Posts by Tim Hannah
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to BenWilson,
It'll at least survive for a while, though if he the lynchpin he's portrayed as and gets found guilty it may not thrive as well as it would have otherwise - may depend on how long he is sentenced to. But the genie is out of the bottle, there'll be a wikileaks.
A lot depends on whether it remains as a sexual assault case against one guy or whether someone somewhere manages to come up with an espionage type charge which is passable enough to force extradition on and tie Wikileaks as a whole up with legal procedures for years.
"accidental death" is still on the cards.
I reckon Sweden and Britain will be quite careful with him, and Palin's idiocy aside, the US won't be overly keen to do a drone strike on London or Stockholm. Though I'd be hesitant about taking up Ecuador's offer of citizenship.
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James, I’m sorry if I misunderstood your:
point that that none of us were around when the condom broke in Sweden elicited a comment that I was trying to make light of rape, when the opposite was my intention
But I was reading it in a thread in which you had already referred to Assange being:
pulled up on BS sex charges
so I wasn’t entirely primed for the sudden and unannounced reversal. Which I still don’t quite understand – are you saying that rape is such a heavy issue that these women who can’t prove they’re not linked to the CIA shouldn’t be making use of it in their BS politically motivated attack on Assange?
You’ve linked to Greenwald at least once in here, and I think he’s been a pretty staunch defender of Wikileaks who hasn’t felt the need to say the charges are BS, or just mention in passing how the women can’t prove they don’t work for the CIA. Ka pai Glenn.
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Do you know / can you ask if the full paper will be available anywhere?
An independent journalist is a journalist who isn't contracted to a particular outlet. Doesn't necessarily mean they're particularly activist, just that they have to sell their output story by story. Which means they have to be good, have to be juicy, or have to have other jobs.
Laws is neither independent nor a journalist. But I guess he's juicy, and he does have other jobs.
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The alternative being what, the status quo?
I don't know. Pepsi?
I'm not claiming my reaction is logical or defensible. And sure, I don't think there's a strong argument that any of these cables should have remained secret. I don't know, if these narratives will be competing, I guess that competition is more interesting, maybe more important, than differences in tactics between small units representing minor players in a war, or how corrupt some prince or other is.
And I suppose the difficulty of maintaining any focus on the content of the cables , even among those claiming to want to, might support the argument that maybe this dump is just too big, too wide for their content to receive the attention they deserve.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Really? Because I would have thought that the community involvement that comes into making sense of the information, giving it context – a task that is not devolved solely to professional journalists – is actually the opposite of dehumanising.
I’m conflicted. If the release and resulting discussions are part of a planned revolutionary media strategy on the part of wikileaks, then taking part in the contextualisation is simply a role in someone else’s pr strategy. As interesting as it might be.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to James George,
Following that my entreaty to at least discuss the one issue in all the cables that is more than a passing mention of NZ because it infers NZ troops are involving themselves in territory outside their region of responsibility, rouses 1 response dismissive of the cable’s import.
Sorry James, didn’t realise discussion required agreement with your analysis rather than discussion, you should have mentioned the entry requirements .
I just think you are rather more certain in the conclusions you’ve taken from that cable than warranted by its content. It seems to me that you’re reading that cable in a way that supports your existing viewpoint. And if support for existing viewpoints is all we’re reading the cables for I don’t see the point.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Sacha,
Hey, I gave it a go on the last page... a whole post about a single cable without reference to he who shall not be named or 'the issue'.
To be honest, and perhaps it's stating the obvious, I find it hard to be as interested in the cables individually as I perhaps should be (successful misdirection bingo). I think Giovanni linked to that article about he who shall not be named and his motivations and theories. And the idea that I'm just some pair of eyes to scan these releases in order to make the authoritarian producers of them stop talking to each other seems somehow dehumanising.
I mean, I realise I don't really matter to many people, but to be taken for granted quite so openly... it weirdly makes looking at them seem like a chore, no matter how interesting they may be in their own right.
However foolish and shallow that is, it does impact on my interaction with the story.
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Because even if there are real complaints underlying the prosecution, these particular victims aren't worthy of notice, let alone focus (and no parties benefit from this contempt).
But go for it, talk about the cables.
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If all that happened was that a condom broke, she said stop and he didn't, then the lesson that seems to be being driven home by his defenders is that that's ok or not something to worry about. It doesn't matter or can't be proven to be criminal (which the initial dropping of charges may reflect), or the women took too long to consider the situation and make a complaint, or they were sluts who braggged about bagging him before conspiring to bring a good man down out of loyalty to the hegemon, or something.
I'm not sure that that's a line 'the left' should seem to be quite so comfortable pushing. And I think that so many seem to be very comfortable pushing it is something to give a shit about.
Though sure, saying it doesn't matter globally is a long way removed from saying they're evil skanks who work for the CIA
But no, doesn't impact directly on wikileaks. [And to the extent that the line the prosecution may be pushing is that it's ok to use a non-winnable rape charge to further a political or career goal, that sucks too.]
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I don’t know enough about Hungarian politics and military doctrine to comment sensibly on what NZ crossing into their area of responsibility to “address a problem” proves about how eager NZ is to increase the US empire in comparison to Hungary.
I don’t think that cable sheds much clarity, though if you hold it up at a certain angle I guess it does show that we are perhaps more eager minions than the Hungarians, for what that's worth.
Then again, according to that cable we’ve lost fewer members of our PRT than they have, so maybe both countries are simply trying to minimise casualties until such time as we’ve paid our dues to the US, and we’re doing it more succesfully by being proactive than they are by hunkering down.