Our concern is mostly with the threat to individuals, the threat to our people and our equipment, but in terms of the types of incidents that are captured in these reports, where innocent Iraqis have been killed, where there are allegations of detainee abuse, all of these things have been very well chronicled over time.
- Pentagon Spokesman Col. Dave Lapan
H/T Antiwar Blog
That's a pretty amazing statement. The government is attempting to preemptively downplay the effect of an imminent WikiLeaks release of 500,000 Iraq War documents, which have been subsequently published, by essentially noting that, "everyone already knows that we're killing innocent people and abusing detainees, nobody cares, so let's just ignore it and carry on." Some further thoughts on this completely typical and unextraordinary showing of the government's brazen contempt for its own citizens:
The Pentagon aka Where This Aggression Will Not Stand, Man is impliedly arguing against the dissemination of information to the American people because we've already made up our minds regarding the invading, destroying, and occupying of Iraq notwithstanding the existence of supposedly similar information in the public realm. And who gets to determine whether the new information is substantially similar, whether the content of the new documents has in fact been "well chronicled over time?" The people themselves? No, too big of a security threat to "to our people and our equipment." I would ask how the information increases the risk (and what the risk is, exactly), but I'm afraid those reasons have either been "well chronicled over time" or that answering the question would further increase the threat in some kind of mobious strip of unassailable, self-proclaimed justification. So, uhh, some sort of in camera review by a partial adjudicator? No, we are not in federal court, and "this is not 'Nam... there are rules." Well, there's mostly just one rule: "what we say goes." OK, who does get to decide on the materiality of the information vis-a-vis the security threat? The dudes with the hard-ons for killing people, of course! It is an astonishingly inadequate argument, and the analogous legal position, "not only can we not show you these documents because they are privileged and would harm our client, we can't tell you why they are privileged, how they would harm our client, or what kinds of information is contained in the documents, and we can't submit them to a judge for independent review to determine if they are privileged/prejudicial," would be laughed out of any court. Luckily for the U.S., and us, international or domestic courts don't have much sway over how the U.S. conducts its business, the business of killing, around the world.
The Pentagon aka Where This Aggression Will Not Stand, Man is impliedly arguing against the dissemination of information to the American people because we've already made up our minds regarding the invading, destroying, and occupying of Iraq notwithstanding the existence of supposedly similar information in the public realm. And who gets to determine whether the new information is substantially similar, whether the content of the new documents has in fact been "well chronicled over time?" The people themselves? No, too big of a security threat to "to our people and our equipment." I would ask how the information increases the risk (and what the risk is, exactly), but I'm afraid those reasons have either been "well chronicled over time" or that answering the question would further increase the threat in some kind of mobious strip of unassailable, self-proclaimed justification. So, uhh, some sort of in camera review by a partial adjudicator? No, we are not in federal court, and "this is not 'Nam... there are rules." Well, there's mostly just one rule: "what we say goes." OK, who does get to decide on the materiality of the information vis-a-vis the security threat? The dudes with the hard-ons for killing people, of course! It is an astonishingly inadequate argument, and the analogous legal position, "not only can we not show you these documents because they are privileged and would harm our client, we can't tell you why they are privileged, how they would harm our client, or what kinds of information is contained in the documents, and we can't submit them to a judge for independent review to determine if they are privileged/prejudicial," would be laughed out of any court. Luckily for the U.S., and us, international or domestic courts don't have much sway over how the U.S. conducts its business, the business of killing, around the world.
3 comments:
Well thats just, like, your opinion, man.
Is this a... what day is this?
In business news, 3M and M&M have merged to form, get this, Ultradine Systems.
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