Glenn Greenwald documents how critics of WikiLeaks are basing their arguments on a falsehood and squirming to find ways to just indict WikiLeaks while not targeting all the newspapers that published the same cables.
As Julian Assange says, “WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain’s The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.”
So why is WikiLeaks being singled out? Because governments always target the powerless and want to teach a lesson to any upstart group that harbors similar ideas of openness.
As Assange says, “Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.”
Freedom-loving people have to fight the combination of secretive governments and their media allies who conspire to hide the fact that they exist just to serve the oligarchy. Transparency to them is like sunlight to a vampire.
One important point that isn’t mentioned nearly enough is that what’s criminalized is the stealing/leaking of government information, not the publication of it, hence why nobody is calling out the New York Times for posting the cables. I’m guessing that because Wikileaks has the word “leak” in their name, people are associating them with the former when they are actually doing the latter (as there’s no evidence, or even speculation/slander that I’ve seen that Wikileaks is going around hacking into databases and stealing the information that they release.)