Wikileaks and 'material support'

By Dave Anderson:

To anyone paying attention for the past five years, the Wikileak files don't contain broad information that was widely known or suspected.  It filled in lots of blanks, but anyone paying attention knew that Pakistan's ISI is backing significant elements of the Taliban with cash, guns, intel and protection, the Karzai government is corrupt as hell, IEDs hit civilians more often than they hit ISAF military targets, portable anti-aircraft missiles are occasionally used and special forces teams are doing frequent raids that sometimes have good results and sometimes are cluster-fucks.  

None of this is new to anyone paying attention.  However, most people are not paying attention to the details, although they are paying attention to the general atmospherics and vaguely know that the war in Afghanistan is not achieving its stated objectives nor is it producing any security gain comparable to the costs.    

The Wikileaks story is burning up Memeorandum and the 24 hour news cycle right now, so people who did not know the details are hearing details for the first time, and the political pressure to do something different in Afghanistan will continue to build.  

Andrew Bacevich has a very interesting take on Wikileaks as an agenda and discussion driver:

Rather than being defined as actions undertaken by a government to influence the perception of reality, information warfare now includes actions taken by disaffected functionaries within government to discredit the officially approved view of reality. This action is the handiwork of subversives, perhaps soldiers, perhaps civilians. Within our own national security apparatus, a second insurgent campaign may well have begun. Its purpose: bring America’s longest war to an end. 

The following is pure speculation....

If an administration that already has a history of expanding executive power and a pliable court that will back foreign policy power grabs, there is a chance that Wikileaks or at least its identifiable individuals attached to it could be branded a "foreign terrorist organization" engaged in "propaganda" that is aimed at combating American national goals.  And since a foreign terrorist organization is purely an administrative decision made by the State Department, it is not subject to judicial review or judicial contest of the facts.  And once Wikileaks is categorized as such, any journalist who happens to go over a juicy leak from Wikileaks happens to run into the 'material support' which means disseminating any good info is a felony that can be prosecuted with all the fun tools in the Patriot Act as that is 'terrorism' or at least 'terrorist assisting journalism....'

I would not lay a whole lot of money down on a bet that Wikileaks is categorized as an FTO, but if I could get 90:1 odds, I would lay 10 dollars on that proposition that it would happen by Jan. 1, 2013.  

Comments

[geoff]

Curious that Bacevich would label whistleblowers subversives i.e. dissidents, agitators, revolutionaries, renegades, rebels. It must be his military background getting the better on his historian's mind.

It would be funny if State tried labelling wikileaks a terrorist organization the problem is that the label only applies in the states so the rest of the worlds media could produce stories based on wikileaks which would have to be censored out of US media. Google would have to start censoring all US activity. China would love that I'd think. On every visit by a Chinese important person they could lecture the US on freedom of speech and the dangers ... .