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Michael Moore is among the celebrities putting up money to try to get Julian Assange sprung on bail, and he writes on his website that he eagerly made his $20,000 pledge—along with the offer of his servers and domain names—because transparency is "among the few weapons the citizenry has to protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt." He lays out examples from the Gulf of Tonkin to the claims of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction as instances in which WikiLeaks could have changed history. (If his site's down, the full column is at Daily Kos, too.)
"I ask you to imagine how much different our world would be if WikiLeaks had existed 10 years ago," he writes, asserting that George W. Bush ignored a specific warning about an al-Qaeda plot before 9/11. "But if that document had been leaked, how would you or I have reacted? What would Congress or the FAA have done? Was there not a greater chance that someone, somewhere would have done something if all of us knew about bin Laden's impending attack using hijacked planes?" Click here for more.
