Quotes from Julian Assange of Wikileaks | Hacker News Reader

Quotes from Julian Assange of Wikileaks

beginning.anitawirawan.com

20 pointsbrl5 comments

We know for sure that one big media company in the US had the ‘Collateral Murder’ video for years and did not release it.

That seems especially incriminating. I wonder if it's as sinister as it sounds, or if there's a good reason for this? (for example, it was encrypted and beyond their resources to decrypt)

Big media is part of the entertainment industry. They sell what people want to see. How many Americans want to watch a video of an Apache firing at civilians during a war that was started based on lies, that has resulted in the death of approx. 5000 U.S. soldiers, and that has cost hundreds of Gigadollars? Looking at the mirror is always hard, especially so if such introspection leads to the conclusion that one's "democratically" elected government regularly engages in terrorism abroad.

Besides, making the U.S. government look bad would be burning bridges, and that would most likely result in decreases in revenue in the future.

From this tweet: http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/15617022129

Statement: Washington Post had Collateral murder video for over a year but DID NOT RELEASE IT it to the public.

That quote stood out at me too, not because it incriminates a media company, but because it incriminates WikiLeaks.

Why is WikiLeaks concealing whatever evidence they have of this? It's awfully convenient for them to make this claim. If true, it demonstrates the importance of the WikiLeaks organization.

But at this point it's just PR. Why should we believe this guy?

And besides, WikiLeaks is supposedly sitting on a stockpile of submitted information. They themselves choose when and how to release information, so who are they to criticize?

I think that the recent case with Bradley Manning demonstrated that even though WikiLeaks provides anonymity to the people who submit the materials, it is still possible to track down the whistle blower anyway and if cases like this were to repeat, people would not submit anything to WikiLeaks for the fear that they will be discovered anyway.

Edit: Huh, I was not aware of the fact that Manning was caught because Adrian Lamo revealed his name to the investigators.

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