The snitch, or not?
In the year of 2007, governments all over the world are stunned by a newly emerged threat: WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is a non-profit media organization that reveals important information to the world. It is an organization founded by Julian Assange and The Sunshine Press organization which relies on volunteers’ involvements in disclosing governments’ exclusive news into a anonymous drop box and the Wiki Journalists will then analyse, verify, and write a news piece about the material to the public. The WikiLeaks is a successful attempt in disclosing governments’ secrets to the world; despite the risks of being arrested, it claimed a database of over 1.2 million leaked documents within the year of its launch. A lot of new front page stories are has been released by WikiLeaks in the past few years, including a package of documents called Iraq War Logs which contains 400,000 documents about the Iraq war and occupation held between 2004 and 2009.
These documents are provided by a US soldier, and it is the largest scale of leak in the US military history. The leaks included more than 15,000 of unreported deaths of civilians killed by US soldiers. As well as hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and murder by the Iraqi police and soldiers that are have not been investigated. This leakage of documents is trusted by many organizations and has aroused reactions from many countries and organizations. The United Nations suggest that an investigation should be held towards the US military in terms of Human Rights. The US condemns the WikiLeaks to be putting the US and its partners’ civilians at risk since the documents reveal the names and private information of people involved in the Iraq War log. In addition, the prime minister of Iraq and an Iranian politician both reject the claims made up by US government to accuse. Other than that, many countries and non-profit organizations have also reacted to the Iraq War Log incident. For more information, please click here.
WikiLeaks: a journalistic organization?
The WikiLeaks is somehow thought to be a journalistic organization in terms of releasing news to the public; however, the creditability is questionable. Since the WikiLeaks is rely heavily on volunteers and citizen journalists, it takes a lot of works for WikiLeaks’ journalists to fact check the news. The Youtube video that is released by the WikiLeaks is also doubted to be edited by its members; therefore, it is hard to decide whether the news revealed by WikiLeaks are reliable or not. So, is WikiLeaks a creditable journalistic organization? What do you think?
Angel or Evil—Human rights
The WikiLeaks on the one hand acts as a humanity activist as it discloses covered information on incidents that violate human rights; however, on the other hand, it defies the basic integrity by ignoring others’ privacy, stealing secrets and revealing them to the public. This not only put people involved in these incidents at risk, but also arouses worldwide attention and stimulates hostilities between countries. Perhaps the price of helping ones from torture is putting others at risk; will there be a better way for people to make peace?
“To be or not to be, this is the question.”
April Chan