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Comment by chrismeller | Hacker News Reader

Sooo... the guys he was leaking evidence of war crimes against claim that he endangered people he leaked information about.

While that may actually be true, I’m curious why you would trust that statement from the US Government (the “indictment”) while ignoring the other (that’s “classified”).

If you trust that there’s doubt as to why things were classified and that they may have been hiding things, why would you also trust that they claim people have been endangered? Again, not saying it’s not true, just that blindly taking the word of US prosecutors seems short sighted.

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Nobody is trusting anything. It should be obvious that these leaks endangered these people. All you have to do is look at them to see that. If you publish the names of civillian collaborators with the US, they're going to get targeted. You don't need classified intel to know that.

>> civillian collaborators with the US

Maybe those were helping (unknowingly) US troops to kill other people...

"It should be obvious that these leaks endangered these people. All you have to do is look at them to see that."

Which, specifically? I have heard that claim before. Would you mind linking to the specific leaks that endangered civilians? WikiLeaks is online and searchable, but I have not seen them.

At this stage it is not actually important if anyone could be hurt or dies. The topic is the global state of human rights and persecution of criminals in important positions. Hundreds of millions gave their lives for our freedoms many of which didn't sign up for it. We want future generations to enjoy those freedoms. Trading them for some claims of endangerment is not a good deal.

I made this point in a more lengthy fashion in a parallel comment [0], but it seems really odd to me you would ignore the circumstance that the lion's share of the work towards endangering those civilians was done by the US, by recruiting them to be collaborators in a hostile country. Why does the US government have more moral license to endanger Afghan civilians than Assange/Wikileaks?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22205463

The US government decision to invade Afghanistan involved a number of other factors. Whether or not you agree with that calculation is subjective. The difference between that and what Assange did is that Wikileaks could have taken the time to redact these names, as they were immaterial to the point they were trying to make.

If this was a tradeoff between "not expose abuses by the US government" and "name these civillians", I think your point would be reasonable. But there was no tradeoff. Wikileaks was just lazy about it.

Wikileaks asked the DoD to help redact the documents. DoD refused and later put out a statement claiming that Assange lied about asking for help. This statement was shown to be false.

Due to the limited time window for release, the choice was either to release as-is or to never release at all.

Calling Wikileaks lazy is myopic. They didn't have the resources to redact the documents in the time window they had to work with, and they asked for help. The US govt knew exactly what would happen if they refused to help. It was a calculated move to maximise collateral damage and help drive the narrative that you now subscribe to. They didn't give a single fuck about the collateral damage, their response was focused on discrediting and prosecuting the source of the leak to send a message to anyone else considering exposing their wrongdoings.

The US govt acted like a bunch of insidious cartoon villains, and gaslighting its citizens about how this situation played out.

Are you claiming that naming Afghan civilians working with the US military wouldn't endanger them, or that Wikileaks didn't name said civilians? I'd point you to my other reply where I cite a number of human rights organizations saying this is endangering civilians, and also cite that the Taliban has publicly stated they are targeting the individuals named in the leaks.

Invading Afghanistan endangered Afghan civilians, and recruiting Afghan civilians to work for the US while Afghanistan was not and was not going to be wrestled from the control of the Taliban endangered them. Why do you not consider this a moral case for Assange to damage the US (by leaking information), but consider Assange's leaks endangering Afghan civilians (by modulating the risk inherent in the US actions described above!) to be a moral case for the US to damage Assange (by subjecting him to legal harassment out of line with established norms of civilised society)?

The situation to me seems to be only a few steps removed from something along of the lines of $government outright taking some civilian hostages and threatening to execute one of them every time someone reports on any of $government's wrongdoings. In a scenario like that, would you also say that the act of reporting is immoral because it endangers civilians - and hence cheer on $government's long hand punishing the reporter?

Assange is an anarchist. Asking him to please leave some of the system up while he’s tearing other parts of it down is fundamentally misunderstanding the man. Surprisingly, despite the risks he took with other people’s lives, he’s done more good than harm. I hope you were more outraged by the war crimes committed by both the US and the Taliban than you are at Assange’s informative negligence.

If we're judging individuals and their actions, it's hard to say that any one person in the system has acted nearly as malicious as Assange. So yes, it is reasonable to hold him accountable for his decision to endanger citizens of a country that is neck deep in shit.

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