Wikileaks prepares next dump, Pentagon continues smear campaign - Polidicks

[img]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_jvugNnBkwBw/SvtzyL9IZoI/AAAAAAAAK1c/KMLTctlFLPw/s320/150_alternet_logo1-300x123.jpg[/img] [url=http://www.alternet.org/story/148231/wikileaks_prepares_next_big_document_dump,_while_media_and_pentagon_continue_smear_campaign_against_its_founder]Source[/url] [release]Scheduled for release in the next few weeks in concert with international and American media outlets, Wikileaks' data dump on Iraq could prove to be just as explosive as its download on Afghanistan. According to Newsweek, the Iraq collection is already three times larger than the 92,000 Afghan field reports made public in Wikileaks' last release, and perhaps the largest in history. It predictably details American military participation in bloody conflicts as well as detainee abuse conducted by Iraqi security forces. It's unclear at this point if its documents were submitted by Private First Class Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. military intelligence analyst who was charged in July with leaking the chilling Collateral Murder video to Wikileaks. Manning is already looking at over 50 years in prison for Uniform Code of Military Justice violations of "transferring classified data onto his personal computer and adding unauthorized software to a classified computer system" and "communicating, transmitting and delivering national defense information to an unauthorized source." After Collateral Murder went viral online and in real-time, Manning's whistle-blowing dominated the news cycle and even prompted U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen to clumsily claim that Wikileaks "might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier." Although he may have been speaking only of Manning, Mullen's damning statement has yet to be fortified with hard evidence. The move swamped the American government and military with further shame, compounding the shame of pursuing two simultaneous wars that retired U.S. Army Colonel Ann Wright argued "have violated domestic and international law, violations that have been fully exposed in the WikiLeaks documents." But the details, as always, are bedeviling. Mullen and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates openly admitted that Wikileaks' Afghanistan revelations had no strategic bearing on the war's prosecution. That added firepower to founder Julian Assange's claims that the military's beef with his organization has nothing to do with data at all. It has only to do with free speech, which is protected by the U.S. Constitution. That pulls the case against Wikileaks into the less sexy orbit of mundane censorship, rather than glamorous tactical compromises or even subconscious desires to bloody young soldiers for no good reason. Which, like Iraq, is a quagmire. Because in a century dominated by the Internet and its light-speed exchanges of information, the concept much less the enforcement of keeping the world in the dark about exorbitantly expensive wars -- over a conservative $1 trillion and counting! -- makes zero sense. In fact, it is costing us more than we can afford. It could cost us the First Amendment altogether. Recently confirmed Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor predicted that the Wikileaks controversy will inevitably lead the high court to once again weigh in on the problematic tightrope between national security and the First Amendment. The last momentous clash came in 1971, after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in New York Times Co. v. United States that the Nixon administration didn't have sufficient burden of proof to suspend publication of the Pentagon Papers, an exhaustive U.S. Department of Defense history of the Vietnam War compiled by the Rand Corporation. Leaked by Rand employee and ex-Marine Daniel Ellsberg to the New York Times and others, the Pentagon Papers proved without much doubt that the American government had zero problem with purposefully lying to its people for the sake of a doomed war that greatly enriched only a few while destroying the lives of millions. But our temporal dislocation is alarming. Back then, it took a major newspaper like the the New York Times to both publish and defend the Pentagon Papers in the Supreme Court. These days, the New York Times is better known for allowing politically compromised reporters like Judith Miller to manufacture lies to sway public approval for Vietnam 2.0 in Iraq. Miller's most egregious transgression -- helping to out intelligence agent Valerie Plame to discredit due criticism of the Bush administration's foregone conclusion -- fits our post-ironic epoch like a bulletproof vest. Instead of unpacking government's criminal element and protecting whistle-blowing in the public interest, mainstream media in the 21st century are content to betray that public interest for the benefit of those whose hands really are drowning in the blood and capital of innocents. It is left to online outlets like Wikileaks to not only reboot journalism by informing a vastly uninformed American public, but also fortify that public's homegrown First Amendment with every data dump. The fact that Wikileaks, and its inevitably replicating clones, might have to defend freedom of speech in front of Sotomayor and the Supreme Court is alarming when you consider that Assange isn't even American. He's Australian, and his affiliated transparency champions are a global group armed with information-stuffed servers stashed across the planet. Through their essential leaks and international makeup, they understand that safeguarding so-called national security at the expense of international truth and transparency is a loser's game in this still-new century. Which is not to say that the Supreme Court might not disagree, given the chance. It's not radical to suggest that judges like Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and John Roberts might be partial to protecting national security at the expense of the First Amendment. Sotomayor can legally give no indication where she stands on the issue until it arises before the Supreme Court, and good luck getting anything out of Elena Kagan. Like the New York Times, the Supreme Court could side with the transitory powers-that-be over what should be immutable American constitutional rights. But for how long? Millennia of human culture have weighed in on the issue and the verdict is pretty clear: Information is contagious, and cannot be contained with any credible strength for long. Mash in a globally networked Internet, whose design and purpose -- military in origin -- expressly mandates extensive information transmission. You're not going to stop data dumps by Wikileaks, or anyone else, from occurring forever. Unless of course, you shut everything down and pull the plug on democracy. Like us, information wants to be free, and mostly because we need it to survive as a species. Without it today, we're drones on autopilot, until we're arbitrarily activated to wreak collateral damage on digital abstractions we once considered fellow humans. We shouldn't cross that technocultural line; we should reinscribe it. We can start by defending those, like Wikileaks, who are redefining both journalism and free speech in an internetworked age.[/release]

Who reads these documents anyway?

The Pentagon paranoids I assume?

[QUOTE=CounterTunes;25063912]Who reads these documents anyway?[/QUOTE] Angsty rebellious teenagers

Yay more pointless media coverage.

[QUOTE=STREWTH_99;25063934]Angsty rebellious teenagers[/QUOTE] I'm sorry but what?

[QUOTE=CounterTunes;25063912]Who reads these documents anyway?[/QUOTE] I do.

[QUOTE=CounterTunes;25063912]Who reads these documents anyway?[/QUOTE] People who don't trust the heavily pro-America mainstream media.

wow.

[QUOTE=CounterTunes;25063912]Who reads these documents anyway?[/QUOTE] Afganistan terrorists who wants to kill people in villages that have helped American troops, of course.

If 9/11 appears once in it, shukaidoX will start another 20 page thread then abandon ship for the next one where the same sequence happens. Facepunch, can we ignore this unless it actually proves something we don't already know? And if a theorist makes a thread, are we able to let them talk crazy NWO stuff without us interfering and disproving them?

I don't even care anymore. It feels like they are searching for attention.

Wasn't that the point in the first place?

[QUOTE=STREWTH_99;25063934]Angsty rebellious teenagers[/QUOTE] What this I how did this get agrees Facepunch come over right right now I need to have a word with you.

[QUOTE=Nerts;25064436]People who don't trust the heavily pro-America mainstream media.[/QUOTE] It's the CRS who leak 80% of the documents on wikileaks anyway

[QUOTE=STREWTH_99;25063934]Angsty rebellious teenagers[/QUOTE] or people who are interested in what their government is hiding from them

[QUOTE=STREWTH_99;25063934]Angsty rebellious teenagers[/QUOTE] Excuse me, but I don't think teenagers have the brain capacity to do such a thing.

[QUOTE=STREWTH_99;25063934]Angsty rebellious teenagers[/QUOTE] True, also conspiracy theorists (may be same group) or people who are just curious and skeptical of the government

I don't need WikiLeaks, I have The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The funniest part of their shows is that they're the best source of news in the U.S.

[QUOTE=marlkarxv2;25081244]Excuse me, but I don't think teenagers have the brain capacity to do such a thing.[/QUOTE] lol

I can see why some military leaks should've not been leaked. But I don't understand why they need to hide so much for us. That goes for every country, do they believe that they're doing something stupid or cruel? If so, why are they doing it? I asked myself many times. If they don't think what they're doing is bad. Why hide it for the public? Me as a Swedish citizen believes I have the right to know what my country is doing (literally).

[QUOTE=IAmAnooB;25081926]I can see why some military leaks should've not been leaked. But I don't understand why they need to hide so much for us. That goes for every country, do they believe that they're doing something stupid or cruel? If so, why are they doing it? I asked myself many times. If they don't think what they're doing is bad. Why hide it for the public? Me as a Swedish citizen believes I have the right to know what my country is doing (literally).[/QUOTE] The military fights them because they know that it only takes a few stories to make them look evil. Just look at Vietnam, all the bad shit got covered and every veteran that go back was spit upon. I'm not saying they aren't trying to hide shit, but the American people are stupid enough to spit on anyone, even they're own blood.

[QUOTE=Swilly;25082929]The military fights them because they know that it only takes a few stories to make them look evil. Just look at Vietnam, all the bad shit got covered and every veteran that go back was spit upon. I'm not saying they aren't trying to hide shit, but the American people are stupid enough to spit on anyone, even they're own blood.[/QUOTE] Yes well, starting a war in Vietnam for no reason does tend to make people angry, I think.

If they're going to leak stuff it better be juicy stuff not just some boring shit intelligence reports

"like fuck the government dude the corporations are invading whoaaa establishmeeeennnnnnnnttttttttt"

[QUOTE=chronochicke;25083626]If they're going to leak stuff it better be juicy stuff not just some boring shit intelligence reports[/QUOTE] strafing schoolbuses full of children boooooooooorriiiiiiiinnggg

It's not like less people will read the documents thanks to the military overreacting. A similar thing happened in Sweden a few years ago. There was a horrible murder of two young children and the attempted murder of their mother. The documentation of the preliminary investigation (containing pics of the victims), as with all such documents in most criminal investigations, is available to the public. So someone uploaded it to The Pirate Bay, which caused a massive media shitstorm. This of course, made everyone download the report to see what all the fuss was about.

They were leaked by a PFC? Who the fuck gives a PFC control of anything more than his rifle?

It's a conspiracy. :tinfoil:

[QUOTE=mastermaul;25084462]They were leaked by a PFC? Who the fuck gives a PFC control of anything more than his rifle?[/QUOTE] The real world isn't exactly like Call of Duty.