WikiLeaks to Release Video of Alleged U.S. ‘Massacre’ in Afghanistan

18 Jun, 2010 by Donald Douglas

Print this article Font size -16+

I wonder how badly doctored the Afghanistan video will turn out to be? As readers will recall, almost everything about the WikiLeaks Apache video was manufactured and wrong. The folks at Jawa Report so thoroughly eviscerated WikiLeaks they should be up for a Pulitzer.

Meanwhile, check out this passage buried in Glenn Greenwald‘s long (even unusually long for Rick Ellensburg) essay on WikiLeaks and Wired’s reporting on whistleblower Brad Manning:

Any rational person would have to acknowledge that government secrecy in rare cases is justifiable and that it’s possible for leaks of legitimate secrets to result in serious harm. I’m not aware of a single instance where any leak from WikiLeaks has done so, but it’s certainly possible that, at some point, it might. But right now, the scales are tipped so far in the other direction — toward excessive, all-consuming secrecy — that the far greater danger comes from allowing that to fester and grow even more. It’s not even a close call. Any efforts to subvert that secrecy cult are commendable in the extreme, and nobody is doing that as effectively as WikiLeaks (and their value is not confined to leaking, as they just inspired a serious effort to turn Iceland into a worldwide haven for investigative journalism and anonymous whistle-blowers).

This Manning detention — whether it was by design or just exploited opportunistically — is being used to depict WikiLeaks as a serious national security threat and associations with it as dangerous and subversive. Just in the last week alone, several people have expressed to me fears that supporting or otherwise enabling WikiLeaks could subject them to liability or worse. There’s no reason to believe that’s true, but given the powers the U.S. Government claims — lawless detentions, renditions, assassinations even of American citizens — that’s the climate of intimidation that has been created. This latest incident is clearly being used to impede WikiLeaks’ vital function of checking powerful factions and imposing transparency, and for that reason alone, this is an extremely serious case that merits substantial scrutiny, along with genuine skepticism to understand what happened.

Who decides the current national security regime has gone too far in “the other direction”? Of course, just to get that initial concession from Greenwald on the necessity of governmental secrecy is something. And notice how the rest of the quote implies that Greenwald himself isn’t in fact rational, ha!

Cross-posted from American Power.