The Downside And Dishonesty of WikiLeaks

Assange lied about US military personnel in 2010

During an interview with Sean Hannity that aired Tuesday night, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asserted: We have the trust of our sources, we have the trust of our readers, having never got it wrong.

This is an important point, Hannity interjected. Not one evidence [sic] where you've been proven wrong.

Not even one sustained allegation, Assange replied. We have a perfect record in relation to authenticating the material that we publish. That's a very valuable reputation to have.

But in 2010, Assange and WikiLeaks released a video that wrongly portayed U.S. soldiers in Iraq as murderers. As Bill Roggio wrote at THE WEEKLY STANDARD at the time: Wikileaks, the website devoted to publishing classified documents on the Internet, made a splash today with a video claiming to show that the U.S. military 'murdered' a Reuters cameraman and other Iraqi 'civilians' in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. But a careful watching of the video shows that the U.S. helicopter gun crews that attacked a group of armed men in the then Mahdi Army stronghold of New Baghdad was anything but 'Collateral Murder,' as Wikileaks describes the incident.