As he saw it, once "Collateral Murder" had passed through the news cycle, the broader counter-intelligence problem that WikiLeaks poses to the military had disappeared as well.
"And the collateral damage is the public confidence in our intelligence community when we need to count on them now more than ever.
You won't find Syrian state television investigating torture by "mukhabarat" intelligence men or the amount of "collateral damage" caused by its military firepower, deliberate murder according to the Free Syrian Army, every Western government and hosts of reporters.
A rising lethal toll from further raids risks support rising for the Islamists and the danger of such "collateral damage" increases when there is a paucity of human intelligence from the scene.
That creates a much greater challenge for intelligence analysts and presents the likelihood of greater collateral damage when the strikes do take place.
According to Wired, federal officials have arrested 22-year-old SPC Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst with the US Army, for allegedly leaking the "Collateral Murder" Wikileaks video.
She may just be collateral damage in a dirty game where those in power use the intelligence services to leak stories to harm enemies.
"If you don't have good intelligence on the ground, your strikes are not precise, they involve collateral damage and casualties … making everything worse".
If we act pre-emptively based on good intelligence, we can probably do so in a manner that holds collateral damage to a minimum.
It was never claimed as collateral damage, nor a short round, not an accident, not a misread map or misinterpreted intelligence.
