OntheWilderSide

(excerpt from) Truthout
Why WikiLeaks Must Be Protected
Friday 20 August 2010
by: John Pilger, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

On 26 July, WikiLeaks released thousands of secret US military files on the war in Afghanistan. Cover-ups, a secret assassination unit and the killing of civilians are documented. In file after file, the brutalities echo the colonial past. From Malaya and Vietnam to Bloody Sunday and Basra, little has changed. The difference is that, today, there is an extraordinary way of knowing how faraway societies are routinely ravaged in our name. WikiLeaks has acquired records of six years of civilian killing for both Afghanistan and Iraq, of which those published in the Guardian, Der Spiegel and The New York Times are but a fraction.

There is, understandably, hysteria on high, with demands that the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange be “hunted down” and “rendered.” In Washington, I interviewed a senior Defense Department official and asked, “Can you give a guarantee that the editors of WikiLeaks and the editor in chief, who is not American, will not be subjected to the kind of manhunt that we read about in the media?” He replied, “It’s not my position to give guarantees on anything.”…

In one sense, the WikiLeaks revelations shame the dominant section of journalism devoted merely to taking down what cynical and malign power tells it. This is state stenography, not journalism. Look on the WikiLeaks site and read a Ministry of Defense document that describes the “threat” of real journalism. And so it should be a threat. Having published skillfully the WikiLeaks expose of a fraudulent war, The Guardian should now give its most powerful and unreserved editorial support to the protection of Assange and his colleagues, whose truth telling is as important as any in my lifetime…

-Truthout

Filed under: activism, afghanistan, Anti-War, international politics, Iraq, media, News, Peace, politics, progressive politics, US Politics, war Tagged: | afghanistan, civilian casualties, Freedom of the Press, government accountability, Guardian, Iraq, Journalists, Julian Assange, protection of journalists, Truthout, US military, Vietnam War