Non-Aligned Media / Brandon Martinez
Donald Trump has condemned Bradley Manning, the US army analyst who leaked thousands of documents to Wikileaks, as an “ungrateful traitor” and criticized Obama’s recent decision to commute Manning’s 35-year prison sentence on espionage charges.
Ungrateful TRAITOR Chelsea Manning, who should never have been released from prison, is now calling President Obama a weak leader. Terrible!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 26, 2017
So Trump was all for Wikileaks when it was releasing damning material on Hillary Clinton during the campaign, but now he’s publicly ravaging Manning and opining that he should still be rotting in prison for exposing US army abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, according to Trump, Wikileaks was bad when it was making the US military look bad, but became “good” when it was making his political rival Clinton look bad.
Typical Trump: no true principles, just vein self-interest.
Wikileaks itself is a biased and untrustworthy organization. During the election Wikileaks made selective leaks damaging to the Clinton campaign, while avoiding any scrutiny of Trump, in a bid to take down the Democratic contender who Assange had a personal grudge with due to her joking about sending a drone after him.
But now that Trump is in power Wikileaks is calling on leakers to target him, bolstering their image as transparency stalwarts holding all those in power accountable. The organization has notably released almost nothing of significance about the misdeeds of any government other than the US, UK and EU bloc, as well as Western aligned countries in the Middle East like the Gulf states and Turkey. Wikileaks has yet to publish anything damaging to the governments of Russia, China or Israel, leading some to believe they are controlled opposition.
Assange himself is basically a Chomskyite who sees no other evil in the world except the US and its allies, deflecting criticism from the BRICS block on the basis that they are a “lesser evil”. Assange was even given his own television show on Russia Today, the Kremlin-backed network, called “The World Tomorrow” where he interviewed mostly left-wingers of the Chomsky variety on geopolitics.
If Assange ever decided to champion Russian dissidents and whistleblowers, RT would promptly cease favourable coverage of the cyber revolutionary and cast him asunder.
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