Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire WikiLeaks: Who's Hiding What and Why - Fred Reed

Hey now... not so fast...

And the Stars and Stripes flew over conquered territory on April 27, 1804. In 1813 we are engaged in tribal warfare in the Marquesas. And so on and so fourth. Nothing new.
Just wondering why folks are surprised.

Why? Anarchists, leftists, illegals here in America all fly the flag upside down, usually just before burning it....so, where do you fit in? Don't tell me you are a follower of TRH!

you notice he has no response other than a funny picture to my question about what the hell he was talking about with his nazi reference.


see, in the Hawkeye parallel universe...you've got a guy who is a fascist, jew hater, loves uniforms, surrounds himself with thugs and perverts who also like fancy uniforms, gases ethnic groups he considers inferior, and commits torture and mass murder on an industrial scale. But the Americans who deposed him are apparently the proto-nazis.

figure that one out

Hawkeye really doesn't want to talk about Jefferson's secret and borderline treasonous foreign entanglements with the French revolutionaries' ambassador, while he was vice president of the United States.

I just re-read Fred's take on the wikileaks . Then I re-read Hunter Jim's excellent post .

This business of " nation building wars " has never worked and will never work . The leaks apparently are just going to hasten the inevitable end of the effort .

The real culprits in this affair are the Pentagon genius's who created a system where a PFC could deliver ALL this classified info to a media outlet which is beyond the reach of US law .

Of course the PFC is guilty of diseminating classified info and that may, or may not , be treason . But the idiots who created a system that allowed ALL of it to be disclosed before ANY of it was discovered are the ones who put our troops at risk just as much as the PFC .

You would never get draftees to fight in a " nation building " war .And THAT is a good argument for the draft .

If the real casualties of the leaks - as Jim's source thinks - will be the afghans we bribed/converted to our "side" they are probably climbing up on the embassy roof already .

If nuthin' changes ; nuthin' changes .

Not sure I follow you on this? Throughout history we've had traitors that occasionally show up and do stuff like this. Sometimes to the media and sometimes to enemies while other times to "friends".

This PFC was obviously cleared and had access through his job. You could never prevent a determined traitor unless we start conducting recurring lie detector tests which would not end well either.

How would you propose preventing such disclosures by a determined individual?

The Taliban are busily analyzing and correlating the raw intel releases to determine who the snitches and agents among them are. Wikipedia condemned dozens of brave men and women to torture and death.

They should be real proud.

The idea that some PFC knows what information should be released and not the classifying authority, is beyond naive and dangerous.

Reed seems to think information is classified to protect politicians and companies, when in reality, that couldn't be further from the truth.

Even the President often receives sanitized information, as the most important factor in classified information is often not the subject information, but who, what and how that information was acquired. Something a user or recipient down the information chain may have no clue of when he/she takes it upon themselves to disseminate it.

I'm not a security expert and know very little about computers . What prompted my remarks is the idea that the Vegas casinos have a guy that watches the guy that watches the guy who watches the guys who move and count the money .

I don't know the level of classification assigned to these reports . If - as they are now claiming - its' disclosure could put the whole war effort in jeopardy it should have been classified at a level that precluded ANY PFC from having access to it .

In the early sixties when I did my hitch , getting a " classified " security clearance was done at Company level .A "Secret " clearance required Battalion level scrutiny and NCO's were the lowest ranks to hold that as a rule .I never ran across anybody with a " Top Secret " clearance but I'm guessing they would have been Staff NCO's and Officers .

The names should have been redacted at the issuing source , I would think .

Your guess is wrong. In the late '50s when I served I held a Top Secret clearance as an 18 y/o E-3. It is not so much a matter of rank as need to know. Of course in those days we understood the meaning of an oath and a sacred trust. None of us would have betrayed our country.

The perpetrator of this outrage should be shot. Since that is unlikely, he should at least given a long prison sentence.

Paul

It all depends on your MOS/AFSC and need to know. There is no rank to security clearance ratio to my knowledge, even in the Army. There may be need to know that escalates with rank of course, but hell, I was sanitizing SCI as an E-4 before I gave my own Majcom 2 star his briefing.

The Russians did stuff like you mention, security guys watching the guys watching the guys... We don't really do that, other than your chain of command and of course some information security IT types that watch for individuals trying to access shyt they aren't cleared or have a need to know.

As far as info that could damage us or the war effort. The amount of information out there that can damage us worldwide is so vast, you simply can't set a rank as a cutoff. Hell, the worst traitors we've had in the past couple decades weren't young guys, they were seasoned veterans in their positions. Hanssen, Ames, Walker, Whitworth, Pollard weren't young guys.

In fact the media age of U.S. Military arrested as spies over the past century is 25 years old and civilian employees is 39 years old. It's not the young bucks doing it.

the executions have already started:


The Taliban has already begun to retaliate against Afghan collaborators named in more than 90,000 secret U.S. files released by a whistleblower website, Newsweek reported Monday.

The documents released by WikiLeaks -- the biggest leak in U.S. military history -- contained the names and villages of Afghans who have been secretly cooperating with American troops.

According to Newsweek, following the publication of the files, a Taliban spokesman threatened to "punish" any Afghan listed as having "collaborated" with the U.S.

One tribal elder suspected by the Taliban of liaising with American officials was taken from his home in a Kandahar village and executed by gunmen at the weekend.

Death threats have also begun arriving at the homes of a number of other tribal leaders.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange acknowledged that Afghan deaths may be "unavoidable" after his website released the files, but he said he felt in was in the public interest.

Questioned by Australian news program "Dateline" as to whether their release may lead to Afghan informants named in the documents being killed, Assange said it was possible.

"It's absolutely not something I want, but ... the possibility of that is unavoidable," the Australian said.

"In the end we are forced to make hard choices."

He explained WikiLeaks removed the names of Afghan informants prior to releasing the documents to The New York Times, The Guardian and German weekly Der Spiegel, but admitted "there may be a stray report here or stray report there."

"We do best effort to minimize harm, which we have done with the understanding that this is an extraordinary body of material capable of producing extraordinary reforms," he told the SBS show.

"It belongs in the hands of the Afghan people. Give it to them."

The Times newspaper in London last week revealed Afghan informants' names and details had been left in the documents.

The reports contain previously untold details of the Afghan war through Pentagon files and field reports spanning from 2004 to 2010.

The files from Wikileaks, a secretive web organization that often publishes classified material, showed coalition forces had killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, detailing 144 such occasions.

The papers also showed attacks by the Taliban have soared -- it is estimated the group has killed more than 2,000 civilians -- and NATO commanders told of their fears that "neighboring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency" in Afghanistan in the leaked reports.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said WikiLeaks was at least morally, if not legally, culpable for leaking the documents, by putting U.S. and Afghan troops as well as Afghan civilians at risk.

The U.S. Justice Department is considering whether to bring legal charges against the website.


Did you catch that.....the commie bastard who runs the site knew that releasing these documents would cause the people named to be tortured and killed, along with their families. His response...well, yes that will happen and its unfortunate but "we are forced to make hard choices"....WTF? Hard choices....not hard choices for you, you smug bastard sitting safe in Europe while you cause the deaths of better men.

I sincerely hope one of the survivors pops a cap on this worthless douchebag....this is just the last in a long line of releases that have damaged the west and gotten people killed. Time he got a real "hard choice" to deal with.

That's right.

My friend Abdul's young son fell and broke his arm while he was in Syria. Abdul and his wife took him to a local hospital, where he was treated immediately. He was given an MRI and a cast and sent home the same evening, and the total bill--no mandatory insurance, no HMO, no universal health care, just competitive free-market health-care service--was just under the equivalent of $200.

Yep. Nothing delivers goods and services more efficiently and cost-effectively than free markets. Most other technology-based services drop in cost over time, while the cost of medical care has increased far beyond the inflation rate.

yup, that right there convinced me--Im packing my bags and moving to Syria, forthwith.

How about, instead, stay here and join us in the fight to restore the United States to free markets and general liberty under the rule of law?

yeah, I think I'll start by flying the flag upside down.

Damned right. More of us should. When Obama Care passed, a bunch of us here did it, but just two of us are left now. Mine's staying till it's reversed.