IRONY: “You’re either with us, or you’re with WikiLeaks”

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were the intrepid young reporters working for The Washington Post when they broke the Watergate scandal which brought down the Nixon administration.

Today, that same newspaper published an op-ed piece by Marc A. Thiessen called:

You’re either with us, or you’re with WikiLeaks

Thiessen starts out by saying,

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got one thing right last week – she described WikiLeaks’ disclosure of hundreds of thousands of classified documents as “an attack.”

—You’re either with us, or you’re with WikiLeaks

He runs with the attack theme, likening the current war on WikiLeaks with the so called “War on Terror.”

Mr. Thiessen doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that, to the Nixon administration, the Watergate Leaks were equally an attack.

As @jayrosen_nyu pointed out, WikiLeaks is a stateless news organization. Like any other responsible media outlet, they gave the United States the option of input:

On 26 November, Assange sent a letter to the U.S. Department of State, via his lawyer Jennifer Robinson, inviting them to “privately nominate any specific instances (record numbers or names) where it considers the publication of information would put individual persons at significant risk of harm that has not already been addressed”.^[19][20][21] Harold Koh, the Legal Adviser of the Department of State, rejected the proposal, stating: “We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained U.S. Government classified materials”.^[21] Assange responded in turn by writing back to the State Department that “you have chosen to respond in a manner which leads me to conclude that the supposed risks are entirely fanciful and you are instead concerned to suppress evidence of human rights abuse and other criminal behaviour”.^[22][23]

—Wikipedia, Cablegate

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