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Comment by rospaya | Hacker News Reader

"Assange made them available to the Guardian and four other newspapers: the New York Times, Der Spiegel in Germany, Le Monde in France and El País in Spain. All five plan to publish extracts from the most significant cables, but have decided neither to "dump" the entire dataset into the public domain, nor to publish names that would endanger innocent individuals. WikiLeaks says that, contrary to the state department's fears, it also initially intends to post only limited cable extracts, and to redact identities."

From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cable...

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I wish Wikileaks would just dump the contents, and leave the analysis to the rest of the world. By doing selective "analysis" and redaction, they're basically doing exactly what they claim to be fighting.

Either release all the information, or withhold it. Don't play sides.

Oh, and while you're at it, Wikileaks? I'd love to see leaks from Russia, China, UK, Japan etc. You've been picking on the US for far too long; these other countries are no angels either.

I think the main reason they redact thing is to protect the innocent, and more so, themselves. I do agree they should stop picking on the US though.

I would have almost immeasurably more respect for them if they did this.

I'm not saying I love the corruption in the US which clearly exists, but giving away only one piece of the puzzle is Opinion Manipulation 101, which I think is the core reason there's rather a lot of us who don't really trust them. I won't even claim the US is nebulously "better" then others, I'll simply claim that I think if you could see everything clearly you wouldn't be able to credibly argue that the US is clearly "worse", and I would certainly bet the "uniquely evil" position a lot of people hold is completely unfounded.

So now all we need is a leak at NYT.

Assange has claimed he is about to release information that targets the Russian government and Russian businessmen (reported 10/26). The thing is, even if he does release it, most Russian citizens won't hear about it or won't care. Anything even remotely incriminating published about Russian businessmen and I can tell you he will probably want to find a good hiding place.

Russian society is thoroughly corrupt, no one there will even blink if more incriminating material is published on businessmen or government. It's just the default assumption really.

Oh, and while you're at it, Wikileaks? I'd love to see leaks from Russia, China, UK, Japan etc. You've been picking on the US for far too long; these other countries are no angels either.

Are you offering to leak this information? Remember, they do not break into US systems to get this information. They need someone to leak it to them.

Plus, a couple of those countries will wipe Assange and his organization off the face of the earth. Assange is only picking on the US because we're more civil. It's like how the anti-religioun crowd tends to pick on Christianity, instead of one of the actually vicious religions that will kill them.

Really, Assange is merely perpetrating a sophisticated form of bullying.

True. Remember Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB officer and Putin critic who somehow wound up with a lethal dose of polonium 210 while in Britain? Just you try leaking documents embarrassing to the Russian government, Mr Assange.

Speaking of which, why haven't I heard anything about Russia in this leak? Surely there must be some interesting diplomatic cables into and out of Russia?

Do you have reasons to suspect that wikileaks has withheld leaked non-US documents?

> It's like how the anti-religioun crowd tends to pick on Christianity, instead of one of the actually vicious religions that will kill them.

This would perhaps be a reasonable argument if they _never_ picked on Islam (I assume that's what you were referring to). This would indicate some actual fear of reprisals. However, this isn't actually the case. Dawkins, Hitchens, Myers, and most other figures have all 'picked on' Islam at one time or another.

PZ Myers: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/11/allah_does_not_ex... http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/03/islam_hates_women...

Dawkins: http://vodpod.com/watch/1959627-richard-dawkins-apostasy-in-...

Hitchens: http://sacredcanons.com/islam-and-atheism/christopher-hitche...

The first comment on the Hitchen's link shows some of the issues inherent when you criticize a minority religion (with respect to audience), however. Namely, you get the nasty anti-(legal)-immigrant crowd thinking you support them, or at least provide ammunition for them (conveniently ignoring arguments against their own beliefs).

Granted, they haven't picked on the Aztecs to my knowledge. They might be afraid of them.

My apologies for going OT.

Yeah, that's good they sometimes point out the flaws in Islam. But, still most venom is focused on the least harmful religions because there is the least reprisal.

And insofar as the atheists' goals are humanitarian they should join forces with the most humanitarian ideologies, which tend to be certain religions. The least humanitarian took root in atheistic thought (whether atheism is a direct cause or merely an enabler is a different debate).

Compared to the Nazis and Communists the radical Islamists are a bunch of puppy dogs.

>But, still most venom is focused on the least harmful religions because there is the least reprisal.

You have no evidence that's why they post more about Christianity. I have already presented several other explanations. To be explicit it could be because they don't want to feed biases against minority groups, they might want to target something which is a visible problem (evolution denial in the states), they might want to target the beliefs of people who have power to abuse (local officials), they might want to clean up their own house before they figure out how to deal with other countries and religions which they are less familiar with, etc.

Furthermore PZ Myers _has_ received death threats from Christians, so the idea that all Christians are just a bunch of friendly folks who would never hurt a fly, is absurd (though a lot of Christians do commonly make this argument). If you're making yourself a target, you expose yourself to every nutcase in the country.

> Compared to the Nazis and Communists the radical Islamists are a bunch of puppy dogs.

What do the Nazi's and Communists have to do with this?

This sentence: "The least humanitarian took root in atheistic thought (whether atheism is a direct cause or merely an enabler is a different debate)."

Also, Christianity is the least problematic of all major religions, and most in line with the agenda of humanist atheists, per its explicit laws about the best way of living. Those who don't follow the laws are hard pressed to claim the title "Christian." So, it is disingenuous and ineffective to target Christians.

Target ideologies that explicitly make anti-humanitarian claims. That is most in line with the atheists' claim that religion is anti-humanitarian.

what we need here is more internet: http://wikileaks.org/media/about.html and search for "Japan".

Releasing the raw contents without any redactions would probably be a disaster. Remember that a lot of these documents name spies/confidential informants. This is also at the level where people are actually killed.

I guess what I'm saying is a complete, unedited release would almost certainly put some blood on wikileaks "hands".

Well, hopefully Wikileaks has better document security than the US, otherwise whoever really wants to know the identity of the spies/informants probably already does.

Either release all the information, or withhold it. Don't play sides.

Now that's just illogical, plain and simple. You don't expect Wikileaks to do some verification and sanity checks? You object to the fact that they take a quick look over the documents to make sure they don't leak anything that will get massive amounts of people killed? Wikileaks doesn't edit to play sides, they edit so they can maintain some form of legitimacy as a journalistic entity. From what I've read, two things happen during the editing phase: (1) fact checking and (2) checks to make sure lives aren't put in danger by the leak. No sides are being played; it's simply common sense practices that journalistis have been doing for several centuries.

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