Awesome video re: Wikileaks

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/10/24/assange/ind...

It looks as if the rape case has been opened up again recently, but I haven't looked into it. Here's my point: if in the end he raped someone and he's tried in court and has to face the consequences, that's the breaks and it would be a real shame. But so far, that issue has come across as nothing but a smear campaign. Wikileaks is pulling up plenty of documents that focus on torture, rape, murder, etc. This is what the media should be focusing on. It's not that any behavior in his personal life should be excused, it's that the media should have way bigger fish to focus on frying. The weekend these documents drop and the best this CNN reporter can do is ask him about gossip?

"All the news that's fit to print" is a joke. The NYT is a solid paper in many ways, but it's not beyond reproach.

I have to disagree about this link being interesting.

This article seems to focus on the power that Assange holds as a whistleblower, not his personal life issues. As far as Assange holding power as the God of War, a lot of the arguments seem pretty weak:

I'll try to say this as respectfully as I can, but it's getting to the point where whatever Glenn Greenwald says, I feel an instinctive need to stand against it, simply on principle. It's not that he doesn't occasionally make some excellent and even necessary arguments from the left; it's that he's become the personification of a movement that's so self-righteous in its outrage, so petulant in its demands, and so destructive to its overall cause by refusing to give even an inch in its quixotic quest to see the Progressive Utopian States of America come to fruition in our lifetime that it's tough to consistently take his side.

Since when is petulance, self-righteousness outrage and a quixotic outlook an excuse to stand against something? Whatever happened to the content of the argument? This guy is going to base his opinion of Assange on Greenwald's style? Please.

With that in mind, I had to fight the urge to automatically say that Julian Assange deserves to be put up against a wall somewhere after reading Greenwald's impassioned and completely expected defense of him yesterday morning in Salon. It was always a given that the institutional left would hail Assange as a hero given that the Wikileaks founder has made it his mission to be a perpetual thorn in the side of the U.S. government by exposing all of its supposed dirty little war secrets; you knew from the very beginning that parallels would be drawn between him and Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the infamous Pentagon Papers which proved that the Johnson administration had essentially lied through its teeth in Vietnam. So to see the left tag anyone in the established media who dares to treat this modern day Horatius at the Bridge with anything other than respect as "Nixonian" is just the next logical step.

This is a whole paragraph dedicated to the author patting himself on the back for predicting how Greenwald would react, using 2nd person as a tactic to pull us in. But seriously, this is just so he can hear himself talk and convince us that he knows more than he does. It's empty filler.

I also have no doubt that more than a few of the accusations that have been leveled at Julian Assange since Wikileaks became the epochal cultural force that it is were and are a direct effort to discredit him and his work. But that said, Assange's attitude when it comes to being asked tough questions about his motives and his methods -- and the potential unintended consequences of both -- has always been one of arrogant indifference. He's fully aware that what he's doing might get innocent people killed, but he's said flat-out that he's willing to accept responsibility for that because in the end, he believes, the greater good is served by the world understanding that it's being lied to about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Where's the quote where Assange says he's aware that he'll get people killed? As far as the Department of Defense is concerned, he didn't hurt anyone and any risks are just speculative. The author assumes a lot about what's going on in Assange's head and offers nothing to back himself up.

Julian Assange now holds a staggering amount of power -- the ability to literally decide who lives and who may very well die, and which countries will face the kind of scandal that can potentially topple governments. It's almost too much privilege to be at the whim of one person. Which is why there's nothing wrong with attempting to hold Assange accountable, regardless of how pissy he may get about being asked to justify his actions or face an adversarial press.

The bolded section is where he links to the CNN walk out video, but the walk-out has NOTHING to do with being held accountable for "toppl[ing] goverments." He walked out because he was being pestered about a rape charge (not conviction) and disagreements between him and his employees.

But as with the governments which accept a certain number of casualties as the cost of doing business, Assange excuses his actions and the authority he feels he's entitled to wield by claiming that the cause he's fighting for is just. He washes the blood off his hands with one of the strongest cleansers imaginable: intellectual rationalization

What blood? As has been pointed out again and again, the Wikileaks documents point out that there is plenty of "blood," war crime, and (perhaps?) rape under the U.S. governments watch, but there is absolutely no evidence that Wikileaks has caused anyone to die.

This is the first Chez Pazienza that I think I've ever read, but he seems like a bit of a hack.

One reason I like Greenwald is that he painstakingly links to his sources and whenever anybody responds to his posts, he links to them during counter arguments. One never feels that they are being force fed his opinion alone. The site is a great jumping off point for a lot of other articles from a wide variety of sources.