I'm not going to touch on politics at all, I'm just going to address the earlier comment about how only documents from years ago were released and how little threat they pose.



HORSE SHIT.

I'm in the Army. In point of fact, I'm in Iraq right now, and this whole issue makes me want to cry at times. In the military, we have a term called "second order effects," which is basically a reinvention of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

You see, we have these things called Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures or TTPs. TTPs only change if they become out-dated, due to, say, the enemy catches on to our patterns and adapts to make that particular TTP invalid. Many of these TTPs are enshrined in a unit's SOP, or Standard Operating Procedures. When you tell the enemy how we operate and why we operate that way -- as many of the documents do -- you're putting American and other NATO soldiers' lives at risk. As a fictional example, let's say that a certain unit's SOP is that, if ambushed with small arms fire on a road, they will respond by laying down suppressive fire and driving through the kill zone, then conduct a halt no more than 500m away to conduct a LACE (Liquids, Ammo, Casualties, Equipment) and BDA (Battle Damage Assessment) check. If the enemy knows this, and recognizes the TTP, they can set up a small arms ambush on the next convoy going through. Except that instead of just AKs and RPGs, they lay the mother of all IEDs 500m down the road.

See where I'm going with this? Some of the information *is* damaging in its own right, especially the Afghan informant/defector stuff (which cannot be considered illegal by other nations, since they're not acting against a recognized government and/or its laws), but its the second and third order effects that the US Government is afraid of.

OK, just repeat after me: Naming the informers was unintentional.

WL commited the same blunder official sources do all the time, they release documents supposedly cleaned of sensitive information, but either overlook stuff or poor computer skills make the information easy to recover. Yet the government still continues to release these documents, and guess why? The right of the public to be informed about what their representatives do on their behalf outweights the consequences of accidental security breaches which might happen.

Just my final 2 cents on this, I'm just going to resist the temptation of the "psychiatric drugs and their public image" tangent

That's like saying "I didn't want to hit anybody when I drove over the red light".

While downing shots.

Well, the problem is, this is how it is done by everyone.

Which is not a great excuse to do it anyways. Only way to prevent something like that is to change how it is done, not replicate the failings of others.

Unfortuently, "National Security" has been used to cover such a multitude of illegal sins that should be aired in the public because they're lumped in with things that protect soldiers (Like the example Red Cap gives above.).

A number of which are downright Anti-American (And Anti-Canadian too. Hell, even Anti-Mexican!) when you get down to it.

Either we go the way we have been, letting them get away with things like selling Cocaine and Heroin to the street to fund black-ops (Vietnam and Contra, anyone?), or we have things like WikiLeak.

Of course, another idea is to scrap the whole thing and start fresh, but that would not be a good idea in the political enviroment we currently live in.

The government isn't the one releasing these documents, you know.

It's a sad thing that governments around the world are far from perfect and act in such ways. I just don't think it would get any better using the same methods. It's like seeing a group of people chop their hands off to put on a bracelet and no one thinks to make an adjustable piece of jewelry.

Technically, the best way is to demand transparency with enough force that it becomes reality, but that would take an entire nation's people with no certainty of success.

That makes me want to believe them even more than if the Government had.

In truth, "You can't believe half of what you read, and a tenth of what you see on TV" was something from my parent's generation. It's gotten even worse with mine.

Really it just highlights the dangers of an idealist in posession of top secret clearance.

I'm of the same opinion, largely due to bias. I firmly believe in research before making a decision or opinion in regards to world affairs and situations.

There is just as much reason to take Wikileaks as truth as any other biased perspective.

As opposed to fanatics who WRITE Top Secret Clearance?

Well, yes. And of the 90,000 or so docs released in this case, eh. An idealist stole the U.S. military's diary and read it aloud to the rest of the school. That's what this amounts to.

alrighty kids, looks like we're still running om current era topic here even after mod posting wanings. So let's shut this down for 24 and see if we can't revisit it wihout the continuation of modern politico talk