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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.
It doesn't matter if Wikileaks complies, Pentagon has made it very clear they will make them comply:
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said that not embarrassing the US military was "doing the right thing" and he hoped Wikileaks would "honour our demands".
However, asked what the Pentagon would do next, Morrell told the AP that it was up to the FBI and Justice Department to decide how to proceed.
"If doing the right thing is not good enough for them [Wikileaks], then we will figure out what other alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing," he added.
Of course the right thing to the US government is always whatever the US military says is the right thing, and as the Wikileaks documents that have recently been released show in brutal detail, the US military has an unusual interpretation of what is 'right'.
Couldn't they just download it?
It is already out in the open. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Or "Things that have been seen can not be unseen."
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Government is the only business which holds the special right to employ coercion (meaning physical force or threat thereof) against you in order to achieve its goals. Secrets have absolutely no place in such a relationship.
Am I saying I wouldn't put an ounce of trust in such an entity no matter how loud they scream "we need secrets"? You're damn right I am.
OMG DELETE THE INTERNET!
Here we go again with people thinking that the paper paradigm applies to the digital world.
How on Earth do you return digital documents? Do you scrape the oxide layer off the hard drives, put it in a little vial, mark it with volume mount point(s) and put it into an envelope addressed to Pentagon? Oh, yes, I know, you first print out the directory listing (like we used to do with the floppies), tape it to the vial, then scrape, fill the vial and ship.
As for the further documents -- they better watch out, because WikiLeaks may just give up and publish all of the unredacted stuff just to preserve it.
As for WikiLeaks somehow "embarrassing" the U.S. military: waitaminuzel here. Did WikiLeaks compel the military to do all the embarrassing stuff? No? Then well, maybe it was better the taxpayers knew what their money is spent on, huh?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Didn't we hear this before during the Vietnam war? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers
".. we've got to be careful, Amy. Mullen actually was quite crafty in his words. He said "might already have" blood on my hands .. it's really quite fantastic that Gates and Mullen, Gates being the former head of the CIA during Iran-Contra and the overseer of Iraq and Afghanistan, and Mullen being the military commander for Iraq and Afghanistan -- I'm not sure what his further background is -- who have ordered assassinations every day, are trying to bring people on board to look at a speculative understanding of whether we might have blood on our hand"
link
I guess if the Pentagon had guns or something perhaps they could have leverage.
But just having 5 sides and 5 angles? What do they expect to to the wikileaks? Poke it to death?
The documents leaked so far illustrate the frustration of U.S. forces in fighting the protracted Afghan conflict and revived debate over the war's uncertain progress.
These documents are showing that the US' operation aren't doing too well. WikiLeaks is holding back stuff that may endanger people's lives.
This is all about the Pentagon and the Government trying hide their incompetence and stupidity. It's also to trying to keep information out of our hands to keep the support for the wars from it's continual slide down.
We're in another Viet Nam type era.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
[Rolls eyes] Can't they just file a DMCA takedown notice like everyone else?
return them to their rightful owners
Rightful owners? They must mean the American people who paid for all of this, right?
Reply to That ||
Losing a war? Here's the plan!
1. Leak documents that show boring day to day operational details, including civilian casualties on the internet
2. Blame the people who distribute, download and read said documents for the deaths of those people and the deaths of everyone else from now on in the war due to "security risks"
3. ???
4. Profit
5. (STILL lose the war)
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I don't think that's the way it is going to have been set up. Far more likely it's going to be an automatic disclosure of the decryption process from a source independent of Wikileaks should Julian Assange or any other key members fail to check in some how at regular intervals. That way if they should be detained or "meet with an unfortunate accident" the contents of the assurance file go public.
Quite frankly, I think the US military and government are pointing their fingers in the wrong direction here. The people that are really at fault here are those who have still not managed to put adequate controls on the access and export of sensitive data; one of the task given to the DHS, IIRC. Quite simply put, I doubt that there is any reason why a single person should have been able to access all those documents in the first place, let alone be in a position to take copies and pass them on too WikiLeaks and the media. It's not like Gary McKinnon hasn't given them enough egg on their faces about poor security procedures already, is it...?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Seriously? The guys been in the paper constantly the last few months and has given countless interviews. My mother knows his name. Oh, and he looks like Bill Maher but slightly gayer and more strung out.
Yes, Seriously. I guess everyone missed my point.
WikiLeaks has been around for years and it has only been in the last couple of months that he's come out of the woodwork to defend what they have done.
Before this episode, one would would have to look kind of hard to get his name and his photo wasn't the easiest thing to find - I tried a couple of years ago when WikiLeaks first started making waves.
That isn't a media whore.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
They knew what we were in for.
When you see photos of Afghanistan and see all that rubble, guess who did that? The Russians bombed them back into the Stone Age and they still couldn't get them under control - and if you consider that the Soviets didn't give a rat's ass about PR, I'm sure they didn't pull any punches like we do (read: the didn't give a shit about civilian casualties)
Bush KNEW this would be folly if they didn't have an adequate plan but Nooooooo, he went in there shoot'in up the place with no plan.
So yes, I'll blame Bush - he deserves it.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
It's a question of access and sharing vs security. Controls on information are more lax towards the front because it's there where the information can make a difference between soldiers connecting the dots and making the right move or not, and the consequences are very real. You try to push that information to the front so the people there can make the most informed decisions possible. You run the risk of something like this happening but on the other hand controlling that information more tightly runs the risk of people messing up and dying in incidents that could have been prevented by better access to information. In the tighter control scenario you would have bureaucrats telling soldiers they can't have access to information that could save their lives and in the other scenario you would have to have a soldier that's willing to put his comrades and mission in harms way in order for there to be a leak. So I think it should be easy to see why it's generally supported to push intel like this to the front, and I doubt they'll let this incident change that much.
I should hope not. Too bad the authorities have convinced the public to condemn the messenger instead of the message... Very sad state of affairs we have here.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Why no classified Russian or Chinese documents on Wikileaks?
Oh that's right.
The Russians and Chinese would hunt them down and kill them.
Which is not out of the question, btw. It will be a real tragedy when Julian is knifed in a botched robbery attenpt.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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...
And you obviously feel qualified to determine what the public is entitled to know and not know. Pure bullshit. Information is power and wikileaks is just doing what democracy is supposed to do, reveal truth and let the citizens decide. You, like so many despotic regimes choose to shoot the messenger, rather than deal with the fallout from the truth. It's pathetic.
The people behind Nixon were the same people behind Reagan, and Bush1, and Bush2. You can look at group pictures and litterally see these same people standing behind the frontman.
And?
Obama has Clinton carry-overs. Clinton had Carter carry-overs. Carter had LBJ carry-overs. JFK/LBJ had FDR carry-overs. And some of those administrations had guys that had White House time going back 40 years.
When a President enters office, he wants some seasoned hands with him. That means people that have served in previous administrations. There's nothing sinister or conspiratorial about that. That's just common sense. One of the things Clinton suffered from his first two years was having more green rookies than guys like Lloyd Bentsen who actually knew what the hell was going on. Plus, since Republicans have won more often than Democrats in the White House since 1970, there's a lot more guys with experience working there on the GOP side. You want to bring in some fresh blood, but at that level, it's more important to have experience.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
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.