22nd December 2010, 10:47 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Well this has already been tested in the courts. A newspaper can't be held to be violating the law if it releases information shared to it by military workers, even if those military workers were violating oaths to give it to the newspaper.
Yeah, indeed. They're looking for something to charge him with, but he's done nothing illegal so there shouldn't be anything they can do, and if they do charge him with something I certainly hope he's acquitted unless they come up with evidence that he's guilty of some real crime (such as the charges in Sweden, that could go either way it seems to me, but are entirely unrelated to Wikileaks releasing anything). Assange has a right to freedom of speech, and has a right to release these things if someone leaks them to him.
That doesn't mean I like him or his agenda, though. As I said I don't like Assange very much as a person; from all the things I've read he's very controlling, either you do things his way in the Wikileaks organization or you're out. He also has a very definite anti-American agenda; this isn't like the Pentagon Papers, which were leaked in the name of knowing the truth and freedom of information, but something leaked by someone with a stated anti-American agenda, or at least an anti American foreign policy agenda. That difference does matter.