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Comment by poet | Hacker News Reader

You're attempting to make the argument that newspapers (most of which are not even American) can make accurate judgements about the effects of releasing US intelligence. That's a poor argument. What is it about news agencies that qualifies them to make such judgments? Compare this to the Pentagon Papers where someone with intimate knowledge of the situation decided what to leak.

Regardless, that doesn't change the fact that your original claim that Amazon rolled over because of Lieberman is false and unsubstantiated.

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Where did the US gain the moral ground here, such that only US papers would be best judges? Almost everything the US does has large effects in the rest of the world. I think it's a very good thing that US media isn't in control of the story.

Did you even bother to read the post I wrote? The thrust of the argument is that no paper is the best judge. In fact, newspapers are categorically unqualified to make judgments in this case.

I agree with you that newspapers are unqualified to make judgements; that's why it's very important that the raw unedited stuff comes out eventually.

The risk with newspapers is that they publish too little, not too much, as they rely on their closeness to elites to do their job.

The American Government was given an opportunity to redact the data themselves, they refused.

> Regardless, that doesn't change the fact that your original claim that Amazon rolled over because of Lieberman is false and unsubstantiated.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/amazon/

If that's the best "proof" you have, it's not even worth discussing. Amazon explicitly denied that they booted Wikileaks because of Lieberman. Lieberman isn't even saying that either. He's claiming that his staffers, were informed by Amazon, which probably is an exaggeration.

Do you think Amazon is habitually informing staffers of any particular Senator that they booted a client off their servers ?

Sorry, but until you show me more proof than the verbal statements of one of the most corrupt US Senators, I'm not convinced it actually even happened.

If a US Senator is not good enough then I don't think I'll be able to meet your exacting standards of proof.

If the conversation was about anything else, using only the word of Joe Lieberman as proof would be a joke. I'm honestly shocked that you think my standards are exacting.

This is why Wikileaks is needed. You're so brainwashed by the current political system you're willing to take a politician's words at face value. The only way we'd know what actually happened is if someone leaked Lieberman's communications with Amazon, and Amazon's internal communications about the issue.

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