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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."
Last line of http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/:
"We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually, in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits."
So this archive isnt complete, come back later for more...
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
Not recently, and there have been a push to make the world a non-corrupt and peaceful place.
Precious few, if any, governments have these goals at the top of their list or anywhere in their list -- ignore the rhetoric and watch what they do. Corruption is the nature of nearly all governments simply because it's how business is done. You'd be amazed at how much of your priviledge of owning a computer and having electricity is the result of bribes and blatantly unethical behavior. Nor is peace their goal. The only goal is economic stability. Whether that means a non-combatant posture today or a brutal attack on certain citizens the next, the goal is only stability for the economy and outside investment.
There is many countries that haven't had war in many many years now. It was different in the pre-modern times.
Besides, the issue is the hypocrisy and hiding it from the public. US has done over and over again the exact same things that they accuse the current terrorists and countries that support them doing.
I agree the US is guilty of the same atrocities they accuse terrorists of committing, but so are many countries. Your memory may be short, but history is quite long, and just because a few years have gone by without major war reporting doesn't mean they're suddenly pure and will never use weapons again.
So let's not be naive about anything here. Much of the criticism against the US is deserved, but it is not the only deserving country.
since in those three wars combined only one single attack was ever made on the US.
So the murder of American civilians traveling on noncombatant ships doesn't count as an attack on the US? Attempting to get one of America's neighbors to join an alliance against her doesn't count as a hostile act?
The US had ample provocation to enter WW1. Ditto for WW2. Ditto for Korea. Hell, the peaceniks here should have loved the way Korea went down -- authorized by and conducted under the auspices of the UN in response to aggression against one of it's members.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
The British and Roman empires were waging at least as many as we are, and were just as ruthless.
No, they were far more ruthless than we are. The Romans would have conquered Afghanistan a long time ago -- it's much easier to pacify a population when you are willing to kill anyone capable of offering resistance and sell the survivors into slavery.
We aren't even as ruthless as we were just sixty years ago. Read up on how we conducted ourselves in the Pacific War against Japan. They refused to abide by the laws of war and we responded in kind.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
Actually this behavior can be seen in any aristocracy/republic, when you have a cultural elite that controls most of the wealth/power/resources it will naturally seek to "domesticate" the population by sending off aggressive individuals to fight remote wars. This pacifies your population in the short run and in the long run you limit their chances of passing on aggressive genes since they are less likely to breed offspring while away or dead. In most mammals you can domesticate them within 10 generations, why should humans be any different?
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.
What a lot of people don't know is that a Soviet submarine captain actually gave an order to launch a nuclear missile during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but his second in command refused to do so.
Actually - researchers in 2008 uncovered that there were weapons on the Lusitania: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1098904/Secret-Lusitania-Arms-challenges-Allied-claims-solely-passenger-ship.html
Really doesn't say anything to the discussion here or the point your making. But I just read this the other day and thought it was interesting.
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
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
Its a long list for the US, then add the black operations and support, death squads ect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_operations
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
There's a big difference. The US military is the best of the best at destroying shit. If things need to get blown up, people need to die, etc, they can do it quickly and professionally. Never before has there been a military with such raw power.
What the US military is not good at is conquest, going in and taking a place over. For that you need lots and lots of troops on the ground, and a willingness to be fairly ruthless. None of that guarantees a conquest is successful, of course, history is full of people pushing out oppressors, but it is needed for it to work. That's not what the US army does, never has except for maybe in Japan in WWII.
So what they US army can do, and has done well, is act as an army of liberation. A country has a powerful occupying force, the US can smash that force and liberate the populace. France in WWII is a good example. That is what the US tried to do in Afghanistan and Iraq. Come in, toss out the assholes in power.
The problem is that liberation only works when people want to be liberated, and are willing to work for it. It worked in France because of two reasons:
1) The French people wanted the Germans out, pretty much to a man. There weren't a whole lot of Nazi supporters there, relative to the total population.
2) They were willing to work together. When the Nazis were kicked out, the worked as a country to untie and rebuild. They understood that freedom meant sacrifices.
This is not the case in Afghanistan. It is a very, very tribal mindset over there. For the most part people care about what is good for them and their tribe. There is little sense of national identity, little cohesion. To them, freedom means freedom to take your neighbour's shit and make your tribe richer/stronger. As such liberation is near impossible. They aren't willing to work for it.
So if the objective was to kill every person in the country, I've no doubt the US military could accomplish that goal quickly and efficiently, with little loss on their own part. That's not the goal though.
Frankly, given that the US government has a plan in place to discredit Wikileaks (which was, of course, leaked on Wikileaks), any article which takes an overtly negative tone of Wikileaks is immediately suspect. Anything that criticizes Wikileaks without at least mentioning that it is an organization of loosely connected volunteers should be taken with a grain of salt. There is a lot of misinformation about Wikileaks, and we really should not be perpetuating it.
Palm trees and 8
Handing out money would accomplish nothing. Few reasons:
1) True wealth is not in having money, it in having the ability to produce things. Rich countries are rich not because they have cash, they are rich because they have strong economies. While cash could be used to buy that, it won't be. Direct handouts are never used in that fashion.
2) It would just fall in to the hands of warlords. When you get an anarchy situation where the strong can prey on the weak that is what happens. Happens all the time in Africa with aid. You can hand it out to individuals if you send in guys with guns to make sure that happens, but when they leave it'll get taken.
3) It would just be used to fuel further fighting. Afghanistan is highly tribal. What this means is people don't really have a large scale, national, identity. They identify just with their "tribe" which in this case is basically extended family living together. By and large they see no problem with stealing from, killing, etc other tribes to their own gain.
Unfortunately, there is no real solution to the problems there. You cannot help people that do not want to help themselves. This is true with individuals who have addictions, and it is true with cultures, with nations, as well. Help only works when the group you are trying to help wants it, and is willing to worth with you. The Afghans don't, so help will do nothing.
The British did conquer Afghanistan on their second try, put in place a friendly ruler and got 30 years of peace out of there while preventing Russian influence from spreading south. They pretty much accomplished all their strategic goals. There was quite a massacre during the first Afghan war though.
The purpose of language is communication, If the idea is clear the grammar ain't important
Would you want a criminal getting a hold of information relating to an active investigation against them?
In fact, sometimes we do, in countries where people are labeled "criminals" for being members of the wrong political groups or other abuses of human rights.
Wikileaks just wants to release any and everything
In fact, the Wikileaks volunteers do review the material that is submitted to them to ensure that it is not personal information about someone or other private information. They are not there to "release everything," they are there to release information that is of political or historical interest that some group of people is deliberately trying to keep secret from the public. You may disagree with that specific goal, but the least you could do is refrain from criticizing Wikileaks for things that they do not do.
Fine, but then the unaltered, uncommented video would be what to release.
They did release it, so what is your point? The commentary on the video is their own take on it, but do not present this as them trying to hide the truth from people -- anyone can download an unedited copy.
Palm trees and 8
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.
Right on!
I saw proof on youtube that the fire couldn't be hot enough to melt those steel girders. Sick of all these lies, I went to look for myself, and I'll be damned: the WTC is still standing! They faked the 9/11 attacks in the same studio where they faked the moon landing. The real reason why the 9/11 attacks were faked was to provide an excuse for grounding all air planes so they could be retrofitted with tanks of neurotoxins for the chemtrails program, which is needed to keep the public confused and ignorant about CIA, FBI, UN and Freemason involvement in the Kennedy assassinations. The Kennedys were assassinated because they wanted to go public about the aliens that had been captured after the Roswell incident. The Aliens were here to warn us about the imminent threat posed by the passing of the planet Nibiru, which the Freemason/CIA/FBI conspiracy is trying to keep hidden because they intend to use the confusion caused by the upcoming disaster to impose UN law on the united states. The black helicopters have nothing to do with it though, they're an extremely fancy pizza delivery service for the Skull & Bones alumni.
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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Took the Romans two centuries to pacify the Iberian peninsula (present day Spain and Portugal). And that was without outside meddling (after they took it from the Carthaginians).
Interstitial spaces are filled with cream.
I hesitate to intrude upon this good-natured colloquy, but I must point out that there were no "Frenchmen" (or French women) for about 1000 years after Caesar and his colleagues conquered Gaul. (The very name "France" derives from the Franks, a tribe of barbarians who invaded Gaul hundreds of years after Caesar). The main source for the Roman conquest of Gaul, of course, consists of Caesar's own books. Is it at all possible that he might have slanted them, perhaps touching up a few facts and figures, in order to impress the voters back in Rome? (Point 1: Caesar is one hell of a general, who conquers whole provinces in a matter of months and utterly destroys Rome's enemies; Point 2: You *really* do not want to anger him).
You are probably aware of the wide gap between pagan Roman (and Greek, and for that matter Gaulish) ethics and the Christian ethics with which everyone in the West is more or less permeated. Whereas Christ abjured us to love our enemies, turn the other cheek when struck, and to forgive our brother "unto seventy times seven" times, the ancients believed in returning whatever they received - with interest. A noble Roman, Greek, Gaul, or Goth would take pride in rewarding his friends and servants lavishly, heaping kindness upon his dependents, and showing the most merciless cruelty to his declared enemies. In some ways, the Nazi philosophy (if one can dignify it with that name) harked back to the days of the Romans in regarding forgiveness and mercy as signs of weakness, likely to be abused and exploited by enemies. So it's not surprising that the Romans took such a robust approach to conquering other nations and repressing rebellions. The very word "virtue" originates from the Latin "vir" (a man) and to the Romans meant the manly virtues of truth, courage, and strength. That's why it's foolish and inappropriate to compare the violence of 20th and 21st century wars with those of the pre-Christian period. One shouldn't forget, either, the appalling bloodiness of the high Christian period, from the Dark Ages through to the Enlightenment. No one who casts stones at Islam for its culture of violent intolerance should forget that Christianity, for most of its history, was very similar in that regard. It has just had an extra few hundred years to lose its sharp edges.
Nowadays, in the post-Christian epoch, everyone has been exposed to Christian ethics - even if many of us are avowed agnostics or atheists, the ethical rules that we consider self-evident and universal often derive from Christianity. So we pay abundant lip service to kindness, mercy, charity and forgiveness. Yet the people who reach the top layers of government and the armed forces cannot afford any such scruples: they have to behave very much like ancient Romans, while pretending to subscribe to Christian or humanist ethics. Hence the paradoxes expressed in the t-shirt slogan "Whom would Jesus bomb?" Clinton had it right: "It's the economy, stupid!" Every US president (and all their staff too) is fully aware that his overriding goal must be to make Americans prosperous and keep them that way. That is not done by exporting the huge amounts of wealth that would be necessary to turn a country like Afghanistan into a passable replica of Ohio (or even Egypt); instead, it is done by sucking wealth out of such countries for the enrichment of Americans. But overt looting of foreign nations is frowned upon, most of all by our own ethics. How to square the circle? (Hint: I do know that's impossible) The method adopted has been to pretend that the invasion is for the good of the invaded. The forces of Western civilisation are conquering Afghanistan - as they did Iraq - to bring freedom, security, and the American Way of Life to the benighted heathen (sorry, "impoverished tribesmen").
It won't work. And there is very good reason to believe that no one in the White House or the Pentagon ever believed it could. This is what Maximilien Robespierre, no pacifist himself, had to say on the subject in 1791:
"The most extravagant idea that c
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I realize that you were mocking the "kindness" statement and not arguing the necessity, but a quick review of the history might enlighten a few readers here about the US approach to war and its determination to minimize civilian casualties.
By 1945, WW2 was nearing its end and everyone knew it; the Japanese were all but beaten but were refusing to surrender unconditionally. Rather than lay down their arms, they adopted a strategy to prevent an invasion of the Japanese home island by dragging out the war as long as possible and making each succeeding engagement so bloody that, hopefully, the US public would be increasingly appalled by the death toll and pressure their leaders to just quit. That strategy came to a head at the Battle of Okinawa which lasted almost three *months* (1 April - 22 June 1945) and resulted in 100,000 and 72,000 Japanese and US military casualties respectively, and 100,000 Japanese civilian casualties--a full 25% of the island's population. There was no Japanese compunction about using civilians as human shields. The Okinawan government to this day claims that the Japanese military gave a mass suicide order to the civilian population and expedited more than a few. 90% of the island's buildings and infrastructure were destroyed.
Still undeterred by those high losses, the Japanese leadership were preparing the civilian population of the home island to escalate that style of warfare even further. The military began issuing hand grenades to civilian families with orders to throw them at US soldiers when they appeared in the streets. It would have made modern day Baghdad look like a playground spat. They had decided that they would rather sacrifice the entire civilian population than surrender. Accordingly, the projected casualty count for the Allies' Operation Downfall --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall
--were in the millions for the Allied forces and in the *tens of millions* for the Japanese civilian population. Faced with those numbers, Truman ordered the use of the atomic bomb. The shock of losing two entire cities in three days, with a total casualty count of 240,000 people, with no loss of Allied life finally convinced the Japanese military they were done. The math and the psychology finally became overwhelming. There would be no more bloody engagements, just one Japanese city after another vanishing in a flash of light until the military was eviscerated with no loss to the Allies, so the Japanese finally surrendered.
Terrible as it was, those numbers were still orders of magnitude smaller than the deaths that would have resulted had the Allies been forced to invade Japan. The only other alternative would have been a blockade, resulting in mass starvation of the civilian population.So by any objective measure, the Japanese refusal to surrender and determination to drag out the war in as bloody a fashion as possible justified the use of Fat Man and Little Boy. Truman made the right call. It was the most merciful option left.
The point is that the US does not kill civilians just for jollies. In fact, it bends over backwards to try to minimize civilian casualties, way past the point of endangering its own troops. The fact that the Obama Administration is considering creating a military award for "courageous restraint" is proof of that. Whether the wars should have been started in the first place is, of course, debatable; but if the US were so ruthless and brutal as some Slashdotters claim, it would have turned Afghanistan and Iraq into glass parking lots long before George Bush had wrapped up his second term.
taking out many civilian targets then trying to hide it
What history book have you been reading? The history of war is one of marching all over civilians. What you are supposed to do is walk in and kill every man woman and child so there is no one left to oppose you. So there aren't any children left fatherless to build a grudge of hatred towards your nation. This idea of not killing civilians is a result of the televised news cycle. Hell during WWII the firebombing campaigns in Japan killed 100's of thousands of people, more than the two atomic bombs.
The reason the war is taking so long is because they are at least attempting to not kill civilians. They aren't doing a great job of it, but at least they are trying.