More Wikileaks.Follow

Ok, but hasn't everything in the Wikileaks stuff already happened? None of it is current or future plans or current troop placement or anything, is it? Or are you arguing the slippery slope angle?

Are you implying that 'leak of documents'>'war-crimes'?

Don't bother to answer actually. I already know that you're a numbskull.

Nah, just the maker-of-signatures for it.

It's like the fact that the codes were cracked was released after the war was over, and they had ceased to be relevant.

Yeah, totally the same as the wikileaks.

edit:
Nobody else is, this is just you trying to shout without actually saying anything and going to play semantics again in which you'll repeat that you are right and everyone else is wrong because we don't understand what we're talking about.
So would you kindly quit doing that or just **** off alltogether?

Edited, Oct 24th 2010 11:55pm by Aethien

According to what I've read on this forum and the little that I've heard from the media (still no tv), I think the discovered information is embarrassing to our nation and the people involved should get punished accordingly. Even though I believe that, I really haven't gotten past the fact that classified information was leaked to get too far into the details of what actually happened.

There's a huge difference to leaking intentive information vs. passive information.

I can't believe you people dared to criticize Alma's military!

Even if the reason its classified is because its embarrassing?

Ideally people would read this sort of released information and realise that wars are being started under false pretences and people are dying needlessly (to put it mildly) and be a little less enthusiastic about allowing it to kick off in the first place and to get involved in it in the second.

But I realise humans are stupid and that probably wont happen.

The information should not be ignored, but in any rate, it does not justify the leak, because there are people with the proper clearance and the need to know to handle situations such as this. The United States operates off of the "check and balance" system. No one person has total control over anything. There are reporting procedures in place to handle such activities. You report those activities to those people, not to the media.



It doesn't matter what you or me think. All information that has the same classification is treated the same. When information is declassified, then and only then can you treat it differently. Individuals possessing this information can not make that call for themselves. Once again, we don't know the relevance of information from 1,5 or 25 years ago. For all we know, we could have pulled off a successful mission 3 decades ago that we would like to keep secret so we could use a similar strategy on another mission in another country in another war.

Bottom line is, individuals do not determine the classification or relevance of this type of information. If a person notices wrong doing, you report it according to the reporting procedures that are put in place.

I can understand the idea behind Alma's point. Classified information should remain classified because the military deems it necessary. Some information, as he said, could be used to hurt our troops. The military, ideally, knows what should and should not be released.

However, what undermines this idea is the fact that this information has seemed to not pose any real value for our enemies - however, the image it could show of our country is extremely negative. In this case, keeping such information "classified" falls very far out of the realm of "Hey, people could die if this gets released!" and much more into the realm of "Damn, we look bad... let's keep this under wraps for the next 30 years." It becomes image control.

No one is saying "All classified information should be shown publicly." But what this case seems to show is that the US government cannot be trusted to tell us the truth. In this case, while WikiLeaks acted "wrong" by airing these documents, the result is a positive. It reminds me of my psychology classes in college, where we learned about Philip Zimbardo's infamous "Prison Experiment." While his actions were reprehensible, we learned a lot about how humans work by breaking the rules. Being idealistic is great in theory, but a lot of times things don't turn out quite right if you stick to it. I find it very hard to condone or condemn WikiLeaks. I don't want to say "Huzzah, more leaks needed!" because unchecked it could end up very bad for our troops (ie, Alma's code breaker scenario). I also don't want to say "The government knows best! It's classified because we say it should be!" because in this case the files seemed to be classified for no reason other than spin, and nothing can be fixed if a problem is not acknowledged in the first place. Both are dangerous, and I don't know what the middle ground would be. It's not an easy situation.

I think that's part of the issue, though. Said procedures are not working, as death tolls are un- or under-reported. Abuse by Americans as well as our allies were documented... and brushed aside. So the situation is the latter you described: the current reporting procedures appear to have failed, so you should not feel sorry for the government.

I can't comment on the motivation behind WikiLeaks releasing the documents, because I'm not them. I think that they did release them in the most responsible manner they could: redaction, but full disclosure after intensive review. As I said before, I can't bring myself to condemn or condone their actions, but I think the end result is a positive one. Changes could not happen if these weren't released. Sure, they could be declassified in future decades, but by then nothing would likely be done about it. Now that major combat operations have ended in Iraq, this seems like as good a time as any.

Edited, Oct 25th 2010 8:11am by LockeColeMA