Andy, that is utter nonsense. Who decides when they are no longer a threat? You, 10,000 Km’s away watching a video or the man right there with a weapon who will die or be wounded if he guesses wrong?
Did you ever hear the expression “All is fair in love or War.” While in theory that is no longer true, in practice it still is. Which is how it should be. If war wasn’t horrible, there would be many many more.
Did you know that it is NOT a war crime to intentionally wound someone so you can kill those that come to his aid? Only when a medic shows up does that game end. You are pretty much clueless.
My advice to you is surrender the first chance you get. Our enemy doesn’t take prisoners other then to behead on camera but who knows, you might get lucky.

Yet EVERYONE does. Nobody gets out of life alive. Anyone with a weapon is a legitimate target in a firefight. The crew of that Apache did nothing wrong. BTW, those were not journalists. Journalists, by the laws of war have to be imbedded, If they are not imbedded, they are spies. That is why Journalists die like flies in a combat zone. If they are imbedded, the troops they are with will keep them alive. Most of the time.
LuLi, if you did, you would die, just as the fool in the video did. And if they had not stopped to pick up a wounded terrorist, they would not have been killed.
War is brutal. It is the ultimate Darwin environment. You watch out for yourself and your buddies. Everyone else takes their own chances.
I notice Assflange doesn’t go after the KGB, China or N. Korea. That proves Wikileaks is nothing but propaganda.

As western democracies go, though, we are definitely in the minority. There’s a lot about the American culture that I abhor, but to their credit they would never accept the government filtering the internet, and to even suggest such a thing would be political suicide. They resent government too much to allow it to happen, whereas we seem to be far more trusting.

I suppose this is the advantage of having a globally dominant American culture. As long as US residents can access (and subsequently re-report it) the leaks, it will get to us, even if it does have a layer of interpretation and analysis attached.

It will come down to someone working out how to keep their servers, infrastructure and funding streams completely off the grid. Assange’s real problem is that he hasn’t figured out where he can stay out of the reach of the establishment’s sphere of influence.

Imagine what sort of mayhem would be caused if some small, impoverished country decides to base its economy on being an information haven, much like the Caymans based theirs on being a financial one. Sovereign protection would add a whole new layer to the Wikileaks phenomenon.

Its true longevity, though, will be as a concept. Assange has shown that it IS possible to bring to light some of the machinations that we are simply not allowed to access. He has achieved enough notoriety to ensure that even if he is discredited (and thus essentially silenced) he has forged a trail that people will follow.

We’re going to almost get to an end-game for this type of secrecy. There is no question that a select group of people profit enormously from this information being kept from public eyes, and those people will have to react to the knowledge that their traditional channels are no longer private. We can hope that they will realise the error of their ways and forgo some of these profits, but more likely (human nature being what it is) is that they will try to clamp down even harder to protect their patches.

If the latter comes to pass, this will not mean good things for us. At least not in the short term.

Merry xmas to you 🙂