Richard Morgan posted a blog, which I partially love and partially.... Well... don't love.
Here are some of my favorite parts:
Imagine for a moment that you know a man who beats his wife.
Beats his wife, has beaten her for years. Puts her in hospital on a regular basis. Breaks bones, lacerates flesh, damages internal organs. He has never been prosecuted for these offences because he is a powerful man locally, and you both live within a culture which takes such things for granted.
Then imagine that you meet him one day down the local pub and find he is complaining bitterly that one of his wife’s female friends has started talking badly about him around town. ...he cries into his fifteenth pint. “Doesn’t she get that she’s poisoning our marriage; that she’s going to put our happy home at risk.”
Congratulations – you have now reached approximately the state of disbelief I’m in as I listen to the US state and its asshole apologists whine about how Wiki-leaks is putting lives at risk.
I’m sorry, US State Department, British Foreign Office, can we just back up a bit here? I need to clarify terms a little. Putting lives at risk, you say?
What, you mean in the same way that conducting an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation in search of weapons of mass destruction for which there was no evidence put lives at risk (when it wasn’t merely snuffing said lives out by the thousand)? You mean in the same way that incompetent bombing of Afghan villages, wedding parties and miscellaneous shepherds put lives at risk? The way in which scooping up a random assortment of human beings and detaining them against every law there is for years at a time put lives at risk? The way in which grabbing citizens with names you don’t like off the streets of Canada, Germany and Italy and flying them out to fuckwit totalitarian regimes for interrogation put lives at risk? The way acting as paymaster and approving sponsor for an unending succession of bloody-handed despots across the geo-political landscape for the last several decades put lives at risk? The way training up the best and the brightest of the world’s torturers and political murderers for the last half centuryput lives at risk? Putting lives at risk in that sense, you mean?
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” - Winston Churchill
Me: So, he believes Wiki-leaks is good? Many supporters of Assange say that no lives are truly at risk here, and that these threats are meant to scare us and keep us from getting on the government for it's pervasive corruption. I don't know the truth of the matter, but I think the arguments are interesting.
Here is one response to Morgan's blog that stood out to me:
I broadly agree, but just want to play devil’s advocate…
So there’s a man and woman who get boozed up and beat their kids. A concerned social worker emails his boss, says “these people are fuckwits, but if we tread carefully we can get them straightened out, and avoid having to tear the family apart, which is really no good for anyone”. That email goes public, the couple go batshit. They refuse to let social worker into their home, beat their kids even more, and start building an arsenal of home made weaponry to defend themselves from evil officialdom.
So, Wiki-leaks is bad?
A response to that:
"Governments may be broken beyond repair."
According to the last statement, it doesn't matter if corrupt governments read the leaks because we aren't going to tread lightly in an effort to fix them. The family/government may have to be torn apart in order to save the children/citizens. So, Wiki-leaks is good?
Even so, you wouldn't announce to a family, "Hey, we think you're beyond repair and we are going to take you down" before you were ready to act on that statement would you? You would want to make sure that you were ready first and didn't give them time to hide or respond preemptively. Is there room for governments to be manipulative and secretive - keeping their enemies closer than their friends so that they can watch and then attack at the best moment? If so, Wiki-leaks might be bad.
As with most topics (though not all) I fall in the middle. I can't take either side with full confidence. It seems to be a complex issue that doesn't fit into a neat little box of "right" or "wrong".
For the full blog and responses, go here:
