Wikileaks: You Can't Fix Stupid

Bradley Manning demanding equality "on the battlefield"

In his own words, 22-year-old Pvt. Bradley Manning, sitting in a base 40 miles east of Baghdad, had "unprecedented access" to classified U.S. networks "14 hours a day, seven days a week, for eight+  months." And he used it to get U.S. military and diplomatic secrets published around the world. Here's how Wikileaks got its start (h/t The Guardian via Ed Morrissey):

It was childishly easy, according to the published chatlog of a conversation Manning had with a fellow-hacker. “I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’ … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing … [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.” He said that he “had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months”.

Manning told his correspondent Adrian Lamo, who subsequently denounced him to the authorities: “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public … Everywhere there’s a US post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. Worldwide anarchy in CSV format … It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”

These things will happen when you entrust U.S. secrets to nervous children, particularly those with bones to pick with the U.S. military and with "society at large." Bradley Manning's anger with his nation and his nation's military centered around his desire for "transgender equality."

Last August, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway was reported to have "expressed his fear" that the effort to repeal "Don't ask, Don't tell" would "distract from the military's mission of protecting the nation." It looks like Bradley Manning was among the distracted.

Worse, far worse, and more dangerous, in my opinion, are the "distracted" leaders in America's political and military structures, who are easily led by whatever politically correct demand marches down the pike, whether it be gay marriage, Muslim extra-sensitivities, new home mortgages for credit risks, citizenship for the "undocumented," or any other feel-good "cause."

In times of danger and economic stress, reasonable people focus first on the most basic matters of survival, and later work on improving those areas on which survival does not depend.

It's time our country's leaders did the same.

H/t AJ Strata.
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