Among the top US news today is an article about the Army intelligence officer who got arrested for leaking a confidential information to a whistleblower website. The guy got access to tons of confidential info in Baghdad and spent his free time looking over everything that he could dig up. One of the videos turned out to be of a 2007 shooting, when a number of civilians, including two Reuters newsmen were gunned down by US helicopters. The Army dismissed any accusations of wrong-doing.

What is more interesting about this is the discussion going on the Wired website. There are generally two sides: one is saying the guy is a hero for doing the right thing, and the others side saying he should rot in jail for possibly putting the country in danger. There is a quote by the guy’s father saying something like this: ” i don’t understand, he was always a good boy, never smoked, never did drugs…etc”. Interesting, no, the father is linking his behaviour to wrong-doing by associating it with some behaviours typically considered to be bad.

No doubt the guy got carried away by planning to leak terabytes of the information he could download, but that doesn’t mean his actions regarding this incident are bad. Sure everyone knows the military kills innocent men, but it doesn’t mean they should hide it. I mean, if civilians and companies are constantly being sued for things they did wrong, why should the Army get a free pass. Furthermore, it would’ve been at least borderline ‘okay’ if this was an honest mistake, but by watching the video of the attack, it’s quite clear that the guys in the helicopter were doing their job as if they were playing Counter-Strike in front of a computer, just shooting up whoever was moving on the ground. That’s nuts!

Thoughts?

The full story and the video of the shootings is available by the links below.

• Full article from the Wired.com
• Video of a helicopter shooting