Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Pentagon: We could have shut down Wikileaks but chose not to
Well, that's certainly good news, but then the question remains...why didn't you?
SeDef Gates' spokeshole doesn't really answer the question directly except to say that a decision was made (obviously by the Obama Administration and likely directly by the president) not to pursue that option of shutting down Wikileaks at this time.
So...what was going on? Why not shut down the site and, er, terminate the activities of Assange and his pals? For that matter, why not simply tell Assange that he had a window of 12 hours to turn over all of the classified documents he had to the nearest US embassy or face severe and life changing consequences?
I'll go back to what I wrote earlier.Either the Obama Administration really didn't know quite how to handle this or deep down, the president actually approved of the US being taken down a peg and saw this step towards his cockamamie ideal of a multi-polar world where America is just another country subservient to the International Community.
Or maybe it was a mixture of the two. But frankly, either one amounts to us being in real trouble.
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2 comments:
"We could have shut down wikileaks but chose not to." This statement reminds me of something. You see in many cases the only real difference between an adult and a child is the price of their toys and the debt they have incurred to acquire those toys.
Essentially this is not much different than the little kid who is cut from the football team, basketball team, soccer team or whatever team and then he tells his buddies "I could a made the team if I wanted to." In this case, its not true and its not true in the case of the Pentagon. Oh well, as with the kid, to say we could have done something if we wanted to makes us feel better and in today's American society many times how it feels is all that really matters.
Btw, the last two paragraphs of your post are spot on, however, I think it the notion that he is not sure how to handle and lacks the intellegence capabilities to actually handle this is actually closest to being the truth.
After 911 and after poor intellegence on Iraq, America's leaders should have realized America's intellegence services are incompetent and needed to be overhauled. Unfortunately no actions were taken to fix this and now we're paying a steep price for this.
At least before this debacle, a good strategy for America's leaders to use would have been to completely dismantle the CIA and the other 15 or so intellegence the US has and start over from scratch in building a competent intellegence community.
There's an old saying. "If you want to be the best, study the best." While building a competent intellegence community we could rely on the Israelis, the British, and others to supply us with good intellegence and we could model our new intellegence after countries such as Israel and Russia. Now with the Wikileaks fiasco even the possibility of utilizing the intellegence expertise of others is compromised. Whose going to trust us now?
Finally, if I could, I would ask the President, "Mr. Obama the United States has already fallen behind Russia and China, at a minimum. How many more pegs would you like to take us down?!!?"
If they could and didn't, or just couldn't, either way it's sad. I can't imagine this kind of scenario under Bush or Reagan (ignore the technological aspect when thinking of Reagan). It just shows wishy-washy, weak leadership. All the stereotypes about Dems are true: Tax & Spend, Tax & Spend, Tax & Spend, weak on defense. All ya need to know about the Dems...
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