Secrets and lies
By Peter Calder
5:30 AM Saturday Jul 13, 2013
... Early in the film, Assange flashes a smile and says, "I enjoy crushing bastards." But even if you share his view of who the bastards are, his "damn the torpedoes" approach comes across as chilling: at one point, he says he would happily publish a recipe for anthrax; at another, he explains his failure to redact from the Afghan War Logs the names of innocent civilians with the throwaway line "if an Afghan civilian helps coalition forces, he deserves to die".
"He had no harm-minimisation process at all," says Guardian journalist Nick Davies, who worked with Assange on the worldwide release. Gibney agrees.
"He's much more doctrinaire about this issue than I am comfortable being. You have to make judgments about whether the revelation of secrets will cause personal damage that is out of proportion to the public value of publishing the secret.
"It throws into question the whole moral calculus of leaking. It's very easy for governments to say, 'We're for democracy; we're for truth and we have to do some pretty nasty things to protect that, including stealing people's secrets.' The problem is that, once you start to go down that road, you start to feel like you have an inviolable right to do whatever you want because you're on the side of righteousness and goodness" ...
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10897493
= new reply since forum marked as read
