Assange gave the public invaluable information that would not have been know otherwise, but he ended up playing right into the hands of the people who wanted to discredit Clinton.
Politics is complicated.
And no, letting USA or any other nation for that matter commit war crimes quietly does not support democracy.
There’s nothing simple when it comes to international politics. But foreign meddling by an adversary is a pretty bright line.
Your statement doesn't add any nuance to said concerns.
Not “adding any nuance” is suggesting that publishing the truth about warcrimes is worse than committing war crimes.
I'll repeat my point so maybe you can focus on that than the straw man.
It's not hard to find scandals, that's the whole point of having institutions meant to watchdog corporations and governments.
But of course governments/corporation will try and cover it up or deregulate said institutions, but this doesn't make an obvious adversary (Russia) a helping hand in holding the corporations /governments accountable because it's not meant to, it's meant to create cynicism and a feeling of hopelessness.
So no publishing truth is never bad, the issue is how you do it.
If I publish an internal report that has good undercover agents doing good things but also has bad undercover agents that are acting against the country's interest, it would be absurdly dumb and reckless of me to publish the internal report as is without redacting names that has nothing to do with said bad actors.
There are correct guidelines specifically about doing whistle blowing and failing to do so can and will cause lives to be lost.
>You reference “correct guidelines.” Please cite them, and what is definitely good and bad outside a local construct within a modern Westphalian political nation state.
I just told you with my example, but here's ICC's guidelines about whistleblowing:
https://iccwbo.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2022/02/icc-gu...
Pretty much any whistleblowing guideline will have similar statements about whistleblowing.
>Should nationally critical information controls survive mere legal disobedience? If they don’t how much security theater fulfills your appetite?
Why do we have to present this as a black and white issue? The best is a compromise to ensure that the power abuse gets pointed out and the adversaries that are responsible be highlighted as the alleged perpetrators (as this is still something that a court has to decide on) without putting national security/innocent lives at risk/at harms way.
You throw examples that are not whistleblowing nor does these cases have anything to do with whistleblowing guidelines but laws regarding whenever or not sources should be disclosed.
Especially the herridge case which is part of a broader case of the federal government employees allegedly leading government documents of an innocent person's information (specifically information about them from the investigation)
Even more it's not even a shut case and what a surprise the judge is also following concrete guidelines.
How does any of that constitute a 'war crime'?
Please, name the war crimes that Chelsea Manning exposed.
This isn't small potatoes. Here in Sweden it wasn't just the extradition from Bromma in 2001, but the US flew multiple illegal flights with prisoners through Sweden, possibly to the US torture camps in Poland and eastern Europe.
I also think these cables revealed information about the Thailand black site, where the US was torturing some people.
Yet they remain steadfastly silent on the crimes committed by Russia and China.
Should the US withdraw from geopolitics and allow those other two to fill the vacuum?
Like Julian Assange himself - I suspect many Russia supporters are hiding in plain sight.
Withdraw from what?
>Yet they remain steadfastly silent on the crimes committed by Russia and China.
How have we been silent on those crimes. We have been quite concerned, they are almost next to us.
I don't myself want to be part of NATO, but evidently the government is to afraid not to be, so now we are.
>Should the US withdraw from geopolitics and allow those other two to fill the vacuum?
The US has not gained anything of geopolitical value by storing people in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp or by flying suspect terrorist to torture camps in Europe, or by inhuman treatment of prisoners, as happened at Bromma. It hasn't gained anything geopolitically by going after people who revealed war crimes.
The US actions that I oppose are for the large part neither of benefit to the US itself, nor to me. On the whole these actions are just stupid.
To the degree that I want to avoid US troops in Sweden, this stupidity, these useless and harmful decisions that get implemented are one of the problems. Because if the US can this stupid on matters like Assange, or can desperately want to torture some random nobody, and are in such a hurry to do so, that they fly him through Bromma just because can refuel there, then they can do any kind of idiocy, and it can end up being me, or something Swedish that matters that pays the price.
The US can defend its interests in a more co-operative way and with greater respect for international law and for its partners.
>Like Julian Assange himself - I suspect many Russia supporters are hiding in plain sight.
If you're implying that I would like Putin, who I consider basically a Chechen-cuddler. I've had less problems with him historically, and I don't think I fully understood how vengeful he was until he did as he did against the Karabach-Armenians. I'm probably more pro-Russia than Zelensky is-- I don't hate the Russians and I like many aspects of Russian culture, including their mathematics tradition and some of their music.
I don't see the Ukraine war as per se very different from the Iraq war. This means that I view Russia and the US as closer on the level of morality than most people, who I feel have a bit of short term view of the world. These things 20 years ago are like yesterday to me. Details matter though, and scale, and many other things.
Rather, when it comes to support of Ukraine my view is not based on morality as such, although I do believe that the Ukrainians have a right to rule their country, but rather on Swedish defence needs. We Swedes need to support them and ensure that Russia does not expand and get a border against Poland or some other unnecessarily forward position. There is no reason why we should allow such a situation, which will only cause us problems.
Oh yeah, that's the big problem with him. Sheesh...
> I don't see the Ukraine war as per se very different from the Iraq war.
Yeah, I distinctly remember how Shrub denied that the Iraqi people exist, claimed they were all Americans anyway, and set out to annex Iraq to the USA. And who can forget the moving ceremony when he bestowed Statehood upon those four Iraqi provinces? Sheesh... Try as I might, I can't come up with any reason for why you would want to pretend to be this stupid, so...
> This means that I view Russia and the US as closer on the level of morality than most people, who I feel have a bit of short term view of the world.
Yeah no, that means it's you who are... If not morally blind, at least severely short-sighted.
The United States is responsible for sowing the good, not Russia for not hiding the bad.
"Being better at targeted propaganda" isn't really how I'd like our leaders to be chosen. Obviously that's where we are, but I wish we could do better.
That however does not mean you are the good guy for playing into the hands of an adversary that wanted to rig a democratic election.
But then if we care about truthful facts then why didn't Assange release rnc documents?
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/dutch...
Besides showing that email is not really that secure in the first place (and evidenced by Ms. Clinton's own maintenance of a personal email server), it doesn't show any evidence that Cozy Bear was behind the DNC leak.
Assange himself seemed to implicate Seth Rich, a DNC staffer who was shot twice in the back in a mysterious murder in July of 2016: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/will-jul...
Thanks, that's a good point, I was motivated to read a bit more about it; the article I linked is indeed a bit vague.
The source for it is a de Volkskrant article, I found it in an archive: https://archive.is/S5KeI
This has more detail and contains the claim that the Dutch did observe Cozy Bear breaking into the DNC network.
However, elsewhere we can read that the emails were leaked to WikiLeaks not via Cozy Bear but via Fancy Bear, which is part of GRU; see the Mueller report Volume I, Ill. RUSSIAN HACKING AND DUMPING OPERATIONS, A. and B. page 44-56 in the PDF.
Both the SVR and the GRU infiltrated the DNC network:
"Cozy Bear" had access to DNC systems since the summer of 2015; and "Fancy Bear", since April 2016. There was no evidence of collaboration or knowledge of the other's presence within the system. Rather, the "two Russian espionage groups compromised the same systems and engaged separately in the theft of identical credentials".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_National_Committee_...
From what I've read that's a common way of authoritarian state organization: to prevent any security service from becoming too powerful and thereby becoming a threat to the dictator, there are multiple services with overlapping responsibilities and they compete with each other.
> Assange himself seemed to implicate Seth Rich...
Apparently Aaron Rich's defamation lawsuit got some results:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/seth-ric...
It's worth noting that leaked messages (the irony) show Assange was knowingly misleading the public about Seth Rich:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kevincollier/assange-se...
And then I have to ask yet again, why did not Wikileaks release the RNC leaks?
I've already covered it in a different thread. It's most likely that the DNC leaks were from an internal source.
Assange implied Seth Rich. The emails that were leaked were largely about the DNC railroading Bernie to favor Hillary during the primary. That's not some state-level propaganda. That's how party politics work. A disgruntled Trump supporter would have little reason to leak RNC emails, since it was publicly known how much they hated him and since Trump won in spite of the RNC's antagonism.
Honestly though it doesn't matter who leaked it. It was standard faire political controversy. It was a much bigger deal that Clinton herself maintained a private server to conduct state department affairs. Hard for her to spin that one on the Russians though.
And according to the intelligence report it was Russia who indirectly hacked the DNC (via guccifer) so I don't know where this "internal source" comes from, would love to see a report that shows otherwise.
The irony is that Wikileaks allegedly did have RNC leaks, but Assange choose not to publish it.
They're not, of course.
But labeling them as such is one of the myriad ways by which criticism of Israel gets automatically branded as you-know-what.
I have no idea what your essential attributes are. Nor do you have any idea as to mine. And I'm not telling you what to think about anything.
This thread is getting far from the original topic. Recommend we both close shop here, and move on.
Again, there are many, many, many such Jewish voices that have emphatically dismissed the format of your attempted victimisation play here.
There are also a lot of people in the Republican Party who go the exact opposite way: They support Israel's actions and Russia's actions, and they were also in favor of the US's invasion of Iraq (though they shut up about that now). They have a very hawkish political philosophy.
Then there is a third group of people I've identified, who confuse me: they oppose Russia's actions in Ukraine, but they support Israel's actions in Palestine. (I do not know what their opinions were in Iraq because this is a group of people I have only encountered online, not in person.) I do not understand their political philosophy at all because it is seemingly self-contradictory; most of my attempts to understand it suggest that it is not really a philosophy so much, but more about nationalism or racism — they like Ukraine more than they like Russia, and they like Israel more than they like Palestine, and that's all the thought they put into it.
The whataboutism surrounding this feels completely disingenuous to me considering much of what was leaked by Wikileaks was war crimes, media collusion with Clinton's campaign and embarrassing mistakes the government tried to cover up, that they had no business trying to cover up.
States have secrets, but that is a privilege granted to them by the people to protect national security, their abuse of this privilege has been completely unacceptable even if the reveal made your preferred candidate look bad for actions they were personally responsible for.
If Wikileaks accomplished anything, it was revealing the hypocrites and those who lack even an inch of integrity.
However as I said there is real utility to publishing information which shouldn't be kept from the public. Which is why I think Assange is a hard case.
It revealed some hypocrites who lack integrity. The main effect, if any, of their exposure was to pave the way for other hypocrites who lack integrity to take over the positions of power and influence of the former.
Someone with integrity supports whistleblowers no matter who they blow the whistle on, I'm sure this revelation must be a surprise for you.
What does that have to do with anything? Assange never was a whistleblower.
So let’s just check your bias. Assuming an American journalist living in England exposes video of Russia gunning down civilians and shows they are covering it up. Would you say the right cause of action would be for that American to be procedures in Russia because “ States have secrets it’s just the nature of the world.” and apparently hiding war crimes and prosecuting journalists who expose them is also just states rights?
But russia is a democracy...
> States have secrets its just the nature of the world.
That's an anti-democratic worldview...
1: https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/dl
2: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
3: https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/12/10/report-russi...
4: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks...
But in [1] and [2], could you hint where in there that information is to be found? Those are quite long documents and wikileaks is not the main subject there.
Also interesting that they didn't Wikileak these messages, some mainstream journalist had to do it for them. Probably they just hadn't gotten around to it
That's not journalism, that's dishonesty and activism.
ITYM he repeatedly implied that Seth Rich was his DNC source, so readers should infer it.
2. Doesn't seem to have made much difference beyond spreading cynicism as it was never appropriately published.
3. This would have been despite Wikileaks.
It's easy to blame one entity or another for these sorts of upset events, but national elections are media circuses largely run by private spending on the terms of private parties and blaming any one party seems like missing the forest for the trees.
Again, election "interference" is not unfamiliar ground for democracies or republics, liberal or classic, so it confuses me why people blame the electorate rather than the flaws in our implementation of democratic ideals (eg the citizens united ruling) that allowed private capital to run rampant over our election mechanics.
To illustrate how inevitable this is, the roman republic had statute stipulating the width of the halls leading up to the ballots to physically restrict voters from being harassed or intimidated. Otherwise the richer candidate would simply pay a mob to physically bully you into voting a certain way regardless of your original intentions—or perhaps they might outright buy your vote out if they knew which way your ballot cast. It was completely understood by all involved that voting (& armies) could be bought with sufficient money and ingenuity by even single people.
Why we are discussing anything other than restricting the ability of money to interfere with our modern processes when it comes to "democratic health" is beyond me.
That's the point though, not that many people care about the implementation of a democracy, which itself is a form of democratic will (or the lack thereof). The problem with simply "more democracy" is we might end up with these contradictions.
People don't care much about the fine details of the implementation of their governance. In an ideal world, they would have voted in people who'd tear up these "money is speech" laws, but we live in a world where the average Joe only cares and are receptive to catchphrases.
The man and those in his orbit have a hard-on for Putin/Xi/Kim-style autocracy.
Naah, he was only the March on the Capitol figure; so much better.
(FWIW, they had/have a Capitol in Rome too. That's what the American one is named for.)