WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange: "Transparent Government Tends to Produce Just Government"

[kgnu_fan]

Source: Democracy Now!

Amy Goodman: We spend the hour with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, talking about the biggest leak in U.S. history: the release of more than 91,000 classified military records on the war in Afghanistan. As the Pentagon announces it is launching a criminal probe into who leaked the documents, Assange asks what about investigating the "war crimes" revealed in the leaked military records? He also talks about the media, why he isn’t coming to the U.S. anytime soon and what gives him hope. "What keeps us going is our sources. These are the people, presumably, who are inside these organizations, who want change," Assange says. "They are both heroic figures taking much greater risks than I ever do, and they are pushing and showing that they want change in, in fact, an extremely effective way."

Read more: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/28/wikileaks_founder_julian_assange_transparent_government

---

Must watch... He speaks about how the ground level reporting have been manipulated and how you can find out by analyzing them. He describes why Washington Post was not included as a media partner. Why media needs to be watching government critically, not to be a mouthpiece for our government. Listen up, "journalists"!

[ElsewheresDaughter]

1. all of these leaked reports are from Jan. 2004 thru Dec. 2009..all done under the Bush admin.

[liberation]

2. A bit early for sea food, no?

Plus herring is not that great for breakfast anyway...

[kgnu_fan]

4. Rhetoric may not help much.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, I’d like you to respond quickly to the responses of the administration, of the Obama administration: one, that this is old news, that it goes until December '09, exactly when the Obama administration changed its policy with the surge.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, so, this is a bit of rhetorical trickery by the White House. The material goes to December 31, ’09, so it's valid up to the beginning of 2010, for a six-year period. So it does cover a sweep of the war which hasn’t yet turned around. Now, Obama’s policy change came in on the 1st of December, so there is, in fact, an overlap. We can see some of what happens.
But looking back through the data at successive policy changes—for example, the policy changes introduced by McChrystal—what we don’t see is a real change to how things happen on the ground.

So a policy change is just words, but what actually happens on the ground, well, we can see it from this data. Very little happens. The US military and the soldiers in Afghanistan are a very, very big ship to turn around. Their interaction with that environment and with the Taliban and with the local population has its own dynamic that is independent to the policies that are tried—that people try and push down from on high. We can see that, as an example, when McChrystal tried to introduce more metrics, more measurements, of how civilian casualties were occurring. Fields pop up in the database around that time. But we see that troops that are causing civilian casualties simply don’t fill out that field, or they lie about whether the casualties have occurred, or they misrepresent whether it was a civilian casualty versus an insurgent casualty. That sort of—that culture and interaction between Taliban and US forces and other elements operating in Afghanistan is very difficult to change. And so, we don’t expect that the situation, as it stands now, some seven months after this data stopped being collected, would be that different to the previous six years, which we can see in the material that has been released.

[no limit]

5. Must be nice living in such a bubble.

[bemildred]

3. I am so sick of government lies. nt

[kgnu_fan]

6. I want more peole to read the transcript. Amy is doing great job here.