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WikiLeaks Publishes Afghan War Secrets
A number of readers submitted word on the massive WikiLeaks release of Afghanistan war documents. "The data is provided in CSV and SQL formats, sorted by months, and also was rendered into KML mapping data." WikiLeaks provided the documents in advance to the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and the UK's Guardian — the latter also has up a video tutorial on how to read the logs. From the Times: "A six-year archive of classified military documents... offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal. The secret documents... are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year. The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian, and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday. The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001."
US is also the only country in the world that is constantly in war with other countries, bullies them and has a history of supporting enemies of its enemies
You realize that every country in the history of humanity has done the exact same things, right?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Huh? Your view of history is pretty narrow. Perhaps in the 20th Century the US has been involved in more wars that others (often as a defensive position, ie, WWI, WW2, Korea) but the history of mankind has been that of war for thousands and thousands of years.
This is reality, not the Federation of Planets. Get used to it.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It merely removes them...
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Y'know what really puts the 300 billion figure in perspective? That the GDP of Afghanistan is ~13 billion. If you can't crush an adversary like a bug for almost a quarter-century's worth of its GDP(and that is comparing your military expenditures vs. their entire economy) there is some part of you technique that you really need to take a hard look at...
Worse, even if we were having it all our way in military terms, our best case scenario seems to be installing our ridiculously corrupt and dubiously competent puppet leader sufficiently securely that we can leave before he gets overthrown. Given what happened in Iran when our ridiculously corrupt and dubiously competent puppet leader fell, this strategy seems to have a strong structural weakness.
Strangely enough, I'm pretty sure the US and Russian stockpiles of nuclear weapons made the world safer overall. I can't say the same regarding North Korea or Iran having nukes. They might actually use them without fear of retaliation.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Citizens and proud patriots of America, look away! Such things are not for your eyes. It is not for you to know how our war (done on your behalf, my steadfast Americans!) is going. Such things will only hurt the morale of our troops--and recruitment numbers! We beseech you, our countrypeople, you have no right to any of this information, for we do not belong to you--you belong to us.
The problem is we have this thing known as the military industrial complex that needs shit to kept stirred to give it a reason to exist and enjoy massive profits.
Old Ike warned us about it in the 50s saying "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. " but nobody listened.
You look at our history pre WWII and we pretty much tried to stay out of everyone else's business for the most part. After all those corps got a taste of the government teat they sure as hell wasn't about to give it up, hence where we are now. Sadly the MIC has become a self perpetuating monster, with plants and projects across every district, and more than enough cash to buy anything they want passed. Short of a total economic collapse I just don't see anything changing with regards to the USA and the MIC.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You know, I agree with you. I suspect the most dangerous thing you can teach kids in an American classroom is the true history of their forefathers.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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Actually, if you watch the video on guardian, Assange specifically addresses the problem of "safety" that is being lauded here, noting how wikileaks take great care not to endanger people, other then politicians and military making the decisions leading to these occurrences of course. He points out why "this endangers the safety" argument is beating on a dead horse - the data here is so old, that the real meat that could in fact endanger lives of NATO soldiers, namely positional info is long beyond any reasonable secrecy requirements, while names are being redacted.
Anyone parroting the "endangers lives of out troops" is doing nothing but repeating drivel meant to discredit wikileaks at this point. Sensitive negotiations on the other hand usually imply "crimes behind them", which brings us to judicial responsibility - i.e. how many children are you willing to have raped, mutilated and killed in the name of Aghanistan, before it gets to be too many? Perhaps it's time to note that NATO has quite a few sociopaths installed in positions of power, and they need to be replaced rather then be taking part in "sensitive negotioations"?
On the other hand, the people dead because of what NATO is doing in Afghanistan are actually dying, in droves. And as these documents show, NATO sweeps many of them under the rug, and who are the people responsible for that accountable for, and who are people covering them accountable for?
And mind you, he's not American. He's Australian, and he claims to speak for no one least of all Americans. He simply offers facts, and allows everyone to formulate their opinion on their own. This is quite different from most modern mass media, that tends to be opinionated to no end nowadays rather then offer facts and let people think for themselves.
They refused to abide by the laws of war and we responded in kind.
I find that statement pretty funny given that I grew up about 15 minutes away from where a bunch of colonial farmers basically engaged in guerrilla warfare and pretty well obliterated almost a thousand British troops. What did those wild heathens do? Why, they didn't respect the proper rules of war by moving around in proper tidy columns and shooting in volleys (the procedure is truly hilarious to watch.) The bastards...they fired from spread out positions! And from behind rock walls! Cowards! And then, as the British retreated, they were picked off militia hiding in the woods all along the road back to Boston.
So. The standards of war are rewritten by whoever wins...and it's not like we went into Iraq and Afghanistan not knowing what we were getting ourselves into. The Soviets did a pretty good job of discovering that a decade or two prior.
Please help metamoderate.
Please correct me if I've lost track of this whole snafu, but if your source blabs to someone else that he's leaking military secrets, and that someone else turns your source over to the military, how are you the guy who let him down?
Regardless of the politics involved, this information was classified and it was marked as such. It was disclosed illegally and the newspapers (at least NYT) have a legal obligation to not print it.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Newspapers have, in the past, published classified documents which were "disclosed illegally".
FFS, the NY Times went front page with the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
The Government tried to silence them and it went all the way to the Supreme Court
Since I'm telling you that you don't know what you're talking about, it should be obvious how the case was decided..
The only reason the NYT is "interpreting the content and publishing summaries" is due to the enormous volume of information.
There are guidelines for classifying data that determine the classification level based upon how much damage (often in terms of lives lost) that the disclosure would cause.
What we've seen time and time again (the Pentagon Papers are only one of the more famous examples) is that the US Government will break the law and/or lie to its citizens, then classify the evidence and punish any attempts at whistleblowing.
Or have you forgotten about things like the retroactive legalization of otherwise unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping?
Legalization which only came about after the whistle was blown and the public was outraged.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"Our weaponry and style of war is far more ruthless today "
Bullshit. Every combat action is subject to public scrutiny, and the commanders have to answer to a Congress that watches the news, right along with reading full reports from the front line.
We do not wage a "ruthless" war. We haven't done so since about 1950. We fight "humane" wars. We bend over backwards to avoid inflicting civilian casualties and civilian damage. We have very strict rules of engagement. If you think our troops are "ruthless", you have no concept of what ruthless really is.
A ruthless military would identify a village from which some combatants came, surround that village, destroy all the structures with air strikes and artillery, then they would roll through it with armor, and follow up with infantry. A sign would be erected, "This village destroyed as penalty for supplying 10 soldiers to fight against America." And, the bodies would be left lying in the road when everyone left. That is ruthlessness.
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