Putting thousands of people's lives in danger because you're not careful isn't freedom of speech [0]. If Assange cared about freedom of speech, he wouldn't have called the Panama leaks an attack on Putin fueled by Soros [1]. Is it a coincidence that almost all Wikileaks cables are about the US, and never anything about Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and so on?
I definitely don't think he should be prosecuted for journalism, but if it is shown that he was Putin's puppet and intentionally helped meddle in US election, then he does deserve whatever sentence he receives.
> Is it a coincidence that almost all Wikileaks cables are about the US, and never anything about Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and so on?
Perhaps it makes Americans feel bad about themselves to hear this, but there are people in the world who feel that America and its 5-eyes allies are actually doing more harm to the world than Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and "so on" - by way of endless, illegal, heinous wars wherein crimes against humanity are constantly ignored by the only people who have the power to do something about it: The American People.
Alas, The American People are being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the realisation that many outside of America's reality-distortion fields have already had: America is a net evil force in the world, and its illegal wars must be stopped at all costs.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen. 500,000+ dead victims of America's illegal wars. When Russia and/or China have invaded and destroyed as many sovereign states as the USA has, then the moral stance you propose would be relevant. But, since neither Russia or China have started and engaged in countless, endless illegal wars of aggression in the last decade, the equivalence you desire is inappropriate. America and its allies are committing war crimes daily and have been doing so for decades. Without doing something effective about that, The American People have no chance to do something, next, about Russia or China. It simply doesn't work.
I never claimed they weren't. But it would be naive to think that Russia is much better. But for some reason, WikiLeaks has nothing to say about them, even if it's clear that they are doing pretty dodgy stuff (IRA, poisoning, etc). That to me shows that Wikileaks is not about transparency, but rather has a very strong bias about exposing a very specific target.
Maybe America has more serious covered-up crimes to reveal than Russia? Maybe America is killing more innocent people, daily (one bomb dropped every twenty minutes for the last 20 years, mostly on innocent people)?
Maybe you simply haven't read what Wikileaks has published about Russia.
America's illegal wars can be stopped from anywhere. All it takes is for the truth to be revealed by those brave enough to stand up to the establishment, and reveal their crimes.
It can be done from anywhere on the globe, as we have learned from Wikileaks and others working to expose the crimes of US's criminal military-industrial complex.
I didn't mean to imply that freedom of speech necessarily applied to this case, just that if it did, the US government would hopefully (?) respect that.
Afaik that Wikileaks tweet about the Panama Papers was referring to the fact that the full papers were never released [0].
While at the same time most of the MSM coverage focused solely on the Russian/Putin angle, making the Panama Papers more about Putin than anything else.
I definitely don't think he should be prosecuted for journalism, but if it is shown that he was Putin's puppet and intentionally helped meddle in US election, then he does deserve whatever sentence he receives.
[0] https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/leak-at-wikileaks...
[1] https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/717458064324964352