Posted on 12/04/2010 12:12:53 PM PST by K-oneTexas
Make no mistake about it, the ongoing WikiLeaks operation against the US is an act of war. It is not merely a criminal offense to publish hundreds of thousands of classified US government documents with malice aforethought. It is an act of sabotage.
Like acts of kinetic warfare on military battlefields, WikiLeaks' information warfare against the US aims to weaken the US. By exposing US government secrets, it seeks to embarrass and discredit America in a manner that makes it well neigh impossible for the US to carry out either routine diplomacy or build battlefield coalitions to defeat its enemies.
So far WikiLeaks has published more than 800,000 classified US documents. It has exposed classified information about US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and it has divulged 250,000 diplomatic cables.
One of the most distressing aspects of the WikiLeaks operation is the impotent US response to it. This operation has been going on since April. And the US had foreknowledge of the attack in the weeks and months before it began. And yet, the US has taken no effective steps to defend itself. Pathetically, the most it has been able to muster to date is the issuance of an international arrest warrant against WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange on rape charges in Sweden.
The US has not taken down the website. Aside from the US Army soldier Pfc Bradley Manning who leaked most of the documents to the website, no one has been arrested. And the US appears impotent to prevent the website from carrying through on its latest threat to publish new documents aimed at weakening the US economy next month.
Neither US President Barack Obama nor any of his top advisers has had anything relevant or useful to say about this onslaught. Defense Secretary Robert Gates assured journalists that the damage caused by publishing US operations on the battlefield, classified reports of meetings with and assessments of foreign heads of state and other highly sensitive information will have no long lasting impact on US power or status.
Ignoring the fact that the operation is aimed specifically against America, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it was "an attack on the international community."
While the expressed aim of the attackers is to weaken the US, Obama's spokesman Robert Gibbs called them "criminals, first and foremost." And US Attorney-General Eric Holder said he's checking the law books to figure out how to prosecute WikiLeaks personnel.
The leaked documents themselves expose a profound irony. To wit: The US is unwilling to lift a finger to defend itself against an act of information warfare which exposed to the world that the US is unwilling to lift a finger to protect itself and its allies from the most profound military threats endangering international security today.
In spite of the unanimity of the US's closest Arab allies that Iran's nuclear installations must be destroyed militarily - a unanimity confirmed by the documents revealed by WikiLeaks - the US has refused to take action. Instead it clings to a dual strategy of sanctions and engagement that everyone recognizes has failed repeatedly and has no chance of future success.
In spite of proof that North Korea is transferring advanced ballistic missiles to Iran through China, again confirmed by the illegally released documents, the US continues to push a policy of engagement based on a belief that there is value to China's vote for sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council. It continues to push a policy predicated on its unfounded faith that China is interested in restraining North Korea.
In spite of the fact that US leaders including Gates recognize that Turkey is not a credible ally and that its leaders are radical Islamists, as documented in the classified documents, the US has agreed to sell Turkey a hundred F-35s. The US continues to support Turkish membership in the EU and of course embraces Turkey as a major NATO ally.
The publication of the US's true feelings about Turkey has not made a dent in its leaders' unwillingness to contend with reality. On the heels of the WikiLeaks exposure of thousands of documents from the US Embassy in Ankara discussing Turkish animosity towards America, Clinton flew to Turkey for the first leg of what The New York Times referred to as an "international contrition tour."
There she sucked up to the likes of Turkish Foreign Minister and Islamist ideologue Ahmet Davutoglu, who was kind enough to agree with Clinton's assertion that the publication of the State Department cables was "the 9/11 of diplomacy."
THE MOST important question that arises from the entire WikiLeaks disaster is why the US refuses to defend itself and its interests. What is wrong with Washington? Why is it allowing WikiLeaks to destroy its international reputation, credibility and ability to conduct international relations and military operations? And why has it refused to contend with the dangers it faces from the likes of Iran and North Korea, Turkey, Venezuela and the rest of the members of the axis of evil that even State Department officers recognize are colluding to undermine and destroy US superpower status?
The answer appears to be twofold. First, there is an issue of cowardice.
American leaders are afraid to fight their enemies. They don't want a confrontation with Iran or North Korea, or Venezuela or Turkey for that matter, because they don't want to deal with difficult situations with no easy answers or silver bullets to make problems disappear.
WikiLeaks showed that there is no Israel lobby plotting to bring the US into a war to serve Jewish interests. There is something approaching an international consensus that Iran is the head of the snake that must be cut off, as the Saudi potentate described it.
Yet that consensus opinion has fallen on deaf American ears for the past seven years. This despite the fact that both the Bush administration and the Obama administration certainly recognized that if the US were to attack Iran's nuclear installations or help Israel do so, despite all the theater of public handwringing and finger- wagging at Israel, the Arabs and the Europeans and Asians would celebrate the operation.
THE SECOND explanation for this behavior is ideological. The Obama administration will not take concerted action against WikiLeaks because doing so will compromise its adherence to leftist politically correct nostrums.
Those views assert that there is something fundamentally wrong with the assertion of US power and therefore the US has no right to defend itself. Moreover, nothing the Arabs or any other non-Western governments do is a function of their will. Rather it is a function of their response to US or Israeli aggression.
So it is that in the wake of the WikiLeaks disclosures that put paid the fiction that Israel is behind the fuss over Iran's nuclear weapons program, Juan Cole, the anti-Israel ideologue and conspiracy theorist favored by the Obama administration, published an article in The Guardian proclaiming that Israel is to blame for Saudis' fear of Iran. If the Arab masses weren't so worked up over Israeli aggression in Gaza, he claimed, the Saudi leadership wouldn't have been upset about Iran.
It is this sort of non sequitur that allows the Obama administration to continue pretending that the world is not a hard place and that there are no problems that cannot be solved by pressuring Israel.
So too, Fred Kaplan at Slate online magazine claimed that the leaks showed that the Obama administration's foreign policy is successful because it succeeded in getting China on board with UN sanctions against Iran. But of course, what the documents show is that China is breaching those sanctions, rendering the entire exercise at the UN worthless.
And the Left's voice of "reason," the New York Times editorial page, lauded the Obama administration for its courage in rejecting the pleas of Arab states and Israel and fiddling while Iranian centrifuges spin. According to the Times, true courage consists of defying reality, strategic necessity and allies to defend the dogmas of political correctness.
Perhaps the best way to demonstrate how fecklessly the US is behaving is by comparing its actions to those of Israel, which suffered a similar, if far smaller case of data theft earlier this year.
In April, the public learned that towards the end of her IDF service, a secretary in the office of the commander of Central Command named Anat Kamm copied some 2,000 highly secret documents onto her zip drive. After leaving the army she was hired as a reporter by the far-left Walla news portal, which was then partially owned by the far-left Haaretz newspaper. Kamm gave the documents she stole to Haaretz reporter Uri Blau, who began publishing them in November 2008.
Haaretz used its considerable power to discredit the investigation of Kamm and Blau by falsely telling foreign reporters that the story was an issue of press freedom and that Kamm was being persecuted as a journalist rather than investigated for treason she committed while serving in the military.
In the face of the predictable international outcry, Israel stuck to its guns. Kamm is on trial for stealing state secrets with the intent of harming state security and Blau, who fled to London, returned to Israel with the stolen documents.
While there is much to criticize in Israel's handling of the case, there is no doubt that despite its international weakness, Israeli authorities did not shirk their duty to defend state secrets.
THE FINAL irony of the WikiLeaks scandal is the cowardice of WikiLeaks that stands at the foundation of the story. Founded in 2006, Wikileaks was supposed to serve the cause of freedom. It claimed that it would defend dissidents in China, the former Soviet Union and other places where human rights remains an empty term. But then China made life difficult for WikiLeaks and so four years later, Assange and his colleagues declared war on the US, rightly assuming that unlike China, the US would take their attacks lying down. Why take risks to defend dissidents in a police state when it's so much easier and so much more rewarding to attempt to destroy free societies?
Assange and company are hardly the first to take this course. Human Rights Watch, created to fight for those crushed under the Soviet jackboot, now spends its millions of George Soros dollars to help terrorists in their war against the US and Israel. Amnesty International forgot long ago that it was founded to help prisoners of police states and instead devotes itself to attacking the imaginary evils of the Jewish state and Western democracies.
And that brings us to the real question raised by the WikiLeaks assault on America. Can democracies today protect themselves? In the era of leftist political correctness with its founding principle that Western power is evil and that the freedom to harm democracies is inviolate, can democracies defend their security and national interests?
[This article was originally published in The Jerusalem Post.]
obamanation is the traitor.... and should be tried as an enemy of America.
as far as helping to worsen America’s reputation, I honestly don’t think more can be done to ruin it than the actions obamanation has taken or not taken so far.
I can only hope that it doesn’t further endanger real Americans... the ones obamanation is really out to get.
Wikileaks is simply the reporter of information supplied to it by traitors in the barking obama’s administration. Rest assured wikileaks and the disgusting little pervert in a uniform are not acting alone. The traitors are in high positions and BO is the head of the snake.
Still haven’t figured out what *secrets* they’ve leaked.
“Abdul said something bad about Habib’s breath” BFD
BO’s WikiLeaks have destroyed US Diplomatic relations. No foreign government official wants to have anything to do with anyone in BO’s regime. The President of Afghanistan refused to meet with BO when BO flew to Afghanistan yesterday.
Who can blame them after BO leaked info that puts their lives at risk.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2637403/posts
http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2010/12/meet-wikileaks-likely-first-victim.html
Friday, December 3, 2010
Meet WikiLeaks’ Likely First Victim
I would not want to be Lebanon’s Defense Minister Elias Murr right now.
As reported by The L.A. Times, a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Beirut revealed by WikiLeaks alleges that Murr assisted the U.S. and Israel in the targeting of Hezbollah:
Lebanon’s Defense Minister Elias Murr told Americans the army would stay out of the way if Israel tried to wipe out Hezbollah, according to a secret March 2008 conversation revealed in a diplomatic cable revealed by WikiLeaks.
PAragraphs with (s) in the front were classified “secret,” those with (c) were classified “confidential” and there are a few others. (What is (SBU)?) Only those paragraphs with a (u) in front were unclassified.
Yep. And there ain't nobody mindin' the store.
Kinda makes you wonder, eh?
I’m with you. What secrets have been released? Everything up to this point seems like tabloid junk. With all these Top Secret, Classified Sensitive Documents being released, BO has another excuse to control the internet.
What! Hillary’s minding the store.
Ah, that’s right. She just looking for FREE gifts.
So bring charges of treason against the US leaker and his vetters and management.
0 has had a very cavalier attitude about declasifying our national secrets since he took office and I believe this is one of the consequences.
The good news though is that we’ve learned just how corrupt the Russians are under Putin, and that public knowledge alone should help kill bringing Russia into NATO defense under the new START treaty.
Let the Arabs take out the Persians.
Make H! explain the success of this "Smart Diplomacy".
You have to wonder about robby and wolfcreek who think the BO’s WikiLeaks of the names, families and GPS locations of our allies in the War against the Taliban in Afghanistan is not Treason by BO against the United States.
"the ongoingGuess it all depends on the perspective.WikiLeaksFox News operation against the US is an act of war."
I just love Glick. The pen is mightier than the sword, but in this commentary she uses hers like a cudgel. Wham, wham, wham. Killer prose! I actually slowed down reading to admire it. :)
Like maybe it's outlined on page 87 of the Soros/Hussein playbook to destroy America?
“BO’s WikiLeaks have destroyed US Diplomatic relations. No foreign government official wants to have anything to do with anyone in BO’s regime. The President of Afghanistan refused to meet with BO when BO flew to Afghanistan yesterday”
Yet, we find out that the Afghan government is rife with corruption, and that hundreds of millions of dollars that we funnel in there are stolen, and removed from the country. Our government knows, and does nothing. But they can use secrecy to keep the TAXPAYER in the dark.
We find out that Isreal is not secretly pushing us to war.
We find out that all of the world will cheer if we take out Iran, but will abuse us publically. We use secrecy to give the Euros the freedom to avoid standing up for what is right, and to abuse us all they want. We all pay a price for nurturing that Euro-culture of abusing the USA.
Im not really sure a case can be made that US State department secrecy has ever worked well for the USA. The loss of China, Korean war, Vietnam, April Glaspie in the Desert Storm era, the lies of Clinton and his Chicom connections,,,etc,,,the list is nearly endless.
The US state department works *consistently* in favor of global warming, law of the sea treaty, an international currency, the eradication of borders, the international criminal court, etc,,
Their use of secrecy is mostly used to cover their anti-USA agenda, and to provide cover for Euro’s who want to beat us up, while we do their dirty work.
Im beginning to think this is a bunch of long overdue fresh air.
Maybe knowing they might face the light of day will lead to less anti-USA activity at the state dept.
It’s funny, you don’t need very much secrecy if you are representing America with integrity. Thats how you get people to play with you. You will attract the honest, and repel the grifters like Karzai,,etc
This wikileaks guy is no hero,, but to me, it’s clear that most of our diplomatic secrecy is used against me as an American, not FOR me. I do not believe the same in military secrecy regarding the order of battle, technology, nuclear secrets, etc,,,
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