I heard a story last night that made me thank god for wikileaks

My buddy is a foreign correspondent for a major Canadian network. When he was in Afghanistan there was a story in which the Canadian Military accidentally killed a local farmer. The government said they would take care of the family because they killed the breadwinner.

So, a few months later, my friend went back to see how they were doing. The government hadn't done fuck all for them. So, he was going to do the story. He called the military and said, "we MAY do this story and if so, we'll want comment." About four hours later he got a call from his desk saying, "What the hell are you doing over there? They're threatening to pull our credentials."

So, the story was spiked. Now, they could have done it and the creds would never have been pulled. That would end up in an even bigger PR mess for the military. It was really just a spineless editor who pulled the plug cause he took the threat too seriously.

Anyway, so this story involves no real security issues or anything, and the military makes that kind of a threat about it. It gets shut down.

Imagine the kind of shit they've been hiding that even the media doesn't know about.

As time goes on I hope wikileaks keeps up this stuff and I hope reporters can keep digging into it more and more. Who knows, maybe some of the SOBS in charge could actually get charged!

I didn't realize the military could pull an organizations press credentials for publishing a story they dont like. I know that they can do it if the story has information which may disrupt their forces but I didn't think it was that simple.

As I said though, that's an idle threat. Had a more ballsy person been in charge they likely would have told the military to go fuck themselves. That's what my friend wanted to do.

It was shortly after the beginning of the war. He's the editor of my local newspaper and very RW, so there was little chance he would come into conflict with the PTB.

Later, his son was deployed to Iraq, and he learned some things. He has also heard me speak in public opposing the war, and we've remained friends and he continues to ask me questions about my views.

His paper is still very RW (the featured columnist is Ann Coulter), but he's expressed doubts about the wars--and at least in that respect, hearing other views seems to have influenced his thinking.

If he were to return as an embed today, I think he'd make a much better investigative reporter.