Saturday, October 2, 2010

Pentagon out to 'destroy' Wikileaks, founder says

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Thursday accused the Pentagon of setting out to destroy the whistleblower website and struck back at news organizations that he said bought in to the smear campaign.

Speaking to an audience in London, the 39-year-old defended the decision to release some 77,000 classified documents related to the US war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon, and some critics, have alleged the leak endangered the lives of civilians there by publicly identifying individuals who were cooperating with the military.

“I need to express the seriousness of the attack against this media organization,” he said according to the AFP. “The Pentagon has demanded... that we destroy, totally destroy, our previous publications, including that Afghan publication. The Pentagon is trying to get up an espionage case and destroy our organization.”
The Pentagon has warned that Assange may release an additional 15,000 documents that are even more explosive than the first batch. The status of those plans is unclear.

Assange denied Wikileaks endangered innocent people.
“We do not have a goal of innocent people being harmed,” he said using language that at times sounded similar to generals who defend their actions when they generate collateral damage. “We have precisely the opposite goal.” He said Wikileaks took a “harm reduction approach” in vetting the documents that were leaked.

8 comments:

  1. I do think wikileaks is great but revealing sensitive info can also be very harmful and can get people killed.
    I guess it really depends on the type info they are leaking. They can push the envelope and hope someone doesn't get hurt but eventually someone will.
    Keep our government and miltary accountable, however i do believe in.

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  2. Information doesn't exist. None of us exist. Wikileaks doesn't exit.

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  3. The government has no right to step in and tell anyone what they can and can not distribute. At most i believe that wikileaks might want to block out a few names if its called for. I think the government is just using this as an excuse to go after wikileaks.

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  4. I too think that the goverment only says so, so they have an excuse to destroy wikileaks.
    On the other hand, I also think that Assange is not neutral and follows a political purpose with his actions.

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  5. Its no surprise that the government wants to destroy Wikileaks given the amount of publicity hell Wikileaks caused them.

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  6. @alt255 - They might not have the right to, but they don't need rights to do it.
    I think they are starting to realize that they will never be able to silence the information leaks, but that doesn't mean they still don't want to try and slay the great beast (in this case Wikileaks)

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  7. I agree that there should be some form of privacy that the citizens shouldn't know, but if Wikileaks uncovers it, then it wasn't hidden enough. Don't punish them for it.

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