Pentagon Seeking Out Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange 628
a user writes "The Pentagon is desperately seeking the 'cooperation' of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, in order to stop him from releasing over 250,000 pages of confidential foreign policy documents. The documents were allegedly provided to Assange by Bradley Manning, the same solider who leaked a video showing a US Army helicopter killing unarmed civilians and international press correspondents."
Re:They know not what they seek! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:As they should be. (Score:1, Informative)
treason (plural treasons)
noun
Definition:
1. betrayal of country: a violation of the allegiance owed by somebody to his or her own country, e.g. by aiding an enemy.
2. treachery: betrayal or disloyalty
3. act of betrayal: an act of betrayal or disloyalty
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:As they should be. (Score:2, Informative)
Did you bother watching the video?! THe guy did NOT have a ROCKET LAUNCHER. It was a god damn camera with super long lens. (I am not trying to be funny, that's what really happened)
Re:As they should be. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:We promise we won't hurt you. (Score:5, Informative)
The things that stood out to me:
MOD PARENT WRONG (Score:5, Informative)
I watched the whole video. It doesn't mention wikileaks, the wikileaks founder, or anything surrounding this case at all. The video is about an entirely different leak (of which almost no details are given), and Obama doesn't even threaten to arrest that guy.
Re:Here comes the court case Judges please be fair (Score:5, Informative)
Er, this was thoroughly explained at the time of the original article - his passport was 'confiscated' because it was old and damaged and wouldn't pass through the bloody readers. It was returned 15 minutes later, and he was informed THAT passport would need to be cancelled. That is, he'd have to go to the post office at some point and request a new one. NOT that his right to a passport had been removed altogether.
No conspiracy there, just customs informing him his old and tattered passport needed replacing. Happens all the time to regular travelers.
Re:As they should be. (Score:5, Informative)
Do you recall the story that broke soon after the video, regarding a house that special forces stormed on bad intel, in which various people were killed, including two women that the soldiers apparently arranged deceptively so that they could claim in their report that they were previously killed in an "honor killing?" The incident that the commanding general of SOCOM had to fork over a wad of cash and apologize for? If there had been a video of that, with black-clad soldiers going "Oh shit! I think these people were just civilians!" and then digging out their rounds from the bodies, tying them up, artfully arranging them, and discussing their cover story, how do you think that would have gone over? Instead of everyone forgetting in a few weeks, we'd still be watching the congressional hearings on CSPAN.
Regarding the guncam video, do you find the destruction of the van, and the attack on the building with missiles while apparent bystanders walk by to be equally unavoidable as the deaths of the journalists? I am a little surprised that the video didn't at least make you wonder at all about the wisdom of the RoE they were operating under. You don't have to demonize the pilots and gunners personally to find fault in the incident. The military's reports found that the crewmen did make the right call in every case, and summarily declared all 20+ men killed in the various attacks "AIF" (Anti-Iraq Forces), so you can't write everything off as a tragic mistake; it was tragic official policy.
Even if all of these things are rendered "unavoidable" by our political need for near-airtight force protection (like the dozens of unarmed civilians killed at Afghan road checkpoints), many people are not aware that they occur. If everyone knew exactly what went on in Iraq and Afghanistan, they might not support the military missions there (or future hypothetical invasions) so much; war reporting certainly had that effect during Vietnam. If no one ever gets outraged, what motivation is there to avoid these entanglements, or even to try harder to avoid civilian casualties in the conflicts we are already fighting?
I can only imagine that all the random milita members on the streets with rifles and RPGs that day didn't realize that the helicopters ~1km away were or could be targeting them. I agree that the Reuters stringers took a foolish risk, and that the initial incident is not indefensible. Maybe "AIF" ambushes are always that ridiculously nonchalant. Everything that happens afterward, though...
Also keep in mind that the only reason anyone (any American) ever cared about this incident was that it was subsequently discovered that two of the "AIF" were Reuters stringers. Imagine how many incidents there must have been where people who didn't work for a major Western news organization were creatively classified as insurgents. I'm sure that some of them weren't pointing giant telephoto lenses at the Bradley convoy down the block, and would be harder to blame for their own demises.
Re:As they should be. (Score:3, Informative)
With the last decade of torture and other war crimes, I wouldn't trust the Pentagon further than I could throw it.
Re:As they should be. (Score:5, Informative)
In my opinion, though, the most interested detail is the motivation for nuclear launch codes. As you pointed out, there should be (and there is) some physical security measure in place to ensure that some random guy does not launch a nuclear missile. The purpose of the arming codes is not to prevent Joe Schmoe from starting World War 3, but to prevent the soldiers themselves from doing so without authorization. Prior to the Kennedy administration, nuclear bombs were armed when they were deployed (dropped from an airplane), and the only measure in place to prevent a pilot from doing so without orders was a single soldier standing near the plane, who was supposed to shoot the pilot in such a situation -- but the commander might issue the order to strike without authorization.
As for the codes being leaked...that was considered as well. The codes change frequently, some change daily (i.e. the codes that the president carries -- there are other codes, like maintenance codes), so even a leak would have a low potential for causing a problem (a pair of rogue soldiers hell bent on launching a nuke would have to get the authorization codes on the same day they are leaked).
Really, people bring up nuclear secrets (and for some reason, launch codes) whenever they want you to abandon all logical thought and stop questioning the need for broad secrecy. A lot of things that people think are secret really are not secret, or are things that were once secret but are not anymore: it used to be the case that anything related to nuclear weapons, even chemical data about the fuel, was automatically classified, but that policy was relaxed somewhat. Sure, there are things that are secret and that are better kept secret, like the locations and planned movements of US military units in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the identities of spies in foreign countries, but there is a limit and things are supposed to be declassified after a certain amount of time, with certain rare exceptions.
Re:This guy Manning (Score:3, Informative)
If you score high enough on the ASVAB test (IIRC 90th percentile & above), recruiters are apt to push you into Intelligence. That's what the recruiter who reviewed my test scores in high school said.
Assuming he enlisted right out of high school, he could have been assigned to an intelligence unit (or assigned intelligence duties in a line unit) for approx. four years, which is plenty of time to get enough experience to be a "specialist".
Re:As they should be. (Score:5, Informative)
And Hitler was elected in democratic elections as well.
No, he wasn't, stop spreading that BS please. Hitler was appointed by Hindenburg, then engineered the Reichstag fire, then enacted draconian laws on grounds of security, used that to rig the next election, which still didn't bring him majority. He then forced Hindenburg out, forced the new Reichstag into giving him legislative powers, effectively suspended the constitution, and then proceeded on to murder his opposition in and outside of his party, and, finally, using the "emergency" legislative powers to declare himself a Furher. Or somesuch. But he was never elected at any point of his national political career by a majority.
Re:Unarmed civilians? (Score:3, Informative)
That is the wrong question. According to the Geneva Convention, the question is, "How did those helicopter pilots know that none of those people were civilians?"
This brings to mind a classic quote... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:We promise we won't hurt you. (Score:3, Informative)
No, you don't - but it helps when you know what you're talking about.
If you have never stood at the wrong end of a gun, it's near impossible to imagine being there for days, weeks, or even months.
Personally, I've only spent several hours of my life standing at the wrong ends of lethal weapons. I don't consider myself qualified to judge the actions taken by front line soldiers, day in and day out. But, at least I have a few clues about what they are going through.
Re:This guy Manning (Score:1, Informative)
I'm not in the military, only acquainted with one person who is, pretty much guessing about all this, and mostly writing this for those who scored this "Insigtful" instead of "Funny"...
"Specialist" is a class of ranks above private -- it means you've had some kind of "special" training (i.e. took a class on how radio frequencies bounce around inside a cave, or something) on a particular track beyond the Basic Training, which everyone gets. In this case, the guy had some "special" training on how to grab 260k documents he wasn't supposed to, and hand them over to the public. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialist_(rank)
Re:We promise we won't hurt you. (Score:2, Informative)