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> I used to be a big WikiLeaks supporter but these days are long gone. Then you've been duped. The prosecution of Assange is based on his work with Chelsea Man

> I used to be a big WikiLeaks supporter but these days are long gone. Then you've been duped. The prosecution of Assange is based on his work with Chelsea Manning on US war crimes in Iraq. But if the lives of poor brown people far away are not as important as cheap partizanship then the CIA can make you believe anything. Not to mention the fact HRC called for the assassination of Assange and his treatment has been characterized by the UN as torture. I presume you're OK with torture too as long as you think it serves your club?

evgen 6y ago
The only dupes at this point are the useful idiots who still support WikiLeaks. It has long since passed from being anything useful into being an cult of personality built around Assange.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  I'd call it halfway between cult of personality and idealistic belief that maximizing free flow of information maximizes beneficial outcomes without attention to measuring whether that assumption is true. It turns out some secrets are harmful, and some are helpful to the stable function of a society. Practically speaking, I believe it is hard to make a case that Wikileaks has been a net positive, unless one can see a president Trump as part of a net positive story. On the flip side, history is also dotted with obvious examples of secret keeping resulting in long-term damage. The truth, I think, is that the beneficial nature of secrets is something you can only evaluate situationally.
shadowgovt 6y ago
The Manning leaks were hugely irresponsible. While whistleblowing is a vital activity, the data dumps Manning pulled from the military network and State Department were unredacted raw dumps. They catalyzed Arab Spring by pushing the delicate realm of international diplomacy into the eyes of the public, leading to hundreds of deaths and, fundamentally, no real change. Possibly setting back democracy in the Middle East by a generation or so. I like Manning as a person, but state secrets exist for a reason and she deserved to be imprisoned for her crimes.
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  > The Manning leaks were hugely irresponsible. While whistleblowing is a vital activity, the data dumps Manning pulled from the military network and State Department were unredacted raw dumps. WikiLeaks tried to get the Pentagon to help them redact documents[1]. They refused to do so knowing there would be people like you accusing WikiLeaks/Manning of wrongdoing here. > I like Manning as a person, but state secrets exist for a reason and she deserved to be imprisoned for her crimes. You do realize she shed light on war crimes right? Do you consider war crimes 'state secrets' that 'exist for a reason'? The reason, oftentimes, is simply to hide wrongdoing, as was the case here. The fact Manning was imprisoned, (and tortured), while the killers of civilians and journalists she exposed were not shows that this is not a just system. It's designed to chill whileblowers and allow atrocities to continue, unpunished. How anyone could support that is beyond me. 1 - https://www.salon.com/2010/08/20/wikileaks_5/ https://www.salon.com/2010/08/20/wikileaks_5/
  - onepointsixC 6y ago
    >You do realize she shed light on war crimes right? Do you consider war crimes 'state secrets' that 'exist for a reason'? What warcrimes? Please be specific. Because if you're talking about that Helicopter gunship video, that was not a warcrime, and was selectively edited by Wikileaks to try to make it look worse. All of which made Wikileak's claims far more dubious.
    - AsyncAwait 6y ago
      > Because if you're talking about that Helicopter gunship video, that was not a warcrime Since when is killing journalists not a warcrime?
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        Wikipedia gives a pretty good summary of how one arrives at that conclusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstrike#Legality_of_the_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri... --- the short form is that the laws around war crimes give broad leeway to soldiers in the field interpreting a situation on the ground, and from the point of view of the gunship, they may have believed they were firing on attackers attempting to reach RPGs in the vehicle. This is one of the tragedies of modern insurgency warfare... Since nobody's in uniform, how can one be sure that the person in civilian clothing crawling through the operation is trying to escape or going for a concealed weapon? I'm personally inclined to agree with Mark Taylor that "...what this video shows is really a case that challenges whether the laws of war are strict enough." Within the US, there is a similar broad cultural argument ongoing on whether laws protecting police officers err too far on the side of assuming the cops' in-the-field interpretation of what happened should guide how the law understands what happened.
nsajko 6y ago
> Not to mention the fact HRC called for the assassination of Assange and his treatment has been characterized by the UN as torture. The claim of Clinton calling for Assange's assassination seems to be a completely unsubstantiated rumor. Your "torture" claim is plainly false (even if it were true, what's the point in appealing to the authority of UN?), the "characterization" is by Nils Melzer, UN special rapporteur on torture (so he's just something like an independent consultant). More importantly, basically everything Melzer said about Assange is bullshit. I read the interview of Melzer that seems to be the source for all of the absurd claims; and all of Melzer's claims there are vague, unsubstantiated, unverifiable or nonfalsifiable; except for one: Turns out that Melzer's only concrete accusation is based on a misreading of evidence at best; the one against the Swedish police, of how they supposedly tampered with (even fabricated) one of the testimonies. The evidence for that is inconclusive, Melzer was possibly confused with the format of the Freedom of Information documents released by the police, but in any case Melzer is making a big fuss out of nothing and downplaying rape with his other comments at the same time. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22209868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22209868 Also see the comment by one of Assange's alleged victims: > One of the women interviewed by Melzer later sharply criticised him and demanded his resignation. She said that by defining how a "proper rape-victim" would have to act, Melzer was engaging in victim blaming and that his report was partially "untrue and defamatory" I think it should be pretty clear that Melzer's word is worth very little.

evgen 6y ago

The only dupes at this point are the useful idiots who still support WikiLeaks. It has long since passed from being anything useful into being an cult of personality built around Assange.

shadowgovt 6y ago
I'd call it halfway between cult of personality and idealistic belief that maximizing free flow of information maximizes beneficial outcomes without attention to measuring whether that assumption is true. It turns out some secrets are harmful, and some are helpful to the stable function of a society. Practically speaking, I believe it is hard to make a case that Wikileaks has been a net positive, unless one can see a president Trump as part of a net positive story. On the flip side, history is also dotted with obvious examples of secret keeping resulting in long-term damage. The truth, I think, is that the beneficial nature of secrets is something you can only evaluate situationally.

shadowgovt 6y ago

The Manning leaks were hugely irresponsible. While whistleblowing is a vital activity, the data dumps Manning pulled from the military network and State Department were unredacted raw dumps. They catalyzed Arab Spring by pushing the delicate realm of international diplomacy into the eyes of the public, leading to hundreds of deaths and, fundamentally, no real change. Possibly setting back democracy in the Middle East by a generation or so. I like Manning as a person, but state secrets exist for a reason and she deserved to be imprisoned for her crimes.

AsyncAwait 6y ago
> The Manning leaks were hugely irresponsible. While whistleblowing is a vital activity, the data dumps Manning pulled from the military network and State Department were unredacted raw dumps. WikiLeaks tried to get the Pentagon to help them redact documents[1]. They refused to do so knowing there would be people like you accusing WikiLeaks/Manning of wrongdoing here. > I like Manning as a person, but state secrets exist for a reason and she deserved to be imprisoned for her crimes. You do realize she shed light on war crimes right? Do you consider war crimes 'state secrets' that 'exist for a reason'? The reason, oftentimes, is simply to hide wrongdoing, as was the case here. The fact Manning was imprisoned, (and tortured), while the killers of civilians and journalists she exposed were not shows that this is not a just system. It's designed to chill whileblowers and allow atrocities to continue, unpunished. How anyone could support that is beyond me. 1 - https://www.salon.com/2010/08/20/wikileaks_5/ https://www.salon.com/2010/08/20/wikileaks_5/
- onepointsixC 6y ago
  >You do realize she shed light on war crimes right? Do you consider war crimes 'state secrets' that 'exist for a reason'? What warcrimes? Please be specific. Because if you're talking about that Helicopter gunship video, that was not a warcrime, and was selectively edited by Wikileaks to try to make it look worse. All of which made Wikileak's claims far more dubious.
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    > Because if you're talking about that Helicopter gunship video, that was not a warcrime Since when is killing journalists not a warcrime?
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      Wikipedia gives a pretty good summary of how one arrives at that conclusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstrike#Legality_of_the_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri... --- the short form is that the laws around war crimes give broad leeway to soldiers in the field interpreting a situation on the ground, and from the point of view of the gunship, they may have believed they were firing on attackers attempting to reach RPGs in the vehicle. This is one of the tragedies of modern insurgency warfare... Since nobody's in uniform, how can one be sure that the person in civilian clothing crawling through the operation is trying to escape or going for a concealed weapon? I'm personally inclined to agree with Mark Taylor that "...what this video shows is really a case that challenges whether the laws of war are strict enough." Within the US, there is a similar broad cultural argument ongoing on whether laws protecting police officers err too far on the side of assuming the cops' in-the-field interpretation of what happened should guide how the law understands what happened.

nsajko 6y ago

> Not to mention the fact HRC called for the assassination of Assange and his treatment has been characterized by the UN as torture. The claim of Clinton calling for Assange's assassination seems to be a completely unsubstantiated rumor. Your "torture" claim is plainly false (even if it were true, what's the point in appealing to the authority of UN?), the "characterization" is by Nils Melzer, UN special rapporteur on torture (so he's just something like an independent consultant). More importantly, basically everything Melzer said about Assange is bullshit. I read the interview of Melzer that seems to be the source for all of the absurd claims; and all of Melzer's claims there are vague, unsubstantiated, unverifiable or nonfalsifiable; except for one: Turns out that Melzer's only concrete accusation is based on a misreading of evidence at best; the one against the Swedish police, of how they supposedly tampered with (even fabricated) one of the testimonies. The evidence for that is inconclusive, Melzer was possibly confused with the format of the Freedom of Information documents released by the police, but in any case Melzer is making a big fuss out of nothing and downplaying rape with his other comments at the same time. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22209868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22209868 Also see the comment by one of Assange's alleged victims: > One of the women interviewed by Melzer later sharply criticised him and demanded his resignation. She said that by defining how a "proper rape-victim" would have to act, Melzer was engaging in victim blaming and that his report was partially "untrue and defamatory" I think it should be pretty clear that Melzer's word is worth very little.