Leaked video showing US helicopter shooting journalists and civilians

[DGuller]

Interviews like this make me think that Colbert would be devastating as a host of Meet The Press.  He's supremely intelligent, supremely knowledgeable, very quick on his feet, and will instantly pounce on any weakness.  He's wasting his talent in his current, increasingly juvenile, show.

[Razgovory]

So he's a dick in person as well.  The guy's got his head so far his ass he doesn't realize he's being revealed as a self-righteous asshole.

[Berkut]

I like his comment that he would not leak a list of his sources.

[grumbler]

I thought the teling bits were:
(1) Assange admitted that the whole "collateral murder" title was designed to make a political statement, rather than to simply report the facts;
(2) Colbert had to interrupt the serious business of the interview to make amusing/entertaining cracks like "haven't you heard that ignorance is bliss?"
(3) Assange noted that he is in a business and that this was one for the money, not to "expose the truth" per se;
(4) No one even brought up the possibility that the "missing 20 minutes" may be "missing" because the targeting system may not have been employed, and so the camera wouldn't have been active, thus nothing is "missing."

I agree that Assange came off as a self-important jerk, but we kinda knew that before this interview.  Self-important jerks go into the media, if they can.  I thought he came out of this pretty well.  He is a self-important jerk, but not a sanctimonious one.  He was very up-front about what he was doing.  I grudgingly respect his stance on this.

Colbert was pretty good, as usual.  John Stewart is still miles better as an entertainer and comedian.

[alfred russel]

Interviews like this make me think that Colbert would be devastating as a host of Meet The Press.  He's supremely intelligent, supremely knowledgeable, very quick on his feet, and will instantly pounce on any weakness.  He's wasting his talent in his current, increasingly juvenile, show.

He probably has a bigger impact and audience on Comedy Central.

[jimmy olsen]

I look at it differently.

You say "Hey, your objectivity is really important to your mission of being whistle blowers, you shouldn't do things that damage it so much!" and I look at it and say "If they cared about appearing objective, they clearly would not do something that is so obviously NOT objective - QED, they don't care about objectivity, QED they aren't really in the business of being objective whistle blowers" even if appearing to be in that business might be useful to their actual business.

If the whistle-blowing business is just a cover for wikileaks, then it's one very intricate cover.  They've been blowing the whistles for years before this that had nothing to do with US or Iraq, and reportedly collected more than a million damning documents.  Their real mission must be pretty damn huge in order for them to spend so much energy working on their cover.

Argument from false dichotomy. I am not saying that their whistle-blowing activities are some elaborate cover, I am saying that their goal is likely not to be "objective whistle blowers". Clearly, it is NOT their goal, otherwise they would not have so clearly violated any sense of objectivity.

It doesn't have to be all one or the other, and as an organization whose basic mission is to simply provide a way to allow some people to publish things they leaked, having an agenda is not really all that much of a deterrent anyway. They are pretty clearly anti-government in general (not surprising given their mission). I don't think there is anything specific to Iraq or the US, other than that the US is a obvious target for the anti-government groups.

How cohesive of an organization" is wikileaks? It's a wiki, so I had assumed not at all before this thread. Is there actually someone or a group of someones truly in charge of what goes up on their site and how?