Posted on 11/29/2010 11:13:01 PM PST by neverdem
Placing hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic cables on the Internet constitutes a massive betrayal of America. A nation must safeguard its military and diplomatic secrets if it is to be trusted in the international system. Whoever provided the material to WikiLeaks should be prosecuted under the death sentence, regardless of his or her alleged motivations or mental worries. Traitors always feel aggrieved.
Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups read the Internet avidly, so it is likely that, by now, some individuals who cooperated with America have fled for their lives, or been murdered. (Capital punishment is a deterrent to betrayal.) As for the founder of WikiLeaks, surely the U.S. government has the power and the motivation to, without physical or illegal methods, make life miserable for him, regardless of where he is.
Individual news organizations have reached different decisions on whether to publish these materials. The New York Times declared, “Most of these documents will be made public regardless of what the Times decides … the more important reason to publish is that the cables tell the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions. … The Times has taken care to exclude information that would endanger confidential informants or compromise national security.”
It is certainly true that the Times went to great lengths to avoid spotlighting any vulnerable individual. But the greater truth, of course, is that those materials were splashed across the world via the Internet.
On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal refused to play along.
“We didn’t want to agree to a set of pre-conditions related to the disclosure of the Wikileaks documents without even being given a broad understanding of what these documents contained,” a spokeswoman for the paper said. CNN also declined to make an agreement with WikiLeaks.
There will be copycats: if not to WikiLeaks, then elsewhere on the Internet. Every government, totalitarian or democratic, has to be shuddering at the precedent established by this massive, deliberate leak. Imagine the consternation now reigning in Cuba, Iran, China, and Russia.
The likely global effect of WikiLeaks is the erection of massive firewalls and the rigorous compartmentalization of computer traffic inside governments and corporations worldwide. This will come at a cost: impeding of the exchange of information will create more bureaucracy and more sluggish, less coordinated responses.
— Bing West is author of The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy and the Way Out of Afghanistan.
How 250,000 US embassy cables were leaked
BTW, you need two witnesses to convict somebody of treason. It's specified in the Constitution, IIRC. So far, only one witness is known. PFC Bradley Manning bragged about it to someone over the net. Is that sufficient for making more than one witness? Maybe. I wouldn't care if it's a firing squad or a life sentence. I would only regret the cost of keeping him in solitary confinement for so many decades. IIRC, he's 23.
/johnny
“Why would any junior enlisted man or woman need access to the State Dept. cable traffic?”
Which is troubling in three ways:
1) If this person could do it and get away with it long enough to hand it off to others who then handed it to Wiki leaks where else did it go and what is to say our enemies aren’t doing this all the time already?
2) If our plans on how to transmit and handle data were before too lax you can bet that the institutions involved will all now clamp down to an unnecessary degree which will present additional challenges to various goals both in the war zones and elsewhere.
3) Most ominously... despite the government (of which the military is a part) generally not having a reputation for competence, both the timing and size of this leak raise doubts in some minds as the official version of events. Is this leak a result of factions within the intelligence/military community taking punitive actions against one another?
There is your second witness.
There was nothing leaked that was not in the news media already for the past few years.
This is much ado about nothing.
You are being distracted by Georgie Soros.
Have you ever been sucker punched?
You knew we were bombing Yemen back then?
save
Good piece.
The whole affair is suspect.
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Attack the right. It's their game plan.
The Socialists know what they are doing. And many of us know what the Left is about. But what Republican politician will announce it? Liberalism and its thug tactics are on full display for the entire world to see.
A representative of the NYSlimes stated that he had been working with the White House for many many hours on just what documents would be released.
Clearly this was a designed to harm hitlery. Rather than force her to resign Obamao will keep her in place swinging in the wind.
If national security was harmed that would be the last thing on Obamoa’s mind.
Thursday, 24 December 2009 BBC
Dozens killed in Yemen air strike on al-Qaeda suspects
This is one of many news accounts.
Go to google, type in Yemen air stikes and you will get millions of hits.
This is much ado about nothing. This crap should not even be classified.
They have released things that evey one already knows.
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