Is Wikileaks Guilty of Crimes Other People Commit?

I murdered a bunch of people and someone blew the whistle on me. Now people hate me and some of them are even seeking revenge. Who’s the guilty party? Me or the whistle-blower?

As former President of Texas A&M University,Gates must not have had too much time for academics, given all the administrative tasks and parties that accompany the role of the President. So many of us take his accusations with a grain of salt:

“[T]here’s … a moral culpability. And that’s where I think the verdict is ‘guilty’ on WikiLeaks. They have put this out without any regard whatsoever for the consequences.” [Source]

I ate some very hot Jamaican food yesterday without regard for the consequences but that doesn’t make me morally blameworthy. So there must be some other basis for the claim that Wikileaks is guilty. The pressing question is: Guilty of what? You have to pinpoint the transgression to accuse someone because accusing a person = accusing the person of x. So what is x?

The only statement resembling an accusation in this article states that “[t]he release of the classified documents has fanned doubts about President Barack Obama’s strategy to turn the tide in the unpopular war.” [ibid.] Fanning doubts can be translated quite simply as shedding light on the fact that the current strategy might not be quite perfect.

So it’s incumbent on us to ask, is there anyone alive on the planet right now who didn’t already know this? Is there anyone alive who thinks that there is an intelligible strategy at all to get us out of this mess? The suggestion is laughable. So let’s keep an eye out for an accusation that makes moral sense, shall we?

CE