John Kass at the Chicago Tribune does a disservice to journalism by implying that Assange is somehow responsible for the cyber attacks, labeling them Assange's "hactivist disciples", and uses this claim and other rhetoric to support his article title "WikiLeaks and Assange pretend there are no consequences".
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-met-kass-1209-20101209,0,5725693.columnFTA:
But Assange — or the newspapers that published the documents — don't have the right to pretend there are no real consequences.
"WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone's aware, has been harmed," Assange wrote in a hubris-filled op-ed piece Wednesday published in The Australian. "But the U.S. with Australian government connivance has killed thousands in the past few months alone."
It sounds very much like a big speech from a Hollywood movie. The big speech, usually delivered by some craggy-faced actor, involving the need for sunshine to illuminate government secrets otherwise hidden from a free people.
But once the big speech is over, and you're driving home with popcorn on your breath, you might be tempted to think logically about what happens next.
Redaction is a courtesy, the lack of which does not imply the vilification of the messenger. Assange certainly doesn't claim to predict the full ramifications of his activities, but I highly doubt he acts without consideration of the consequences.
If you want to seize authority and pass off the consequences, run for office.
Their analysts aren't wringing their hands over whether they should be studying the secret cables. They're just studying. They have computers. And their analysts do what analysts do best — connect the dots.
And not only the salacious and entertaining big dots, like that Saudi prince and the prostitutes at his big bash, or the attributes of the curvy Ukrainian nurse for Moammar Gadhafi, or what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton wanted her diplomats to do with DNA. There are also the smaller, seemingly insignificant dots.
Analysts aren't interested in the well-known names, the public names, the official names. They're interested in the names hidden between the lines. And they'll find them.
These smaller dots aren't famous. They're foreign nationals. They could be clerks and janitors and such. They have names and friends and families. And soon, one dot is tied to another dot is tied to another dot.
Once they're connected, a door is kicked in by the security forces. The dot is put into the back seat of the car, then driven to a place where sunshine does not illuminate anything. And nobody notifies Assange about what became of the dot or its family.
By then, they're not dots anymore. They're not abstractions. They're real people. Or they were. And that's something that Assange — who reasons like a child — pretends not to understand.
Apparently leaking details about sex parties, extortion, lying, spies, and murder is worse than the activities themselves...
Kass disregards the violence of government and substitutes reason with insults. He very much wants to blame Assange for violent abduction and murder as a consequence of the publication of documents without that tricky little bit of logical consistency called causality which would show that it was the initial act of force or coercion which put people in danger.