Anger as Wikileaks Releases All Cables Unredacted

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It looks as though WikiLeaks has essentially burned every bridge it had left...including the one it was standing on. How bad is it? This quote ought to give you some idea:

“The reason Assange held on to these prizes [the cables] is clear: Without them, he is little more than a poorly groomed blowhard under house arrest. ... So you’ve got no reason to pay attention to Julian Assange anymore. There's nothing left there to see.”
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On one hand I'm glad they are finally released, maybe it'll help uncover the bad guys and put them behind bars.

On the other hand it's a shame the good folks were not more protected.
 
Truth is a double-edged sword. Assange should know that and if he doesn't, he's about to find out the hard way since there is nothing left to protect him.
 
I'm a Citizen, so I dislike what happened with wikileaks as much as anyone. However, I find a lot of bias in the media ridiculous. If he had released a bunch of this type of info on China, and then in turned their informants here in the US got released as well... we'd celebrate him as a patriot and hero. Funny how that works.
 
defuseme2k said:
I'm a Citizen, so I dislike what happened with wikileaks as much as anyone. However, I find a lot of bias in the media ridiculous. If he had released a bunch of this type of info on China, and then in turned their informants here in the US got released as well... we'd celebrate him as a patriot and hero. Funny how that works.
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History Favors the Victorious.

I often wonder what our history would look like if we knew the unedited truth.
 
Just think it's the governments fault. If governments where honest And stop all the shit they do, this would of never had happen in the first place.
 
Iraqi family rounded up and EXECUTED by US Special Forces.

Only the brave indeed.
 
If you don't want it to be about Assange, quit doing him so much lip-service.

"I can't believe he thinks he is so important, he isn't. Which is why we will continue to talk about him for months!!!"
 
Dekoth-E- said:
History Favors the Victorious.

I often wonder what our history would look like if we knew the unedited truth.
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You know it's funny, I was just reading some history (well, counter-factual what-ifs, but still...) and George Washington and Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress, corresponded often about writing their memoirs.

This is George Washington, and the secretary who was present for nearly every session of our first Congress, from 1774 - 1778. They finally decided that writing their memoirs would be a bad idea, as it would be too disillusioning if the American people discovered how often the Revolution came close to disaster.
 
TwistedAegis said:
They finally decided that writing their memoirs would be a bad idea, as it would be too disillusioning if the American people discovered how often the Revolution came close to disaster.
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Ironically, that's what many people love about it. We were seriously the underdog there. We should have had no hope of winning. Ever. We fought against a powerful nation and won. By the skin of our teeth. We did what we had to do to survive.

How drastically we have changed.
 
for fucks sake, most americans don't want these stupid wars and think they are wrong, but when has that ever mattered?
 
I don't think many people even care about Wikileaks..... besides the "conspiracy" theory addicts.

Besides that, most of it is "meh" quality material being 'leaked' .....
 
Good. Good on the Guardian on leaking Wikileaks' file passwords, good on Wikileaks for putting all this out unredacted.

If the government knows that their secrets will end up in the open, they're going to start acting more like the servants which they're supposed to be rather than the gods which they want to be.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."​
 
Good on Assange.. People SHOULD know all the dubious shit that goes on with not just the US govt but ALL our governments.. More exposure the better I say.

The moment you blindly trust your govt with no question or doubt.. Goodbye freedom
 
fattypants said:
Good. Good on the Guardian on leaking Wikileaks' file passwords, good on Wikileaks for putting all this out unredacted.

If the government knows that their secrets will end up in the open, they're going to start acting more like the servants which they're supposed to be rather than the gods which they want to be.
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I tend to agree. I am glad that the info was simply released. One would hope that it would cause governments to be more honest in their dealings. Lord knows they should be.

Wikileaks was really stupid for not having enough foresight to realize that once they encrypted info was out there floating around as a torrent, that the original encryption passwords would always work. That really does show a monumental stupidity and it is rightly damaging to their reputation. However, the guy from the Guardian who published the passwords comes off even worse IMO. Because, unless I have misread something, he did it as part of a book project. It was part of the "story" and information published for the sole purpose of making that asshole some money. That is even more irritating as far as I am concerned - not only stupid but done in the pursuit of personal monetary reward. Pathetic.

Below is another perspective on the issue (link and excerpt):

Facts and myths in the WikiLeaks/Guardian saga

As usual, many of those running around righteously condemning WikiLeaks for the potential, prospective, unintentional harm to innocents caused by this leak will have nothing to say about these actual, deliberate acts of wanton slaughter by the U.S. The accidental release of these unredacted cables will receive far more attention and more outrage than the extreme, deliberate wrongdoing these cables expose. That's because many of those condemning WikiLeaks care nothing about harm to civilians as long as it's done by the U.S. government and military; indeed, such acts are endemic to the American wars they routinely cheer on. What they actually hate is transparency and exposure of wrongdoing by their government; "risk to civilians" is just the pretext for attacking those, such as WikiLeaks, who bring that about.
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Youn said:
for fucks sake, most americans don't want these stupid wars and think they are wrong, but when has that ever mattered?
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Yeah, you've got to admit that you come out looking like a huge asshole when, due to 3k of your civilians die, you wind up killing 137k other countries civilians chasing the guys who did it....


But don't worry they hate us because we have refrigerators, not the above reason!
 
It's a shame that the whole Wikileaks issue has come to this. There is a real need for what it does in this world, something that helps keeps governments and the ruling classes accountable, but Assange and co have inadvertently messed up their own PR so bad that they've slowly lost the rapport and credibility they should have amongst the general public.
 
TwistedAegis said:
Yeah, you've got to admit that you come out looking like a huge asshole when, due to 3k of your civilians die, you wind up killing 137k other countries civilians chasing the guys who did it....


But don't worry they hate us because we have refrigerators, not the above reason!
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Make warfare against you painful. Let them know that their mothers, fathers. siblings, wives, and children will pay the price, if they raise their hands against you.

In our politically correct world, they pretend this is not their policy. It is, and it always has been. Notice, I do not actually reference a country or a people in that statement. I don't because the policy is fairly universal.

only if you have one of those stainless steel side by sides that also makes cubed, crushed, or even shaved ice.
 
Falling Anvil said:
It's a shame that the whole Wikileaks issue has come to this. There is a real need for what it does in this world, something that helps keeps governments and the ruling classes accountable, but Assange and co have inadvertently messed up their own PR so bad that they've slowly lost the rapport and credibility they should have amongst the general public.
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They never earned this rapport or credibility. From the start, they were very selective in what they released. Not selective to save lives or livelihoods, they have been outing people since day one. Selective to make sure that they inflicted maximum damage on those they did not agree with. Had they properly released everything with just enough redacted to protect identities, they might have actually earned this rapport and credibility you speak of. That is not what they did, as such they never were going to have much credibility outside of the "yeah fight the man", "sub adult" and "anarchists" crowds.
 
The news media keep mentioning "cables" were released...for the lay person, what do they mean by "cables" and why do they call them that?
 
Bojamijams said:
Iraqi family rounded up and EXECUTED by US Special Forces.

Only the brave indeed.
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Joe S said:
This. Also, one was an infant and others were little children.
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http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-onthemedia-20110903,0,435906.column

In the document, written a dozen days after the shootout, Alston requests more information from U.S. authorities about the Ishaqi episode. From his investigation, which is not described in detail, Alston concluded that, at the end of the shootout, the "troops entered the house, handcuffed all the residents and executed all of them."

When Schofield followed up for this week's story, the U.N. official told him that he had been frustrated in 2006 when he tried to get more information from American and Iraqi officials. Alston, now a law professor at NYU, said the U.N. Human Rights Council did not have the power or will to respond when requests were ignored.
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As much as sites like Democracy Now! (linked to in the news article in the OP) like to toss this around as absolute proof that the military is the devil, the truth is that the cable in question is a UN investigator asking for more information.

The US side of the story is that there was a firefight, a high value target was nabbed, and things happened. Their side is that US soldiers handcuffed a family with women and children and executed them. We don't know which side is the truth. The investigator who wrote the cable still has no idea what actually happened. For my part I'm not going to believe it until I see the evidence.
 
You guys are idiots. You do NOT want to know all the gritty details of everything that happens in the world. You do NOT want to know just how many times you could have been killed by bad guys but were not because the government stopped them.

Live a happy life, let those whose job it is to know all the horrors of the world be there to keep your life happy. No sense in being unhappy AND have no power to do anything about it.
 
LstOfTheBrunnenG said:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-onthemedia-20110903,0,435906.column



As much as sites like Democracy Now! (linked to in the news article in the OP) like to toss this around as absolute proof that the military is the devil, the truth is that the cable in question is a UN investigator asking for more information.

The US side of the story is that there was a firefight, a high value target was nabbed, and things happened. Their side is that US soldiers handcuffed a family with women and children and executed them. We don't know which side is the truth. The investigator who wrote the cable still has no idea what actually happened. For my part I'm not going to believe it until I see the evidence.
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Shush. Don't let things like reality and facts get in the way of US hating. All the cool kids hate on the US because...well, that is what all the cool kids do and we know that following the herd is what keeps the cool kids cool. Stop making it harder for the herd.
 
Terrorist actions are blow-back from us invading their lands and manipulating their leaders. We could all live happy if we kept our noses out of other countries affairs.

Just 4-5 years ago we were making deals with Kadafi in Libya. Now we are spending millions killing him.

Our (US) foreign policy needs to be evaluated.
 
I am not really taking sides here, but it does seem like a lot of people want their cake and eat it too. For all the wrong that the US does (and as an educated American, I will admit that we have done a lot of wrong), we are distributing more humanitarian aid than any other nation, by far (total, not per capita). The US is a capitalism. It should not be shocking or unexpected when business hops in bed with government and things start looking a little bleak. A business, in general, is out to product its bottom-line above all else. To hell with ethics and morality. They only exist as long as they continue to make profits. The US military industrial complex is a massive beast that needs to be fed, and fed continuously. You would be hard-pressed to find a person living here that does not know someone employed by it. It can prop up entire communities. Unfortunately, the only way that business (and it is a business) continues to function properly is if there is conflict in the world in which we need to continually insert our presence.

Do you have any idea how disastrous it would be for our economy to suddenly have no one to fight? You think that 10% unemployment is high? I am not advocating war, but this is the economy that has been built over the past 50 years. We need war to keep millions of people employed. And unfortunately, war is not pretty or politically correct. In fact, most countries are willing to conduct war with little to no rules whatsoever. So why should the US be held to a higher standard? Do not give me any ethical or moral hogwash about us being the pinnacle of democracy or we need to lead by example. At the end of the day this business will protect itself. If that means we need to occupy the planet in the process, that is what will occur.

This is very depressing to consider, and I am not advocating it, But the next time you want to blast the US poilicies, maybe you should look at all the cheap electronics you have in your house, or the relatively cheap gas prices (in comparison to the world) that you pay, and be thankful for every person you know who has a job because of our dirty little wars.

Don't like it? Stop contributing to the problem, in whatever form you are doing it.

(oh yea, I am a HUGE part of the problem I just stated...)
 
cybrsage said:
You guys are idiots. You do NOT want to know all the gritty details of everything that happens in the world. You do NOT want to know just how many times you could have been killed by bad guys but were not because the government stopped them.
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What about all the times they killed good people to satisfy the ambitions of a tiny group of oligarchs? I guess we won't know that either.


cybrsage said:
Live a happy life, let those whose job it is to know all the horrors of the world be there to keep your life happy. No sense in being unhappy AND have no power to do anything about it.
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I can't think like this, because I'm neither a sociopath nor a misanthrope. I genuinely care about the well-being of humans that I don't even know, and I firmly believe that keeping every government honest will result in a net reduction in world misery.

Tell you what, how about we let oppressive governments continue their path of untold horrors, except we remove the "untold" part and let the general population make an informed decision about it. They report, we decide.
 
Neslepax said:
I am not advocating war, but this is the economy that has been built over the past 50 years. We need war to keep millions of people employed.
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What you're saying seems to me to be fairly similar to the dictionary definition of 'advocate'?
 
LstOfTheBrunnenG said:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-onthemedia-20110903,0,435906.column



As much as sites like Democracy Now! (linked to in the news article in the OP) like to toss this around as absolute proof that the military is the devil, the truth is that the cable in question is a UN investigator asking for more information.

The US side of the story is that there was a firefight, a high value target was nabbed, and things happened. Their side is that US soldiers handcuffed a family with women and children and executed them. We don't know which side is the truth. The investigator who wrote the cable still has no idea what actually happened. For my part I'm not going to believe it until I see the evidence.
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The link you provided gives substantially more evidence than the investigator "still has no idea what actually happened."

In fact, "Alston requests more information from U.S. authorities about the Ishaqi episode. From his investigation, which is not described in detail, Alston concluded that, at the end of the shootout, the "troops entered the house, handcuffed all the residents and executed all of them."

His conclusion is corroborated by, "Iraqi police commanders described a markedly different scenario, one that ended with five children younger than 5, including a 5-month-old infant, dead. The words of the local authorities rang with particular power, because they had been working closely before that with U.S. forces."

None of which is specifically refuted by the official statement of what happened by US authorities (markedly different from your "things happened"), "U.S. forces engaged the house in Ishaqi, about 55 miles north of Baghdad, that day because it was occupied by a suspected member of Al Qaeda in Iraq, military spokesmen said. A ferocious gun battle ensued, leaving the home in rubble. The Americans said that somehow in the chaotic scene they managed to nab their suspect.

What evidence are you waiting for? Are you waiting for US officials to openly admit what eye witnesses and outside investigations revealed to be accurate? If you're waiting for that kind of evidence you'll never receive it.

On one side we've got Iraq police working with US military saying family was killed, supported by UN investigation vs. US saying we reduced the home to rubble and "nabbed" the bad guy (a statement that doesn't even refute the claim that the family was killed in the process)...and the people who think those kinds of activities are inappropriate are blind US haters exhibiting herd mentality according to cybrsage?
 
Dekoth-E- said:
History Favors the Victorious.

I often wonder what our history would look like if we knew the unedited truth.
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You'd be reading about how the US gave weapons to the Philippine guerillas to pressure Spain into selling the philippines to the US for 20 million dollars as an american colony. And then killing the same 300,000 filipinos they 'helped' (plus 500,000+ civilians) afterwards to keep them from revolting against the US.

It's a big part of our history, but if you ask any american, they wouldn't even know where the Philippines is.
 
TwistedAegis said:
Yeah, you've got to admit that you come out looking like a huge asshole when, due to 3k of your civilians die, you wind up killing 137k other countries civilians chasing the guys who did it....


But don't worry they hate us because we have refrigerators, not the above reason!
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Just be glad they didnt nuke a country okay.
 
We would be reading all sorts of shit that all sorts of governments and people did that would turn our stomachs. I know picking on the US is fun for the foreigners and the not so cool kids, but there is no one here that can claim their country/race/people are free from being guilty of one atrocity or ten.
 
GORANKAR said:
We would be reading all sorts of shit that all sorts of governments and people did that would turn our stomachs. I know picking on the US is fun for the foreigners and the not so cool kids, but there is no one here that can claim their country/race/people are free from being guilty of one atrocity or ten.
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With great power comes great responsibility. But I agree, most of these cables were tame for a reason, the gov americans have is something they can be proud at least in terms of not committing secret crimes or plotting to fool millions of people that sort of conspiracy stuff. Its a little disappointing though to not have any UFO evidence, area51 or mentions of a stargate somewhere; I guess that stuff is very very top secret.
 
pretty sure after the initial kneejerk reactions to wikileaks releases at the beginning, no one, including the governments really care about it at this point.
 
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