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."

Comments

Re:Wouldn't it be against the rules anyways?

[oldspewey]

Well, there's classified information that very few people have seen, and then there's classified information that several billion people have (potentially) seen, and that your battlefield enemies have very likely studied in some detail.

Authenticity

[Fractal Dice]

Aside from the security classification not having officially changed, you also don't want your troops getting into the habit of taking "leaks" off the Internet at face value. It may not be relevant to these documents, but there will come a day when deliberately altered documents are released (by friend or foe) as part of a propaganda campaign. Best to remind people not tasked with doing the analysis to stay away from the koolaid.

Re:Wouldn't it be against the rules anyways?

[PopeRatzo]

there is no way our own people seeing it will result in further compromise to the enemy

Let's be honest. The reason the military doesn't want their own people to see the wikileaks documents is because it doesn't want them to realize what a complete farce this war (and by extension the war in Iraq) is. They're probably worried that there would be a big drop in morale if the service people on the front line knew that they had been sent to war by an administration that just didn't care about success, as long as their friends at Haliburton and KBR got fat contracts.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan never had a thing to do with terrorism or 9/11 or national security. That's ultimately the secret our military doesn't want getting out.

When we have to keep our own forces from learning what the rest of the world can easily learn, we no longer have any claim on being a moral nation, or a force for good in the world, or some "shining city on the hill" spreading freedom throughout the world. The corporatists and rich elitists and Right-Wing ideologues that have run our government since at least 1980 are so cynical that they'd let young men and women and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians die just to protect their own profits and power while complaining that anyone who would seek to end these useless and meaningless conflicts is "an appeaser" or "un-American".