Yes, we should whip him for not having a level head when the entire US government is against him. Someone like you and I would have been sure to keep humble and not be egotistical when seeking asylum and fair justice against an entity that has military bases all over the world
People are so sure he made the wrong choice when he fled to the Ecuadorian embassy, but I wonder how they can be so sure. At the time, his biggest worry was to get assassinated or get snatched off the street and end up in a secret CIA torture prison. Neither of these fears were unjustified. Add to this the belief that US maximum security prisons are blatant violations of basic human rights and the belief that the UK and Sweden are close allies of the US, and his actions made perfect sense. His notoriety and his choices saved him from either of these fates, albeit at a high price.
Did he make the right choices? Who knows. There is always a lot of counterfactual reasoning involved.
The worst choice he made in this period was to be a terrible guest and eventually be evicted. However he had going through psychological problems and honestly I'm not sure if he wouldn't be evicted regardless (the new president was aligned with the US and wanted him gone)
I think the person you're replying to is referring to the accusations against WikiLeaks of just dumping raw documents without at least removing information that could lead to identifying (and thus endangering) people who e.g. assisted the US in Afghanistan or who provided documents to WL in the first place.
Yes, there was a point in getting the information out as fast as possible, but I think it's fair to blame Assange for not putting in the redaction work.
If I recall correctly, the endangering information was not originally published by Wikileaks, but by other journalists (the decryption key was written in a book or something, my memory is fuzzy on this); and Wikileaks only published the whole thing once the cat was already out of the bag.
To sum this up, they were putting the redaction work, but someone else failed to, and at that point it was too late.
The material was shared with The Guardian and several other (including prominent US) media outlets, they are the ones that published it unredacted. Never was there any proof provided that those articles caused any harm to any personnel at any point in time.
Those media outlets that are in fact guilty of what Assange/Wikileaks was accused of jumped at the first opportunity to throw Assange under the bus.
Something tangential that I don't think has happened, but that I'd be curious to see the results of: an analysis of the number of people endangered by Wikileaks disclosures versus the number of people endangered by Americans abandoning interpreters and collaborators, or other action expressly consistent with US policy.
With how mad we are about him fcking over our people, surely we haven't fcked them over ourselves at a higher rate.
Well you don't know what I would do (except for what I'm saying here where you can see I wouldn't do what he did! haha), but I understand if you're speaking for yourself.
I think precisely in that situation is when you need that kind of ability. But I wouldn't say we should whip him! Again speaking for yourself I suppose hahahahahaha! :)
