About a dozen guys are striding along a desolate street in Bagdhad. The view is from a hovering Apache chopper. An AK-47 is identified as carried by one of the men, and later the radio voice cites "guys with AK-47s." Permission to "engage" is asked and received, and all of the men are "lit up." Only one survives, and is crawling to the curb. The radio voices are seeking some justification - "Does he have a weapon"- to "engage" further. Other weaponry spotted: an RPG. (This was apparently a camera carried by one of the Reuters reporters killed in the ambush.)
A van stops at the ambush scene, and the driver and two others dismount. (We read later that this is a father taking his two children to school.) He sees somebody down in the street, and stops to render aid. They are in the act of carrying a badly wounded individual from the site of the massacre.
They are promptly atomized by fire from the lurking Apache. The children are seriously wounded.
A tape of this episode is on YouTube.
Defense Minister Gates complains that viewing this tape is like` looking at the war through a soda straw.' Perhaps, but what you see is, guys in no hurry ambling down the street. A Good Samaritan stopping to render aid. The sole justification for the slaughter is a report that one or more of the individuals is armed.
Later in the tape, six men, identified as armed, enter an abandoned building. After that, two unarmed individuals enter the building. Three hellfire missles destroy the building.
The tape was relased through the auspices of Wikileaks, and a thorough report of that organization is in a New Yorker article. I was a bit surprised by one of the conclusions of the author.
But experimenting with the site’s presentation and its technical operations will not answer a deeper question that WikiLeaks must address: What is it about? The Web site’s strengths—its near-total imperviousness to lawsuits and government harassment—make it an instrument for good in societies where the laws are unjust. But, unlike authoritarian regimes, democratic governments hold secrets largely because citizens agree that they should, in order to protect legitimate policy. In liberal societies, the site’s strengths are its weaknesses. Lawsuits, if they are fair, are a form of deterrence against abuse. Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.
Now, just when and under what circumstances, have you ever in this democracy voiced your wishes that more secrecy should be practiced upon you by your faithful caretakers in DC? Is it part of the DNA of citizenship in a Free Society? I think no one has ever requested of me whether I want to know less about the workings of federal or state agencies. Had they, I might've offered the opinion: I think more harm than good arises from public business conducted in dark alleys and subterranean closets, and for the most part such mystery abounds in regions where a healthy exposure to the antiseptic air would be most beneficial to all except those who are plotting against our best interest on behalf of their own. That is, secrets protect nefarious and noxious hireling perps, not honest citizens.
What you don't know may very well harm you.