Friday, October 22, 2010

Does the CIC oppose the leak(s)?

Honestly, I ask.

Certainly President Obama can not (officially anyway) sway this rogue Wikileaks founder/"America is the problem" leftist. But the Afghanistan Wikileak release was done in conjunction with the NY Times, Germany's Der Spegeil, and the UK's The Guardian. Any 3 of which the editor-in-Chief would presumably take a call from President Barak Obama. Did he even try? The Pentagon knew the leak was coming, and soon after discovered the source. This was reported back in July of 2010:

U.S. government agencies have been bracing for the release of thousands more classified documents since the leak of a classified helicopter cockpit video of a 2007 firefight in Baghdad. That leak was blamed on a U.S. Army intelligence analyst working in Iraq.

Spc. Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Md., was arrested in Iraq and charged earlier this month with multiple counts of mishandling and leaking classified data
[Afghanistan documents], after a former hacker turned him in. Manning had bragged to the hacker, Adrian Lamo, that he had downloaded 260,000 classified of sensitive State Department cables and transmitted them by computer to the website Wikileaks.org.

Lamo turned Manning in to U.S. authorities, saying he could not live with the thought that those released documents might get someone killed. Source.


How about having a moral compass less then that of a "hacker?"

In theory Titus is right, with this additional classified document release the president would normally face tremendous embarrassment, if nothing else. This is a serious security breech. And clearly its coming from multiple sources because the Afghanistan leaker is in custody! But consider this - if the documents "hurt" the popularity of the Iraq war, does that not serve a president's purposes if his intent is to get out of Iraq, and get out now? I'm not talking conspiratorial, as if he was "in" on the leak, not at all. I'm simply saying these leaks, especially the Iraq documents, seem to me similar to the BP oil spill in terms of serving this White House's goals. These are events that publicly the president will oppose, but privately I can't help but think they check off every "yes" box on whether it aides their political/ideological aims. Perhaps that's why we don't see "outrage", public or otherwise. Consider this - the president made more frequent public statements (and they were more heart felt) over the Cambridge "the police acted stupidly" incident then these National Security breeches. It just doesn't add up to a president sincerely outraged, not to me.

No comments: