Slashdot Mirror
US Military 'Banned' From Viewing Wikileaks
Following up on its risible demand that Wikileaks return the Afghanistan documents, the Pentagon has banned military members from viewing the documents. The Washington Times obtained copies of Navy and Marine Corps messages to their troops saying that accessing the documents even from a personal computer is "willingly committing a security violation." Wired notes that terrorists everywhere are under no such restriction. Reader carp3_noct3m writes "I am personally left almost speechless at this disconnect from reality demonstrated by the military. I am a USMC Iraq war vet, and find these policies completely ridiculous. They show the inability of our supposedly technologically knowledgeable military to fuse this knowledge with policy, mostly due to the political pressure that has erupted to 'take care of' the Wikileaks problem."
seems the military might be afraid what i s leaked me thinks....
You sir, are worse than Hitler.
While I see your point, I would like to be sure in a firefight that the guy who has been ordered to watch my back is actually there and not on a plane home because he/she decided they didn't want to play war any more.
What happens when said person shoots you in the back because they weren't allowed to go home willingly? Better to let those who don't want to be there to go home, instead of having people there either indifferent or who will work against you.
Are you saying Clinton was right-wing? And that the Obama-Pelosi time (Pelosi started earlier) has been right-wing? I think that says more about your own personal political leanings than it does about anyone else's.
No-one outside the USA thinks of the Republicans and the Democrats as anything but "right wing", often to the right of the most right-leaning mainstream parties in European countries.
The fact that Americans think otherwise says more about the homogeneity of beliefs in free-thinking[tm] America than it does about anything else.
Lets pretend your conspiracy theory is correct and the war is a sham.
Lets also pretend that troops get ahold of these documents and lose morale.
Lets also assume that morale affects how well you focus while at war.
Troops will die from lack of morale, is that what you want? More people dying "for nothing."
Even if you don't like what's going on, you really need to think things through a little more thoroughly and think of what will happen as a consequence of your actions. Wikileaks didn't do that. They could easily have waited until the war was over and said "look at all these war-crimes." They want attention. They could have stayed anonymous in their fight against corruption, but they chose to give themselves a face and to get in front of a camera. The US government isn't going to just stop waging war because some guy posted a document.
Morale directly affects the safety of our troops and allies over there. So, its probably true that the military doesn't want them to lose morale, I don't either. I don't know any of the troops personally, but I don't want them to get hurt just as much as their families don't. I also don't want anyone who has helped us out over there to be harmed either. But that's just me talking.