Private Bradley Manning is behind bars. Apparently he was the source of the information that was disseminated by WikiLeaks in three batches since July of this year, originating in military intelligence offices, including thousands of "cables" from State Department sources. The reaction to the internet disclosures has been essentially identical to the publication of the Pentigon Papers back during the Vietnam War. The author of the Pentigon Papers, Daniel Elsberg was vilified and attacked as a traitor. After the smoke cleared it became evident that there was nothing in the papers that had not appeared in the press or could be easily deduced from the facts. In other words, the truth.
The smoke is still thick and the vilification is rampant following WikiLeaks disclosures. Representative Peter King [R] of New York wants the State Department to designate WikiLeaks a terrorist organization. Senator Dianne Feinstein [D] is asking for espionage charges be brought against Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks website and Senator Joe "what's my party Lieberman" is calling for an investigation of the New York Times because the paper published part of the leaks. Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, is in a ratsnit. It may be many months before the smoke clears and it becomes evident to anyone who reads any reasonably responsible news source that all we are reading is a hefty dose of the truth--what President Wodrow Wilson wanted to achieve in his dictum to foreign policy makers, "Open covenents, openly arrived at".
What happens to WikiLeaks and who gets prosecuted and when may be in the end the least important result of the WikiLeaks Affair. According to the New York Times [Dec. 12, 2010, Week In Review], The Defense Department is "scaling back information sharing, which its leaders believe went too far after information hoarding was blamed for the failure to detect the Sept 11 plot". What we are learning is that there will be a constricution of information sharing in the intellegence community, and that means something we all may not realize. The fact is that 80% off all US intellegence funding goes to the military meaning the Pentigon. Caarried to a undesired extreme, we might as a nation, find ourselves being provided with information from essentially only one source. If this does not approach the warnings from an Orwellian world, I do not know what does. Frankly it frightens me more than any meaning from the leaks themselves.
We will all watch with great interest what justice be provided in the case of Private Manning. As for Julian Assange who is as of today free on bail in London awaiting the outcome of charges of rape by two Swedish women. How outrageous if it turns out that secret military intellegence paid for setting up the charges in Sweden. See how paranoid you can get when information cannot be trusted? Just imagine the uproar had the leaks come from the State Department and not the Department of Defense.
Bottom Line! A United States government fed only military intellegence is the ultimate danger, not WikiLeaks.
