Editor's Note: American taxpayer dollars hard at work -- something to remember around tax time.
Tech Dirt
One refrain we keep hearing against Wikileaks is that the cable releases aren't really "whistleblowing," because they're not really revealing anything. However, it seems like each day there's another big revelation of rather horrible things being done (and covered up) by the US government. The latest, pointed out by Boing Boing, involves a report from a cable that US-based private security contractor DynCorp, who was hired by the US to train Afghani police, was apparently supplying drugs and young boys for a sort of sex party.
The details are horrifying. The Afghani interior minister apparently went to US officials to warn them that reporters were sniffing around this story, and urged them to try to kill the story. He specifically warned that this would look bad if the connection to DynCorp was made clear (he called them "foreign mentors"). Apparently, US diplomats told him not to worry, and the eventual story was in fact watered down greatly (until now, of course) calling the whole thing a "tribal dance," rather than a party where young boys wear "scanty women's clothes" and "dance seductively" before being "auctioned off to the highest bidder" for sex.
Oh, did we mention that DynCorp makes $2 billion per year -- 95% of which comes from American taxpayers.
And US government officials are declaring Wikileaks as an organization to shun and not to work with? What about DynCorp? Are their DNS providers pulling the plug? Are their banks shutting down their accounts? Are they being denounced by Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman? No? Why the hell not?