Wikileaker found and in custody

[Simon_Jester]

Many of them accepted the government line that the war as being fought was both necessary and winnable.

It was. The JCS and Saint Curtis proposed in about 1964 the same basic plan which ended the war -- a massive sustained strategic bombardment of every target of importance in North Vietnam from railyards, harbors, airfields, power plants, and industrial sites.

Johnson and McNamara vetoed it. It took eight more years before Richard Nixon executed the plan -- as Linebacker I and II.

Shep, that's the point.

Let us say that the Joint Chiefs propose a plan for winning a war- it would be easy, it would be straightforward, we could do it with minimal loss. The president vetoes the plan for some half-assed muddy-headed reason. This is information the public needs to know, in a republic. They may not need to know the details of the plan, but they need to know that something has gone wrong. Think about how a republic works. In theory, the public elects officials. The officials run the government. When the officials come up for reelection, the public gets to decide whether it is satisfied with their performance and their long term goals.

Now, imagine that a president is a complete fool, who blows a chance to win a war easily, and instead chooses to win it in a slow and bloody fashion. The public needs to know this, because they're the only ones who can fire him for incompetence. If the president's incompetence is a state secret, then the republic fails. It cannot work, because there's a monkey wrench jammed in the feedback mechanism. The elected officials cannot be held accountable for their actions, because the nature and extent of their actions are not known. Nor is the context in which they acted known.

And when senior government officials know this, that they cannot be held properly accountable for their actions because no one will ever really know what they're doing... that hurts the quality of government. It defeats the entire purpose of having elections in the first place, because no one except the people with Top Secret clearance actually know enough about what's going on to cast a meaningful vote.

Sadly, in the end, it wouldn't matter. The other side can bullshit too much. In order to truly defeat their claims, you would have to reveal pretty much all of the technical tactical characteristics of the system; and that wouldn't drive a stake through the claims -- they would just switch to "it's unproven and never has been tested in a real scenario".

The only way you'd be able to defeat their bullshit is if you simply built a full scale representative SAFEGUARD complex on Kwajalein, and then had no less than two SSBNs fire their full loads at the site directly.

Frankly, I don't think this is an unreasonable test of the system, though it's certainly expensive.

What I'm getting at is that an environment in which the basic strategic realities the nation faces are not known to the public, where they do not know if wars are winnable or if their government is making claims about its intentions in good faith, the entire exercise of democratic government is sabotaged.

[Elfdart]

Now they want to "neutralize" Julian Assange:

Don't post such woo-woo-woo bullshit. All they have to do is get a subponae from a Fed Judge to track Assange's credit card and other stuff to hunt him down; and then bring him into custody to formally charge him with unlawfully receiving classified/confidential information. Why would they want to send a fucking hit squad?

For the same reason Nixon's henchmen plotted to have people beaten and killed -and their offices firebombed. Oh, and to make an example of him. They also get to avoid extradition from foreign countries, as well as that whole due process thing if they should ever get him in an American court. I wouldn't be surprised if they either declared him a "person of interest" (so they can lock him up without charges) or a "terrorist", so they can kidnap and torture the man, then send him to Guantanamo to be tried by a kangaroo court. Afterward, he could be "commit suicide" by shoving a rag deep down his gullet and hanging himself in his cell (with his hands tied behind his back, no less).

[Teleros]

I thought Bush was supposed to be in charge of the banana republic, not Obama ?

Seriously, yes I can see why they'd want to find the guy to try & stop him from publishing any documents, and if nothing else, face-to-face conversations are much better than talking over the phone or by email. Bear in mind that WikiLeaks hasn't helped itself in the eyes of the US intelligence agencies with its "Collateral Murder" video etc, so it's natural that said agencies will be rather determined to stop a security threat like this.

It's also likely in the best long-term interest of WikiLeaks to help the US government over this one, because the more WikiLeaks pisses them off over this the worse it'll be the next time, and you just know they'll be looking for excuses to shut the site down. WikiLeaks does do good work, but it does have to be careful when it comes to biting the hand that feeds it: if it's going to do so it should be careful when picking its battles.

[Illuminatus Primus]

The authoritarians don't like their dirty laundry being aired. Big surprise. If it contains what is alleged, this man is a hero.

Now they want to "neutralize" Julian Assange:

Don't post such woo-woo-woo bullshit. All they have to do is get a subponae from a Fed Judge to track Assange's credit card and other stuff to hunt him down; and then bring him into custody to formally charge him with unlawfully receiving classified/confidential information. Why would they want to send a fucking hit squad?

Time to send the client state to do the Master's job against their own citizens. There's been no evaluation of whose position is correct.