Julian Assange: The Whistleblower
September 19th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Julian Assange at the 2010 Oslo Freedom Forum. Paraphrasing Orwell, Assange explains that he who controls today’s internet servers controls the intellectual record of mankind.
Julian Assange is a spokesman and advisory board member of WikiLeaks, a transparency website whose mission is to “open governments” and expose human rights abuses. It has a core focus on protecting dissidents, whistleblowers, investigative journalists, and bloggers who face state threats, and it largely operates by publishing leaks of sensitive documents. Winners of Amnesty International’s 2009 Media Award for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya, Assange and WikiLeaks have recently launched www.collateralmurder.com, a website that hosts a leaked video of U.S. military forces in Iraq apparently slaying over a dozen people indiscriminately. In his speech, Assange chooses to focus specifically on WikiLeaks’s work against censorship and human rights abuses committed by Western governments. Paraphrasing Orwell, Assange explains that he who controls today’s internet servers controls the intellectual record of mankind. He warns us that Western governments, large corporations, and certain wealthy individuals are increasingly able and increasingly trying to remove material permanently from the historical record using sophisticated methods. Assange reviews WikiLeaks’s work in uncovering human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo, and discusses the dangerous irony in the U.S. military’s conduct as it decorates its detention centers with “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” signs. If the West doesn’t reverse its course of increased censorship and rights abuses, Assange warns, it will lose all of the ideals that it once stood for.
When the Pentagon Papers were turned over to the NYT, the publisher had commited to publishing them in their entirety, whereas Assange allowed the NYT and the Guardian to utilize Wikileaks pieces as they see fit. That is a vast difference. It allows the MSM to further whatever agenda it has going. For example:
“Iran is engaged in an extensive covert campaign to arm, finance, train and equip Taliban insurgents, Afghan warlords allied to al-Qaida and suicide bombers fighting to eject British and western forces from Afghanistan.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/ieds-improvised-explosive-device-deaths
But in fact the Wikileaks documents appear to have been filtered prior to their release because out of 92,000 pieces not one mentions either the RAW or Mossad whereas the ISI is the primary subject of hundreds of pieces.
Wikileaks is the new and improved Judith Miller, an ‘anonymous sources’ conduit from the pentagon to the NYT. Smarter warmongering.