Pentagon Orders WikiLeaks Destroyed – 2008

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

– (S//NF) Wikileaks.org, a publicly accessible Internet Web site, represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the US Army. The intentional or unintentional leaking and posting of US Army sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org could result in increased threats to DoD personnel, equipment, facilities, or installations.

(U) The stated intent of the Wikileaks.org Web site is to expose unethical practices, illegal behavior, and wrongdoing within corrupt corporations and oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East. To do so, the developers of the Wikileaks.org Web site want to provide a secure forum to where leakers, contributors, or whistleblowers from any country can anonymously post or send documentation and other information that exposes corruption or wrongdoing by governments or corporations. The developers believe that the disclosure of sensitive or classified information involving a foreign government or corporation will eventually result in the increased accountability of a democratic, oppressive, or corrupt the government to its citizens.

… The governments of China, Israel, and Russia claim the right to remove objectionable content from, block access to, and investigate crimes related to the posting of documents or comments to Web sites such as Wikileaks.org. The governments of these countries most likely have the technical skills to take such action should they choose to do so.

(The New Yorker) – In some respects, the most interesting moments on the video are unrelated to the killing of the journalists and the wounding of the children, as dramatic as those portions are. Watch the thirty-eight-minute version of the film. Around thirty-one minutes into it, the Apache–its crew designated Crazy Horse One-Eight–flies to a nearby part of Baghdad. The crew sees a man walking into a building, and he appears to be armed. “He’s got a weapon,” one of the soldiers says. “Got an RK–AK-47.” Crazy Horse One-Eight then radios the on-scene commander, Bushmaster Six, and another soldier on the ground, Hotel Two-Six, to inform them that they have witnessed six armed individuals enter a building on a busy city street.

“It’s a triangle building,” Crazy Horse One-Eight reports, “Appears to be, uh, abandoned.” He adds that the building looks like it’s “under construction,” and that the “six individuals walked in there from our previous engagement.”

Bushmaster Six then gets on the radio and says, “If you’ve PIDed the individuals in the building with weapons”–that is, positively identified them as combatants–“go ahead and engage the building.” Crazy Horse One-Eight then fires three Hellfire missiles into the structure, demolishing it, and sending huge quantities of debris into the street and surrounding area. A soldier in the Apache reports back, “Building destroyed.”

BUILDING OFFERED LIVING FOR THREE FAMILIES

Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic investigative reporter who worked with WikiLeaks on the video, went to Baghdad to locate some of the local people affected by these incidents. He claims to have found the owner of the building, “an old man named Jabbar Abid Rady, born in 1941, a retired English teacher.” Abid Rady told Hrafnsson that his wife and daughter had died in the attack. He said that five other people who had been living in the building died, too. Buildings under construction often serve as housing in war-ravaged places; people live in the lower floors, which are often built first and are inhabitable before construction ends. Abid Rady told Hrafnsson that three families had been living in this particular structure.