Thursday, September 16, 2010

Should Wikileaks Be Taken Seriously?

The website was supposedly set up as a safe place for wistleblowers to air out their incriminating evidence for legal scrutiny, should anything posted on Wikileaks be taken seriously?


By: Ringo Bones


Even after the furor of the 90,000 or so leaked documents highlighting the shortcomings of the Bush Administration era War on Terror inexorably died down (has it?), the whistleblowing site Wikileaks had now indisputably become the conspiracy fetishists conversation piece du jour. Though it only confirmed everyone’s concerns on everything that’s wrong with the Bush Administration era War on Terror, it gained a little more air of authenticity after that inexplicably still-born rape and child molestation lawsuit against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Are rattled intelligence agency personnel resorting to Roman Polanski-style intimidation for damage control?

Ever since that incriminating Abu Ghraib Prison scandal photos have been posted on the Internet and “fall-person” US Army Specialist Lynndie England got branded the title moniker of a “sexually-depraved torturer” by the world’s major news providers, on-line whisleblowing on the irregularities of the Bush Administration’s War on Terror finally got the much-needed press attention that it deserve. Worse still, the subsequent whistleblowing incidents only confirmed the rest of the civilized world’s suspicions of the Bush-Cheney run War on Terror as a legitimizing platform of American lunatic fringe organized Christianity that sincerely believes via their religious doctrine that the United Nations and the Geneva Convention are the work of The Devil.

While the gist of the 90,000 or so Afghan theatre of the War on Terror that got Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in trouble centers around the under-reporting of civilian casualties killed by both the Coalition Forces and the Taliban. The under-reporting of incidences of IED (Improvised Explosive Devices) attack, not to mention the Taliban’s not-so-oft mentioned access to man-portable surface-to-air missiles. And the most damning of all is the Pakistan’s Intelligence Agency or ISI colluding with the Afghan Taliban. The Pakistan government’s “rumoured” collusion with the Afghan Taliban probably dates back as far as when Zia Ul-Haq ruled Pakistan deciding to solve the Kashmir problem by whatever means necessary.

Even if the authenticity of most of the leaked documents are yet to be confirmed, an overwhelming majority of the documents seems to be in congruence to the criticisms of those intimately involved with the Bush-era War on Terror. Add to that majority of the world’s population already fed up with their respective governments deciding what kind of information the masses supposedly can handle – and deciding what’s our best interest is. Maybe Julian Assange was right when he said: “Without the truth, no public policy is coherent”.

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