[lbo-talk] McClatchy Newspapers: Tying Assange to Manning won't be easy

[Carrol Cox]

We now know (and presumably this will not change) that u.s. departmentnss
are infested with hundreds, perhaps  moe, employees with top-secret
clearances who are willing to reveal classified information. I don't know if
this is trivial or important;, but it is of some interest.

I still think the efforts to repress are more damagaing (i.e. helpful to us)
than the information itself could ever be.

There may also be hundreds of employees with top secret clearances who are
also willing just for the fun of it to release false information. It's
probably happened already in fact.

Carrol

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
On Behalf Of Charles Turner
Sent: Saturday, December 11, 2010 4:11 PM
To: LBO-Talk
Subject: [lbo-talk] McClatchy Newspapers: Tying Assange to Manning won't be
easy

<http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/12/10/105110/wikileaks-tying-assange-to-man
ning.html>

"Despite the obstacles, [Jeffrey] Smith, the former CIA general counsel,
thinks the U.S. must prosecute.

The sheer volume of documents makes it likely that the government can find
at least one example that proves Assange damaged U.S. national security, he
said. He said the fact that WikiLeaks solicits those with classified
information to provide it to the website shows an ongoing effort to harm
U.S. national security.

To not prosecute, given the number of documents, would be a bad precedent,
he said.

"The U.S. government, I just don't see, throwing up their hands and saying
there is nothing we can do," Smith said.

Still, any prosecution is likely only to dissuade others from publishing
secrets in the future and won't prevent the continued release of the State
Department documents, experts agree. WikiLeaks already has said it has the
U.S. government's assessment of every detainee who was ever held at
Guantanamo Bay and will release the documents next week.

"I don't see a clear linkage between prosecuting and a cessation of
publication," [Steven] Aftergood said. "If prosecution would lead to an end
to the publication of these documents, the decision might be
straightforward. If prosecution is essentially irrelevant to the process of
further disclosure, we are back to where we started."

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