WikiLeaks site fills critically important need
For the past three years, the U.S. government has rebuffed Freedom of Information requests from Reuters. The news agency wanted answers after two of its employees were killed in a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad.
It has the answers now, and so does the entire world. An anonymous whistleblower passed on shocking film footage of U.S. pilots firing on unarmed civilians, which was posted Monday on WikiLeaks.org, an Internet site dedicated to making public important information that a state or corporation does not want out in the public domain.
The video, which is said to be confirmed as authentic by the Pentagon, shows two U.S. Apache helicopter crews repeatedly firing on a group of men including the Reuters employees. Twelve people died in the attack and two children were seriously wounded.
In the days that followed, millions of people around the world watched the film, listening as soldiers jeered at the dead men in the street below: "Look at those dead bastards," said a pilot, while another answered: "Nice . . . good shootin'."
The leaked video was hailed as a victory for free speech and a validation of the WikiLeaks website. WikiLeaks' goal, it says, is to promote freedom of information, to be the "people's intelligence agency."
At a time when mainstream media are struggling to find the resources to carry out investigative work and when even states such as Canada clamp down on Access to Information requests, however innocuous, WikiLeaks is fulfilling a critically important need.
It claims to be funded by "human-rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists, and the general public," but is secretive about its own operations.
The site now publishes up to 1,000 documents a day. It accepts "classified, censored, or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance," but not rumour or opinion.
Its on-call staff of about 1,000 people - plus five full-time employees - sift through the material. The U.S. government has confirmed that the Baghdad video is genuine. As was a report from within Swiss-based commodities trader Trafigura, a company outed on
WikiLeaks over its alleged dumping of tonnes of toxic wastes on the Ivory Coast in 2006. It had sought an injunction against the release of the report, a pointless move once the report was leaked.
WikiLeaks provides an outlet for information from whistleblowers and censored journalists who have no other means of informing the public. It says it has survived more than 100 "legal attacks." In a sign of how seriously WikiLeaks is taken, the British government rushed through legislation aimed at curbing it, but which is happily unlikely to survive a court challenge.
The Internet in this instance has proven that at least one of the overheated claims for its ability to reform the world is legitimate.
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