Defense Department message to Wikileaks

The message from the Defense department to Wikileaks is quite interesting.

Geoff Morell repeats their talking points ad nauseam at the press conference, “do the right thing”. “return stolen property”, very professionell.

“Do you know what they have?”, he is asked. He answers: “We know what’s on the website…” and when he has to admit that they don’t know, he makes an unusable statement, very complicated sentence.

All this may appear stupid or even funny (“returning electronic documents”) but the communication is a very professional way to deal with classic news agencies, given how they operate. Also the concept of “stolen property” looks pretty compelling from a media communication perspective, though US government documents are generally in the public domain (irrespective of disclosure).

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