I just heard Robert Gates on MSNBC say that Julian Assange will– not might– have blood on his hands for the leak of 90,000+ classified documents to the media and their posting online.
It is my personal opinion that setting aside the issue of whether any war is justified, a war in which we have occupied a country other than our own, are losing that war, our alleged ally in that war not a reliable and committed ally, with a neighboring ally– Pakistan– supporting actions against us i.e. aiding the enemy, is a war that must be ended sooner rather than later.
If the actions of activist Julian Assange and his coterie at Wikileaks undermine the relationship between the U.S. Military and its sources among the Afghani people– and that is what it takes to bring this war to a halt– then so be it. No one wants to see anyone killed. But our children are being killed by a vicious guerrilla enemy hiding out in mountainous terrain when our true enemies, Al Qaeda, including the centipede Osama bin Laden, are in the mountains of Pakistan and elsewhere. The argument for fighting the Taliban is negated by the facts, and this month has seen the highest death toll of U.S. troops since the beginning of the war. Whose hands are bloody? Those– including the Administration– sending our kids into death traps for no good reason.
Loquaciously Yours 
Gates simply parrots the expected statements. He’s hyperbolic. And lest we forget, he was appointed by the very person who got us in the war in the first place. And how much easier to point the already blood-stained finger at another rather than be honest. I can’t remember the last time I regarded information from the Pentagon as accurate.
I don’t find Assange a particularly admirable character. He’s admitted to editing documents in ways they result in implying things to be other than they are. His own sense of importance is as sickening as that of the higher ups throughout government.
I despise the wars (we’re in two) and think we should be out of both. I keep asking, where is the kind of protest we saw during the Vietnam years? Is it going to take a restarting of the draft and the deaths of 50,000 young men and women to get Americans to demand the wars’ ends?
I just saw this Maureen. There are certainly obnoxious elements to Assange and his arrogance. But I wonder if any young men and women signing up for the military are given the whole truth in order to make an informed choice. To me the answer appears to be a resounding no. Our starry-eyed kids do not have all of the information about the situation in either occupation. I didn’t hear/know that Assange doctored the material… xj
The info about Assange doctoring info is new to me, too, Maureen and I thank you for sharing that. I am opposed to our occupation in both Iraq and Afghanistan and, like Maureen, I wonder about the silence from those opposing the wars. I just returned after two days at the Chautauqua Institution in western NY where I heard Fred Ritchin speak about how difficult it is to get news photographs published when they are “depressing.” He said most Americans are living in cocoons … protected from the realities of the world by the media. After hearing him speak, I want to know more about him and this issue.