It's Another WikiLeaks Drop Day

It's another WikiLeaks day and this time it concerns GITMO.  How much concern should this generate?  It depends on your perspective.  From Hot Air:

Mainly, these revelations don’t reveal much at all about AQ plots in the past, nor their operations today.  The most recent data in either report is years old.  They are both interesting for purposes of background information, but neither tells much of a story on its own or together that we didn’t already know.

And over at The New Yorker where bleeding heart Amy Davidson laments the use of "torture":

One sees how Guantánamo became a whisper factory: after years of interrogation, the subject many prisoners had left to talk about was other prisoners. Some were doing so after being tortured. The Times notes that Mohammed al-Qahtani was “was leashed like a dog, sexually humiliated and forced to urinate on himself” before implicating himself and sixteen other prisoners, and that those claims appear in the others’ files “without any caveat.”

If this is "torture" then I'd suggest Davidson expand her reading list to include Surviving Hell by Leo Thorsness, or Devil at My Heels by Louis Zamperini. 

Michael Tomasky at the UK Guardian:

An honest inquiry into these errors that tried to assess what actually happened without pinning blame would be instructive. But what we're actually likely to get in the US, if we get anything at all, is a set of hearings in the House of Representatives under Republicans that's going to ignore Bush-era problems and focus completely on Obama-era ones. 

The "errors" he refers to are repatriation and recidivism, specifically the Saudi and Yemini programs.

Michelle Malkin is not impressed with the release and points to the coordinated suicide attempts as discussed in the New York Times piece:

Gitmo sympathizers continue to characterize the suicides/suicide attempts as acts of desperation by poor, innocent potato farmers and bystanders. But these were clear acts of asymmetric warfare by cunning, cold-blooded jihadists versed in exploitation of Western sensibilities.

Lawyers, Guns and Money thinks this leak might not be all bad:

My only other reaction for now is that while the past four major WL releases were carefully framed to make US foreign policy decisions in the war on terror look bad, this new release may well have – or have been calculated to have – the opposite effect. While some news sources are stressing that “children and senile old men are among the detainees” other are almost making Obama look too soft on Guantanamo detainees (breaking news from the leak includes detainees’ threats against interrogators and claims of a nuclear holocaust if bin Laden is captured). 

The Memeorandum aggregation is growing and is worth surfing through.  The value of the dump depends on your perspective.  

Meanwhile, Private Bradley Manning has been moved to a more "humane" prison than his former digs at the Quantico brig.

(Cross posted at Potluck)

Merry Christmas, Terrorists!

I'm getting really tired of Julian Assange.  Yesterday's Wikileaks drop include a list of "all installations whose loss could critically affect US national security."  Merry Christmas, terrorists!

The geographical range of the document on installations is extraordinary, our correspondent says.  If the US sees itself as waging a "global war on terror" then this represents a global directory of the key installations and facilities - many of them medical or industrial - that are seen as being of vital importance to Washington.  Some locations are given unique billing. The Nadym gas pipeline junction in western Siberia, for example, is described as "the most critical gas facility in the world". 

This, combined with Assange's promise to drop a new cache of uncensored documents should the government attempt to shut him down, simply confirm this man's status as an enemy of the state.

He's dangerous.

(H/T:  Memeorandum)

Enemy of the Country

All I can say about the WikiLeaks document drop is where is Julian Assange getting this information?

This just enrages me that this Julian Assange has not been captured, extradited to the United States and prosecuted, but maybe things don't work like that.  It's horrendous enough that he's publishing these documents, but I want to know where he's getting them.

Professor Jacobson wrote the best post I've seen on our government's seeming lack of response:

Have we lost our minds?  Wikileaks is about hurting us, bringing us down, damaging our relations with others, rendering us impotent.  This is not about open government policy, as if Wikileaks went a bit too far on its class project.

Julian Assange should have been indicted by now, and if the law did not allow more punitive measures in this circumstance, then the law should have been changed after the first document dump.  Assange is an enemy of our country and should be treated as such.

And as far as I'm concerned, the New York Times, is absolutely contemptible for publishing them.  Oh, I know that the foreign papers would publish them anyway, but ...If I'm in charge of the NYT?  Would. Not.Get.Published.


John at Powerline says:

Do the diplomatic cables "relate to the national defense"? Some of them certainly seem to. So a criminal prosecution of those involved in the leaks who are within federal jurisdiction (e.g., the New York Times) may be possible. Scott has studied these issues more closely than I have and may have more to say on the subject.  The Times explained its rationale for publishing the leaked cables here. The paper's most persuasive argument is that a number of foreign newspapers also have the documents and are sure to publish them, so the Times might as well join in.

(Insert unprintable expletive here).   As far as I'm concerned, this is an act of war. Prosecute Assange.  Find out the source of the documents leak and prosecute.  End this.

(More at Memeorandum)

Treaon!

I wrote yesterday that my opinion of the WikiLeaks document drop this week is nothing short of pure treason.  Victor Davis Hanson seems to concur:

There has never been anything quite like WikiLeaks in American military history. We are engaged in a great experiment to see whether the U.S. military can still persist in a conflict when it knows that any and all of its private communications can become public — and will be selectively aired and hyped by people with a preconceived bias against it. Had the public known in real time from periodic media leaks about operational disasters surrounding the planning for the D-Day landings, intelligence failures at the Bulge or Okinawa, or G.I. treatment of some German and Japanese prisoners, the story of World War II might have been somewhat different.

Hanson points out that while Julian Assange claims to be dedicated toward "uncovering  bad behavior by governments around the world," he only  "targets the West."

Call me naive, but could someone explain to me how it's not treasonous when he's endangering the lives and revealing the secrets and methods of our U.S. military operations?  

Hanson doesn't scream "treason!" as I do, but he does foresee trouble on the horizon for WikiLeaks:

But WikiLeaks is now flitting around within the red zone, and any leaks about Afghanistan or Iraq post January 2009 reflect upon a left-wing Obama government. A public perception of inappropriate military policy would endanger an entire far-left social experiment at home.

Yes, indeed.   As Obama has adopted many of the Bush policies in the war, and retained Gitmo, after all, and as WikiLeaks begins to release documents of that nature, maybe the NYT won't feel the need to publish this sort of thing any longer.  Certainly our military would be safer.