About that Wikileaks release

4 Responses to About that Wikileaks release

1. Rivrdog says:

   July 26, 2010 at 12:01 pm

   Even though I’m retired military, and see the need for some secrecy when at war, I tend to agree with you about big Brother government.

   That said, the anti-war guy who released the documents is NOT equipped to decide which ones might pose “exceptionally grave” damage to the war position of the USA. considering the number of documents involved, it’s not likely that the Wiki guy even read more than a few of them.

   What this incident shows me is that the military needs to take it’s information security a bit more seriously.

   That said also, I will cheer for the Brits if they prosecute this bonehead for violating THEIR Official Secrets Act, since some of the docs involved were apparently British, or concerned the operations of British units.
2. MadRocketScientist says:

   July 27, 2010 at 5:51 am

   This isn’t just one strange guy doing all this.

   The guy in front of Wikileaks might not know, but he has a rather large & diverse group working for him, so we don’t know exactly what kind of intelligence expertise he can bring to bear, or how much time they had to go through it all (we don’t know when he acquired the documents). In addition, he did hold back over 15000 documents while they went through and redacted sensitive information.

   I don’t think these are people who are trying to endanger soldiers & sailors, they are people helping us to keep our government accountable.
3. Rivrdog says:

   July 27, 2010 at 6:53 am

   Mad Rocket, I stick by my guns. Most of those reports are communications on specific military battlefield events, a very few are intelligence analyses. For them to be useful to the reader (any reader), the reader has to know about the events which presaged the reports. Those events may and may not be chronicled in the welter of stuff WikiLeaks put out.

   The problem is, an expert (and you have to believe that the Taliban have military experts, too) will be able to use that info to sort out patterns of battlefield conduct, patterns of orders from certain ranking officers, etc.

   The military is taught to be careful with EVERY such communication, and this guy has just released 76,000 communications. If I’m an enemy, I now have the complete book on our battlefield operations. During a war, being able to know what the enemy is going to do next generally makes you the winner.

   What WikiLeaks just did is nothing less than hand victory to the Taliban. The best we can do from this point on is to negotiate a deal with them and get the hell out, because, from now on, it gets VERY expensive to stay there and fight.

   But then, having the US negotiate rather than win is what the WikiLeaks people had in mind all along.

   Mad Rocket, you’re the first libertarian I’ve read who is totally anti-war. Most of the rest of the ells want to maintain a strong defense posture. It’s pretty damn hard to maintain a strong defense posture by advocating what amounts to a US surrender.

   Grow up, man.
4. MadRocketScientist says:

   July 28, 2010 at 5:39 am

   Yes, most libertarians want a strong DEFENSIVE posture, as in, military is for defense only. Most libertarians agreed with invading Afghanistan, but deplore our entering Iraq, since A) Iraq did not have any direct hand in attacking us, and B) because we might already be out of Afghanistan if we hadn’t divided our military resources.

   As for this wikileaks info, there is nothing there that the Taliban could not gather & asses just by simple observation or normal humint (which the Taliban are very good at, since they not only have civilian informants, they also have the Pakistani ISI working for them, along with god knows who else). As the White House said, there is nothing new here, except to those of us paying for the war that our government can’t seem to execute worth a god damn.

   Finally, if our government had been honest with the people footing the bill, such information would have no value.

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