Wikileaks is stirring it up again, and getting bolder as they go. Julian Assange has become a celebrity, but I am guessing he is smart enough to make a network that functions without him. The Pentagon wants him either dead or imprisoned. That group is pretty good at getting their man.
It occurs to me, and many others too, that what Assange and Wikileaks are doing is both strange and unrecognizable … but then like a flashback we realize that it is called journalism. Good journalists are not liked or admired by people in power. Quite the opposite. Real journalists don’t get invited to parties or get called upon to question politicians in phony debates or do talking-head interviews. Real journalists piss powerful people off. That’s dangerous to livelihood, and for Assange, perhaps even his life.
Real journalists find out what powerful people are doing, and report back to us. Right now it seems as if Wiki is teasing, embarrassing people, tantalizing power. That is fascinating. They are even threatening to go after a Wall Street bank, where real power resides. Banksters could force Elliot Spitzer out of office, but Assange and Wikileaks are an international operation, and mere bad press won’t harm them.
Like I said, it’s either prison or murder for Assange. He’s toying with real power, real killers.
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Footnote: I feel Lily Tomlin’s pain. She said “”No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.” The tentacles of U.S. power reach into Sweden, which has issued a warrant for Assange’s arrest, and now to Interpol, which is likely conducting a global manhunt. The man is dangerous, as seen in this Mother Jones discovery – that none other than the Obama Administration saw fit to pressure Spain to back off of investigation of Bush Administration crimes – right off the bat. There was never any prospect of Obama offering anything remotely resembling “change.”
Piece of Mindful 
Saw this today at AOS which i find more interesting than the leak itself.
Here’s what the NYT had to say during ClimateGate:
“The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.” Andrew Revkin, Environment Editor, New York Times Nov 20, 2009.
That sentence almost invents new punctuation used to denote sniffing and chin-elevating.
Here’s what they say today:
“The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. The New York Times and a number of publications in Europe were given access to the material several weeks ago and agreed to begin publication of articles based on the cables online on Sunday. The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match.” New York Times editorial 29/11/2010
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Obviously, The New York Times is saying there is no “public interest” in Global Warming.
Huh?
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I don’t look to the NY Times for consistency, nor much care about it. Equivalency? I see your point. There is a difference in that climate scientists are not scheming now to murder or imprison the people who pulled off that stunt.
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They would be scheming to murder them if they could find them. But, hey, they’re “climate scientists,” which means they can’t figure out jack.
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If we can’t keep our secrets while China, Russia, and Pakistan keep theirs, then we lose and they win.
You enjoy losing too much.
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What Wiki knows and you don’t is that the secrets are not kept from the hobgoblins you just mentioned, but from the American public. That is the real enemy, largely neutered by decades of propaganda.
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The biggest note from this latest dump was what foreign governments told our diplomats in private. This just weakens our ability to negotiate in the future. I don’t see where this is speaking truth to power. It seems more like bleeding the beast.
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