"Julian Assanges ideas of transparency and secrecy is not what he practises - he may preach it but he doesn't practise it - Wikileaks under his watch is a very secretive organisation"
I struggle to make sense of Lydia's comment here. The same principles of transparency and secrecy applied to gigantic organisations like the U.S. Government cannot be applied to small organisations of people like Wikileaks. This notion is simply absurd.
First of all, Wikileaks is not a democratically elected body of government that exercises power domestically and across the globe on behalf, and in representation of, its citizens. Hence, to insinuate it shares the same obligation that the US government has to be transparent to its citizens with regards to its activities is non-sencical.
Secondly, by virtue of the fact that the US government is many times more powerful, and given that its secret activities have serious worldwide ramifications for both individuals and nations,
the responsibility that the US government has to be transparent about its activities holds even more weight.
Thirdly, even the assumption that Wikileaks is a secretive organisation is misplaced. Wikileaks' activities have been explored and exposed in depth my mainstream media. The relations that Wikileaks has had with various media organisations throughout the world, and the failings of those relationships, has received an enormous amount of media attention. Fall outs between employees with the departure of Dominic Domscheit-Berg from the Wikileaks team is now public knowledge. Even intimate aspects of Julian Assange's life - from the sexual relations his had with women to the way he treats cats has been scrutinized by the public eye. That is an unprecedented level of transparency a small organisation like Wikileaks has had to endure, and this is all in the context of several long standing and expensive legal battles, banking blockades and severe restriction of funding resources, media smear campaigns and not to mention having the world superpower after them. Wikileak's ability to remain as transparent as it has is nothing short of miraculous.
Yet we still have people like Lydia Khalil claiming that Wikileaks is a secretive organisation because of its secret sources. Yes, Wikileaks does have a system to keep its sources confidential (in such a way that even Wikileaks can't identify them) just like any other journalistic organisation does. However, unlike dominate mainstream media bodies like the Murdoch’s press's News of the World, which uses illegal phone hacking to attain sources for its publications, Wikileaks has a detailed description of its drop box system and how it works on its website. So detailed infact that other media organisations like Al-Jazeera have been able to adopt similar systems.
Even the supposition that somehow there is something wrong with keeping the identities of sources protected is misplaced. Protecting journalistic sources is simply not comparable to the US Government being secretive about its diplomatic dealings or its activities during the Afghan and Iraq wars. The US government’s diplomatic dealings and its wars have serious and detrimental consequences. The more secretive that these activities are, the less accountable the US government will be - which is all the more reason to be transparent about this kind of information. The more public scrutiny of such information the more responsible the US government will be during diplomatic dealings and wars. When protecting sources, the very reverse is true, the more secrecy there is surrounding a whistleblowers identity, the less chance that whistleblower will be harmed.
Let's look at the Bradley Manning Case. This is an individual who has been detained for almost two years on the mere suspicion that he leaked the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs and diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. He has, among other things, been maltreated in detention, forced into solitary confinement and threatened with the death penalty. He has not been charged and not been given a fair and public trail. Considering that this is what the US government is willing to do to people who are merely suspected of whistle blowing - it is imperative that measures are taken to protect sources.
In this sense, Wikileaks is not a hypocritical organisation at all; because the principles of transparency that it applies to organisations like the US government is simply not applicable to Wikileaks as an organisation itself.
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