Posted on 12/16/2010 5:45:00 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Soros' Open Society Foundations did not contribute to Wikileaks above board, but who is to say there are not laundered contributions (prepaid credit cards funding Wikileaks via PayPal). Just like prepaid credit cards were used to fund Obama's campaign anonymously.
I still have to wonder what was meant by "Soros will kick you out of the office with such over-reaching." I guess the idea is if Wikileaks went to Soros and asked for $5, he would not oblige. Or it means Soros and Assange collaborated on Wikileaks, and Soros would kick Assange out of the kingdom if he overreached during the creation of Wikileaks.
“He is an opportunist, he releases what he gets, but he is no journalist.”
First of all, who should decide who qualifies as a journalist? The government? The New York Times? You?
Secondly, even if he’s not a journalist, I don’t remember reading in the Constitution that freedom of the press is limited to a certain class of credentialed individuals. I have as much freedom of the press as Willy Hearst did, and I don’t take kindly to anyone suggesting that I don’t.
Wouldn’t he have to have committed the acts under U.S. Jurisdiction to be liable? If some foreigner does something in another country what rights does U.S. Law Enforcement have anyway?
Freedom of the press and trafficking in stolen information are two different items. You may have the freedom to ‘bear arms’ but you don’t have the freedom to steal a gun and protect your position of that under the 2nd Amendment. You may have the freedom of religion but you don’t have the freedom to steal vestments of a church and use them for your own religious practice.
Let’s put it this way, do I have Constitutional protections to take your personal information and publish it claiming protection as a journalist?
“Anyway, Assange and Wikileaks are not themselves “media” entities by any reasonable standard...”
What reasonable standard? Are you implying that if I don’t meet these criteria I have no freedom of the press? If not, how does one go about getting permission to have this freedom?
Well, for one, stealing information and hacking networks to get information would be a reasonable standard to say you are a thief (or spy) instead of a journalist.
That’s a reasonable argument. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but it’s more reasonable that implying the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply because he’s not a journalist. Whether or not he is a journalist is simply irrelevant.
“Well, for one, stealing information and hacking networks to get information would be a reasonable standard to say you are a thief (or spy) instead of a journalist.”
As if “journalists” never resort to shady practices to obtain their stories. Ha!
If there is evidence of Assange hacking government systems he ought to be tried for that.
But calling what he did with the papers from Manning ‘espionage’ is overstating the facts by several orders of magnitude. Manning is most deserving of an espionage trial, Assange, not so much.
Cindy isn’t going to be sent for Assange. She is reserved for ex-Dimona employees with scrapbooks for sale.
If they are a buying and selling classified documents that is a crime worthy of prosecuting to the maximum extent of the law. What I had heard and assumed (not a good excuse for me) was that they were posting the information for people to read for free. I have gone to some websites (mostly press) and seen some of the non-classified dispatches, that would just "confidential." In those cases there was no cost for reading anything and they were mostly no big deal from what i could see, but I didn't read many nor did I read anything that was identified as classified.
Are any of the documents he got actually classified? I thought it was all just embassy cables. Perhaps we do send the Predator but that’s not the Death Penalty in the traditional sense of the term. :)
Yes you are correct but they are sending al queada money NOW!! We should invade them NOT Iraq.
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