If the person making the decisions is elected we can throw or vote them out of office. If a self-appointed protector makes them, we’re stuck with him. His actions show him to be bit a hypocrite and an enemy of the U.S. and he should be dealt with accordingly.
I don’t think this question can have any answer than “no” until the US government comes up with an example where it would be “yes” in some reasonable way. AFAIK they haven’t, though unsubstantiated allegations and threats keep coming, but the answer remains “no” until they do. And “we feel embarrassed” is not a matter of national security in any reasonable sense.
Ha, “Enemy of the People”, where’s comissar when you need him?
- Assange is not a US citizen, doesn’t live in the US, and is far from obliged to like the US.
- His decisions are his own - you may not like them, but please show how they harm the US in any real way.
Please also show how “[voting him] out of office” would have any effect if it was applicable and you could do it.
Was Ralph Nader an enemy of the U.S. when he publicized fatal design flaws and limitations in U.S.-made cars of the 1950s and '60s ? Nobody elected him to watchdog the auto industry, after all.
What about Woodward and Bernstein, who specifically investigated governmental malfeasance? Can you define “enemy of the U.S.” in a manner more weighty than “I don’t like him” ?
I’d imagine, based on the leftists I know who are crazy about him, one of three reasons:
- He’s releasing stuff embarrassing to the US Government? That MUST mean that it will embarrass the Republicans more!
- Information WANTS to be free, man. Substitute real free speech/free journalism arguments here as necessary.
- You can only truly trust government so far as it is transparent, and for a government to properly discharge its duties to its citizens it must be possible for citizens to hold it accountable–and step one of accountability is “knowing what’s going on”.
I fall somewhere between 2 and 3, for the record.
Well, (1) is just a matter of timing. Had Al Gore been elected in 2000 and the years 2001-2009 been of his administration, I guess Wikileaks would now be embarassing Democrats. I have no illusions that they incapable of the same degree of sliminess as Republicans.
I suppose (2) might be considered left wing at least some of the time, but aren’t militia-types also knon for making Freedom-of-Information requests?
And I thought (3) played into the whole mess of libertarian, “live free or die”, “blood of tyrants and patriots” mystique, which I guess I associate more with right-winger than left.
Of course, being Canadian, I cheerfully acknowledge my potential bias, where a policy an American might consider left-wing seems normal to me (because it’s already in place here) and a policy an American might consider right-wing looks borderline fascist (because we don’t have it or need it here).
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I know he’s not a U.S. citizen. and as far as I’m concerned, even if he were a citizen he would not be obliged to like the U.S.
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Whether I can draw a line from his actions to an actual harm today is immaterial. You don’t know how things will shake out (with the Afghani informants, for instance) and neither do I. But it is not necessary to show that the documents he released has caused harm. That puts the U.S. in the position of saying “You released that one, okay. You released that one, okay, You released that on—hey, what the fuck do you think you are doing?”, thereby showing our hand as to which information we hold to be more valuable. Nope, that doesn’t work. What DOES work is that once something is classified as secret or top secret and someone releases it or abets in its release, the weight of the U.S> should crush them.
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You can’t vote him out of office. THAT is the point! He self appointed, deciding what should be done with our country’s sensitive information. I can’t believe people are alright with that. We actually elect people to make those decisions. Surely you understand the whole democracy thing, no?
As I’ve said, I predict that some operative from a minor country will put a bullet in his head. And that will be a good day.
Much of the diplomatic cables which has caused chaos via anarchy and revolt in Tunisia which has inspired similar ones throughout the Middle East. Threatened releases on American banking which caused drops in stock prices for Bank of America. If those are released in the current fragile state of the economy we may very well end up blaming Mr. Assange for being the author of a “double-dip” recession.
Really? We should blame him, and not B of A?
At least down here, there’s a fair bit of overlap between the libertarians and the far-left on social issues, FOIA stuff, and government distrust. Much of that wouldn’t have been true to the same extent ten years ago, and it would have been even less true pre-Nixon.
I cheerfully agree that the 1) guys are missing the point, especially since at least some of the leaked stuff is same-ol’ from the Obama administration.
There’s only one problem with all this in my view: in my day job (IT Director for a small company that does some defense contracting) I know that there’s a fair bit of classified/confidential/NOFORN information that is not properly labeled as such, and I also know that stripping off said labeling renders the resulting product indistinguishable from any number of unclassified documents with similar content. If I didn’t have a key and a number of other people to ask, I would not be able to distinguish between a Secret/SCI document with the relevant labeling stripped and an unclassified white paper regarding broadly similar technology.
So suppose my company starts doing something horridly evil or embarrassing–for the sake of argument, we’re developing a wide-angle crowd-control ray that has a small-but-significant chance (5%) of blinding the targets permanently instead of just stunning them. I decide that I HAVE to release this information to make sure the world at large knows the risks of this device, so I strip the classifications off it and send it to Assange.
Mr. Assange, however, is a journalist and not familiar with the state of the art in sci-fi stun ray technology, and may not realize the document is legally classified and secret instead of just an embarrassing little-known white paper. In addition, he’s been given the document by someone who presumably has authority to access it. He therefore publishes it, not knowing that he’s abetting the disclosure of classified information but agreeing with me that it needs to be more well known.
Certainly, I am guilty of several criminal acts and civil torts here. However, I think a court or jury could EASILY conclude that, aside from the obvious First Amendment implications, Mr. Assange has no mens rea–no intention to commit a crime–and therefore isn’t guilty of anything but being somewhat misled by his sources as to the actual provenance of the documents in question. Furthermore, punishing Mr. Assange merely removes one obvious conduit for potentially classified information to move to public view–and once it’s out there at all, the classification is irrelevant, it’s out there, game is over.
Essentially, I am arguing that once a secret document is revealed, there’s no damn point in punishing the journalist who published it. It doesn’t put the cat back in the bag, it doesn’t prevent publication on any of the OTHER “leak” sites out there (and there are hundreds, just ask the software industry how well their trade secrets for encryption and such of media stay hidden), and the journalist in question may not even be aware he’s committing something that’s a crime in the US.
So yeah, punish the people who unlawfully break classification on secret documents. Punishing the publishers is counterproductive, makes us look like idiots, and is frankly immoral.
Are you familiar with The Freedom of Information Act?
I see your point, and in the singular scenario you crafted I’d say the scumbag Assange is off the hook. But we can then look a t a pattern of his behavior, and when we do his cries of "oh, secret? really?, I didn’t know,sound likes a load of shit (true or not). Whenever I could, I’d go after him and whomever else seeks to subvert the power that is vested in our elected officials. I’d make such an example of him, and the next guy, and the next guy, no one would think about doing it in short order. I’d be as extreme as I had to be to reach those ends.
Please tell me about the FoIA for secret and top secret documents.
Then I don’t see why your problem is with Assange, or at least it seems greater than the problem you may or may not have with the people who gave these documents to him.
I’m incidentally amused by Qin Shi’s claim that Assange’s publishing of American diplomatic cables caused the revolt in Tunisia and threatened revolts elsewhere in the Middle East. Aren’t these dictatorial nations? Wouldn’t some revolt be good for the citizens? And that’s with the absurdly generous granting-for-the-sake-of-argument the rather egotistical assumption that American diplomatic traffic was the trigger.
What about Valerie Plame?
Oh, right, of course, that was the Bush administration outing a CIA operative. I think the Plame affair really reduced the strength of the ‘protect our people by protecting our secrets’ argument.
Let me clarify. Manning should be tried for treason and shot. Yesterday. And anytime this happens, the trials should be as accelerated as possible, so as people can see a clear link between that type of activity and the punishment.
That kind of depends on what replaces the dictatorship they had, does it not?
Assange is a hero. he had the nerve to show the BS that is done in our name. Why is it good to lie to your country? Why is it necessary to do illegal acts in the name of America? Why are we stupid enough to accept we should be kept in the dark by those who work for us?
Assange is not making this stuff up. He is simply telling us what our diplomats and soon what our bankers did in our name. He is doing us a patriotic service.