Robert Gates Slams Wikileaks: ‘Like Seeing War Through A Straw’

Yesterday’s online tiff between fellow NYTers Anderew Ross Sorkin and Paul Krugman wasn’t the only battle on words going on over an Internet post. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates yesterday pushed back against last week’s Wikileaks’ posting of video of the US Military killing two Reuters reporters, saying the video (which was edited) was like “looking at the war through a soda straw and you have no context or perspective.”

“These people can put out whatever they want and are never held accountable for it…There is no before and no after. It is only the present.”

[…]Gates told reporters that the videos were akin to looking at war through a narrow lens and said that millions who have viewed it on YouTube and elsewhere could not understand what was going on before or after the airstrikes incidents.

One suspects this is probably a small preview of what we can expect in the future, namely: as much as the White House apparently enjoys the freedom the Internet allows them to circumvent the press, it also provides a level of transparency and accountability that certain parts of the government are utterly unaccustomed to. One wonders whether every newspaper in the country won’t sooner than later, establish their own wikileaks department in order to get the news scoops they need to survive.

Related: Stephen Colbert Accuses Wikileaks Founder Of ‘Manipulating’ The Public

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