What's with the Weird Psuedo-Patriotism Regarding Wikileaks??

[Bullet1987]

Name one person that has been killed as a result of Wikileaks and Julian Assange. The only group that has come out looking bad as result of the Wikileaks releases is our government. They've been exposed by Assange. Now I'm not claiming to know the man's motives...no one does. He may be in it for notoriety, fame, who knows. Or maybe he represents something else entirely. We need to really think outside the box with this Wikileaks story because there's surely much more to it than what we're being told. But I've been a little shocked by the willingness by so many to parrot the government line. As many have already stated, much of it is about diplomacy. It's not a layout of the next target we're about to bomb in Yemen or Pakistan, it's not naming current targets being watched by intelligence agents. People wanted transparency and we finally get it and people complain. I honestly don't get it. Then some say there's nothing new. How many documents does Assange claim to have? The recent files haven't even been released to the mass public because the site itself was attacked (by we know who). There could be much more information yet to be deciphered. What is the America's real role currently in South America, specifically Venezuela and Haiti. I'd like to know more about our going-ons in Yemen as I'm sure the Saudi's all totally behind that and apparently even the Yemeni paramilitary too. If you value total truth then you're not upset about what Assange has done.

[mike_c]

1. sunlight is ALWAYS the best disinfectant....

eom

[TwilightGardener]

2. Why would you assume anyone's patriotism is "pseudo"?

Because they disagree with you?

[DirkGently]

5. Patriotism is a common go-to for disingenous attack. It's a fair comment vis a vis Assange.

[TwilightGardener]

7. It can't be genuine reason to think he's not all that and a bag of chips?

[EFerrari]

8. Genuine but hardly a matter of patriotism. n/t

[TwilightGardener]

9. I don't think you can speak for someone else's feelings and motivations.

[EFerrari]

11. Correct. But a personal dislike of Julian Assange is not

a manifestation of patriotism because objectively, Assange and Wikileaks have not attacked America nor, apparently, broken any American laws. They have revealed material that challenges the good faith of American government officials just as they have released material regarding government officials all over the world.

[DirkGently]

14. I don't see the poster trying paint all critics with one brush, but agree fake patriotism is in play

[TwilightGardener]

15. I don't agree.

[DirkGently]

16. With which part? Are all the cries of "Traitor!" and claims of "endangering troops" sincere? Fair?

[TwilightGardener]

17. Well, he can't be a traitor. So that's silly. I don't know who, if anybody, he's endangering.

But it shouldn't come as a surprise that some people don't like this guy and what he's doing because they fear his motives and fear that our country could suffer consequences. Fearing that bad things might happen to your country, and your fellow citizens, your leaders and your allies can certainly be borne of patriotism.

[DirkGently]

19. Fair enough. We should be able to discuss those concerns without locking into "either / or."

IS Assange endangering U.S. security? My perception based on incomplete knowledge is that it's a greater benefit to expose some of what's being exposed, particularly given that at least the last time around, the U.S. ended up admitting there was nothing that truly endangered Americans.

I think it's a reasonable concern that dumping nominally classified materials into the public domain has the potential to sow chaos, of course. Someone out there would think it would be fine to publish schematics for a weapons system, or troop movements, or (and this may be the biggest real concern with Assange / Wikileaks) the identities of American agents working undercover.

What *I'm* cheering, anyway, is not chaos, or the notion that there are no secrets whatsoever worth keeping, but that on balance, we've been treading way too far on the side of blanket, unaccountable secrecy, and all the evils associated with that, for a long time, and that our new Democratic administration has done far too little to counterbalance that.

I also thought Wikileaks had been fairly careful in what it provided to whom, and hadn't sought or released the kind of physically destructive "secrets" that reasonable people would understand need to be withheld to prevent actual harm.

The problem I think a lot of people in favor of this sort of "leak" see is that as secrecy expands, it very quickly encompasses the type of embarrassing and even criminal government behavior that citizens and journalists have not only the right, but a real need to uncover. I think a lot of us sensed the Bush administration's firm embrace of the convenient proposition that "Anything that makes 'us' look bad, is a matter of 'National Security.' "

And Obama doesn't seem to have fully rejected that logic. Isn't that our sense of what happened to those Gitmo / Abu Ghraib pictures he at first favored releasing and then suddenly said would "put American lives in danger?"

The question is: "Put American lives in danger" HOW? Unmasking field agents or detailing troop movements is a quite a different proposition than, say, "Here is proof that female Muslim prisoners were raped in U.S. custody, which, if confirmed, will further enrage the Muslim world against America." THOSE "secrets" aren't entitled to "national security" status in my opinion, because at that point, you're just empowering government to behave criminally. Which is the whole problem with the War on Terror mentality Bush, et al. hid behind.

We ought to talk about this subject, on all sides, without reducing it to diametric opposition. There is more to it than, "Assange: Hero or Villian?" We (Americans) keep falling into a pattern of epithets and slogans, which can hide all kinds of bad-faith noisemaking that gets us nowhere. Besides (some) examples I'd characterize as counterfeit patriotism, now we're getting, "Assange is a 'blackmailer!' and "An accused Rapist!" with a convenient lack of context regarding broken condoms and attempts to avoid being kidnapped and thrown in a black prison somewhere. I think that's dishonest argument coming from somewhere other than where it pretends to come from.

But reasonable minds can differ. We just have to ... differ reasonably?


editted for the grammerers, spelings, and syntaxes, the.

[EFerrari]

6. Because it confuses the nation with the government. n/t

[DirkGently]

21. Great definition of the idea.

[PufPuf23]

3. Here is a video of Assange's Conference in Sweden.

Assange is well spoken.

The two women involved in the sexual misconduct allegations are in the video.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWh1Mk2_GVg#t=03m42s

[cbdo2007]

4. Not real patriotism?? What is this 2004?

[uppityperson]

10. I'm confused. Are you "psuedo-patriot" if you agree or disagree with Assange/wikileaks?

Is "psuedo-patriotism" related to supporting "total truth" or against "stealing secret documents".

[EFerrari]

13. Or maybe regarding nationalists who believe threatening Assange's kid

is somehow supportive of the American military?

[mainer]

12. You're a pseudo-patriot if you say you're for free speech

and a free press and due process...

and then call for Assange's unlawful persecution.

[Bullet1987]

18. ^This

I'm talking about the same people that call for transparency and complain about government secrecy, then attack Wikileaks because it "endangers" people even though there are never names of current operations and targets listed. Everything we've been shown is in the past. It's hypocritical.

[Igel]

20. The bar's raised rather high.

In many cases one points to contributing factors that give rise to a problem. It's not like any one of those factors creates the problem and is solely responsible for it.

Take WWII as an extreme example. Name one factor from 1917 to 1941 that contributed to the war and then show how that factor was specifically responsible for a death. You can always look to the Nazi prison camp guards, the soldiers' bullets and bombs and bayonettes; you can look to troop movements and official plans and policies; you can look at politics and larger macropolitical and macroeconomic factors. Whenever you finger a specific death you can always find a linkage to pre-war policies, political and economic conditions, but determining strict limited causality is difficult. By that standard, none of those factors actually caused any deaths. After all, no diplomacy can cause any deaths. When the US said that how Iraq handled Kuwait was not the US' concern, that didn't cause any deaths. When the US sold precursor chemicals that could be used to produce toxic gases, that didn't cause any deaths. Right?

It was the same with the leaks concerning Afghanistan. Every informant and soldier is in danger. Any group on the front lines, any collaborator could be discovered and the object of an attack. Proving that the Taliban specifically used the leaks to identify individuals and that those individuals would be absolutely safe and sound except for the leaks is impossible. So the commander who said that no deaths could be attributed to the Wikileaks leaks was right. The standard was high, "probably triggered" by the leaks was not a reasonable answer. Yes, beyond any doubt; no, not beyond any doubt. We can ignore that any informant killed would, instead of having his identity trumpeted as an informant would have had his status denied for the safety of his family.

[TransitJohn]

22. If this situation occurred during the Bush* admin., DU would be in unanimous support for Assange n/t

n/t