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December 04, 2010
Wikileaks & the Drug War
The latest Wikileaks "dump" generated a firestorm of headlines and opinion, much of which echoes those expressed almost four decades ago following publication of the Pentagon Papers. Although the stimuli for both unauthorized releases of classified information were foolish, expensive, and fundamentally dishonest American wars, the two people most responsible for the exposes could not be more different. The Pentagon Papers were gathered and turned over to major newspapers by Daniel Ellsberg, Harvard Phd (Economics) and ex-Marine officer who had accidentally discovered the illegitimacy of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution while serving as an aid to then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. His younger counterpart, Julian Assange, the founder and driving force behind Wikileaks, is an Australian career activist who became committed to political causes in his teens and was thus probably searching for an opportunity to be disruptive on behalf of a just cause.Their methods and tools, also different, primaily reflect their different generations and intervening technical advances. Ellsberg's main tool was a Xerox machine- woefully slow by modern standards- but in 1971 it could amass enough damning evidence to convince the NY Times and other influential Newspapers to publish it. Finally; the enhanced capabilities of modern IT explain the huge volume of the Wikileaks dump, while the Internet it gave rise to also provided Assange with the dedicated coterie of helpers Ellsberg lacked. The sheer volume of the Wikileaks dump also raises its own questions: would it have been better to parcel it out bit by bit to keep other important issues from being overlooked? We simply don't know that answer yet, but I suspect Google will prevent that from happening.
For example, the US is now engaged in another foolish, futile, and expensive war much closer to home than Afghanistan. Among the Wikileaks revelations was a refreshingly frank assessment of the drug war's most recent failure to "control" smuggling, which was grievously exacerbated by Bush & Cheney's pressure on newly elected Mexican President Calderon to use Mexico's Army (and later its Navy) in 2006.
Ironically, one of the best current descriptions of our Mexican debacle appeared in an Australian newspaper, suggesting we are now truly a "global village" in which embarrassing secrets are harder to hide than ever.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at December 4, 2010 07:50 PM