On October 31st, an email from journalist Lucy Komisar asked me to sign a petition in support of Wikileaks, and today it was published on the web site of the Global Investigative Journalism Network:

Journalists from every region of the world have joined together to support the whistle-blowing organization Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange who, they say, have provided an extraordinary resource for journalists around the world and made “an outstanding contribution to transparency and accountability on the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars”.

(…)

The journalists, who are linked through investigative journalism networks, decided to speak out publicly after watching a growing campaign of threats and unfair criticisms against Assange and Wikileaks.

I’m number 94 (and the only one from Panama), of a total of 142 journalists who signed it. It’s a relatively small gesture which I nevertheless hope will have some impact. Wikileaks has done more in just months to reveal the truth about the US led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than all the US media combined since 9/11 and, on top of that, it has exposed much of the corporate media as the charlatans they are. I’ve been more than a bit annoyed by the ridiculous attacks on Wikileaks and Assange – attacks that only seek to distract, to cover up, and more often than not in a rather unintelligent way. In my own country for example, the Netherlands, journalist Bert Brussen wrote on Tea-Party-On-Wooden-Shoes website Geenstijl about the “anonymous little cowards” (“anonieme lafbekjes”) of Wikileaks – say what you will about Julian Assange, but “anonymous”? – before dismissing the content of the 400,000 documents as “old news”, in good Fox News fashion.

In a recent tweet, Wikileaks wrote:

Ethics101 for mainstream media: Ask not what llegal & illegal but what is moral & immoral. Recall that slavery was once legal.

Which, the media being what they are, will mostly fall on deaf ears, but there is a bit more to it. As a journalist, you don’t want to just be on the side of morality; you also want to have an impact. Because of the publication of these war logs and the clever strategy to create simultaneous global coverage of their contents, Wikileaks has accomplished that a number of countries and international bodies now demand answers from the US, about killings, torture, war crimes, human rights abuses. And that’s where a lot of the whining and attacking and hand wringing comes from, from the hurt sense of entitlement of the impostors who created war so that they could then make money by ineffectively and falsely reporting on it.

So yes, I happily signed that petition, and if there’s anything else I can do to keep Wikileaks afloat I’ll do it.