Why WikiLeaks Must Be Protected by John Pilger

[another saigon]

Published on Thursday, August 19, 2010 by The New Statesman


http://www.commondreams.org/print/59544

The case of the Afghanistan war logs and the hounding of Julian Assange prove that there’s never been greater need to speak truth to power than today.

by John Pilger

On 26 July, WikiLeaks released thousands of secret US military files on the war in Afghanistan. Cover-ups, a secret assassination unit and the killing of civilians are documented. In file after file, the brutalities echo the colonial past. From Malaya and Vietnam to Bloody Sunday and Basra, little has changed. The difference is that today there is an extraordinary way of knowing how faraway societies are routinely ravaged in our name. WikiLeaks has acquired records of six years of civilian killing in both Afghanistan and Iraq, of which those published in the Guardian are a fraction.

There is understandably hysteria on high, with demands that the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, be "hunted down" and "rendered". In Washington, I interviewed a senior official in the defence department and asked: "Can you give a guarantee that the editors of WikiLeaks and the editor-in-chief, who is not American, will not be subjected to the kind of manhunt that we read about in the media?" He replied: "It's not my position to give guarantees on anything."


-snip-

Their current propaganda is that WikiLeaks is "irresponsible". Earlier this year, before it released the cockpit video of a US Apache gunship killing 19 civilians in Iraq, including journalists and children, WikiLeaks sent people to Baghdad to find the victims' families in order to prepare them. Before the release of last month's Afghanistan war logs, WikiLeaks wrote to the White House asking that it identify Afghan names that might draw reprisals. There was no reply. More than 15,000 files were withheld and these, Assange says, will not be released until they have been scrutinized "line by line" so that the names of those at risk can be deleted.

-snip-

Last May, following the release of the Apache footage, Assange had his passport temporarily confiscated when he returned home. The Labor government in Canberra denies it has received requests from Washington to detain him and spy on the WikiLeaks network. The Cameron government also denies this. They would, wouldn't they? Assange, who came to London last month to work on exposing the war logs, has now had to leave the country hastily for, as he puts it, "safer climes".

[provis99]

1. and you have conservative idiots on DU calling him an American traitor.

DLC morons! He's an Australian!

[cutlassmama]

3. yep

[another saigon]

7. bizarre

to say the least. Stay safe Julian!

[Ignis]

2. Kicked for visibility.

:kick:

[jonnyblitz]

4. k & r. nt

[MerryBlooms]

5. Let the sun shine in. n/t

[sabrina 1]

6. John Pilger is one of the best journalists

ever. It was he first questioned whether there was torture going on in Abu Ghraib. He wrote about the woman, Noor, who had managed to sneak out a note begging Iraqis to blow up the prison because she did not want to live.

Attempts were made to try to see if she existed but all requests, from Iraqi lawyers, were turned down. When the videos were released, anyone reading John Pilger at the time was not suprised although the shock of what we saw and the knowledge of what we did not see, was still staggering.

'History will not absolve us' for remaining silent. Julian Asange is a hero no matter how much propaganda there is trying to paint him as a 'traitor'. Ludicrous since he is not an American.

If we had more sunlight on what they do, there would be none of these wars. If our own press had done its job the war criminals would have been stopped. But then I remember people like Dr. Kelly and I know it takes great courage to speak out.

Pilger is right. Wikileaks needs to be protected, and we need more of them ..

'If they have nothing to hide, what are they worried about'?

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

8. John Pilger is the guy who called Obama a "glossy Uncle Tom."

I'm sure he's very fair and balanced.

:crazy: