Wikileaks leaks embassy documents - Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabiaetc

[Hammer Birchgrove]

I'm - to say the least - conflicted about Wikileaks, and leaks in general. For starters, I don't like Julian Assange as a person. When a few women and the Swedish police accused him for rape or sexual offence, his own son didn't say to the press "He's innocent, he would NEVER do such a thing!" but something like "He often get into trouble like that". So even if he's not a rapist - he has neither been judged or cleared yet - it looks like he has issues with women.

I "know" that doesn't prove anything as far as Wikileaks goes, but I do think I should acknowledge that I have a bias against him.

As for Wikileaks: Not everything that gets "leaked" is really that interesting. My first (and so far, only) visit made me find a lot of unverified conspiracy nonsense, a "study" that "proved" that (some?) pedophiles are better than certain - violent - parents to take care of children... and then I left the website. Gatekeepers (editors etc) in media are underrated and under-appreciated.

As for the leaks: It depends on what type of leaks, IMHO. If someone reveals another Gitmo or CIA kidnapping-and-torture operation, then great. If someone reveals the identity of a CIA-agent for, lets say political reasons, then it's treason. And yes, all those examples were before Wikileaks got started.

To make a comparison to older days: I think most people don't cry over that the Hoare-Laval plan (to allow fascist Italy to conquer most of Ethiopia) was exposed, even though that plan might have kept Italy on the side of the Entente, and despite that League of Nations was too chicken to help Ethiopia when it was invaded, bombed and raped by Italy.

But I think everyone here agrees with me that it was extremely stupid to let US media tell the world that US torpedoes - or was it submarines? - had technical issues so that the Japanese Imperial Navy could escape torpedoes/destroy submarines.

Also, whenever I hear or read about Wikileaks, I keep thinking: It was a good thing Internet didn't exist during WWII, think how many Allied soldiers would have died at Sicily if Operation Minced Meat had been exposed, for example.

 

[Hammer Birchgrove]

What I remember from when I saw the video, is that I first thought that the helicopter crews had made a horrible mistake,

It's easy to suspect that someone is making a mistake when you're watching a video of someone do something that you already know was a mistake.

Actually, it seemed to me that the news was "wanting" me to think that the chopper crew killed civilians *on purpose* and for *evulz* like in a certain Vietnam film. I was actually trying to be reasonable and unbiased.

but after one or a few minutes, I thought they should stop shooting... but they kept shooting... What the crew were saying didn't help their case, they were without mercy or remorse

Their job was to kill people, and to kill 'em dead. Doing so with "mercy and remorse" is probably a bit problematic. Should every soldier drawing down on an enemy combatant be in a constant state of showing mercy and remorse every time they see a terrorist getting ready to, say, blow up civilians?

The gunner did his job. He just... did it against the wrong people. In a war zone, shit happens. It's just that now we get to see it all on video, and can armchair quarterback.

The civilians *weren't armed*, or the very least DIDN'T SHOOT BACK, and waved to the crew to stop. At least, that was what I *saw*, I wasn't with the crew OR with the civilians.

that is not the *impression* I get.

Which impression?

In 250,000 documents, expect there to be a *lot* that is outright embarassing, and expect to see a lot more that'll be taken out of context. And expect to see a lot of idle speculation in memos that turned out to either be right on target (through random chance/dumb luck), or which will fit into various conspiracy theories. Look at 9/11... with hundreds of thousands of recorded conversations that day, there were a few "suspicious" ones (like a firefighter saying to "pull" WTC7... the term meaning to pull the firefighters out, but demolitions experts - which the firefighter wasn't - use the same term to mean somethign very different). And those few suspicious ones have fed an entire industry.

Wikileaks is gonna make *somebody* freakin' rich, writing nonsense for the conspiratorialists.

I mean I didn't get the impression that Sherrod was being racist. And while we're at it, certain Tea Party members' comments about Obama being born in Kenya, and thereby being a Fifth Columnist, and Obama being a Nazi, a Communist, an Islamist, are, if not racist or border-line racist, simply not true. Having a mother who lived in a Totalitarian Socialist country - former Czechoslovakia - I feel personally insulted when people misuse the "c-word" in that way, especially when uttered by people who have no frigging clue about how it was like to live ruled by The Communist Party.