[jorblumesea]

The entire point was to embarrass the US, not to take some high minded stance. Wikileaks has shown some extreme bias, after refusing to expose dirty secrets of the Kremlin. They are hardly some do-gooder organization. If it came out in 15 years that wikileaks was Russian funded, I would not be surprised. Spreading false rumors and misinformation, failure/refusal to fact check sources, anti-semitism, possibly editing or doctoring videos.

The list goes on, they are not the BBC or Al-Jazeera. The DNC hack/wikileaks release timeline is absolutely disgusting and shows the true nature of the organization.

Just such a bizarre take completely divorced of reality.

[runlaszlorun]

This fact isn’t stated often enough.

Not to mention the usually cited helicopter video is highly edited and anything but impartial, with an American Bradley fighting vehicle under ambush a block away as can be heard in the audio. And I can’t fathom why a journalist, accompanied by men with AK’s themselves, would be pointing what obviously looks like an RPG from a distance at troops in a firefight- not to mention bringing women and in children with him in the minivan.

If this highly edited footage was the worst that could be found in such a large dump of documents- I’m highly underwhelmed.

Evidence of war crimes? Hardly. A chance to see how ugly these conflicts are and another reason why Americsn troops perhaps should never have been there in the first place? Yep, absolutely.

But my hunch is that the entire event is a Rohrschack test where most people will take away from it the same perceptions that they walked in with.

[ktallett]

It wasn't the worst that was found but it did show a war crime. It wasn't the only one by any stretch.

It showed a cover up of the number of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan which had been caused by American Troops.

It showed significant horrific human rights violations against innocent and untried inmates at Guantanamo Bay. (As if just the existance of that wasn't enough.)

It showed illegal spying by the NSA on governments around the world.

Plenty of good done by wikileaks.

[jazzyjackson]

I don't think it materially changed anyones perception, maybe gave fuel to the fire and reminded people it was still going on

"Torture At Abu Ghraib" was published in 2004, Collatoral Murder not until 2010. Were there still fence-sitters at that point? I honestly can't recall the prevailing attitude of the time, besides Assange being an enemy of democracy who deserved to be brought in and shot. I think the reaction was most telling, the continued bloodlust for traitors who are doing little more than advertising the US's incompetence and aimlessness in that war. If collateral damage didn't make me any less patriotic, seeing our politicians harass an australian for treason (???) certainly did

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/10/torture-at-abu...

[ktallett]

2004 was only a year after the war started, so yes many wouldn't have been swayed of their patriotic view. It was still too soon to know definitively it hadn't been worthwhile going to war. By 2010 it was extremely clear the Iraq war was a mistake and wikileaks only added to that.

Saying the above, the reason to release wasn't to sway patriotism, it was to get the truth out. For that reason it was the right decision even if it ended up with a portion of society disliking Assange for his so called 'treason' (which of course it wasn't as he isn't an American).

Anyone that has blind patriotism without any doubts, to the US military, after Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib can't be helped.

[robxorb]

The "edited" version's edited. The unedited version, released by WL at the same time, isn't. The entire war was a crime and killed 150K+ innocents. If the release of video of a fraction of those deaths puts attention on that; excellent journalism.

[rightbyte]

> And I can’t fathom why a journalist, accompanied by men with AK’s

I don't remember the bystanders to the camera man being armed?

Also, the camera might look like a RPG barrel on the ground, not from the helicopter.

[elliotto]

Did you really watch the helicopter video and think 'wow the US military is definitely in the right!'. I was young when the video was released, and it was a huge step in my journey to becoming critical of imperial powers.

[peterashford]

Embarrassing the US is worth being jailed for years or being extradited to a country where you don't reside and are not a citizen and being tried for sedition in said country?

[lp0_on_fire]

> The DNC hack/wikileaks release timeline is absolutely disgusting and shows the true nature of the organization.

in my experience people who condemn wikileaks for this almost universally praise wikileaks for other releases (just so longs as the other releases happened to paint their political opponents in a bad light).

[lmm]

Even if everything you say is true (and FWIW I think you're exaggerating a lot), so what? None of that makes them not journalism or not free speech. They're clearly not a spy agency. They published important facts and that's something we should be grateful for; that they did so for their own purposes, and may have chosen not to publish other important facts, does nothing to diminish that.