The Best Those Who Accuse Wikileaks of Having Been "Deadly" Seem to Have Is Not All That Convincing
David Frum, unsurprisingly, was on Twitter over the weekend mocking and tut-tutting moonbats and un-Americans who were in a tizzy over a Time journalist, Michael Grunwald, tweeting about how he can't wait to defend the extrajudicial murder by drone of WikiLeaker Julian Assange.
J.D. Tuccille wrote about that here over the weekend, and Conor Freidersdorf today in the Atlantic analyzes the radical statism behind Grunwald's ideology.
Frum had to stress the "deadly" consequences of what Assange and Wikileaks have done, "lives at risk," as opposed to Grunwald's mere good-natured jest.
Both the stories he linked to to support that contention don't really do a very sharp job of supporting that contention. One is this 2010 (!) CBS story speculating on all the people Wikileaks was going to get killed.
Another was this National Journal story from 2011, updated earlier this year, called "Wikileaks Collateral Damage"–oo, that sounds intense!–which has one tale of a specific human harmed, an anonymously named "dissident from a very authoritarian country" who is unable to return to it because the state-controlled media outed him "as a collaborator or possible spy for the United States. And just like that, Arturo is a man without a country."
A simple accusation from an overbearing government, and suddenly a man without a country. That's certainly chilling–"Arturo" and Edward Snowden would have much to commisserate over.
The rest of that supposedly damning article, though, is stuff like this:
Certainly the U.S. military has been impacted by l'affaire WikiLeaks. The Pentagon has been forced to explain why it allegedly made hundreds of thousands of classified State Department cables accessible to a young private….
The collateral damage of the WikiLeaks episode has also impacted the State Department and its relations with foreign governments. Foreign officials now know that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ordered U.S. diplomats to act almost as spies, collecting personal information on them to include credit card data, frequent-flier numbers and even biometric information….
The Fourth Estate has also come under uncomfortable scrutiny as a result of the WikiLeaks case….
Having to explain themselves! People don't trust them! Uncomfortable scrutiny! C'mon, what the hell is that Assange guy still doing alive after causing all that deadly havoc in the lives of innocents?
If that's the sort of evidence that makes Assange a fit subject for droning, or that makes jokes about it appropriate and balanced, to Frum, I'm glad he's not spending time on juries (as far as I know).
