Julian Assange of Wikileaks for Nobel Peace Prize?

Great Debates
21

Meh, it doesn’t matter: most non-Americans are well aware that the American authorities will promise vast rewards for betrayal, but usually find a way to wriggle out of giving it out once they have the result desired. It’s rather a standing joke.
Whomever betrayed Saddam did not end up with $25 million.
*
“He was someone I would call his right arm,” said Major Stan Murphy, the head of intelligence for the 4th Infantry Division’s First Brigade in Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit said on Friday of the man who led to Saddam’s capture at a hideout near there on December 13.
Murphy said the informant was in detention, ruling out the possibility that he would receive any of the $25-million bounty that the United States had placed on Saddam’s head.
“He is a bad man and should rot in jail,” the major said.*

Although **allegedly**they did pay the $15 million for Saddam’s two sons.
In the case of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, America again promised $25 million ( it is obviously a magic number, enough to get people to sell their own mother, but not too much as would sound implausible ), and…

In apparent contradiction to statements made earlier in the day by U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, an Iraqi spokesman said the US$25 million reward “will be honored” (although this need not mean that any money will actually be paid, as the terms of the reward would indeed be “honored” by having no payee if no one qualifies). Khalilzad, in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, had stated the bounty would not be paid because the decisive information leading to Zarqawi’s whereabouts had been supplied by an al-Qaeda in Iraq operative whose own complicity in violent acts would disqualify him from receiving payment.
And from an article from 2003 upon Rewards rarely paying off:
There is no evidence to indicate Saddam would pay these bounties even if Iraqi aim were to improve. But some also wonder if the U.S. government will honor its reward contracts or become a welsher. Don’t be surprised if Washington finds a way to weasel out of paying, on the grounds that some intelligence agency was more crucial to cracking a case than a tipster or informant. “If that happens,” Fryrear says, “no one is going to care or get upset about someone not getting paid. People look at it as someone trying to cash in on bad news. We offer these rewards in a rush and what we end up doing is really cheating people.”

Egger, author of The Killers Among Us: An Examination of Serial Murder and Its Investigation, blames the press for the continuing failure to pay. “The press is not asking the hard questions, such as, `What happened to the reward?’ They are real good with splashing the reward in a headline, but tracking the reward is another story.”

For example, ever wonder what “hero” Kentucky truck driver Ron Lantz did with the $500,000 reward money he earned helping to capture John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo, the alleged snipers who last year terrorized the Washington metropolitan area? He didn’t do anything with the money because he never was paid. Worse, he might never get it.

And how happy are those Pakistani neighbors who believed they had hit the $25 million jackpot when they alerted authorities to suspicious behavior in the two-story house in Rawalpindi where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States, was captured? Apparently an Egyptian radical soldier who squeezed information out of a witness will be the one to get the reward, along with another $2 million to relocate. But it is all but impossible to discover whether so much as a dime has been paid because there is no oversight tracking. As far as the neighbors go, criminologists say, they’d have had better luck if they had won a lottery. Unlike the reward system, the lottery pays every winner who comes forward.

So… the tax-payer wins; comedy is satisfied; and a bad guy is either in his grave or a maximum security prison for the rest of his life. All it took was the heartbreak of broken promises.

In the other hand, even Stalin disdained the snitches he honoured; and even the Jewish Priests honoured the Thirty Pieces of Silver to Judas. Autre temps, autre moeurs…

22

In just two hours of searching the WikiLeaks archive, The Times found the names of dozens of Afghans credited with providing detailed intelligence to US forces. Their villages are given for identification and also, in many cases, their fathers’ names.

23

Why would you think that?

24

Please.

WikiLeaks isn’t working with an incentive structure based on the Pentagon’s choice to redact. Nothing that the Pentagon does, or does not do, with redacting sensitive information affects WikiLeak’s goals. I mean, Christ, think for a second about what they actually want: free information, or some other hippie journalist ideal. They want to release every bit of relevant intel they find, and the Pentagon’s actions with redacting the information are totally irrelevant to that goal. If the Pentagon chooses not to redact, WikiLeaks will release as much relevant information as they can. If the Pentagon chooses the opposite, WikiLeaks will release as much relevant information as they can. WikiLeaks goal remains the same, regardless of the Pentagon’s choice to redact.

The Pentagon taking action to keep the actual damaging stuff out of circulation does not affect WikiLeaks’s motives.

That couldn’t be more different from paying off terrorists with dollars, which actively encourages more terrorism. The whole point for terrorists is the pay-off, and the pay-off would itself provide more incentives for more terrorism. That isn’t remotely true for WikiLeaks, neither in the immediate present with their latest leak nor in the long-term. They want to get more information out there, and the redaction activities of the Pentagon provide no incentives or disincentives at all for those releases. If WikiLeaks were actually breaking a real law–something more substantive than meeting what’s-his-face’s standard of “common decency”–the Pentagon’s redaction would still not absolve them of legal culpability, were any such culpability actually provable in a court. But such a redaction would help the Pentagon’s own ostensible goals of reducing the damage from the release. If the information is as sensitive as they claim, then the Pentagon gains genuine information security, while losing nothing, if they choose to redact. Redact now and prosecute later is a perfectly serviceable plan, if there is truly anything that can be prosecuted.

If they can’t see the crystal clear cost-benefit here, then they are simply not competent with handling sensitive intelligence. That doesn’t necessarily impeach their competence in other fields, like drone bombing or whatever, but it’s a clear indictment of their intelligence capabilities. We would be entrusting people with management of a war who deliberately allowed the release of dangerous information that they themselves could have stopped.

The “long-term solution” here is the same as the short-term solution: prevent any damaging information from getting out and tighten security protocols. Nothing about the long-term situation changes at all, because the Pentagon’s actions would not provide any support for WikiLeaks to continue doing what it’s doing. WikiLeaks gets its information from other sources, and it will continue to get its information from other sources regardless of the Pentagon’s actions with redaction.

Now this is a beyond fucking idiotic thing to have written, but it once again illustrates my own point perfectly.

The first accusation against WikiLeaks was that “releasing these documents put people’s lives in jeopardy”. That’s what the claim was. That’s what he wrote. And as soon as I pointed out that that damage could have been prevented, that danger averted by smarter action from the Pentagon, the accusation magically morphed itself into something else in order to continue to blame WikiLeaks while leaving the Pentagon off the hook.

According to the Pentagon itself, the actual damage from the leak–the “rape” as it is so charmingly analogized–was the disclosure about real names. And yet the Pentagon could have prevented the damage. But that’s not sensationalist enough. The entire info release, even the harmless parts of it that no one cares about, are analogized to a “rape”. What’s more, it’s a “rape” that can’t be stopped! Oh noes!!!1! (Never mind the fact that the Pentagon could have prevented the actual damaging information from getting out–the moronic analogy must go on!)

It’s exactly like I said originally. The Pentagon has been cast as the good guys, and so they can’t be blamed for their own short-sightedness. Good guys don’t do bad things, because they’re the good guys, and so their actual actions don’t matter. WikiLeaks are playing the role of the bad, and even when both the good and the bad are culpable for potentially sensitive information getting released, only the “bad guys” get blamed, while the mistake on the good guys part gets ignored.

Now, I’m not personally casting the Pentagon as “evil”. I’m saying we have to judge them based on their actions, and we have to judge them consistently. Which means: If this information really is all that sensitive, as the Pentagon claims, then both WikiLeaks and the Pentagon should have taken more care with the information. Neither side gets off the hook. If the Pentagon is right about the damaging nature of the info–keeping in mind that they are often unreliable with the facts, as this very case shows–then they have to step up and accept the fact that they knew sensitive information was about to be released, and they did nothing to stop it, even though it’s a part of their job description that they are themselves responsible for management of sensitive intel.

They can’t rely on the hippie journalists to have the same motives as the military, so it’s about time that they man up and do their own fucking jobs.

25

What ridiculous double standard? It pretty clear to me that Assange is a vile excuse for a human being. He release secret information that put people’s lives at risk. Everything we said on this board about outing Valerie Plame goes double for Assange because he did it KNOWING that it would put peoples lives at risk.

They didn’t tell him to fuck of and they didn’t sit on their hands. They told him not to publish the information. Its a crime to expose secret information, it would only compound the damage to tell people WHY the information is secret.

That is some seriously twisted rationalization there. You’re saying that we should blame the Pentagon for not cooperating with a guy that was about to leak state secrets?

Didn’t you just suggest they get the Nobel peace prize?

The pentagon’s blame begins and ends with letting the information out of its control in the first place. The guy that gave Assange the information should be executed.

26

So you think its a good idea to publicize which Afghani peasants are cooperating with US forces in Iraq? Which ones are responsible for pointing out where the head of the Taliban is hiding out?

I generally think sunlight is the best disinfectant but in the case of national security, I think we should at least have some sort of filter to prevent sensitive information from becoming public knowledge.

27

I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know about any crimes of non-US nationals releasing US information. But even if that’s the case, then redact the sensitive parts now, and prosecute him later when you get a chance.

Why is that so hard?

Of course.

If the information is sensitive, then they should do what they can to prevent its disclosure. That’s fully implied in the whole “sensitive information” bit of things. If it’s sensitive, and they have a chance to keep it from getting out, then the people who are in charge of keeping sensitive information from getting out should keep sensitive information from getting out. Pretty simple.

No.

My choice to post in this thread has nothing to do with my feelings on the Nobel Prize. I think WikiLeaks (probaby) fucked up. But I’m not the type to excuse one side’s mistakes just because another group messed up. If there’s blame here, then it belongs to a lot of people.

No, it does not.

The Pentagon is still responsible for sensitive info even after it’s been leaked. That’s their fucking job. If the leak-fairies give them a second chance to eliminate the damage that might be caused by the original security breach, then as the proper custodians of that information, they should take that opportunity to save lives. (That is, assuming that this information is as sensitive as they claim it is. I’m not the type to trust a perennial liar without more evidence.)

This is their job. Their responsibility for sensitive information doesn’t magically stop after it’s been leaked. It continues as long as they have the power to make changes and stop the damage that they themselves claim exists. I mean, hell, the Pentagon itself were the ones whining about WikiLeaks not “directly” contacting them about the possibility of redacting the information (never mind the fact that WikiLeaks did, in fact, contact the Pentagon through an intermediary). They had a chance to redact information that they themselves claimed would save lives, and they didn’t take it. That’s unacceptable for any competent custodians of information.

That’s something for a court to decide, yes?

28

Abu Ghraib wasn’t discovered by wikileaks. For that matter, wikileaks hasn’t really ever broken a story of consequence. Here’s a few stories wikileaks has carried over the years:

  • doctored up footage of a US attack in Afghanistan nine years after the public knew we attack people in Afghan.

  • Thousands of low level documents about Afghan. So far no one has found anything surprising or new in them. Well, the Taliban found out the names of people to kill, but I meant surprising or new in a public interest sort of way.

  • They released Sarah Palins email contents, which made exactly jack shit difference to the public because they are politics as usual.

  • They’ve released hundreds of secret UN reports, but the fact no one has heard of a single one of them tells you how much interesting they were.

  • In 2009 they released hundred of thousands of pager messages sent on 9/11, including from the Pentagon and NYC Fire Dept. Thanks to the information contained, we now know there apparently were terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001. Imagine how much an effect this would have had if only we had watched the attacks live eight years prior to this leak.

  • Hosted CRU emails which has given global warming conspiracy buffs hardons ever since but hasn’t actually done jack shit for the actual science. Note - they weren’t the original leak of this info, they just hosted what someone else released.

  • Were legally threatened by Scientology in 2008 for hosting documents related to OT levels. Documents which have been easily available since 1994, twelve years before wikileaks even existed.

  • Revealed some of the specifics of Gitmo’s operations. Nothing major though, everyone already know Gitmo existed and what went on in it already.

  • A list of contributors to Norm Coleman’s senate campaign. Perhaps someone should tell them about the FCC disclosure site.

  • A list of blocked sites in Australia. Except it wasn’t actually the list of sites blocked in Australia. When that was pointed out, they later released another (different) list of blocked sites in Australia. Incidentally, there are a LOT of kiddie porn sites in the list. So if you wanna see a six year old with a dick up her ass, head on over to wikileaks. Truly information that’s of public interest.

It might also be noted that they constantly claim how much danger they’re in, that the CIA is stalking them, and so on. They’ve never provided actual proof of those claims and an investigation into them came up with nothing to substantiate it.

I support the idea of a site like Wikileaks. There are many times when there is information which should be public and isn’t. However Wikileaks has never released anything of actual public interest value. They’re the internet equivalent of the guy who goes through your trash and writes a book on how many banana skins you threw away. Sure, that’s info we didn’t know before, but who gives a flying fuck? This is just some people who post a lot of worthless info, and occasionally just blatantly edit stuff to serve their biases better. Then they make unproven conspiracy claims and brag about how great they are. Fuck em.

29

Yes. Of course. Wikileaks cannot control itself, it is not culpable for anything it does, it is simply a cog in the journalistic apparatus. They get info, they publish said info, heck we should be grateful they even offered to redact the stuff that the specific parts of a top secret document that they consider especially sensitive. In fact we should give them a FUCKING NOBEL PEACE PRIZE.

There’s some stuff that the pentagon wants to keep secret because its trying to hide information from US citizens and then there’s information that they are trying to hide from our enemies. Assange didn’t give a fuck which kind he was exposing and the excuse that the pentagon could have sifted through the stuff and redacted the stuff that was real sensitive information versus stuff that they were trying to keep from the public is bullshit when you consider what was actually revealed.

Show me the smoking gun that justifies endangering the lives of those Afghani informants? Show me the Abu Ghraib type revelation. Show me the My Lai massacre that justifies endangering the lives of US and Nato troops over there fighting the Taliban.

All that was in those documents was stuff we already knew, except we didn’t know the names and locations of our informants. Now everybody knows.

30

When you finally take the time to read the words that I actually wrote, instead of hitting “reply” to one of my posts and then responding to somebody else, we can have a discussion.

31

Maybe I’m getting my signals crossed because you seemed to be excusing Assange for what he did because “he’s a journalist and that’s what journalists do” Are you in fact saying that Assange is a scumbag for what he did and the pentagon was incompetent not to take Assange up on his offer to redact sensitive information?

[quote]
My choice to post in this thread has nothing to do with my feelings on the Nobel Prize. I think WikiLeaks (probaby) fucked up. But I’m not the type to excuse one side’s mistakes just because another group messed up. If there’s blame here, then it belongs to a lot of people. No, it does not.[//quote]

Wikileaks, didn’t just “fuck up” they killed people when they released that information. He was the least cost avoider of the harm. He was the last person who could have prevented the harm. I thought you were somehow shifting that ultimate blame from Assange to the pentagon because the pentagon could have done something to mitigate the harm by cooperating with Assange and chose not to.

They said the whole damn thing was sensitive which is why it was classified as SECRET.

When I say he “should” be executed for it, I thought I was expressing an opinion.

Maybe, I’m mistaken but I thought it was a soldier that gave him the info. He would be tried by a court martial and if it is established that he knowingly gave classified secret information to Assange, then he certainly could be executed for it and in my opinion, he should be executed for it. In a time of war, I don’t see how you don’t execute the guy.

32

OK, forget the peace prize. My mistake. But you are awfully quick to place blame on the pentagon and not on the guy that actually leaked the information that put people’s lives at risk.

We’re not over there because the Taliban threatened Bush’s daddy. We are over there because every connection that Bush tried to make between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein (a thoroughly bad guy who posed no threat to the US) actually exists between the Taliban and al Qaeda. We not only have every right to be there, we MUST be there. No nation can survive for long if it doesn’t respond decisively to something like 9/11 just because its hard.

Show me the smoking gun that was worth leaking all that sensitive information? I hope Assange hangs and I hope a Democrat hangs him.

33

If he released names of informants who could get killed, then yes, that’s an incredibly scummy thing to do.

That he asked the Pentagon for help in reducing that very kind of error is without question a mitigating circumstance, but it does not absolve him entirely. But here’s the thing: Everyone who blames Assange and ignores the Pentagon’s own willful decision to allow the information to be released, even though they had a chance to open a dialogue and prevent it, is employing a vicious double standard.

I’m not sure of the actual gravity of this release, so I’m relatively cool about assigning blame to anyone. But if there is blame here, then a lot of people fucked up. The posters who are hyperventilating about how much WikiLeaks fucked up, while simultaneously ignoring the Pentagon’s slip-up that could have and should have acted as a fail-safe are engaging in the normal deference to authority, gobbling up the story of the Pentagon and ignoring the Pentagon’s own culpability. If this was a serious breach (something I personally don’t know), then fault for that breach does not lie solely with the WikiLeaks, when WikiLeaks did take a measure, insufficient as it was, to try to avoid this very sort of damage.

The last I read, there have been exactly zero (0) reports that anyone has died specifically because of this release. If you have information otherwise, I would be happy to read it.

Then that was a lie, too, as others have pointed out in this thread. Much of the information was stuff we already knew. And yet the whole damn thing was classified as SECRET. Why? Likely because stamping a big red CLASSIFIED on a file is just something they do, without consideration of whether it’s really necessary.

Again, this does not speak well of the Pentagon’s handling of classified material. It clouds the issue. And to say it again, this does not absolve WikiLeaks of anything. But it does mean that the Pentagon fucked up as well, in not being smarter about separating what’s classified with what’s not, in order to better protect information that should be protected.

Okay. The release might have put people’s lives in danger, and you want a punishment for that. That’s reasonable.

But here’s the thing: the entire war is killing people, even innocent people, for the purpose of some vaunted greater good. Maybe this greater good even exists. But the very sorts of people who clutch their pearls and swoon at the possible damage of government interference in, say, the domestic economy, then turn around and give the government every single benefit of the doubt when it decides to bomb for freedom. We’re not talking about some fuzzy economic issue like the deadweight loss from expected future taxation, where the damage is unclear. We’re talking about real people getting killed, some of them indisputably innocent, in the name of a higher cause.

I’m not saying that WikiLeaks gets a free ride here. I’m saying, instead, that no one gets a free ride, most especially those very people who have been entrusted with life and death decisions. If this breach is as serious as people seem to believe, then it doesn’t just cast a shadow on WikiLeaks. It taints the competence of the very people who are supposed to be in charge of protecting the greater good.

It is simply irresponsible to use this particular case as a hammer to bang away at WikiLeaks, when the story is much more complicated than the way it’s being presented.

34

What’s the charge? There are no laws for “common decency”. He can’t commit treason against the US as a non-American. We can blame him for an unconscionable lack of discretion in deciding what info to release, but what’s the actual criminal charge against a non-US citizen releasing US secrets?

35

Here is an article on the subject, basically stating that the investigation is still on-going, so charges are only still being considered. If any US federal charges are filed against Assange, the two most likely would be Knowing receipt of stolen public records of the US and/or Disclosure of classified information or conspiracy to do either. Neither of these two specific crimes allows for capital punishment.

36

You keep repeating this as though it were a fact. However, the journalist who says he forwarded Assange’s request for assistance in redacting documents said this:

Link.

37

Is that so? It seems to me that cooperation with redaction benefits WikiLeaks in a number of ways:

  • It tells Wikileaks which information the Pentagon considers especially sensitive, allowing them to focus their search for that information and potentially release it anyway knowing it would be the most damaging.

  • It verifies and legitimizes the information.

  • It eases whatever ethical qualms they might have about releasing the information if they follow through with the suggested redactions.

  • It makes them seem as if they have the blessing or cooperation of the government.

That’s all I can come up with off the top of my head. But you seem pretty smart. I’ll bet you could even come up with a few more if you tried.

38

What makes you think you have to be a citizen to violate the criminal laws related to disclosure of classified information, or to be subjected to US criminal laws generally? I don’t know for certain, but I would guess there is a statute providing extraterritorial jurisdiction over aliens involved in organized criminal efforts to disrupt US national security by disclosing classified information.

39

:dubious: The fact that America isn’t the sole ruler of the world?

40

So, Der Trihs’s personal politics will stop the US from doing so? I doubt it. Do you even vote?

(If you want to have an argument over whether the US should do such a thing, perhaps you should open a new thread. My point was about their actual legal power to do so, at present.)