Open thread for night owls: Julian Assange
by Meteor Blades
Tue Oct 26, 2010 at 09:06:05 PM PDT
On Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. An excerpt:
| AMY GOODMAN: And back in Washington, Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell also lashed out at WikiLeaks for releasing the war logs.
GEOFF MORRELL: The bottom line is, our forces are still very much in danger here as a result of this exposure, given the fact that our tactics, techniques and procedures are exposed in these documents, and our enemies are undoubtedly going to try to use them against us, and making their jobs even more difficult and dangerous. AMY GOODMAN: That’s Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell. Julian Assange, your response? JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, this is the same old argument that the Pentagon has been trotting out every time there is media exposure of their abuses for the past fifty years. They tried it with the Afghan war logs. Last week, NATO told CNN from Kabul that there was not a single case of an Afghan that they could find who needed moving or protection. The Pentagon—Secretary of Defense Gates wrote to the US Senate Armed Services Committee privately on August the 16th saying that no intelligence sources, sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been revealed by this material, while saying publicly something completely different. Similarly, the Pentagon stated last week that it could find no incidents of an Afghan who had been adversely affected by this release or the injury to any US troops. The reality is that the only thing at risk here is the reputations and the jobs of those individuals who put troops in harm’s way in Iraq and who put Iraqi citizens in the middle of a civil war.
So, on the one hand, we see no credible evidence of harm being committed. We also see the Pentagon making a position that it’s not really involved in Iraq anymore. Well, we all know that there’s 50,000 US forces presently in Iraq and hundreds—over 100,000 US military contractors. So that argument can’t stand up on both accounts. But when we look to see what happened with the Afghan experience, we see no one harmed by this, apart from the reputation of an abusive organization, who is not credible, who’s been shown time and time again, not just by our work, but by others, to make statements that are simply not credible. And so, that is the lack of harm. So then we look at the other side of the equation. What is the possible benefit? Can this material save lives? Can it improve the quality of life in Iraq? Can it tend to shape our perceptions of how war should and should not be conducted? Can it shape our perceptions of who should be conducting war and in what manner? And the answer to that is a clear yes. We see serious consideration and calls for investigation by the top levels of the United Kingdom government. That is the correct response to the revelation of this type of material. You know, it must be disturbing to Iraqis to see this sort of revelation, which reveals 15,000 civilian casualties that were never previously reported, 66,000 internally declared total, but 15,000 that are not present in any media report since 2003, to hear the Pentagon take such a cavalier attitude to the discovery, the public discovery, of six 9/11s, the equivalent death count of six 9/11s. And, you know, really, if the Pentagon is to be seen as a credible institution—every country needs a military to defend it, but if it’s to be seen as credible in that role, it needs to also be a responsive institution. AMY GOODMAN: You know, you— JULIAN ASSANGE: All these reports were made secret at the time that they were written. Without doubt, they—nearly all of them should not be secret now. Their time has elapsed. They’re not of tactical significance. And yet, they are still concealed. So, what is the purpose of concealing them? |
You know, late last week, the Pentagon was saying—pushing out the message that they had found 300 names in this material of people who needed protecting. But that, in fact, is misleading rhetoric. What they had found was 300 names in their internal material, which they say needed protecting. But the Department of Defense issued—confessed yesterday that in fact none of those 300 names were present in our material.• • • • •
At Daily Kos on this date in 2004:
| I was interested to see that most papers still endorsed candidates this time around. I suspect that with an increasingly organized and polarized partisan community, the newspaper endorsement may be on its final legs. Is it worth it to any paper to endure hundreds or thousands of angry letters, newspaper cancellations, protests, and other negative publicity in order to endorse a candidate? And really, it's not as if newspaper presidential endorsements carry much weight these days anyway with the proliferation of alternative media.
If I had to guess, the presidential endorsement is on its last legs. If I was a newspaper publisher, I'd run two editorials -- one making the case for each candidate. And it's perhaps as it should be -- if people really need help making up their minds, let them read two arguments so they can make the decision themselves. Down-ballot races are a different story. I depend on my local alternative weekly to make sense of the myriad local candidates and ballot initiatives. But as for the president of the United States? Most of us can make that decision on our own, thank you very much.
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Check out the Daily Kos GOTV diary series coordinated by Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse and Sophie de Vries: So far, the diarists have been Robert Reich, Al Franken, digby, and Bob Fertik. See here for the whole list of scheduled participants. On Wednesday, Sen. Jeff Merkley, Gov. Howard Dean and Mimi Kennedy will be diarying on GOTV. The series continues through Sunday.
