My view of him changed when I saw a recording of him in a documentary saying that murdered Iraqi translators who worked with the US military got what they deserved for working with the enemy.
David Leigh and Luke Harding's history of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to Moro's, a classy Spanish restaurant in central London. A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. "Well, they're informants," Assange replied. "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths. They persuaded Assange to remove names before publishing the State Department Afghanistan cables. But Assange's disillusioned associates suggest that the failure to expose "informants" niggled in his mind.
I'm ambivalent about his jailing. If you are going to get heroic people killed then you can't cry too much if you get jailed a bit.
Many you really couldn't possibly sanitize the situation any more. He said an absolutely heinous thing out loud that reflects values I definitely don't want from someone running a "neutral" dissemination platform for secrets
The Taliban are awful, but they're the awful legitimate government of Afghanistan. And they've already ended two of these problems. If you inform against a paramilitary that has no concerns with rule of law, you're already inserting yourself into their war and accepting the risk of being outed.
However, Assange has always displayed a great respect for human life, and so, this doesn't sound like him at all.
I can't find any clip of this, nor anyone discussing this, and have never heard of it before your claim. Care to bring receipts?
Edit: Looking more into it, I found the source - people said that Declan Walsh said that he heard Assange say this at a dinner party. You really ought to be a little more discriminating when using a single quote to try and completely dismiss someone.
I hope the rest of his life is equally miserable now that he is a free person.
It was reported in several major publications as well at the time.
> Wikileaks response:
> A representative of Wikileaks responded, ‘We have no further reports on this “rumour/issue”. Another Wikileaks representative told Index “obviously it is not approved”.
Following back the Guardian story linked in the above, there's this:
> Assange subsequently maintained he had only a "brief interaction" with Shamir: "WikiLeaks works with hundreds of journalists from different regions of the world. All are required to sign non-disclosure agreements and are generally only given limited review access to material relating to their region."
As far as I can tell, it looks like Wikileaks paid Shamir ~$2,000 for reviewing a batch of documents, but he maybe broke his NDA and tried to sell the docs (even the evidence for this, as far as I can see, is purely circumstantial).
It's all a far, far cry from "Assange gave cables to KGB". Small wonder this isn't even in the top 3 attempts to smear Assange as 'linked' to Russian agents (all of which have never had a shred of direct evidence btw).
Notice also how I never said "Assange gave cables to KGB" but that his buddy did. Are you going to bicker over whom Shamir got the cables from?
Of course wikileaks/assange aren’t going to admit to doing something terrible. Whether or not it’s true, they’re going to give the same answer!
I haven’t looked into that Belarusian thing, so I don’t know what evidence there is but it doesn’t make sense to take Wikileaks at face value - it’s obvious confirmation bias. Even if one doesn’t want to accept that it’s confirmation bias, one should be aware that it comes off as it to everyone else.
The whole wikileaks thing was so annoying because it was 95% of the time of two different choirs preaching opposite sermons based only on faith not objective facts.