Do whistleblowers make the world a safer place?

MPACUK were present at a debate organised by New Statesman/Frontline and was held over the weekend at Kensington Town Hall where Julian Assange, Mehdi Hasan & Douglas Murray debated the motion: “This house believes that whistleblowers make the world a safer place.”

We're not going to repeat the finer points of the debate ad verbatim, you can read up on that for yourself at the New Statesman website, part one is here, part two is here and there's also a couple of good write up’s by alexweir and the hallucigenia blog who attended the event, and was good enough to record and upload the youtube clip.

My biggest concern with anyone who has set up shop as a whistleblower is how precisely do they corroborate the claims of the whistleblower?

Wikileaks and Julian Assange now claim an unassailable command of the truth, anything they say is taken as the absolute truth and that is where the danger lies.

In an information age, it is not beyond the realms of imagination to see parts of the military industrial intelligence complex, to offer up faked information via a planted whistleblower to wikileaks.

If this were early 2003 today, could wikileaks have been used by the american neocon administration to plant disinformation to build a case for invading Iraq?

Could a soldier have come forward saying he had information on yellow cake and WMD’s and it would be accepted as the gospel.

Don’t get me wrong, we're glad to see wikileaks doing its job, but we must always question the veracity of both the information and the source that presents it.