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U.S. Intelligence Analyst arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe
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Did you get it? When we tried, we got shot down.
It really doesn't, when you consider that we're effectively always at war. New and rehashed wars are on the back burner should they ever become necessary.
In this particular case I'd be surprised if all DoD video intel of a battle didn't automatically fall under either secret or TS, making it unauthorized for disclosure for 10 or 25 years respectively. Which means it's left up to someone qualified to to actually declassify it before then. More detailed info in this pdf.
So there's an argument to be made that the government should have declassified this sooner (discounting whatever vague intel concerns there may be for the sake of simplicity) but I strongly doubt it was classified because of civilian deaths.
Also, we're not really at war.
The U.S. has not been in a state of war since the end of World War II.
From a constitutional standpoint, everything since then has been a military action. Military law is affected by this, as are veteran's benefits and so forth.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
1- Background check
2- Need to know
3- Signed Non-Disclosure agreement
Now, I'm just guessing here, but the average Army E-4 prolly doesn't need access to all the things this kid got his hands on, which makes a big mess of how we classify and store data in the intelligence community, regardless of whether or not he was a 733t h4x0rzing government systems (which are subject to monitoring in accordance with DoD blah.blahblah.blah).
The NDA, though, is where they're really gonna hang his ass out.
And because the same people in charge of declassifying are the ones who benefit from everything being classified.
Because the people with desk jobs are the ones committing war crimes? O_o
During the early years of the Iraq occupation, US forces would leave things like explosive components or ammunition on the side of a road at night. If a person picked it up, he was considered an illegal combatant and immediately shot.
How high up the chain of command does something like this have to originate before the person is qualified as having a 'desk job'?
Forget that, look at the Bush/Gitmo thread for a second. Grunts are not the responsible ones when atrocities are being committed, by and large.
Regardless, the ones who commit war crimes are not the ones responsible for the declassification of sensitive documents.
I mean it's one thing to say "shady tactics" or whatever, but the phrase "almost illegal" doesn't really compute to me.
I think this is new evidence of criminals are stupid, if you get away with something DON'T TALK ABOUT IT.
Then again keeping secrets is something he had a hard time with in the first place.
We were actually denied those lat/longs as well. And there was no historical coverage to look at either. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but we should have definitely been able to pull up something. Maybe they just didn't want kids doing exactly the thing we were trying to do.
Sorry, off topic a bit. Getting back on the rails here.
Just because a ton of things get classified that may not need it, doesn't mean it's suddenly okay to share it. If it's classified, it's classified, end of story. There's no grey area here.
I figure that if what was released can hurt American soldiers or her citizens, then the guy's guilty of treason. I know he didn't share plans for a nuclear reactor, so there's that at least. But giving organizations like Al-Queda more recruitment ammunition is pretty awful as well. Can you legally judge someone on the impact of their actions, as opposed to the actions themselves? Drunk driving carries a stiff penalty, regardless of whether or not anything else happened.
I don't particularly care for our government in the best of times, but I'm smart enough to know what would happen should I break the law. And I wouldn't have been gloating after doing it. Or listening to Lady Gaga while doing it. Seriously? That's what you brag about? Ug.
This is an argument I can't accept. If the army is going around shooting civilians, it shouldn't be covered up just 'because it would make us look bad'. It's one thing to keep guys from going on record and saying stuff like "we're at war with all of Islam!", but if shooting guys for driving through the wrong place at the wrong time outrages people, well sure, they deserve to be outraged.
Uh, sure there is. You are assuming too narrow a premise for the actual argument being put forth.
The argument isn't that so many mundane things are classified that classifying information is itself wrong; the argument is whether or not certain very important things should be classified or not. Massive gray area there.
Yeah, but if I recall the video correctly, aside from callsigns (which can get changed whenever - "Okay, you guys are Dagger now instead of Spear - GO!") wasn't there some discussion on determining that the people on the video were unfriendlies? So in addition to the world knowing exactly what we can and cannot see on specific types of feed, there's an insight to the process of how we determine these things and RoE. All kinds of information can be derived from video feed - I'm not so worried about the recruitment side of it.
I'm very not cool with giving anyone an idea of our tactics, techniques and procedures. And TTPs are the reason a lot of this shit is classified, because it's not stuff you want the bad guys to know. The video doesn't need to be out there, but peepees really need to be smacked that it happened in the first place.
You mean like when Wikileaks released the technical details of the jammers being used to stop remote-detonated IEDs, including which frequencies they blocked and which ones they didn't?
I don't know about treason, but I'll bet somewhere in these 260,000 communiques there's something in there that qualifies as a violation of the Espionage Act.
Wow.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/12/warlock-wikilea/
Are you serious.
I mean, did nobody on the Wikileaks board look at that data and realize that maybe, just maybe, it wasn't a good idea to publish it? I mean, there's revealing corruption and crime and revealing how soliders stop bombs from killing them.
The article itself says they're still used.
So yeah that's a dick move. What Hoz said too.
WikiLeaks is not based in the United States. The people who run it are, by and large, not Americans. In fact, a lot of them think that Americans are silly geese, and that some of our current military activity is unjustified and illegal. So that might explain some of their motivation.
A lot of the posting here seems to assume that everyone out there is either an insurgent, or should be doing everything they can to support the mission of the US military. However, I can tell you that many people out there in the world don't really care if American soldiers can prevent IEDs from going off in their faces, without necessarily having any malevolent intent towards those soldiers or the United States in general.
To put it another way, would you care if 260,000 Chinese diplomatic documents were posted on WikiLeaks?
"Vyn is the Master Director of PA. He's an Oscar winner, IMO." - MayGodHaveMercy (drunk)
Exactly this.
Also, if Wikileaks' twitter account is to be trusted, as of a few days ago they knew nothing of the 260,000 embassy cables.
You've misread or skimmed through a good portion of this thread then.
To answer your question: Yes. Now are we done with silly claims and silly questions aimed at showing how Americans don't care about foreign countries that don't end with -merica and don't begin with A?
Good point, I honestly forgot all about that.
However, I feel that if the video shows non-combatants being killed it should be released, because if it is found that non-combatants are killed purposely (i.e., murdered) I want the prosecution to have all the evidence necessary to punish all those responsible.
Google+ Profile Origin: 13Evigilant Steam: Evigilant
The jammers, as I understand them, are not offensive weapons. If this was a manual on how to avoid detection by Predator drones or something, I might understand. But publishing the jammer details seems to be a way to cause more death, not less. From thinking the US military should not be in the Middle East to making it easier to kill American soldiers in the Middle East is quite a leap, I'd say.
It also comes down to exactly how separated journalists should be from the story. Should they be 100% impartial? I remember that Anderson Cooper was criticized for saving a child being beaten by looters in Haiti, because his involvement in the story comprised his duties as an "objective" journalist. Sanjay Gupta was criticized for similar reasons after offering medical care to earthquake victims in Haiti, as well as tsunami victims in Southeast Asia. A truly impartial witness-bearer would not have gotten involved, but rather simply filmed the person dying.
IED's have blown up civilian or aid convoys a fuckton more than military after all
That kind of impartiality is heinous borderline monstrous behavior imo
If a reporter can save a life he has a duty as a fucking human being to do so
When you release stuff that serves no purpose other than getting people exploded, it fuels the fire of "SHUT DOWN WIKILEAKS AND WHISTLEBLOWER SIGHTS CAUSE THEY HATE AMERICA"
hrm..
Conspiracy theory: The government intentionaly released the jammer leak so that they could use it as fuel to shut down wikileaks.
Releasing jammer info isn't what I'd describe as whistle-blowing. Whistle-blowing is shedding light on something that is wrong, either morally, ethically, or legally. It's not like the jammers were being powered by the blood of babies. How are their technical details something immoral that must be brought to light?
If there were a secret report saying that the jammers were known to be defective but were being used anyways, publishing that would be whistle-blowing. But the act of publishing confidential information by itself is not enough. If I stole a bunch of people's medical records and threw them up on the Internet, that would not be whistle-blowing, it would just be me being a jackass.
You probably wouldn't have liked the 1987 Fred Friendly panel on ethics regarding the media and the military then. That's where Mike Wallace and Peter Jennings famously declared they wouldn't warn American soldiers of an impending ambush, because they were reporters first and Americans second.
That predictably pissed off George Connell, a Marine colonel on the panel, who said ""I feel utter contempt. Two days later they're both walking off my hilltop, they're two hundred yards away and they get ambushed. And they're lying there wounded. And they're going to expect I'm going to send Marines up there to get them. They're just journalists, they're not Americans. But I'll do it. And that's what makes me so contemptuous of them. And Marines will die, going to get a couple of journalists."
Treating someone who has a neck wound versus letting them bleed out is a different matter
Doesn't make not it a dick move in 2008 and, as was mentioned, if the newer technology is based on the old they gave everyone a jumping board for figuring it out.
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And a lot of things are kept classified because as was mentioned it starts off classified. Nobody took that tape, decide what was on it was important, and then classified it. It was classified the moment it was a DOD tape recording of military operations. And until someone bothers to declassify it it stays that way depending on what level they classify those. We just went over this.
It just puts more people in danger.
Now granted some people will say 'well that's what that video does because now people will not trust US military' but trust is earned not granted and when that trust is broken through questionable tactics and cover ups it should be known. That's how you fix things.
But there's simply no truth to this concept that stuff gets classified because the government is determined to hide any and all information that might make it look bad. Frankly, I'd find it more likely that the tape never got declassified simply out of callousness and laziness than actual malevolence.