Much of the news regarding WikiLeaks and its latest release
of sensitive to classified documents got me thinking of the SR-71
reconnaissance aircraft.

My encounter with the plane came in the spring of 1970 when
I pulled temporary duty to Okinawa. It was part of a three-month tour for my
bomb wing. Some planes and personnel went to Anderson Air Base on Guam while
the rest went to Kadena on Okinawa.

We newbies to Kadena were on a bus going to a briefing when,
as we were crossing the flight line, the NCO in charge suddenly said, “
Gentlemen, what you are about to see does not exist.”

Out the window we look and here comes an SR-71 taxiing
toward the runway. One of the guys I worked with said he thought the plane
looked like two fighter planes connected by a rocket. Not too far from
accurate.

The plane was a superfast high altitude espionage craft,
super top secret. Nobody could know it was there. Nobody?

Okinawans would stand on the road, off-base, at the end of
the runway and take photos of the plane taking off; Soviet trawlers, spy
vessels actually, were in the South China Sea monitoring B-52 takeoffs; in
downtown Koza City (the town outside the base), stores sold plastic models of
the bird.

Then there were the ground crews who worked on the SR. They
nicknamed it Habu, after the Okinawan snake. One night several of them got
pretty well liquored up, had a stamp made up and on every bar and brothel they
frequented stamped the walls with “Habu Approved.”

Nobody was allowed to know the plane was there? How ‘bout
everybody but the American public was allowed to know?

Such was the case. The Soviets, Chinese, Ho Chi Minh and the
VC could know, but not my parents or sister. I wasn’t allowed to tell them
because the information was classified. You and yours weren’t allowed to know
either.

So now comes Wikileaks.

Why did the federal government think Americans—or anyone
else for that matter—couldn’t know that Saudi citizens are the biggest backers
of al-Qaeda? That the U.S. wanted to get enriched uranium away from Pakistan?
That Saudi Arabia and Bahrain wanted the U.S. to take out Iran’s nuclear
capacity for them?

Despite the Chicken Little reaction from pundits and
politicians that the release of this material kills people, no Americans have
been killed because of any material that the site released. All information
released came after the fact. Troop deployments and other pre-action information
have been secure. The current release is little more than a public
embarrassment to Washington.

As Nancy Yousef, writing for the McClatchy newspapers said,
“Despite similar warnings before the previous two releases of classified U.S.
intelligence reports by the Web site, U.S. officials concede that they have no
evidence to date that the documents led to anyone’s death.”

Also note that no one is disputing the accuracy of the
material WikiLeaks posted.

But, if keeping classified material secure is that important,
how come a lowly private, Pfc. Bradley Manning, had so much unsupervised access
to such sensitive material? According to reports, the man downloaded thousands
of pages of classified material and sent them to Wikileaks. Shouldn’t an
officer or senior NCO have been supervising him for at least most of the time?

Pfc. Manning faces up to 52 years in a federal prison if
found guilty of releasing information that shows how foolish, misguided and
cruel those in government and the military can be.

In previous information Manning provided, a video showed
U.S. military helicopter crews firing on unarmed civilians—including
children—then joking about Iraqis bringing children to a firefight.

What WikiLeaks did is not a crime. It, like other media, can
release and print whatever information is received. If the information released
showed the government to be stupid, incompetent or dishonest, so much the
better.

Recall, please, that President Lyndon Johnson committed U.S.
ground troops to Vietnam based on a lie regarding an incident in the Gulf of
Tonkin. The American people were told in 1964 that North Vietnamese gunboats
attacked the USS Maddox in international water. That was a lie. The Maddox and
smaller US patrol boats encroached into North Vietnamese waters and raided
facilities on the mainland. The North Vietnamese were responding to our attack.
We struck first and illegally, but Johnson and others in his administration
lied to us.

Had there been a Pfc. Manning and a Wikileaks then, maybe
more than 50,000 of my peers would still be alive.

If government lies, then we need the truth to come out from
some other source. If it takes a Pfc. Manning and a WikiLeaks, so be it. Truth
is preferable to lies.