The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters – Salon.com

All of this has made WikiLeaks an increasingly hated target of numerous government and economic elites around the world, including theU.S. Government.As TheNew York Times put it last week:"To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret." In 2008, theU.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a secret report -- obtained and posted by WikiLeaks -- devoted to this website and detailing, in a section entitled"Is it Free Speech or Illegal Speech?", ways it would seek to destroy the organization.It discusses the possibility that, for some governments, not merely contributing to WikiLeaks, but "even accessing the website itself is a crime," and outlines its proposal for WikiLeaks' destruction as follows(click on images to enlarge):

As the Pentagon report put it: "the governments of China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam and Zimbabwe"have all sought to block access to or otherwise impede the operations of WikiLeaks, and theU.S. Government now joins that illustrious list of transparency-loving countries in targeting them.

It's not difficult to understand why the Pentagon wants to destroy WikiLeaks. Here's how the Pentagon's report describes some of the disclosures for which they are responsible:

The Pentagon report also claims that WikiLeaks has disclosed documents that could expose U.S. military plans in Afghanistan and Iraq and endanger the military mission, though its discussion is purely hypothetical and no specifics are provided. Instead, the bulk of the Pentagon report focuses on documents which embarrass the U.S. Government: information which, as they put it, "could be manipulated to provide biased news reports or be used for conducting propaganda, disinformation, misinformation, perception management, or influence operations against the U.S. Army by a variety of domestic and foreign actors." In other words, the Pentagon is furious that this exposing of its secrets might enable others to engage in exactly the type of "perception management" which the aforementioned CIA Report proposes the U.S. do with regard to the citizenry of our allied countries.

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The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters - Salon.com