Assange, Manning, and why some secrets need to be kept

I saw the quoted text in the comments on another blog. My response ran long, so I'm posting it here.

"BTW, I wonder how many patriots who are currently clamoring for Wikileak's demise, would act if their actions hurt a traditional US enemy?"

To be blunt? If Assange had taken action against the MME, the North Koreans, the Iranians, the Russians, pretty much anyone we really don't get along with and will probably find ourselves in conflict against? I'd think he was a sleezeball, but at least he's our sleezeball. I find the 'crusading for truth' journalists obnoxious at best. Some things simply are best kept quiet until they can do little harm. Some things need to be out in the open. Characters like Assange rarely know the difference.
You can't draw a moral equivalency between our enemies and us (certain presidential administrations and... hell, pretty much everything in DC notwithstanding).

But then, I'm an active duty soldier. Journalists are pretty much my natural enemy, even moreso than the ones who shoot at me.

Assange, I don't harbor so much ill will against. Charge him with espionage and put him in prison. Let him write a book, make a ton of money off of it. If we can prove someone's been killed because of what he did, then by all means get him with manslaughter or second-degree murder. I don't expect him to be able to see the consequences of his actions, being that he's not military. I hold him in contempt, as he's a trussed-up little puke who thinks he's something special. I do *not* want him assassinated. We are *not* a nation of vigilantes, we are a nation of laws. He should face trial for his actions, not be declared a terrorist and gunned down. If we do that, we prove him right.

So yes, I disagree with those internet commandos lusting for Assange's blood. We were once a principled nation. Doing the right thing, the just thing, with this person will be a sign that there's something of that left.

Bradley Manning, on the other hand, is guilty of treason. The firing squad for that one. I fail to see how my coldblooded desire to see him executed for crimes not against the government, but against his fellow soldiers, separates me from 'true patriots'. The man decided that he would betray us after we entrusted him with access to a great many 'national secrets'. While they didn't show the "True face of the evil American Empire" like some have crowed (rather, they tend to affirm that we - the military, that is - are who we say we are), it's the principal of the thing. I, like Manning, am a young soldier in military intelligence with a Secret clearance. I'm a drone operator, and have seen things and will see things that the public need never know about. Like Manning, I disagree with a number of the government's policies and actions. I do not find myself overwhelmingly compelled to release a flood of classified Secret documents that do little to harm the Federal government and pose a potential risk to our allies both on the state and personal levels. Assange claims he is going through the documents to make sure that nobody's put at risk - I don't trust him, and with some of the docs I've seen rightfully so. He is not a friend of liberty, and he's no friend of justice. Neither of them. If I am able to refrain from producing such a flood of classified information, then so should Manning.

The only thing Manning accomplished with this leak was giving the government an excuse to generate more layers of secrecy and to hide things more. The government cannot be trusted with the ability to hide its actions from the people even more. It's simply human nature to abuse such power. Sometimes the government does things that need to see the light of day. People like Assange and Manning need to exercise discretion, to release those things to the public without airing out all the sundry little details of day-to-day life in the diplomatic corps, or giving out sensitive information about our TTPs and interactions with the locals. If they don't... well, the results speak for themselves, don't they?

Between Young Soldiers and Old

I have a shibboleth I use to really tell people who've been in the Army for a very brief time from those who've been in long enough. It's a simple question: "If you were in a survival situation, life or death, would you eat a dead human?" Presumably, you didn't kill him for the sole purpose of eating him. There's lines, after all.
The young bucks almost always answer with a vehement "No!"
The old bastards almost always answer with a "Yeah, sure, why not?"
I don't think it's so much that the military encourages cannibalism as it is that us fellas who been in a minute have a better understanding of ourselves and have much fewer taboos. We have a better idea of what we will and won't do out of necessity, whereas civilians cling to certain illusions about what they won't do in order to survive.

In other news, I'm having pork for dinner.

It's Been a While

Yeah, it's been almost three months since I've posted in this. Sue me, I'm the only one who reads this thing anyways.
It's also been nine years since the attacks on September eleventh. Talk about generationally defining moments. You saw 'em, I don't think I really need to say much more on the subject. If you didn't, the basic summary is a bunch of savages from the Middle East killed thousands of innocent civilians in four attacks - the north and south towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field south of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. The flight that went down in Pennsylvania is, when it's remembered, remembered as the beginning of our War on Terror. Then-President George W. Bush received word while he was reading to a group of elementary school students and got a shit-ton of flak for continuing to read for seven minutes. It's amazing how much younger he looked back then. People like to say that, from then on forth, we were a nation at war.
Yeah. Right.
See, here's the fact of the matter: Your average American is not at war, nor has he made any 'sacrifices' for this war. He is, in fact, continuing on much as he did before the attacks. Sure, he's gotta spend more time jumping through hoops at airports, and the global jihad makes the news a lot more frequently, but less than two percent of the country is actually anywhere close to the war.
(That whole economic collapse thing? It's called the end result of living beyond your means like a jackass, not the result of the war's expenses.)

A pastor in Gainesville, Florida decided he'd get some free publicity by publically announcing he'd burn a couple hundred korans as a protest against the government's dhimmitude. Everyone and their mother's been pleading with him not to do it, not to antagonize the Muslims. Okay. One: Why should he be concerned with antagonizing Muslims? And this is speaking as one of those Joes who the jihadists target whenever they get their man-dresses in a bunch. It's like telling an abused wife not to talk back so she doesn't antagonize her husband. Two: How in the wide, wide world of sports can the creator of the infinite multiverse be offended by the actions of a mote of dust on a mote of dust in a cloud of dust in a cloud of dust? Three: With the strictures against idolatry, how can any material items be truly sacred? How can any item of this world be more sacred to the Creator than even the least of His children? I know my God would rather all the Bibles in the world be burned than one person be harmed by another.
I'm just sayin'.

It's Not the First Time I've Said This...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/22/AR2010062200813_pf.html

Now, I'm not the good General's biggest fan. I have serious doubts as to whether or not he's actually had boots on the ground at any point in the recent past, as he seems hell-bent on reducing the lethality of our engagements... for our enemies. He's the guy who handed out the order about not going into areas where they could reasonably expect to take contact. That kinda defeats the purpose, doesn't it? General Petraeus he is not, and it's made even worse by his civilian commander. General McChrystal is trying to apply a strategy that worked in Iraq to a whole different ballgame. Petraeus's strategy in Iraq worked because we had the insurgents whupped. We haven't whupped the Afghani resistance yet, so we haven't established in their minds that we're Big Billy Badass. Until we do that, any peaceful overtures will be seen as attempts at surrender.

But this Administration? Holy heavenly God, America, what were you thinking? These people seem to be even more dedicated to losing Afghanistan than the Taliban is to winning it! They shouldn't be demanding apologies, they should be straightening up their acts. Like I say whenever someone complains about me going on about one of my many triggers, "I'll quit saying it when it quits being true." How long did Obama sit on McChrystal's request for more troops? How many men died because Obama couldn't make a decision recommended him by the expert *he* appointed? How many men have died because the American civilians - that's you, every damn one of you who voted for the Dhimmicrats - demanded that we fight this war like civilized men and not kill any of those precious, precious civilians?

Here's a little secret I'm going to let you all in on. There is no such thing as an "Innocent Civilian" in Afghanistan, Iraq, or any other Middle Eastern pisshole. Honest. There's only degrees of guilt. You say how horrible it is for children to die, and it is. Even so, the little ones grow up to be the big ones - that is, if they aren't used as suicide bombs first - and the big ones kill Westerners whenever they get it in their heads to do so. I say it's horrible that American children die because of these people. We Westerners respect discipline and restraint. Middle Easterners respect strength. By restraining ourselves so unnecessarily, we're actually working against our goals. We are not fighting civilized men. We're fighting barbarians. It's long past time for us to take the kid gloves off and go after them with the full might of the American military.

Support our Students?

A few days back I saw someone on a forum asking why the nineteen-year-old in Afghanistan was more worthy of support than the nineteen-year-old in university. As the forum was one of the many where political and religious debate are discouraged, the topic was quickly shut down after my, ah, response. Let's call him Jack. Jack is from the UK, so there's some cultural differences. As a more moderate type explained to me in private messages after I went after Jack with both barrels, Europe lacks a lot of the "Military Worship" that the US has. He said it's only recently become socially unacceptable to spit on men in uniform.
I think you can imagine my reaction. "Ungrateful pissants" was only the start. I think that might provide fodder for another post, but not today.

I'll go more into my reasoning here, and I'll pull experiences off my own life. I was, as matter of fact, a nineteen-year-old in college and a twenty-year-old in Iraq. I had my twenty-first birthday in a guard tower. The sons of bitches on duty with me, having found out my birthdate from my section chief, sang "Happy Birthday" over the radio. Bastards. I digress.

Let's imagine, if you will, two paths a life may have taken. Picture a nineteen-year-old male, fresh out of high school. We'll call him Tim. Let's pretend this is before the economy tanked, say around '07, so Tim here has actual job prospects. On the one hand, our man Tim could choose to go to college, get a degree and work in some cubicle until he dies of old age. Retirement, as we're beginning to realize, is just not gonna happen. On the other hand, our man Tim could choose to enlist, go to war, and if he comes back he might just come back fucked up in the head.
If he were me, he was fucked up in the head to begin with so it was just drops in the bucket.

Let's say Tim goes to college. He works part-time at some soul-killing minimum-wage job like all college students should, and the most he gets out of it is a real motivation to do well in school so he doesn't have to keep doing that same soul-killing minimum-wage job. He does fairly well in his classes, not quite as well as he did in high school but well enough. When he wraps up his time in college he's twenty-three, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to start a career in whatever field he studied for.
Jack seems to think that our man Tim deserves our support, morally and financially, because Tim is studying art or history or engineering or whatever. I disagree. Tim is studying, and the only real, direct beneficiary of Tim's studying is Tim. Tim's parents might enjoy a more comfortable retirement, if they have one, if he does well, but overall he's really the only person who benefits from his college education.

Let's take a look at the other path, and say that Tim decides to enlist. He joins the Army, signs up for a combat arms MOS. Take your pick, my personal preference was 13B. Sucker that I am, my day-to-day wound up looking more like an 11B. Our man Tim, though, wraps up basic training with about four to six months to train with his unit before he deploys over to Iraq. There's still and insurgency there, and overall Tim has a bad time. He manages to avoid catching any serious injuries, but he sees some stuff of the sort that you just can't unsee. He has some buddies blown up, but doesn't get into any firefights himself. He picks up physical and mental scars, and the deployment changes him in ways most people simply can't understand. When Tim finishes his first four-year contract he's twenty-three, but most people think he's closer to thirty. Some good has come of his time in the Army, he's stronger in mind and fitter in body than he's ever been, but overall he comes away damaged. His job prospects are actually pretty lousy, as many employers don't want to risk hiring a veteran who has the dreaded PTSD. He didn't acquire any job skills in the Army, at least none documented on paper, so the best he can really hope for is that someone he knows is looking to hire somebody. Tim comes to the realization that while civilians will smile to his face and thank him for his service, he can't find too many willing to pull the knife out of his back.
Jack seems to think that this version of Tim isn't particularly worthy of support, being that all he did was go over to some foreign country and pick fights with people Jack's pretty sure would leave us alone if we'd just leave them alone. What Jack doesn't seem to understand is that when Tim joined the Army, he didn't join some mercenary outfit. It's called the service for a reason. Just like policemen and firefighters, servicemen provide a fundamental necessity for modern life. The problem is that we do our job too well, and there are a lot of people in the Free World who take their liberty for granted. There are a lot of people who fail to understand that freedom is not the natural order of things, that it takes a constant, active struggle - both politically and militarily - for a nation to remain free.

Remind me sometime, and I'll have to go into just what freedom is. I've had plenty of time to think on tower guard.