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Pentagon Demands Return of Leaked Afghanistan Documents
Multiple news agencies are reporting that the Pentagon has demanded the return of WikiLeaks' collection of secret documents relating to the war in Afghanistan. Defense Department spokesman Geoff Morrell said, "The only acceptable course is for WikiLeaks to take steps immediately to return all versions of all of these documents to the US government and permanently delete them from its website, computers and records." According to the BBC, Morrell also "acknowledged the already-leaked documents' viral spread across the internet made it unlikely they could ever be quashed," but hopes to prevent the dissemination of a further 15,000 documents WikiLeaks is reportedly in the process of redacting. "We're looking to have a conversation about how to get these perilous documents off the website as soon as possible, return them to their rightful owners and expunge them from their records." WikiLeaks, predictably, shows no sign of cooperating.
Didn't we hear this before during the Vietnam war? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers
You need to download the internet before you can delete it.
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Yeah, too bad Wikileaks redacts identifying names of at-risk persons before publishing, which invalidates your entire comment.
He's a nice guy. Soft spoken, almost shy. Not someone I'd consider a fame whore.
Obama is? He took three months to consider his general's report, then gave the man LESS than the MINIMUM number of troops the general asked for-- as if to claim that he somehow knew better.
My point is this: don't pin it on W. All of our leaders are rife with incompetence.
That may as be (I certainly think Clinton would have made a vastly better president than Obama--his inexperience is showing rather painfully in many venues), but that is irrelevant to this wikileaks leak.
All of the documentation covers a time prior to Obama taking office, so the grandparent is correct: this reflects entirely on Dubya and his administration, not Obama, whatever Obama's failings may be.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Obligatory bash.org:
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Wikileaks relies on stuff people send them. If you have classified information from the North Korea government/military, I'm sure they'll be happy to post it online.
And they do have some reports about North Korea, including about when WMD were traded between NK and Pakistan, but they come from the US, which is where they can get that info.
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He started a war? Amazing, I didn't know he had his own country.
Not just that, http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/07/26/times_wikileaks_white_house_meeting
"New York Times reporters met with White House before publishing WikiLeaks story" ie "administration "praised" New York Times reporters for their handling of leaked Afghan war material"
" They also praised us for the way we handled it, for giving them a chance to discuss it, and for handling the information with care. And for being responsible.”
"but the White House doesn't seem to have told the Times that publishing stories based on these documents would in any real way harm our troops."
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Except sadly, there's no hyperbole there. It's a public international shakedown by the DoD, not their specialty. The rules for disclosure have fundamentally changed, and the DoD is throwing a conniption. Not much else they can do but partner with the mainstream media on this, and try to convince the general public of the evilness of wikileaks. NBC was happy to oblige from what I've seen - having the military mouthpiece on meet the press last week for a one sided pity party. Like cuckolds, NBC happily reported creamy detail from the 90,000 pages after the release.
The coming of the digital era hasn't exactly eliminated paper; maybe someone sent actual physical documents to Wikileaks.
I say let's see if they'll use their black ops death ray on Wikileaks, or just shut down the entire Internet for a week to punish Wikileaks. You remember, "If that apple isn't back on my desk by the time I count to ten, the entire class will have to stay after school."
"If those Wikileaks documents aren't back in the Pentagon by the time I count to ten, well, then everybody's going to have to suffer".
That's sort of been the foreign policy of US since the Cold War, right?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone, especially the section on Criticism. The CIA funded several groups in Afghanistan against the Soviets, but bin Laden's was no among them; he had his own money (inherited from his father's construction business) and funded his own soldiers. There is no evidence to suggest any CIA money ever went to equipping or training bin Laden or his followers.
And even if there were, it would not make one iota of difference. Choosing the lesser of two evils sometimes means you're left with a really evil choice.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
What's with this "return the documents" crap? Has the pentagon lost their copies?
Maybe wikileaks should send them an invoice for backup services.
Exactly... the request to "return" the documents means the Pentagon doesn't know what Wikileaks has.
but honestly, the guy is a fame whore who really doesn't care who dies just as long as he has fame. He wants his time in the sun. Even after seeing other press stories about Taliban acting on namesof informants and such he doesn't really seem to care.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, we’ve got to be careful, Amy. Mullen actually was quite crafty in his words. He said "might already have" blood on my hands. But the media has gone and turned that into a concrete definition. There is, as far as we can tell, no incident of that. So it is a speculative charge. Of course, we are treating any possible revelation of the names of innocents seriously. That is why we held back 15,000 of these documents, to review that.
Now, some names may have crept into others and may be unfortunate, may not be. But you must understand that we contacted the White House about that issue and asked for their assistance in vetting to see whether there would be any exposure of innocents and to identify those names accordingly. Of course, we would never accept any other kind of veto, but in relation to that matter, we requested their assistance via the New York Times, who the four media partners involved—us, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and the Times—agreed would be the conduit to the White House so we wouldn’t step on each other’s toes. Now, the White House issued a flat denial that that had ever happened. And we see, however, that in an interview with CBS News, Eric Schmidt, who was our contact for that, quoted from the email that I had relayed to the White House, and that quote is precisely what I had been saying all along and completely contradicts the White House statement.
You can't take the sky from me...
20. ^ Graham Fuller in interview with Peter Bergen, Bergen, Peter, Holy War Inc., Free Press, (2001), p.68 21. ^ Henry S. Bradsher, Afghan Communism and Soviet Interventions, Oxford University Press, 1999, p.185 22. ^ "The Road to September 11". Evan Thomas. Newsweek. 1 October 2001. 23. ^ "1986-1992: CIA and British Recruit and Train Militants Worldwide to Help Fight Afghan War". Cooperative Research History Commons. http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a86operationcyclone. Retrieved 2007-01-11. 24. ^ "CIA worked with Pak to create Taliban". India Abroad News Service. 2001-03-06. http://www.rawa.org/cia-talib.htm. Retrieved 2007-01-11. 25. ^ "CIA bin Laden". October 2001. http://www.sabrang.com/cc/archive/2001/oct01/cover6.htm. Retrieved 2007-01-10. 26. ^ "Did the U.S. "Create" Osama bin Laden?". US Department of State. 2005-01-14. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/24-318760.html. Retrieved 2007-01-09.
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
That's hard to deny. Bin Laden's express purpose in attacking the US was to goad the US into a counterattack that would precipitate a holy war. GWB did exactly that. He gave Bin Laden everything he wanted.
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Of course they did.
Then they became republicans.
Never heard of the "southern strategy"? Or just want to keep quiet about it?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
The names you cite in number 4 are an obvious straw man. Wikileaks is not leaking those names, it is redacting them as we speak BEFORE listing those names. so what's in those 15,000 documents? And who is paying you to mislead us?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Most of those were democrats in name only (hence, Dixiecrats), because "Republican" was a dirty word to the south ever since Lincoln freed the slaves. After the civil rights legislation was put through by west coast and northeast democrats, most Dixiecrats went Republican to show the non-racist wing of the Democrat party their displeasure.
And now you know the part that the right wing leaves off of their explanation of what's left out of the history books.