Wikileaks debate.

[The Riddler_]

So, there should be not legal action taken against Wikileaks, but they should have (if they did not. I don't know) only released documents that would not put people in danger and saved the ones that could potentially hurt people until what ever situation that could have put people in danger was resolved.

Why not post it all? Is it not the same as posting the identification of a Pedophile in a communities?

 

[Trinity19]

The way I see it is that Wikileaks as a website is just fine and taking them down is not alright. However, leaking documents that could end innocent lives is not alright but it is not illegal.

So, there should be not legal action taken against Wikileaks, but they should have (if they did not. I don't know) only released documents that would not put people in danger and saved the ones that could potentially hurt people until what ever situation that could have put people in danger was resolved.

Yeah technically it is illegal in the united states because of the Espionage act that was enacted during WWI, It's hardly ever used but then again we rarely ever have a release of documents of this magnitude.

This picture's shows how trigger happy the soldiers are for enemies. They saw the camera as an RPG, took no time to confirm before taking action. How come the police do, but the army doesn't?

Ok let me ask you this, if you were in the army and another unit was previously shot at in that specific area and there have also been confirmed reports of RPG's in the area. So protocol dictates that you keep a decent enough distance as to act accordingly if fired upon. Now if you see something that even looks like a weapon, would you land, go over to them, and ask them if theyre holding a gun? No ofcourse not, you'll go on reasonable suspicion at that point and fire.

 

[SuF]

Why not post it all? Is it not the same as posting the identification of a Pedophile in a communities?

If the document contained information that could be harmful at the present and would not be at a later time, it would be better to release it then. I don't know if this is the case for any of the WikiLeak documents.

Yeah technically it is illegal in the united states because of the Espionage act that was enacted during WWI, It's hardly ever used but then again we rarely ever have a release of documents of this magnitude.

Wikileaks is not in the United States and even if it was the site would be protected under the first amendment.

 

[Rsaccounttrader]

Wikileaks is a bad thing for US diplomacy but there is no reason it should be stopped unless (legitimate) evidence is brought forth showing the source to be illegal.. Then it would be considered espionage and the founder would be judged accordingly.

Just for reference, many human rights/pro WikiLeaks groups have looked into the rape charges put forward by Sweden and they are not fabricated. They are legitimate charges.

 

[Loyal 2 da game]

Glenn Beck said that Julian Assange should be tried for treason and executed

God damn that Glenn Beck is a dumb motherfucker. How can an Australian citizen be tried for treason in the United States? Am I the only one seeing how fucking retarded that is?

 

[The Riddler_]

Ok let me ask you this, if you were in the army and another unit was previously shot at in that specific area and there have also been confirmed reports of RPG's in the area. So protocol dictates that you keep a decent enough distance as to act accordingly if fired upon. Now if you see something that even looks like a weapon, would you land, go over to them, and ask them if theyre holding a gun? No ofcourse not, you'll go on reasonable suspicion at that point and fire.

Soldiers are taught to keep their fingers off the trigger for a reason. They are not the aggressors. In this case, they were. I would not have shot at them without clear evidence that they are aggressive combatants and my life was in danger. The men were trying to escape in a van, and they shot at the van. This shows that the "soldiers" were not a threat, but the US soldiers still wanted action to be done against them.

Police are in the same situation as the soldiers. There are cities with high crime rates, and the policeman still are able to keep their cool and control the situation without any haste.

 

[Oxytocin]

Wikileaks puts out information that is good as a whole, in that it does more good than it does bad. Scientology is dangerous and wikileaks is helping expose that, and therefore saving lives. Scientology is the one with blood on it's hands. The U.S. government have blood on their hands at Guantanamo and they know it. They've been sloppy and havn't covered their tracks, and people who want justice have showed us their crimes.

What wikileaks stands for is a good thing.

whyweprotest.net

 

[samryan720]

I believe that people have the right to know what's going on in the world.

 

[Trinity19]

Wikileaks puts out information that is good as a whole, in that it does more good than it does bad. Scientology is dangerous and wikileaks is helping expose that, and therefore saving lives. Scientology is the one with blood on it's hands. The U.S. government have blood on their hands at Guantanamo and they know it. They've been sloppy and havn't covered their tracks, and people who want justice have showed us their crimes.

What wikileaks stands for is a good thing.

whyweprotest.net

What they stand for is ridiculous, they stand for exactly the thing they say they're against. They want to impose and show truth over the false, well by doing so they are worsening every possible situation. They're pathetic for not realizing this and anyone who contributes to them obviously has no mind of their own and is only convinced under the simplistic idea that our government is evil and lies to us only to hinder us when in reality that is nowhere close to the truth.

 

[TobyL65]

I think it's enlightening for the public however it cannot be good on the international scale of things. It will probably heighten tensions between countries.

 

[Oxytocin]

I would have to disagree. My view is they stand as a path to truer democracy. It's the idea of a democracy with information received and distributed with disposable ideas.

Why is a disposable identity the base of our proposition?

Ego is a parasite that has outgrown our society. An example of ego, would be a child making up a story they find more interesting than the truth. True knowledge is viral. Everyone in power already knows the game of politics - they generally weren't surprised. The only damage these kind of cables do is to their own governments collective EGO, which reduces their power. China is scared of losing power from freedom of information, and in North Korea it is controlled meticulously. The United States government currently controls the flow of information quite well. Julian Asange's idea of a collective whistle blower group causes fear in the USA government because the crimes has exposed are only a small portion of what they have to hide. I am not just a paranoid, conspiracy theorist; I am an analytical, agnostic optimist.

A large quantity of ego-thriving carefully placed false information is disguised among true information and is used to specifically mislead people.

In politics, the one with the most convincing ego, wins.

 

[redawsomeness]

It's good, the government shouldn't hide anything. I've honestly downloaded tons of documents off of their website before they switched it over from the old wikimedia layout to new one. The new one is useless and all it shows is the iraq war logs which only prove that the United States military did a lot of illegal things out in iraq and hid it, nothing much.

 

[WoW Seller]

Wikileaks puts out information that is good as a whole, in that it does more good than it does bad. Scientology is dangerous and wikileaks is helping expose that, and therefore saving lives. Scientology is the one with blood on it's hands. The U.S. government have blood on their hands at Guantanamo and they know it. They've been sloppy and havn't covered their tracks, and people who want justice have showed us their crimes.

What wikileaks stands for is a good thing.


also wikileaks has in-dangered lives also by giving out names of undercover agents.

 

[Ri¢h]

How can a system that collaborates in keeping the promise of a government ever a bad thing? Some of their sources were unfortunately inaccurate but they are making sure the government that the PEOPLE made to work FOR the People does what it was intended to instead of trying to dominate the people for control of itself through mind illusions

 

[Schnell]

Ok let me ask you this, if you were in the army and another unit was previously shot at in that specific area and there have also been confirmed reports of RPG's in the area. So protocol dictates that you keep a decent enough distance as to act accordingly if fired upon. Now if you see something that even looks like a weapon, would you land, go over to them, and ask them if theyre holding a gun? No ofcourse not, you'll go on reasonable suspicion at that point and fire.

I must have misread your post, as that is not how any military is supposed to act by international law. The correct action would be to keep monitoring the situation until there was certainty regarding whether they were enemy combatants or not. The soldiers heard in the clip are not in immediate danger, so they have no reason or right to act on suspicion.

And that's without even mentioning firing at medical personell.

 

[Skaterdude456]

I don't read or keep up on wiki leaks but I do agree that governments should not be lying to their people. Honestly, I figure that it's all relative to the country. For example, whenever there is a post about anything from the USA that shows the government lied to us, obviously the government is going to be against it. BUT, when there is an article about another country having bombs or missiles (whatever) that are planned to attack the USA, than the US government would be relieved to find out that information and approve of Wiki leaks.

That scenario was obviously made up but I hope you see what the main idea of that post was.

 

[Oxytocin]

also wikileaks has in-dangered lives also by giving out names of undercover agents.

Give proof of one instance where they have endangered lives...

 

[normalcy]

Diplomatically, this is not a good thing for the United States government. They kept secrets for a reason. I think citizens have the right to know what their government is doing and I fully support the 'WikiLeaks movement'.

 

[SuF]

Can you prove that people were put in danger?

Wikileaks offered to be fully cooperative with the Pentagon to remove any information that might jeopardize American troops or informants. The Pentagon declined, and is now whining that people could have been harmed. Who's at fault?

I can not. I also read that Wikileaks would be taking steps to censor names of people who could be put in danger due to the leaks, so I have no problem with them.

 

[The Fat Controller]

I forget whether I posted my views before, but...

I have a gripe. Wikileaks is a bit of a misnomer, since it isn't a wiki in the proper sense. Assange is a real poser for the cameras, has anyone noticed that?

I'm disturbed that some people take the nonsense about leaked documents potentially getting innocent people killed seriously. They're edited documents, as has been said time and time again.

This imaginary death toll isn't even an issue in the grand scheme of things, like the wars themselves, but somehow this seemed to be the mainstream agenda for some time.

--

I happened to know about Wikileaks fairly early on. I heard of them because they had wiki in their name... So, I watched the collateral murder material pretty carefully, this was my impression at the time...

In the short clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0), what happened was that the guys in the helicopter mistook a camera lens for an RPG (supposedly) aimed at friendly ground forces, and then shot everyone.

Now, what I learned was that a couple of them had AKs and one had something that looked like an RPG and another had RPG ammo, you can see that in the video. However the soldiers didn't spot the RPG, but mistook the camera for an RPG instead... Furthermore, in edited Pentagon-released documents, there are photos of the AKs, but the images of the RPG-like weapon are edited out, although the gray boxes are labelled as such. So it's very hazy just what was going on.

The most pessimistic explanation would be that the journalists were tagging along with a bunch of people that were going to launch an RPG at some US ground forces or something.

The part afterwards where they shot the van up was inexcusable though, I don't believe that was by the book at all. All the way through the soldiers were acting like they were playing Call of Duty. It was pretty sad.