> How can you be pure toward him when he is fine getting informants and others killed, and asking for and telling how to go about getting classified info. Are the facts in dispute?
No they are not in dispute, they are simply not facts.
From [1]:
The head of the IRTF, Brigadier General Robert Carr, testified under questioning at Chelsea Manning's sentencing hearing that the task force had found no examples of anyone who had lost their life due to WikiLeaks' publication of the documents.
I'm unsure where the purity claim comes from. Parent said people should praise him for his actions. Nowhere it's stated ALL his actions, or that he is pure in any way, shape or form.
Nobody is perfect and he's no different, all that they're expressing is that making the hard moral choice to expose bad behavior should be applauded instead of punished.
I know the vast majority of us (including me) would not have the courage to risk personal retaliation to expose bad behavior. We all love to think we would, but we all witness corruption everywhere and never say a word for a plethora of reasons.
If they were claiming "purity" as you imply, I'd agree. But that's not what was written, and it seems a lot of people have the same flawed interpretation. Yes, he's flawed, but that doesn't make what he has done any less brave.
I don't understand why Assange should be treated more harshly for putting people's theoretical lives at risk than the people who were actually murdering civilians and committing war crimes?
Revealing war crimes easily qualified for declassification of government documents. It’s a straightforward of course the end justified the means situation
And the other 99.999% of documents that didn't allege any war crimes?
I'm glad the darker side of the US operations came to light, but it would have been better if the leaks went straight to an actual news organization that had enough ethical standards to ensure names of informants and activists at risk were properly redacted.
Even ignoring all the public changes to the tech industry, wouldn't we need another whistleblower to even be able to tell that there hadn't been any internal change to what they considered acceptable behaviour?
The US testified in court that his disclosures didn't get anyone killed, this is misinformation stemming from early propaganda against him by the political establishment that was humiliated by WikiLeaks' publications
“Well, they're informants," Assange replied. "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it."
The US’s testimony makes it barely better given the quote (I’ll take your word for the testimony) and leaves me equally puzzled regarding his admiration.
I had never seen this purported quote before. And I found it extremely dubious that he said such a thing. Seeing as you didn't provide a source I went looking for one. I found first a recent NYT piece [1] with the purported quote. Here's the first paragraph of that piece :
> Fourteen years ago, at a human rights conference in Oslo, I met Julian Assange. From the moment I encountered the wraithlike WikiLeaks founder, I sensed that he might be a morally dubious character. My suspicions were confirmed upon witnessing his speech at the conference, in which he listed Israel alongside Iran and China as part of a “rogue’s gallery of states” and compared the Guantánamo Bay detention facility to a Nazi concentration camp
I think it's pretty obvious from that opening that it's a hit piece on Assange. Anyway, that piece links to an earlier Guardian piece [2] for the source of the quote. That Guardian column is another, and even more obvious, hit piece on Assange. Here's its first paragraph :
> You did not have to listen for too long to Julian Assange's half-educated condemnations of the American "military-industrial complex" to know that he was aching to betray better and braver people than he could ever be.
Vomit. But finally in the Guardian piece we find the source of the purported quote. It's from David Leigh and Luke Harding's "history" of WikiLeaks. I think most people who have closely followed the Wikleaks story will understand how unreliable and compromised both David Leigh and Luke Harding are to serve as 'witnesses' or sources for any reporting on Wikileaks and Assange. But they've served their masters very well as yellow journalists engaged in a state backed smear campaign against Assange.
Is a non-US citizen culpable for publishing US secrets?
In sincere good-faith: is there even a US law about publishing the names of undercover informants? Isn't that what Dick Chaney and the New York Times did?
There is no dilemma! We need a harsh societal reminder that you are not responsible for the actions of other people. It’s a moral fallacy to say that JA would be responsible for getting informants killed (if any were actually killed—they weren’t) by exercising fundamental inalienable freedoms. If somebody kills an informant, that is on them. This mindset of culpability for consequences of exposing evil is literally how evil festers and wins. Don’t fall victim to evil’s rhetorical agenda.
