That’s what Caroline Glick says of the WikiLeaks document dumps:
Make no mistake about it, the ongoing WikiLeaks operation against the US is an act of war. It is not merely a criminal offense to publish hundreds of thousands of classified US government documents with malice aforethought. It is an act of sabotage.
Like acts of kinetic warfare on military battlefields, WikiLeaks’ information warfare against the US aims to weaken the US. By exposing US government secrets, it seeks to embarrass and discredit America in a manner that makes it well neigh impossible for the US to carry out either routine diplomacy or build battlefield coalitions to defeat its enemies.
I tend to agree with Glick on this.
The scope and indiscriminate nature of the WikiLeaks document dumps is what distinguishes it from the type of selective leaking which is a Washington tradition, or even the time-to-time revelations by The NY Times and other papers.
WikiLeaks is not about good government or anything else; it is the electronic equivalent of anarchy directed primarily at the United States.
We are in the process of constructing a Cyber Warfare command center in Texas. There’s a reason we call it “cyber warfare.”
Whether it’s an electronic intrusion, or a data dump onto a CD, the purpose is disruption of the government’s ability to build international coalitions and to function in the hot war against al-Qaeda, and the not-yet-hot war against Iran and its allies Hezbollah and Hamas.
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Off topic: Thanks for the Blog of the Day link! That was very kind of you.
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Act of war against whom? One might be surprised to learn that all the information being 'dumped' is already known by the enemies of USA.
Like the Pentagon Papers way back in the days of Viet Nam, the only people who did not know the SECRET information was the people of USA. The official government lies and distortions being fed _to_ the people of USA then and now was coming from the government of USA.
These WikiLeaks are good for USA. The truth will set you free.
Ema Nymton
~@:o?
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Help me out with this.
What exactly is an act of war? Obviously, one warship sinking another would qualify but there is so much hyperbole surround the word "war" that its meaning has become dilute. We have the War on Drugs (not a war), the War on Obesity (not a war), the War on Poverty (not a war). We also have the War on Terror, which unless I am mistaken isn't a war either since we haven't formally declared war against another nation. That is not to say that we haven't been engaging in warfare – certainly that is so.
So is what Assange has done an act of war? Or is it an act of terror, treason?
1. WikiLeaks is not about good government or anything else; it is the electronic equivalent of anarchy directed primarily at the United States.
Yes. Their behavior masquerades as principled conduct, but to date the common denominator has been malice against America.
2. Mechanisms will be developed to deal with threats like WikiLeaks, and precedents will be created. Authoritarians will try to exploit these for purposes that have nothing to do with national security. Look for surreptitious attempts to construct the empowering legal framework in a manner that facilitates such overreaching.
3. Ema Nymton said…These WikiLeaks are good for USA. The truth will set you free.
Although governments routinely and grossly abuse their powers of secrecy, some things should legitimately remain secret.
4. Jeez, Glick rubs me the wrong way! More often than not, my support for Israel momentarily wavers a bit after I read one of her pieces.
5. From WAJ's Glick link: First, there is an issue of cowardice. (p)American leaders are afraid to fight their enemies.
There are ways to make the point without using an inflammatory insult.
Barack Obama is President of the United States. I would be ecstatic to see a qualified opponent displace him in 2012, but he is President of the United States.
6. From Caroline Glick's discussion of the greatness of Caroline Glick: (I) travel several times a year to Washington where I routinely brief senior administration officials and members of Congress on issues of joint Israeli-American concern.
Afaic Glick should be persona non grata in US government offices until she fully apologizes in her JPost column and on video. Given Israel's situation, I'm not happy to demand that, but Glick's statement is unacceptable.
gs "There are ways to make the point without using an inflammatory insult." – And yet no one is denying that Obama is a coward.
I jest, but we've all said worse about him, I'm sure. He is displaying a remarkable level of inaction over the entire issue. Don't try to tell me "there is nothing more he can do about it." He *is* the President of the United States after all.
My only concern in all of this is that the real outrage appeared after this most recent document release, and not as much so after the last one, which was far more damaging and may have had our allies in Afghanistan endangered.
So the rest of the world is pissed at the US. What's new? And damage to our efforts to build coalitions is kind of a hokey argument. The efforts to appease the State Department and Turtle Bay to build these 'coalitions' before we act in our own self interest have hurt the US in the past, and never helped us, in my opinion.
Of course, like a broken clock being right twice a day, some the leaks do show how the US government has attempted to bribe, blackmail and otherwise coerce other countries to adopt its criminal global warming agenda. So maybe we should offer Assange some hemlock before stringing him up.
I'm with Ema and Turfmann on this one. (I read the "Pentagon Papers" when they were first published and again later and in retrospect, there was nothing in there that deserved all of the outrage by the government. I urge everyone to spend a little time and read the book.
As to these leaks, the more I look into these leaks, the less and less I find myself concerned about the "spying" and "national security" aspects of it. I am more interested in what the leaks reveal about what the "world government" is doing.
Besides, if we can't or won't make a case against the NYT as a serial traitor, how would you argue the case against Wikileaks? It was up to the Pentagon and State Department to guard their "secret" information. If I pick up an envelope stamped "Top Secret" on the sidewalk in Times Square and give it to the NYT, am I a spy?
Wikileaks got Bernanke to finally reveal that the Fed has bailed out the entire world economy and got Hillary to finally convince us that she will soon be retiring from public life. How bad can Wikileaks be? It also buts another dagger in the global warming cabal too. I have yet to see anything revealed that I regret being revealed. We knew that our world leaders were a bunch of scumbags and now we know exactly HOW they are being scumbags.
I am reserving my judgment. I bet that there will be no charges filed (other than those child porn charges… maybe).
I must have been sleeping in my classes on the law of armed conflict, but I missed the part where an individual, or a collective of individuals can declare war on a nation state or by inference execute an act of war.
What has been done is no doubt criminal and may constitute an act of terrorism, if its purpose is to coerce the United States.
As in most espionage cases the principle culprit is the trusted agent with access to the data within the protected systems.
How is what Assange is doing different from what Obama has been doing throughout his presidency?
Didn't Obama begin his presidency by leaking our secrets? Hasn't Obama been embarrassing and discrediting America on the global stage? Why should Assange be meted out punishment for his publications when Obama is allowed to continue on as POTUS?
Usually, I would agree with Caroline Glick. However, I see no difference between Obama and Assange. IMO, both are community organizers with no moral or actual responsibility for anything. Both are likely puppets of Soros.
What Wikileaks has done is demonstrate the utter lack of seriousness, the thuggishness, and the weakness of Obama and the Democrats. In the long term, Wikileaks has helpfully demarcated the cesspool that President Palin will have to begin draining in 2013. In the short term, Wikileaks has given Palin another stick with which to beat Obama.
Leave Assange alone. He's just copying Obama.
If Clauswitz's war is "an expression of politics by other means," and, as some reconfigure it, diplomacy a war by other means, then WikiLeaks leaks (oh, brother) are nothing less than a bellicose campaign to cripple U.S. diplomatic integrity, fracture our warfighting alliances and compromise sensitive commercial and currency negotiations. Assange said he specifically targeted our military in the first round of leaks and the government in this latest, and promises he has American commerce and banking in the crosshairs next. The extensive leaks could add up to all sorts of overlapping and amplified damage, in which case "innocent" citizens who'll suffer if overseas diplomatic and financial relations go south (ok, more south than they are) should be considered intended collateral damage.
During the Cold War, the Soviets and Americans fought each other without formally squaring off, except at the Berlin Wall, using "soft" weapons of war: espionage, propaganda, sabotage, diplomacy, embargos, arms build-up, manipulation and stoking of groups, etc., along with some proxy hot wars. State-sponsored intrigues, occurrences and sown discord were, and history today still gets things wrong, sometimes difficult to trace as to real agenda and instigators. Cyber with its tentacles into all of modernity and shield of anonymity is the ultimate soft weapon. It can also be arena of conflict and battlefield. It's war without borders and open to any genius of any age who can figure out how to get in the game from her living room or lab.
We don't know if WikiLeaks' mission fits into a larger picture of conflict, but the outfit appears to want to damage our ability to advance national interests, from war to trade. Assange's merry band of cyber saboteurs could be an independent non-state group or even a front, witting or no, for shadow interests, possibly those of another State. (I blame Soros and his not-at-all Open Society for everything, including missing socks from the dryer. [oh, I see Juba got there first;]) WikiLeaks dumps might be orquestrated by domestic and foreign enemies, or even be "permitted" sabotage embedded with our intentional misinformation and revelations. All I can figure is we're being played but that it's no joke.
Cyber warfare is an extension of politics by nearly unscalable means. Somebody met the hardened Iranian nuclear threat with a computer sneak attack in an almost poetically executed, certainly justified act of brilliant belligerence. OTOH, a cyber-based attack on the US with the whole world watching was met with our pixellated paralysis– charges of sexual misconduct and a letter telling Assange to stop dumping and leaking on us that left him free to keep doing just that. We are told freelancers(?) mounted a DDoS attack on WikiLeaks for temporary relief. Either this administration is impotent, wanted the leaks for some useful or selfish reason, or is taking some effective action we're not privy to.
We'll still have hot war maybe forever, with sovereign missiles and rogue bombs wreaking horrible, mostly containable damage. Seems we're getting closer, though, to the existential danger– and promise– of cybertech and human gray matter melding into an unreckonable force, (said by someone whose idea of dealing with cyber terrorism is full-on armed conflict mode of flailing them when posts get vaporized by militant Etherists. Bet you wish one had struck just now ;))
Anyway, we shouldn't get carried away over cyber war's downside, when there's global boiling, supercollider black holes, bio-engineered plagues, asteroids and Cthulhu going to kill us off, too.
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The information being 'leaked' by the WikiLeaks document dumps shows a group of conspirators totally committed to performing nefarious acts and lying about it all the while they perform these acts. The very same group of conspirators then tell you that the leaker has jeopardized the integrity of USA.
And _YOU_ (William A. Jacobson, Associate Clinical Professor, Cornell Law School) of course blindly accept the stories by the conspirators.
Countries have agencies that "create news". False or misleading stories are written and planted with the hopes that our news media will pick up on them and distract or redirect the public. Realize that many people lie and do so quite frequently. Those that are very good liars, often can rise to positions of power. They often use misdirection and create or feed other conflicts to take attention off of the truth.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. – George Orwell
So again tell us this is an act of war against whom?
Ema Nymton
~@:o?
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