the names of informants in Afghanistan? That’s not speaking truth to powerful, it’s horrendously unethical and victimizes the vulnerable.
I agree he’s motivated more by principle and a love of attention than the desire for money, but this is silly. People love to hear about scandals involving the extremely powerful, wealthy, and important. Anyway it must be tough to be deeply paranoid and love the limelight.