Wikileaks question

If you don't understand the importance of Niger in the world of nuclear weapons, then you really should not post.

To fear the truth, is not the way to live

As The New Yorker reported, WikiLeaks has published technical details about an Army device designed to prevent roadside bombs from detonating.

It posted soldiers’ Social Security numbers.

DMT,

Torture works, I've used it and gotten the information I wanted.



The evil one


edit: only once

And here I get to the meat of this... he went on to say in the next breath that because of the wide spread anxiety and panic in the weeks and months after 911, those techniques were justified.

Let me state that again - he said that BECAUSE OF THE PANIC (felt by the public)... torture was justified.

Think about that. Its why we should never let the harsh trenchcoated men with bright terrible eyes operate carte blanche behind the curtain of secrecy. These people torture others because they are AFRAID. And the tortured for MARKETING REASONS.

The justification for torture was fear. Naked fear. Never forget this. It came from Saddam's interrogator.

Dingus said: ...BECAUSE OF THE PANIC (felt by the public)

2010-11-30: ACLU issues statement on WikiLeaks, Cablegate
Submitted by admin on Wed, 12/01/2010 - 02:39

The American Civil Liberties Union has issued a statement on WikiLeaks and the Cablegate disclosures:

"The Wikileaks phenomenon — the existence of an organization devoted to obtaining and publicly releasing large troves of information the U.S. government would prefer to keep secret — illustrates just how broken our secrecy classification system is. While the Obama administration has made some modest improvements to the rules governing classification of government information, both it and the Bush administration have overclassified and kept secret information that should be subject to public scrutiny and debate. As a result, the American public has had to depend on leaks to the news media and whistleblowers to know what the government is up to.

Without whistleblowers such as Wikileaks who disclosed illegal activity, we wouldn’t know, among other things, about:

* the CIA’s secret overseas prisons
* the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program
* that civilian casualties from the war in Iraq are much higher than was thought
* that U.S. troops were going into battle without adequate body armor

There is certainly a narrow category of information that the government should be able to keep secret in order to protect national security and for other purposes. But the reality is that much more information has been classified by the U.S. government than should be, and information is often classified not for legitimate security reasons, but for political reasons — to protect the government from embarrassment, to manipulate public opinion or even to conceal evidence of criminal activity. When too much information is classified, it becomes more and more difficult to separate the information that should be made public from the information that is legitimately classified.

What the Wikileaks phenomenon means in the longer term — and how the government will respond — is still open to question. But two things are already clear. First, to reduce incentives for leaks, the government should provide safe avenues for government employees to report abuse, fraud and waste to the appropriate authorities and to Congress. Second, the Obama administration should recommit to the ideals the president invoked when he first came to office: “The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.”

Democracy, after all, depends on transparency. The American public has a right to know what the government is doing in its name."