a) your government likes to spit polish its image using the flags which were buried with its honorable military dead and
b) it's embarrassed such indiscriminate violence against civilians was published ONLINE right under their noses.
For those not in the know, Wikileaks.org is an off-shoot of Wikipedia.org which is the world's best free online encyclopedia. Boundaries do not exist in their mind. Wiki's founders and directors have fought for years on the issue of freedom of speech- especially crossing country divisions where people simply do not have access to uncensored information by their government. A grade school child in China cannot do a search on "Tienanmen Square" without getting the red screen of death meaning that they've chosen to search for an illegal term. There are servers which have popped up sporadically in countries like this to offset the totalitarian thought control, however the majority of populations in countries with censorship still do not know a great deal of what is really going on in the world around them. Everything is hearsay.
A few months ago when I first learned of the Wikileaks organization I immediately put up a link to it in the Human Rights Sites and Organizations module on the blog. It will remain a permanent link.
As far as 'gnosis' is concerned- Wikileaks is right up our ally. Why censor, denounce, classify, or withhold information unless it is damaging to an entity's perceived image? And if something isn't broke then it doesn't need fixing, right? But if it is.....
{Link to another interesting article: US Intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks, 18 March 2008}
Charges filed against soldier in Wikileaks case.
Private First Class Bradley Manning faces two charges and 12 counts of illegally providing classified information to an unauthorized source.
The charge sheet claims that PFC Manning unlawfully accessed the gun camera video of an Apache helicopter attack on July 12, 2007 against suspected insurgents killing an undetermined number of civilians. Then Manning allegedly passed that video onto Wikileaks, which is known for posting such controversial documents as the Army’s Guantánamo Bay procedures, Church of Scientology documents and contents from Sarah Palin’s e-mail account.
Wikileaks posted two versions of the now-infamous Baghdad airstrike video, a 39-minute unedited version and an annotated 18-minute version, on April 5, 2010. Titling it “Collateral Murder,” Wikileaks cited the video as evidence of a Pentagon coverup. Two Reuters employees and a Baghdad man were three of the more than a dozen killed during the attack. Two children were also seriously injured.
Manning is also charged with unlawfully tapping into the military's secret Internet protocol router network to obtain the video, and more than 200,000 classified State Department cables.
The Associated Press reported previously that former computer Hacker Adrian Lamo says that Manning claimed in a series of online chats that he downloaded 260,000 classified or sensitive State Department cables and transmitted them by computer to Wikileaks.
Manning remains in custody in Kuwait but will be returned to Baghdad shortly to face an Article 32 hearing, the military's equivalent of a grand jury hearing.
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"Chris" commented on the article:
I am just an old guy. But I was career military intelligence and served in Vietnam. While there I had the "privilege" of watching Nixon on TV swearing "on his mother's grave" that were not bombing in Laos or Cambodia while interviewing pilots who were returning from bombing in Laos and Cambodia. We constantly received TWX's (teletype messages) telling us that we could go to jail for disclosing any information at all to journalists, Congressmen, FBI agents, or any other person, official or not, who asked. While I was in Vietnam I read Bernard Fall's book, "Rue Sans Joi" and when I returned it to the base library, watched in horror as the librarian tore the book to pieces, because it was considered to be harmful to morale.
In another later incident, I had a NSA employee show me the radar tapes of the Gulf of Tonkin incident that Johnson used to justify new ROE's for bombing of the North. There were no torpedo boats on the tapes. There were no intercepted communications with the non-existent boats.
I got to see infants who had been killed with M-16 fire (where I was it could have been either Americans or Koreans who did the shooting) and was ordered to count dead babies as "main force NVA soldiers."
I had friends who died and friends who were wounded (including myself) in Vietnam. I didn't come back with PTSD or Agent Orange poisoning, just some scalp and facial holes and a great deal of hearing loss. But what I did bring home was a sense of guilt that I did not make an attempt to disclose what I knew. Sometimes not telling the truth is the same as telling a lie.
But I did what, at the time, I perceived as the "honorable" thing --- when my hitch was up, I threw away 10 years of service and did not re-up. My heart simply was no longer in watching my government under both Johnson and Nixon tell lie after lie about the war.
So I can well understand how a soldier, when confronted with situation where the military acted inappropriately and with ill-conceived malice would find it easier to tell and suffer the consequences rather that have to live with the knowledge that he did nothing.
And for those who call it treason. Telling the truth has never been treasonous. And treason is strictly limited to giving aid to the enemy in a declared war. The military has a long history of classifying documents and such in order to keep the truth from the American public and the victims' families. A good example is the Tillman affair in which McChrystal knew that Tillman was killed by friendly fire, in violation of the RoE's and in a situation where training and "best practices" had been disregarded. McChrystal proposed awarding Tillman a Silver Star instead and had everything related to the incident classified "Top Secret." The people who "blew the whistle" on the Tillman situation was an Army physician who did the autopsy and several of the Seals who were with Tillman. Was that treason?
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