Shut Down WikiLeaks, Execute Everyone Responsible. It is not for private persons to declassify classified documents just because THEY think there is no need for secrecy. If the policies by which materials that do not need to be classified ARE classified, needs to be changed, that is a case that can be made without STEALING documents. The publication of 92,000 classified documents by a website is wholesale ESPIONAGE, and should be punished by DEATH to everyone responsible.
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If a Taliban spy who somehow managed to penetrate the Pentagon or CIA, stole those documents and turned them over to the Taliban's leadership, no one would have any difficulty in classifying that as espionage. Ergo, if ANYONE steals such documents and turns them over to the Taliban and other enemies, he is EQUALLY guilty of espionage. Everyone who participates in such transfer is as well guilty of espionage, including any media outlet, including The New York Times. The Times is not entitled to receive classified documents; it is not entitled to reveal for the whole world, including the Taliban and Pakistanis cooperating with the Taliban, what those documents contain. The Times is guilty of espionage, and should be punished with extreme severity, up to and including death to the writers and editors involved, and the seizure and closure of the entire New York Times news organization. (FYI, I worked briefly for the NYTimes company many years ago, in a noneditorial capacity. I was very happy there. I walked to work and was paid more than my job paid in other types of companies.)
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The paper edition of the Times is in any case threatened by the same forces that have shut down other newspapers. We would simply be hastening the process, and shutting down TNYT's electronic publishing operations as well. It's not an issue of freedom of the press. It is an issue of ESPIONAGE. Would anyone have trouble condemning the Times if it published, on June 5th, 1944, the plans for the D-Day invasion of June 6th, 1944? I don't think so.
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The Afghan war is not yet over, and the revelation of secret U.S. military documents may empower the Taliban and Pakistanis in cahoots with the Taliban, to wage their war against not just the United States, not just NATO, but also the world more effectively. This is not a trivial matter, but IS espionage in time of war, and a comparison to June 5th, 1944 is entirely apt.
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This mass espionage is not just espionage. It is indeed treason under the definition in the Constitution: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." No honest person can pretend that this mass release of documents has not given the Taliban "aid and comfort". Ergo, the spy who stole those documents and any U.S. news organization or individual American reporter or editor who published them is guilty of both espionage and treason, and should be executed for those crimes. Quickly. Let's behead them, as their friends in Afghanistan so like to do to their enemies. (The only possible "out" is that the Afghan war is not a declared war. For reasons I do not understand, Congress has given up the power to declare wars but just gone along with what are, as a consequence, arguably illegal military actions.)
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The website WikiLeaks.org should be shut down, and every mirror or backup of the stolen documents destroyed. Anyone who tries to protect a copy of ANY of those documents should as well be executed, preferably by beheading.
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The hypocrisy of the managers of that site is astounding: they reveal secrets, but protect their sources! That is, they have the right to violate other people's secrets but keep their own. KILL them.
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Were Soviet spies, or Americans spying for the Soviet Union, entitled to claim as legal defense that the Soviet Union had a right to know about U.S. or NATO plans of every type that involved the Soviet Union? No, they were not. And WikiLeaks just does not have any defense for revealing secret military documents in time of war. It is espionage on the grandest of scales, and should be punished as grave espionage has always, and properly, been punished: by death.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,413 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:19 PM