Wikileaks Founder Advised To Avoid American Gov't 632
eldavojohn writes "Media darling Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, has been told by his lawyers to avoid the United States on the grounds that the US military would like to ask him a few questions about his source of the Collateral Murder video. Assange claims to be holding yet more video (of a US attack on a village that allegedly killed 140 civilians in May of 2009), as well as a quarter million sensitive cables relating to the current foreign war operations from the US State Department. Assange surfaced for the cameras in Brussels while speaking about the need for the freedom of information. Can he build a high enough profile to protect himself from danger?"
The Whistleblowers' Blues (Score:5, Insightful)
The best thing he can do is get as much press as possible, make as many speeches as possible, engage in as much public activity as possible, and stay in a group at all times (no late night strolls alone). If the general public and press don't know who he is, the U.S. government can just grab him and quietly throw him in a secret jail cell somewhere (or even render [wikipedia.org] him to a country willing to get their hands dirty torturing him with more than a little waterboarding).
It would be nice to live in a world where whistleblowers were rewarded and praised for their efforts. But the truth is that whistleblowers almost always suffer for their sacrifice. At best, they lose their jobs and/or are harassed. At worst, they end up in a filthy jail cell with electrodes on their balls.
Good on him (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand the need to keep things secret, and I understand that in war shit happens...but that doesn't mean when things go awry, we the people shouldn't know about it. For the same reason why I think uncensored war footage should be shown on the nightly news, maybe if the average civilian actually saw what goes on in war, the public would be less likely to stand by idly while our government spends billions on killing people on the other side of the planet.
Just my $.02
Yes, he should. (Score:3, Insightful)
Because, he could probably be arrested and tried for espionage.
Re:Good on him (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, except for the "spying" part.
Re:Baiting a nation's military is not a good idea (Score:4, Insightful)
He has balls. Bigger balls than your balls and bigger balls than my balls. I guess the point I'm trying to put across is that he has big balls.
So, even if he fails, he has shown that one man is able to wander around the world in a particular way credibly announcing he has sensitive government information without being David Kelly'd. Sure, he has to be white and rich, but that's better than nothing. If there's one thing we can learn from Assange, it's that we're mostly a bunch of fucking cowards not to stand up to Goliath, and we are getting the government we deserve. So, that's two things. Two things we can learn.
Attention whore (Score:4, Insightful)
By teasing over the alleged videos and documents, he's shifting the focus of attention to himself and how he's treated by the US.
So. Fucking. What?
His story is utterly, totally trivial next to the things that he's allegedly holding back.
So publish already, or shut up. Or publish, then shut up. Either way, just shut up, as Wikileaks itself is rapidly becoming a distraction from the real stories that it ostensibly exists to publish.
Re:High Profile? (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless you buy into conspiracy theories, they were killed by lone nutters. The assassination of someone with a high profile wil draw a lot of unwanted attention on the way the US conducts this sort of business, as well as an public outcry.
Re:I am not very sympathetic and here's why... (Score:3, Insightful)
I lost all sympathy for him
Just as a matter of interest, how much sympathy do you feel for the good samaritans who were going to the aid of the wounded when the Americas shot and killed them?
Re:I am not very sympathetic and here's why... (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, I have no sympathy for Reuters' guys because Reuters has a history of being embarrassed in that region by having its "correspondents" not only embed themselves with guerrilla forces, but often hires people who are working both sides (ex: the egg on Reuters' face when it came out that its subcontractors in Lebanon were actually members of Hezbollah).
Well, how else are we to get both sides of the story? If journalists are only embedded on one side, then we're only getting half of the story, no? Journalism should be neutral, unless you're implying that we shouldn't hear their side unless it came directly from us. At that point, it is no longer journalism. Instead, it is full blown-out propaganda.
Re:Good on him (Score:5, Insightful)
Any of the "good things" that might possibly come out of war can also be done without war.
Let us chat awhile. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, there was a time when this simply meant what it says. Now, the guy could end up getting water-boarded at some US secret prison in a third-world country - or New Jersey (shudder). Of course, the US doesn't torture people. Paying other people to do it is another matter.
Excuse me, there's a knock on the door ...
Re:Dead man walking (Score:4, Insightful)
Our US thuggery is fairly predictable. I'm sure the CIA or equivalent has already been given hit orders.
You've seen a few too many movies.
More than likely, Assange is having his lawyers try to get some kind of amnesty deal in turn for testimony and/or returning the materials. The only danger to Assange is that he be arrested, held and tried like any other person who breaks the law. He may even get off at trial due to Constitutional protection of freedom of the press.
Playing up the danger does get Wikileaks more press, so bonus points for good guerrilla PR for Assange.
Re:Attention whore (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikileaks itself is rapidly becoming a distraction from the real stories that it ostensibly exists to publish.
Wikileaks is becoming one of its own valid stories: They're harassed at the international level by a government that keeps stating publicly that it supports freedom of press.
The leaks they have are only half the story, what people are willing to do to stop the leaks is the other half.
Re:Good on him (Score:5, Insightful)
But there are already systems in place to handle these issues inside the DoD.
And those systems are obviously broken. Top Secret information must cause "exceptionally grave damage" to national security if leaked. This information leaked, and has caused no damage to national security. The only person who deserves their balls nailed to a wall is the person who classified this inappropriately.
Hey, Julian. Plan for the future. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good on him (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Whistleblowers' Blues (Score:5, Insightful)
He's also using it to continually detain a man proven in court to be innocent, Mohamed Hassan Odaini, who has been wrongfully imprisoned for the last 8 years, in defiance of a court order that he be released. Why? Because mid-term elections are coming up soon.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/06/21/pundits/index.html [salon.com]
The US government and MIC are monsters dressed in the stars and stripes and I thank %deityOfChoice% that there are sites like Wikileaks, and governments like Iceland who are beginning to see the light that is cast by transparency.
With the SCOTUS decision yesterday, the US can just put Wikileaks on the list of terrorist organizations, and Mr. Assange won't even be able to get a lawyer in the US, assuming he's still alive. The US government, or its people at large, don't care about rights of US citizens, who can now be extra-judicially assassinated (i.e. murdered). What do you think anyone would say if some Australian journalist disappears?
Only sites like Wikileaks can save us from ourselves. Getting the genie back into the bottle is a difficult task, indeed.
Re:Good on him (Score:5, Insightful)
I will feel sorry for the people on the other side of the planet just as soon as they start hunting down and killing the people on their side of the planet that are sending people to this side,
It might be news for you, but Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 911. Zero, Nada, Zilch.
I also find it a bit hypocritical to complain about a few missing minutes (in which likely nothing of interest happened), when the military is censoring the whole fucking war. We are not taking about minutes of footage here, but months or even years of footage then ended up on the cutting floor or never being released in the first place.
Re:I am not very sympathetic and here's why... (Score:3, Insightful)
So the government is the only one who gets to edit for political impact? Both sides inevitably play the propaganda game. At least Wikileaks made the entire video(that they had) available. Only the shorter, more YouTube friendly version was edited, and they never once tried to hide the fact. That's a lot more honesty than you can expect from the US military.
Re:Good on him (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell me, what is the worst that could be released on Wikileaks? Total schematics for the F35 aircraft along with source code? What would the Afghans do with it? Build one out of moistened sand? How about the Chinese? Trust me, the so-called free-world has nothing to fear from a poorly injection-molded plastic F35.
The military might of the US lies in its industrial output, not its secrets. Secrets only protect the US regime from its own population.
Sound and fury, signifying nothing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite all the noise, the most sinister claims made about the US government are that
1) The self-confessed whistleblower, Manning, is being held "incommunicado" in Kuwait and
2) The military would like to question Assange.
Manning hasn't been disappeared, vaporized, liquidated, or what have you; there's not even an allegation that the UCMJ has been violated in his case. And there's nothing at all strange or nefarious about the military wanting to question someone who received classified material; they'd hardly be doing their job if they didn't. If I was Assange I'd certainly avoid the US, but ascribing evil intentions or actions to the US military or the government in general is at least premature.
Re:The Whistleblowers' Blues (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I am not very sympathetic and here's why... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Whistleblowers' Blues (Score:5, Insightful)
Protection (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good on him (Score:5, Insightful)
For the same reason why I think uncensored war footage should be shown on the nightly news, maybe if the average civilian actually saw what goes on in war, the public would be less likely to stand by idly while our government spends billions on killing people on the other side of the planet.
Just my $.02
Hey, I'm good with that. Lets bring all the troops home, stop spending money "killing people on the other side of the planet", and only show the footage of the what other people do. How's that grab ya?
Just think, we can have hours of news footage daily of the plight of Muslim women alone. Being arrested for having a suntan? Being beaten, caned and stoned to death. Marital rape being legal? How about footage of rapes before their beheadings? How about child marriages? How about female castrations as punishment?
Would you like to talk about kids being strapped with explosives? That'll be juicy footage. How about bombs set off in weddings and funerals? How about 7 year old kids being murdered because their grandfather spoke out against the violence of the Taliban?
The point is that you're so quick to condemn the military on this situation. And if they were actually knowingly murdering innocent people then they should be condemned. But the fact is that you dont have all the facts, and yet you want desperately to see them all hanged along with the entire US military establishments. You casually ignore the attrocities commited around the world, many of which we have military might in place to help prevent. But the world media is so complicit that they don't report on those things, except for a by-line here and there quickly denouncing the act and distancing themselves, governments, and religions from them. It's glossed over as if to say "Yeah, that's a real shame... So anyway lets get those US Soldiers and hang 'em high!".
You think that we should show the world how brutal we are? Fine. As soon as we show the world how brutal the WORLD is I'll be right there with you. As soon as we start showing people WHY we are in many of the places we are, instead of shielding everyone here from the horrible acts that people outside our rubber-bumber nation commit then we can start showing them how all people compare. You don't want to show both sides. You don't want to give context. You don't want people here to see how bad some of these dictators and regimes are because you know it will do nothing if not ensure the resolve our nation has for kicking the crap out of some of the nutjobs out there.
War sucks. It's horrible. It's ugly. It changes people forever. But quite frankly, better that than live in a world where everyone's too afraid to stand up and fight the tyrants because it's not politically correct. You can hope for flowers and bunnies all you want. But there will always be people who really don't care what you hope for and are willing to crush any dream you ever had for your kids. And I'll always be supportive of us not standing there watching and doing nothing, while shielding our citizens because it might damage their delicate psyche's.
You fucking moron (Score:5, Insightful)
I will feel sorry for the people on the other side of the planet just as soon as they start hunting down and killing the people on their side of the planet that are sending people to this side, to this country, to kill us.
The US and Britain have had a constant military presence in the middle east since the end of WWI. That's about 90 years. How many middle eastern nations have a military presence in the United States or UK?
I will feel sorry for them when they stop supporting people who say I should die because I don't believe in their religion of murder and conversion at the point of a sword, or barrel of a gun if you prefer.
And they will feel sorry for you when you stop sending armies over to kill them and take control of their oil resources. Especially when you stop supporting murderous local dictators and monarchs who conspire with Western powers to suppress democratic movements in exchange for piles of money.
The association of America and Democracy causes hatred and laughter across the region for a very good reason: we've been doing our best to destroy a nation's right to self determination for decades. Look at the Kurds for chrissake. One one side of the Iraq border, we give them monetary and military support in exchange for their political support inside Iraq. On the other side of the same border we supply the Turkish army with the weapons to kill Kurds and suppress Kurdish popular movements.
The reason you don't know any of this is because none of it is reported, but you just swallow the same bullshit lines over and over again. Yeah, a bunch of people halfway across the world just woke up one day and decided they hated freedom, so instead of attacking democracies on that side of the earth, they spent millions of dollars to attack the United States because they are "evil." But that's okay, we're "good" so in response to the murder of 3,000 of our citizens, let's start two wars and kill and maim a few hundred thousand Muslims on their home territory. Let's send the cradle of civilization back to the stone ages, since it's the only place in the region where women have something resembling equal rights. That should alleviate the tension between our two cultures!
You fucking moron.
Exactly. (Score:3, Insightful)
Torture is usually worse than death for the victims family because it involves loss of honor even if the individual is left alive. Framing the individual for a bunch of crimes, or framing the individuals family members for all sorts of crimes is an example.
Besides they wont want to kill Julian anyway. They want to know what he knows and find out who his sources are not kill him. They need him alive and chances are they'd put him in a super max prison or a secret prison which has 23 hour lockdown and basically put him in a dark room for 23 hours a day until he goes crazy and talks. If you put someone into a room with no light, no sound, no sensory information at all, it's only a matter of time before they start talking to themselves and literally go crazy.
The soviets used to torture political dissidents by putting them into insane asylums. In these special political hospitals doctors and psychiatrists would scientifically torture them until they literally went insane or broke and spilled their secrets. This type of torture is worse than waterboarding, worse than physical pain, because it's psychological and on some level everyone is psychologically weak.
Please. (Score:2, Insightful)
He is wanted for questioning. He has received classified information and has published some of it.
How he published it was shameful and one of the worst examples of Yellow Journalism I have seen in a very long time. It was as unbiased and as even handed as the worst that FOX News has delivered.
The title the was created for the video and the additions to the video where pure emotional manipulation all for purpose of fund raising.
This guy isn't going to vanish into a dark hole he would at worst be questioned. Unpleasant but also totally to be expected.
What I think is at best amusing is this is considered news.
It would be right up with there with water is wet.
Yea this guy if he comes to the US will be questioned. If he goes to any nations that are close allies to the US he may be questioned. To whom is this exactly news?
Re:Learning more about Wikileaks everyday (Score:4, Insightful)
While the idea of Wikileaks is still quite popular; with more revelations about Wikileaks, Assange is no longer the media darling with everyone taking a more critical view of the man behind Wikileaks.
Yeah, because when you out corrupt business practices, everyone but the criminals you're exposing can get behind that and you're everyone's pal. When you're outing soldiers for gunning down unarmed children in broad daylight, there are some people who think you're attacking the military.
they need $55,000 to run servers but as much as $200,000 is used by the men who run Wikileaks for business class travel, hotels etc.
Goodness me, they have other expenses besides server costs in their efforts to do real journalism? Those evil bastards!!!
Read Cryptome to see that despite its idealistic mission, at some level Wikileaks behaves like another secret Government department with a couple of people deciding what is public interest.
Seems like a no-brainer that it takes some effort and restraint to remain credible while publishing these important stories. You can't just publish any unsubstantiated conspiracy theory, then publish a real story and expect anyone to take you seriously.
Re:Why should Iraqis hunt Saudis? (Score:1, Insightful)
By your logic, how many times should the US already still be invaded as payback for things it did in the past but for which it wasn't punished?
(captcha: laughed)
Re:The Whistleblowers' Blues (Score:4, Insightful)
A little information and suddenly you think it's all brand new. The transparent stuff that we know about today was stuff that got people labeled as crazy gun nuts 30 years ago. Just because most people didn't know about it it's not like it wasn't happening. And happening a lot more than it does now.
Re:The Whistleblowers' Blues (Score:2, Insightful)
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr. [wikimedia.org]
A high profile isn't much of a bulletproof vest.
Re:Good on him (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of what I posted was to point out that if you want to condemn the US Military for its brutal activities, be consistent and be fair. If you want to display the evil of our soldiers, display the evil of all soldiers. If you want to prove how bad we are by display all information, then display all information about how bad those we fight are too. Give all the info, and let people actually make some self-judgements rather than expecting us to just swallow the spoon fed self-loathing of the far left.
Re:The Whistleblowers' Blues (Score:3, Insightful)
How can you guarantee anything while everything is still classified?
The law of averages. He grabbed communications in bulk, so he didn't verify all of them were of 'wrong-doing'. Perhaps I should say 'practically guarantee'.
That said, something can be embarassing yet still worthy of remaining classified. Unless they are all evidence of criminal wrong-doing (according to a guy who himself breaks the law and gets in fist-fights), I would still say he should be prosecuted for that crime.
I agree that it's a burden of trust, but do you have an alternative system that protects legitimate state secrets without potential for abuse?
Re:Attention whore (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikileaks is desperately attempting to become a story. By doing so, they're detracting attention from the actual important stories that they run. What are we debating here: the mass murder of innocent civilians, or Wikileaks?
No. No, they are not. You've bought Assange's story. There is no evidence, other than his assertions, that he is being "harassed" at any level, let alone the international. Remember when he claimed his passport had been "seized", and it turned out to be that all that happened was that it had been pointed out to him that it was due to expire?
He's been threatening to release these videos and documents for months now, in what has become a rather pathetic attempt to get some attention from the Big Bad US. That shows that he's more interested in becoming a cause célèbre than in actually doing what he set out to do: publish and damn their eyes.
The man has or had good intentions, but now he's pulling a Jimbo Wales, and getting delusions that he's bigger than his creation, when he needs to be as anonymous as his sources.
Re:Good on him (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good on him (Score:2, Insightful)
Nice non-sequitor.
The problems you describe (beating of innocents, opression of women) are not problems that are solved by military force, nor occupation. If those are your sufficient justifications for imperialism, occupation, and our own breed of opression, then you are an easy tool of evil.
Re:Good on him (Score:4, Insightful)
"One day truly serious info will be released and cause the bad sort of trouble that will make the Rosenbergs look like common gossips."
Any half-competent engineer can build a gun-type nuclear weapon. Should we censor all information about U-235 neutron cross-section because of this? Or maybe require a government-issued license to read particle physics journals?
The fact of life: you need large industrial base to use any advanced technology. And only state-level actors have it.
Re:Good on him (Score:3, Insightful)
But you dont appear to be. You arent calling for the heads of people who will murder a 7 year old boy, or rape a woman so that she can be beheaded. The left will instead find every reason why we just don't understand their culture, and they sure as hell dont advertise that kind of behavior to our public.
And you're precisely right about the rest of the world too! There are barbaric tyrants worldwide! But it's convenient for us to by clothes made in china, and toys from here, and oil from there, and blah blah blah. We don't report how brutal they are to their citizens because if we keep our mouths shut and foster a "world economy" we can get their shit cheap.
I don't mind condemning soldiers who step across the line. But I have a real problem with the hypocricy of forgiving everyone else in the world for their sins and being the first to step up onto the soap box to condemn our own.
Re:Good on him (Score:3, Insightful)
Any of the "good things" that might possibly come out of war can also be done without war.
Pol Pot ...
Hitler
Hussien
Mugabe
Al-Bashir
Kim Jong-Il
Sayyid Ali Khamenei/Ahmadinejad
Castro
Stalin
Mao Tse-Tung
Milosevic
and many many more...
None of these dictators could have been/can be removed from office without the use of force. No amount of talk, sanctions, or shame will cause these evil men to willingly give up their power. War is the only answer sometimes. Yes, war is a horror unto itself, but it is nothing compared to the wasted lives and absolute horror people are forced to endure every day under tyrants. Wars almost always end in a few years. Tyrants survive a life time and usually hand pick their successors who are just as bad or even worse. People like you who insist on trying to talk these sons of bitches down only cause their people to suffer more. By refusing to make the hard decisions, people like you are just as guilty of the suffering and needless death of the innocents.
Another fine example. [wikipedia.org]
Re:The Whistleblowers' Blues (Score:4, Insightful)
With a government, or at least, any organization that I am willing to consider as such in a legitimate fashion, the people are the share holders, we are the board. There is no legitimate reason to hide information from even the lowest of us. We OWN IT. It is OUR SECRET.
And the problem is that some people are really shitty at keeping a secret. If we have the right to know all these secrets, then they won't be secret anymore, and not just within our country. Instead it's a privelege to those who need access to these secrets and have shown they can be trusted to keep them.
That said, the system does need more protection against abuses. Any idea how? If not, I qualify this as an unfortunate, yet necessary evil.
Re:The Whistleblowers' Blues (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>He's not a US citizen.
>>>He's got damning information about their spying.
>>>He's about to release it.
>>>I'd say more his life is in danger.
I'll be happy when we get rid of that damn Bush so these things stop happening. Oh. Wait.....
Re:Learning more about Wikileaks everyday (Score:1, Insightful)
spare me the bullshit. Oh, wow, really it costs money to run an enterprise. You showed us that server costs alone amount for 25% of the costs of the organization thats pretty fucking impressive. And guess what, Assange is not the only person who works for wikileaks, and yes genius, it costs MONEY to travel around the world to speak on behalf of your organization. Amazing. You are going to have to work a lot harder than that to besmirch this organization
Re:Sound and fury, signifying nothing. (Score:3, Insightful)
From what I've seen over the past few years, ascribing evil intentions to the military and US government should be our default position by now. We still haven't learned much from history yet.
Re:No sir (Score:1, Insightful)
While a lot about what you say about the US reliance on technology to fight war is true, the above is extremely misleading. Why don't you list all of the other planes in the air force? I suspect because the numbers wouldn't suit your argument. Fighting china with only what you cited above would not make for a short war in favor of the US. It's not just secret technologies that define the US military might, but also the size of the military, and the fact that if the need was there, the US could build a shit load of military hardware. The US is getting ready to build a couple thousand F-35 warplanes over the next decade. Not the rate of WWII, but there isn't a world war going on. The aircraft you cited have a niche role in the military, and every military has high-tech equipment that maintains a niche role and therefore small numbers.
Re:Good on him (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Whistleblowers' Blues (Score:3, Insightful)
Expiring the Patriot Act would have had severe political results (aka political suicide).
As I recall, the Miranda Act issue was the removal of applying them to terror suspects (revoking their citizenship, therefore American law did not apply), introduced to Congress by Senator Lieberman. The other issue was a SCOTUS ruling that the Miranda warning did not need to be read.
Unfortunately, the way politics work, to get some actions through that are not favored by the majority, you have to make concessions. It's a huge game of bartering. I want you to sign off on my bill, so I'll sign off on this one for you. Very little is done as a direct representation of what the people want. If you fail to play political politics correctly, it becomes a nasty war, where there is no forward progress, but there are lots of long winded speeches before Congress about why your way is right. After a few hundred hour long speeches of how each persons way is the "right" way, which usually are defined by party lines, the issue may be dropped, or dragged on so long that the actual issue at hand may already be dead.
Re:The Whistleblowers' Blues (Score:4, Insightful)
In the US, we DO have a legitimate government, in the sense that the majority of voters have chosen it. That is as true today as it was when anyone else was president.
Whether or not YOU voted for this government doesn't alter its legitimacy.
This doesn't mean that everything the government does is wise, good, admirable; it just means that we, the people, have chosen those who are responsible for making our laws and making the decisions that "the government" must make.
Re:The Whistleblowers' Blues (Score:3, Insightful)
Drones are more cost effective to run than actual manned flights. They're cheaper to build, cheaper to operate, and if one goes down, you don't run the risk of a pilot being interrogated/tortured, and revealing any information to the enemy.
Like I replied to someone else, politics are rarely about the wants and needs of the people. They are a bartering game. You can cherry pick any set of votes from any representative to show how good or evil they are. The reality is you have to figure out what *they* wanted, and you will see them vote for that, and vote for or against something else as a favor in return. Any player (including the POTUS) who doesn't play by these rules will find himself in a very dangerous position, where nothing can go in his/her favor, regardless of how good it will be for the people they represent.
Re:Mod UP! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Whistleblowers' Blues (Score:3, Insightful)
Expiring the Patriot Act would have had severe political results (aka political suicide).
And yet, being a leak coordinator like Julian Assange puts his own life and livelihood at risk far worse than political suicide.
It's clear that in a group of people consisting of the last 10 U.S. presidents, including Obama, plus Mr. Assange, only one of them is a true leader in character versus a leader just because of some election.
If you fail to play political politics correctly, it becomes a nasty war, where there is no forward progress, but there are lots of long winded speeches before Congress about why your way is right.
When the overwhelming majority of acts of congress revolve around taking rights away from people, I say GREAT: fewer chance for those stupid bills to actually become law.
Indeed! (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, several of them weren't removed through war, despite actual wars being fought against their regimes.
A rather pointless list that.
Re:Mod UP! (Score:2, Insightful)
Despite all that, I do agree that force is sometimes necessary to stop more suffering. However, it's rarely the case that war couldn't have been prevented beforehand through a bit of moral thinking. Obviously, that means no military aid to nations with a bad track record, such as Israel or Colombia. This also means you don't exploit the rest of the world, creating a perfect vacuum for a warlord to rise to power. The Vietnam war was mainly caused by the grueling poverty imposed by French imperialism, for example. And you certainly don't shake hands with those warlords once they gain command. We could make a similar list here, rivaling yours, the difference being of course that we are partially responsible for the suffering caused by these monsters through our aid and military support. Often these support mechanisms directly cause the exact type of dictator you are using as justification of war, taking the Taliban, Hussein, Indonesia, and Batista, for example. Perhaps some of these dictatorial regimes could be avoided by more carefully choosing our relationships with the rest of the world. Simply boiling down foreign policy to "useless talking" and "invasion" is a gross oversimplification that makes you sound like a warmongering idiot.
The best way to avoid war is to not help cause it in the first place. For example, let's take the war in Iraq. Had we not supported Saddam militarily throughout the eighties, he wouldn't have had the capacity to to invade another country. We could have prevented all of this by simply not selling arms to a dictator. The U.S. not only sold Saddam weapons, but they also helped Saddam develop his chemical and biological weapons programs in their crusade against Iran. I would assume that to someone who expresses so much reverence for freedom, you would understand the concept of not aiding those who legally despise it, i.e. dictators. Explain to me then, why Saddam was a former ally? The U.S. was pretty quiet when Saddam was using chemical weapons on his own people and the Iranians, despite the fact that it is explicitly forbidden internationally as a war crime. We certainly knew about it, so where was the outrage then? After the first war Bush I suggested that the Iraqi people overthrow Saddam, but in an ironic twist of fate we gave absolutely no aid to the Iraqi people to achieve such a task, after heavily funding the mess in the first place through Saddam. Instead of helping the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam, we punished them with brutal sanctions we knew would do nothing to the Iraqi elite, but would have horrible consequences for the rest of Iraq. When half a million Iraqi children died due to sanctions, the fact that most of Iraq's water treatment facilities were intentionally destroyed, and there was a dramatic increase in infectious disease, people like you turn around and blame Saddam! Before you go off about the Oil for Food program, keep in mind that is wasn't initiated until 1996 - by which time the damage was done. The Pentagon admitted [fff.org] that one of their goals in the first Gulf war was to disable Iraqi society at large, rather than concentrate solely on military targets. They have also admitted that one of their goals was to make living conditions so unbearable to the Iraqis that they would overthrow Saddam out of desperation. In addition to destroying Iraq's underlying infrastructure, the U.S. fought to keep humanitarian goods, which had no military use, out of Iraq. Sounds pretty fucking sick and sadistic to me. If this is how you bring "democracy" to the rest of the world, you can definitely count me out. Explain to me again how this use of force was supposed to prevent human suffering and uphold freedom?
Re:I am not very sympathetic and here's why... (Score:3, Insightful)
Usually if a person is making an argument the burden is on them to provide proof. That's the way it works. It's also a lot better because it keeps things grounded in fact, rather than ending up with a game of telephone where people go around repeating things they heard. You can see where the latter system leads by reading the many chain emails that go around. Consider that not everything is easy to find on Google. This is, because it was a well publicized Internet-based story that can be summarized in a few search terms that are relatively unusual in combination, but there are plenty of important things that don't fit that mold. Furthermore, there's a big difference between finding a web page mentioning something and finding a good discussion by a reliable source. So, there are a lot of reasons it's worthwhile to go ahead and cite a source if you know about an issue. Slashdot (indeed, the net and the world in general) would be a hell of a lot better if people did it as a matter of course.
Also consider that it makes a lot more sense practically for the person originally making a claim to cite his sources. What did you and the other replies say? Essentially that it's so easy to Google. Well that would seem to be a good argument that it would be really easy to cite a source. And what makes more sense, the one person making the claim doing this work once or the many people reading the claim replicating the same work?
Long story short, I think the GP was dead on for commenting that if you care enough to post about something like this (not necessarily common knowledge and possibly controversial), you ought to cite a source.