So you claim nobody has the "moral authority" to hold the people from wikileaks accountable, yet you want to hold Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld accountable (it's interesting you would use only republicans as examples btw) for their actions?
If I intentionally gave out your address to criminals and told them when you wouldn't be home (and they robbed your house), would you hold me accountable? I'm just "exposing the truth"
This information has the possibility of getting thousands killed. On a side note, I'm hoping I can get jake's full address and phone number so I can give it out to some people. I'm sure he won't mind. I'm just "exposing the truth"
Perhaps I'm just out of touch, but I normally would put most of the responsibility for these things on the warring parties. Blaming a third party that doesn't have an army, a militia, or guns seems self-serving or disingenuous, depending on who's doing it.
They are very good at propaganda and so went full steam with it. A couple of themes emerged from that effort.
1) "Obama knows about these problems and is already handling it". This is a great use of propaganda. It both makes the leaked documents "un-interesting" and it makes Obama look good. I've heard this one on the radio and in a couple of other sources. It is often regurgitated verbatim without any supporting evidence how Obama has improved the situation.
2) "This will hurt our troops". This is also a great propaganda line because it plays on the existing framework of "support our troops". Nobody wants to hurt the son or husband of their neighbor in their small town. Wikileaks is not exposing cover-ups and mis-management of resources, death of civilians, it is "hurting our soldiers". This appeals to the middle America. "Those Wikileaks kids might as well just shoot our boys in the back" kind of feeling.
3) Now, in the Defcon case. They just hope to scare any hackers or anyone thinking of contributing or collaborating with Wikileaks. The implication is that "you might also get a visit from FBI" or "You might get randomly search everytime you fly. Are you prepared to make that choice?" Again that is very effective.
Now I am not saying that there is necessarily a unified, centrally controlled propaganda campaign, it could be just an emergent behavior from a bunch of govt. agencies.
Would you be accountable for the deaths of the officers?
I'm not blaming Wikileaks for those things. As you say, they don't have an army. What they do have is a very large audience. Just like with a militia (or owning a gun), you need to be responsible. Giving out the names of potential informants and spies is not being responsible.
If there was even a chance that people could die as a result of this information, they shouldn't have gone public. Because they did, it leads me to believe that they are being driven by an anti-war political agenda.
To me, the information given is not worth the number of lives that will be lost as a result.
Fair enough; that's an honest disagreement. My perspective on the matter is simply that whatever the number of deaths that Wikileaks will hypothetically be responsible for, the American government and Taliban are each responsible for a hundred times as many. I do a little introspection and realized that I'm not all that outraged about the actions of the American government with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq[0], so I can't bring myself to be upset about something that is a drop in the bucket (not to mention indirect, rather than direct, responsibility) in comparison.
Clarification: I am not suggesting that you either disagree or agree with the position I present here. I'm just presenting it.
[0] To spell it out: Afghanistan started their war by knowingly allowing al Qaeda to plan and train for the September 11 attacks in Afghanistan. The American invasion is therefore a retaliation, and not a war of aggression, so fair enough. My feelings on the war in Iraq are that it was a waste of time, effort, lives, and money, and was driven by the American and British governments knowingly and intentionally deceiving their publics. If the country I live in had tagged along for the ride, I would be rather upset about the situation, but if some foreign government wants to self-harm it's not my problem.
This makes Wikileaks just as bad as the people they are trying to "expose". It really makes me question many of their past articles.
Why release a video of American soldiers killing innocent people when they themselves don't have the decency to respect human life? They don't know or care about how many people could die as a result of this information. It could be 0, 10, or 1000.
Assange has never claimed that there are no legitimate secrets. He's not exposing cyphers nor nuclear secrets. The truth that he's exposing is one that the Afghans know well, but that the American public does not know. The purpose of WikiLeaks is to promote transparency and accountability by exposing truths that catalyze reform. This means, essentially, to close the feedback loop so that the electorate can make wise decisions every four years. If the electorate has no clue what is going on, you have no republic, you have a farce.
What reform is attained by exposing someone's phone or address? That's right. None. If you can't understand that privacy and transparency aren't incompatible, then you must be seriously intellectually challenged. In other words, you have no point, and you have no argument.
When you are exposing potential informants and spies to known murderers, lots.
2. If exposing the truth is always the best alternative, one wonders why Assange & co are so secretive about their own operations & movement. Clearly they have good reasons, for example Wikileaks tries to maintain the secrecy of their sources so they don't end up on jail. If they really exposed Afghan sources in these documents, the outcome for them will most likely be far worse than jail.
Personally I think WL is important and has great potential, but I wouldn't automatically consider them the good guys in every situation. It's more complicated than that.
From what I understand WL offered the US government the chance to clear names of informants. They refused. They obviously wanted to pressure wikileaks not to release the information.
I feel it might be part of an urge people have to latch on to concrete and explicable causes for events they feel an emotional repulsion to, ie:
"You, specific human being (Obama, Bush, Jake, Jesus, what have you) are to blame for the evils in the world."
as opposed to
"You, complex social phenomenon that may or may not be capable of being influenced by any individual action, are to blame for the evils of the world."
