Wikileaks Prepares Next Big Document Dump, While Media and Pentagon Continue Smear Campaign on Its F

[unhappycamper]

Wikileaks Prepares Next Big Document Dump, While Media and Pentagon Continue Smear Campaign on Its Founder
AlterNet / By Scott Thill

September 20, 2010 | Scheduled for release in the next few weeks in concert with international and American media outlets, Wikileaks' data dump on Iraq could prove to be just as explosive as its download on Afghanistan.

According to Newsweek, the Iraq collection is already three times larger than the 92,000 Afghan field reports made public in Wikileaks' last release, and perhaps the largest in history. It predictably details American military participation in bloody conflicts as well as detainee abuse conducted by Iraqi security forces. It's unclear at this point if its documents were submitted by Private First Class Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. military intelligence analyst who was charged in July with leaking the chilling Collateral Murder video to Wikileaks. Manning is already looking at over 50 years in prison for Uniform Code of Military Justice violations of "transferring classified data onto his personal computer and adding unauthorized software to a classified computer system" and "communicating, transmitting and delivering national defense information to an unauthorized source."

After Collateral Murder went viral online and in real-time, Manning's whistle-blowing dominated the news cycle and even prompted U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen to clumsily claim that Wikileaks "might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier." Although he may have been speaking only of Manning, Mullen's damning statement has yet to be fortified with hard evidence. The move swamped the American government and military with further shame, compounding the shame of pursuing two simultaneous wars that retired U.S. Army Colonel Ann Wright argued "have violated domestic and international law, violations that have been fully exposed in the WikiLeaks documents."

But the details, as always, are bedeviling. Mullen and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates openly admitted that Wikileaks' Afghanistan revelations had no strategic bearing on the war's prosecution. That added firepower to founder Julian Assange's claims that the military's beef with his organization has nothing to do with data at all. It has only to do with free speech, which is protected by the U.S. Constitution.

That pulls the case against Wikileaks into the less sexy orbit of mundane censorship, rather than glamorous tactical compromises or even subconscious desires to bloody young soldiers for no good reason. Which, like Iraq, is a quagmire. Because in a century dominated by the Internet and its light-speed exchanges of information, the concept much less the enforcement of keeping the world in the dark about exorbitantly expensive wars -- over a conservative $1 trillion and counting! -- makes zero sense. In fact, it is costing us more than we can afford. It could cost us the First Amendment altogether.

[DCKit]

1. The unreccers are having a busy morning. n/t

[kgnu_fan]

2. First Amedment is what makes America great

Now America is afraid of free press?