Jon Dillingham on the absence from the US public debate of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:
"But we in the press often do Washington’s bidding: The politicians don’t talk about these things, so neither do we. We’ve rendered ourselves, and this entire exercise in democracy, null and void. We may prattle on about health care reform or human rights in China, but if the press and the public don’t push back against America’s crimes of aggression and the mass killing of innocents, then we’re nothing more than obscene jingoists.
Our silence, that of the people and the press, has quickened our country’s slide into what military historian Andrew Bacevich calls “permanent war.”"
Read the full article here: TruthDig
The MIT Center for Future Civic Media hosted a panel titled "Civic Media and the Law" to discuss the legal challenges related to crowdsourcing and websites like WikiLeaks, versus traditional journalism source protection.
The panelists included David Ardia, co-founder of the Citizen Media Law Project and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Micah Sifry, co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, and Daniel Schuman, policy counsel at the Sunlight Foundation.
Event details and the video recording of the panel are available at the MIT website
Hacks/Hackers Boston, in partnership with the Boston University School of Communication, Department of Journalism, and the Society of Professional Journalists, is presenting a panel discussion on "Legal liability in the age of WikiLeaks."
The panelists will be First Ammendment attorneys Jon Albano of Bingham McCutcheon and Robert A. Bertsche of Prince Lobel. The panel will be moderated by Dan Kennedy, assistant professor at Northeastern's School of Journalism.
The panel discussion will take place at the Boston University Student Lounge at 6pm. Please find further event details here.
This Thursday at 19:30, a panel discussion titled "Crímenes de guerra y transparencia: los papeles de WikiLeaks" ("War Crimes and Transparency: The WikiLeaks Papers") will take place in Madrid. The speakers will be war correspondent Olga Rodríguez, activist Javier Couso and Rafael Escudero Alday, professor of the philosophy of law at the University Carlos III in Madrid. Please see www.rebelion.org for the event details.
GENEVA, Nov 16 (Reuters) - The new U.N. torture expert urged the United States on Tuesday to conduct a full investigation into torture under the Bush administration and prosecute offenders as well as senior officials who ordered it.
Juan Ernesto Mendez told Reuters he also hoped to visit Iraq to probe a "very widespread practice of torture" of detainees with the help of coalition forces, revealed in confidential U.S. files issued by WikiLeaks.
"The United States has a duty to investigate every act of torture. Unfortunately, we haven't seen much in the way of accountability," said Mendez, himself a former torture victim, in the wide-ranging interview at the United Nations in Geneva.
Read the full article here: Reuters
"WikiLeaks revelations clearer outside the United States": Andrew Oxford looks at how US media reporting of the WikiLeaks Iraq War Logs has been strikingly different from the rest of the world.
"When five news organizations - including Der Spiegel and Al Jazeera — were granted access to WikiLeaks’ Iraq War Logs before they were published online on October 22, only The Times avoided drawing the same conclusions as its colleagues abroad. The Guardian’s coverage featured headlines such as “Secret Files Show How U.S. Ignored Torture” and “How Friendly Fire Became Routine,” while Le Monde was no less dramatic. Der Spiegel, the German news weekly, published a lengthy editorial titled, “Dumb War: Taking Stock of the Iraq Invasion,” which concluded that the WikiLeaks documents confirm that the war was a failure.
Meanwhile, The Times’ front-page headline assured us “Detainees Fared Worse in Iraqi Hands.” Other American newspapers seemed similarly unimpressed by WikiLeaks’ latest publication of nearly 400,000 classified military documents. The Washington Post printed an editorial declaring that the Iraq War Logs offered no new insights."
Read the full article at In These Times
You can still vote for Julian Assange in TIME Magazine's Person of the Year poll. He took an early lead when the poll was announced on Wednesday, November 10, and had the top spot for most of the time in between. Help him stay on top and go vote, WikiLeaks Nation! This is a chance for us to be heard, loudly.
Selected media coverage:
WL Central began its coverage of WikiLeaks in mid-November 2010. This leaves four years of WikiLeaks history, in the news and on the web, prior to the inception of WL Central. The WikiLeaks Press Archive is intended to serve as a compendium of important, interesting, or historical WikiLeaks coverage in other publications since 2006.
Coverage is listed on a by-month basis. Because WikiLeaks became subject to intense media scrutiny in April 2010, the Press Archive contains more entries in the months following this date.
Note
Some of the coverage here is on controversial pieces by traditional transparency advocates, and their criticism of WikiLeaks. The collection is to serve as a portal, through which readers can familiarise with the debate about WikiLeaks as it emerged daily. This archive cannot substitute an in-depth reading. Much can be learned from reading the comments on these articles, and following the links there. In many ways, the history of WikiLeaks is written in comment streams and on Twitter, and emblazoned across the web. A comprehensive reconstruction is impossible. Readers are therefore encouraged to construct their own narrative, and to arrive at their own informed conclusion.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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