Supporting the Whistle Blower

In Mary Shaw's "Smirking Chimp" submission Tuesday, July 27th titled "With Wikileaks, they want to shoot the messenger", she states that the recently leaked military information was not so secret anyway, and that Obama needs to use this opportunity to keep his promise of a more transparent government. She backs these claims with a link to an NBC News investigative report, that finds no real smoking gun or threat to our national security or the safety of our troops within the leaked documents. She also adds a summarized excerpt from the UK's The Guardian of the details revealed within the infamous leak. In contrast, she does add that U.S. National Security Advisor General James Jones released a public statement claiming the dangers of the now public information on the 6 year war in Afghanistan.

Her audience is easily the American citizenry as a whole, yet she rallies more towards those Democrats who believe in Obama (and possibly even voted for him) but have yet to be satisfied with his performance. As this is her personal stance, she finishes that hiding the truth about war's costs and casualties will not undo the damage we've caused overseas.

I do believe her opinions to be valid, quite simple, and to the point. She states her knowledge easily, and backs up her facts with several bona fide links. She even goes as far as posting the link to the White House's web page which contains a very official and convincing-looking argument against the rest of her own post. This only further shows the reader that she is convinced that the information "leak" was hardly blowing the cover off of unknown troubles overseas. She helps to convince us that, although war is ugly and the numbers and individual failed attacks are hard to hear, this is just the facts; "everyday war stuff" that, if we are expected to support and fund, we have the right to hear about. Kind of like a "Okay, Mr. President: We know more than we wanted to know...Now how the heck are you gunna fix it?"

She brings up another good point about how governing bodies need to think before they speak as well, especially when making official statements that could scare the general public. We hear "security breach" or "classified info leak" and we already start to think the worst. It doesn't help that the U.S. Advisor of National Security's response to it is "Oh, Boy. This could be bad!" This appears, as in the Shirley Sherrod case she refers to, to be a government "finger pointing" type of tactic to remove negative attention from itself in the light of a public failure. A knee-jerk reaction to a highly publicized issue indeed. Their hope, I think me and Mary Shaw both feel, is to pretend like they're taking action against the wrong-doer (Sherrod or the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange) in an attempt to placate the American people's feelings about who is causing the real injustice.

Meanwhile, we can only hope, they are rushing to take the proper steps toward cleaning their now-public dirty laundry, and not just pushing it under the bed.