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US Intelligence Planned To Destroy WikiLeaks
An anonymous reader writes "This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN), 32-page US counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks (PDF). 'The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out.' It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses 'trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers,' the report recommends 'The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site.' [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective.] As an odd justification for the plan, the report claims that 'Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the Wikileaks.org website.' The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks — US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay."
And just as there are some things that the government should NOT be allowed to keep secret, for example the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.
Tax information about specific persons.
Operation strategies and plans during warfare
Certain security procedures
The exact location and strength of military assets
Procedures for arming/deploying certain weapons
Just to name a few.
Only on slashdot would a statement so legally invalid as this be considered "informative."
A more realistic statement is that people will tell everything they know to prevent $BAD_THING from happening, and once they run out of the truth, they will start making things up.
And how will you know the difference? You won't. If you're intelligence gathering is so bad you have to rely on torture, you don't belong in the intelligence business.
The US Congress [is] elected by the general population.
Yes, but in name only. The general population doesn't get to decide who they vote for or against. They only pick from among the short list of candidates vetted by unelected entities.
Perhaps if there would exist an unelected federal entity such that would create legislative frameworks for the states. Would that be an unelected congress, perhaps?
You mean like the Federal Reserve? Or the Department of (Concept)?
While technically correct, it is largely misleading to make that claim. The justice department report (http://documents.propublica.org/justice-department-report-on-waterboarding-memos#p=1) clearly covers how the waterboarding used to torture prisoners and the waterboarding used to train special ops to resist torture vary. In case you don't feel like digging through the 289 pages though I will highlight the major differences.
The training method uses a small amount of water applied to a cloth over the prone soldiers face for around 20 seconds. The torture method uses extremely large quantities of saline (because when the used water the amount they swallowed started killing them by extreme electrolyte imbalances) poured over a inclined prisoners cloth covered face for 40 seconds. Now if you can't see how being oxygen deprived for 20 seconds and oxygen deprived and have the sensation of drowning for 40 seconds differ, lets move on.
The training method was NEVER applied more than twice and typically only once. The 'approved' torture method allowed for 6 'pours' of 40 seconds each during a 2-hour session where the prisoner remained strapped to a gurney with his head down. But the good news is that they were only allowed to do this twice per day, except for the extra 4 minutes of supplemental drowning they could add in if they needed. The guidelines allowed them to shackle the prisoner to the roof for up to seven days before waterboarding them, causing extreme discomfort and keeping them awake the entire time, but of course Club Gitmo's spoiled little jihadi's got hand-fed and diapered while they were chained up. Between waterboarding sessions they could look forward to enjoyable pasttimes like being placed in stress positions, being stuffed into a small box, being thrown against the wall, or having hypothermia induced by being doused with ice water.
There are also adorable guidelines on having medics standing by so that prisoners could be pushed close to death without quite going over, and to resuscitate them if those naughty terrorists have the audacity to die on them. Information on keeping them on a liquid diet so that it was less dangerous when they would breath in their own vomit. It reads remarkably similar to a guide on human experimentation that you would expect from the Nazi's.
Remember as well that this was just the 'approved' method. If all those recordings hadn't gotten 'accidentally' destroyed we might know what actually happened and whether it went beyond approved methods. Regardless I can't concieve of how anyone could consider what was done to be 'not torture'.