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Human Rights Groups Join Criticism of WikiLeaks
e065c8515d206cb0e190 writes "Several human rights organizations contacted WikiLeaks and pressed them to do a better job at hiding information that endangers civilians within their leaked documents. From the article: 'The letter from five human-rights groups sparked a tense exchange in which WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange issued a tart challenge for the organizations to help with the massive task of removing names from thousands of documents, according to several of the organizations that signed the letter. The exchange shows how WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange risk being isolated from some of their most natural allies in the wake of the documents' publication. ... An [Amnesty International] official replied to say that while the group has limited resources, it wouldn't rule out the idea of helping, according to people familiar with the reply. The official suggested that Mr. Assange and the human-rights groups hold a conference call to discuss the matter.'"
An Amnesty official replied to say that while the group has limited resources, it wouldn't rule out the idea of helping, according to people familiar with the reply. The official suggested that Mr. Assange and the human-rights groups hold a conference call to discuss the matter.
Mr. Assange then replied: "I'm very busy and have no time to deal with people who prefer to do nothing but cover their asses. If Amnesty does nothing I shall issue a press release highlighting its refusal," according to people familiar with the exchange.
Kind of comes off as a narcissistic jerk here.
I hate the need for wikileaks, if not wikileaks directly.
Freedom of the press was supposed to be a balance between this and the traditional media. However, with the major news outlets falling over themselves to appease different market segments, real news gets lost in the translations. Real information is not reported when it should be, letting situations like Iraq happen.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
It appears Mr. Assange does not know the basics of information security. Wikileaks does not have a system through which to vet it's insiders. These insiders who are supposed to help Mr. Assange in editing out or redacting the names could very well be foreign intelligence agents sifting through the data specifically to get the list of names to sell to Al Qaeda, Taliban or whomever has the money to pay for it. I expected more from Mr. Assange, if he does not take his information security a lot more seriously how do we trust this man to keep these secrets safe? The leakage of these secrets can cost lives, so this is very serious.
Who vetted Julian Assange? How do we know he's not foreign intelligence himself?
It's time that people understand that information wants to be free. And we the people should want information to be free.
One of the secrets released was that the Taliban are quite a bit more violent and willing to kill innocents than has been reported. It has sums of civilian casualties created by the NATO (US) forces and the Taliban. Yeah, these guys are scum bags.
More importantly, wasn't Obama supposed to have the most transparent administration?
But most importantly, government secrets in the open are inherently good for the People. Why is there not an understanding of this? 9/11 did not teach us how bad the terrorists were. We already knew that. Instead, we should have learned that government cannot, under any circumstances, be trusted.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Maybe those human rights groups should spend their time more vigorously fighting the wars, corruption and shenanigans that make wikileaks such a required global asset.
I'm still torn in regards to Wikileaks. On the one hand, transparency can be a phenomenal thing. On the other, it can't help but bleed interpretation, which in and of itself can lead to misgivings and the perversion of a "truth". Granted, there are concurrently 4 million different truths all bubbling away. Ew, interpretation just reared its ugly head. Does the right hand always want to know what the left is doing? In a perfect world, yes. In this one? I just don't know. Yep, still torn. I contributed absolutely nothing. Flog me.
This is what was told to me. There's some truth to this too. I tend to think of Wikileaks as a hero, but maybe they aren't. Maybe they are just a tool, like a gun or a hammer. A tool is neutral. It accomplishes a goal. It is neither good nor evil.
I'm wondering if I should consider this leak "good", or simply an "effective use of a tool".
I don't think it's evil as a whole, but if people are dying due to the individual parts, then perhaps the issue is not so simple as "good || bad".
I don't know.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Obviously my last post resulted in an immediate troll rating but I'm going to say it again.
The US government and governments around the world go through ridiculous means to keep this information secret. It's not stored on a laptop somewhere. It's stored in such a way so that only people with top secret security clearance can access it. This classification system is called access control. Anybody who knows about information security knows that in order to secure or keep information secret you need absolute control over who accesses it. You have to control it on the "eyes only" level in some cases and in other cases you have to minimize it to only people who have been fully vetted and checked so as to find out if they are a member of a foreign intelligence agency, or if they are a compromised individual who can be turned into an informant for a foreign intelligence agency.
Wikileaks does not appear to have any internal classifications or compartmentalization. If Julian Assange thinks he can just let entire organizations with hundreds or thousands of eyes access top secret information then hes naive. If he thinks he can come up with his own classification system without government support hes also probably naive but at least this would be a step in the right direction. If he gives the documents out to one wrong person it will get to the Taliban. If he does not take information security seriously it will get to the Taliban. The only solution is for Julian Assange to work with the US government on this.
The real question is who vetted Julian Assange? If he has these documents how do we know he isn't passing it along to some foreign government himself? It's a matter of who to trust and how would Julian Assange know who to trust in this situation assuming he really is an honorable individual? And if he is a corrupt individual how do we know we can trust him? With no government or state protecting him or doing the process of handling the web of trust, it's like not having a certificate authority, or not having a web of trust for PGP. You don't know if there is a man in the middle or if the person you communicate with is friend or foe, or just a neutral who sells information to friend and foe.
Er, for the rest of us, it will actually be Sept 8th, 2010 (8/9/10). I don't know why Americans insist in writing the date the wrong way around...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It is most interesting that the “leaker” had access to human intelligence sources true identities. Within most of the Intel community HUMINT is Top Secret Code Word material. SCI under special handling and access controls. Guess we didn't consider their lives worth protecting.
I don't even know where to start....the naive idea that information wants to be free or that someone voted you up. I disagree that exposing all secrets is a good thing. Do you divulge to your co-workers how much you earn? Or a more appropriate question is, the employer who hired and is paying you to work - does he have the right to know your health problems and decided whether to hire you, or enroll you into the company health plans? Just because you pay your taxes, it does not entitle you to *everything*. You can't just walk into a military base and ask to see the f-22 or even fly it.
But if you don't trust the government at all, I hear Somalia is doing a great job governing itself.
Wikileaks and Julian Assange own this now. The good, and the ill, from publishing that information are on them. And it looks pretty ill to me.
According to Newsweek, a man named Khalifa Abdullah was killed after the release of these documents. So that's one man dead already. The Taliban has vowed to hunt down and kill anyone who is a "spy", and they are using the Wikileaks information to do it, so there will be more. Some of the people listed in Wikileaks have disappeared, hopefully into hiding rather than dead.
Julian Assange's stance on this is callous. He "insisted that any risk to informants' lives was outweighed by the overall importance of publishing the information." Okay, at least one man is dead now. What is that "overall importance"? I sure don't see it.
I'm also not buying his idea that this is really the US military's fault, together with Amnesty International, for not helping him redact the critical info. Much of the info is years old. What was the big rush? If Wikileaks didn't have enough volunteers to vet the info carefully, why rush ahead and publish it anyway?
If I were Julian Assange, I wouldn't be sleeping well at night.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Wikileaks can only work as a concept in the same way that the UN works as a concept. You get all the governments of the world to agree to support Wikileaks with technological support, experience, advisory support, financial support, and so on. This would allow Wikileaks to work. The problem is that no government on planet earth is going to support Wikileaks releasing the names of informants. Once Wikileaks passed that phase it became a foreign intelligence instrument itself because now it's actually assisting the Taliban and is no longer neutral in the information warfare theater.
Wikileaks should have NEVER under any circumstances for any reasons released information which could lead to the death of sources. The sources in my opinion are more important than the Wikileaks project itself. Wikileaks exists to protect the sources, and to protect civilians from abusive regimes. Wikileaks did not however develop the appropriate legal, technological, and physical structures necessary to actually protect certain kinds of information. First of all Wikileaks has complete faith in AES256, and while the US government uses it and it's difficult to crack it may be crackable through mechanisms or math we don't know about. Wikileaks also does not seem to have a system to determine who can view what, who can access what, and if they do have such a system there is no indication as to how it would work.
They need an American with Top Secret Clearance to work with Julian Assange on certain documents. This requires working closely with the US government. They'd need to do this with every government around the world for the exact same reason, so they'd need people from all governments who they can contact and work with. This would present major information security problems which I don't see how they'd be able to resolve. Foreign intelligence agencies around the world know Julian Assanges face, and even if he hides his identity they have trained hackers to target him. This puts him and his information in constant danger and under constant attack. This constant attack means there will be nobody for Julian Assange to trust, so how can Wikileaks have the web of trust necessary to get anything done?
I would say it would be very very difficult to do without government support of some kind. So once again if a government is supporting Julian Assange then can the global community trust him? There are so many issues here that Julian Assange is very probably going to have to resign his position over this. Wikileaks can survive this, I just don't know if it will survive with Julian Assange as it's editor.
huh? today is 10/8/9..
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
So we go to war, supposedly to "protect our freedoms," having soldiers willing to lay down their lives. We then censor all those said fatally defended freedoms. A journalist then decides to express their lost freedom by ousting the underhanded and barbaric activities of our own government. Another group whose sole premise is to advocate the rights of humans, ignores the whole barbarism bit and advocates censorship.
Yes, bad shit happens in war. Being willing to help cover it up makes them accessory to all those bad things. How many more years before can start taking all the Vietnam comparisons and switch them to Afghanistan comparisons?
The logistics of how do you allow the US government to do it difficult. First problem is finding a trusted rep of the US government. I suppose Julian Assange could have sent a copy to Adrian Lamo via PGP who could have sent it to the people who could properly take out the information which needed to be removed and then send it back to Adrian who sends it to Julian all via PGP.
Let's not pretend like this system is easy to implement or that the web of trust cannot be compromised. It would not be easy, but I accept that it would have been possible and that Julian Assange should not have released these documents without doing the right thing.
These groups have correctly identified a life-or-death issue affecting real human beings. Nevertheless, they're failing to see the forest for the trees. The reason these people need to hide their identities for fear of being murdered is that there's a war going on around them. The real issue is this: should there be a war in Afghanistan, or should there not be a war in Afghanistan? There was more justification for invading Afghanistan than there was for invading Iraq, but that ain't saying much, considering that the best public justification for the war in Iraq happened when Dick Cheney convinced Bush to get Colin Powell to lie to the UN. According to our own country's intelligence, Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan number in the hundreds. For that reason, we're subjecting millions of people to a brutal war. We're supporting an Afghan regime that is in power because it committed massive fraud in the last election.
I'm a community college teacher. You know what army guys tend to do when they get their limbs blown off in Iraq and Afghanistan? They tend to show up at community colleges, hoping to go on and do something better with their lives. Brave guys. They've been ill-served by people like Bush and Cheney, but they move on. What about the U.S. soldiers who just plain died in Afghanistan? They're easy to forget. I don't see them sitting at the desks in my classroom. What about the innocent civilians getting killed by U.S. drone aircraft in Afghanistan? What about an entire Afghan society that can't make any progress because we invaded their country in order to go after a few terrorists? To me, that's the big picture. Solve that problem, and the problem of names not being redacted by Wikileaks will become a non-issue. That would be the right set of priorities, in my opinion. By the way, one guy who I think really had the right set of priorities is Bradley Manning. He committed a crime by blowing the whistle on war crimes. He's currently in solitary confinement, under suicide watch, in Quantico, Virginia. If you want to send him a letter and lift his spirits, the address is Inmate: Bradley Manning, 3247 Elrod Avenue, Quantico, VA 22134. If you want to donate to his legal defense fund, the information is here. (You can verify the donation link via the locked link from the WP article
Find free books.
Lots of armchair quarterbacks give you ideas. You say to one of them, "Great idea! Why don't you go ahead and do it." Then their excuses begin.
The correct answer, and ideal situation, would be for the Pentagon to be redacting the personal information and releasing these documents themselves in the first place. Instead, they choose to classify documents in order to manipulate public opinion. Manipulating public opinion blinds voters to the reality of the situation. If voters don't have the complete picture, they can't make an informed vote and we have a de-facto totalitarian state. Military personnel intentionally trying to manipulate public opinion by hiding information (as they've admitted that they do) should be considered an act of treason. Wikileaks is doing what they can because the Pentagon refuses to do their job.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
As a funny-man once said; Reality has a strong liberal bias.
- These characters were randomly selected.
Assange needs to take some responsibility for his own actions and quit playing the martyr. His irresponsible behavior, by not redacting the documents, will quite likely get people killed. That is not the US government's or Amnesty's responsibility. It is his and he needs to man up to it and quit being such an ass.
Who vets the reporters for the new york times or any other news agency?
There's a long tradition of documents getting leaked to news agencies over the years.
As a general rule the moment state secrets reach a reporter/news agency based in another country who are citizens of another country they cease to be secrets and the system supposed to keep them safe has failed utterly in every way.
When classified documents get released to the New York Times the FBI and CIA get involved. The FBI has files on every American, especially journalists who work for the New York Times. The CIA probably has files on them too. They know who is loyal to the USA and who might be attached to foreign intelligence. The fact that we have domestic counter intelligence agencies that exist specifically to determine who the foreign spies are is why you don't see classified documents with the identities of sources included in them.
The last time classified documents of these sort were released, it was the covert action quarterly. For all who don't know what CAQ was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CovertAction_Quarterly , it was controlled by Philip Agee. Phillip Agee was a CIA agent who may have become a double agent for the KGB. He went on to release the identities of CIA officers through the CAQ publication.
The fact is the US Government considered him to be a traitor. In Julian Assanges case he was from Australia so it's not exactly the same, but if his publication released the identities of sources or released information which assisted the Taliban in determining the sources, if Julian Assange does not want to be looked at in history as being another Philip Agee he has to do everything within his power to protect the sources. There are lives at stake, and if lives have been lost he's just the same as Phillip Agee, Robert Hansen, or any of those others.
Their compassion for all human life -- as long as it's civilian life -- is touching.
</sarcasm>
sigfault (core dumped)
It's so fkn simple Wikileaks should have never released those documents.
Documents with names, locations, and sources, should never be saved on any computer system. If they must be saved they should never be viewed by anybody who does not have Top Secret clearance. It puts lives at risk just for Assange to be able to view it. If Assange was able to view it, Bradley Manning is directly to blame and if people have died and importantly if Wikileaks dies, all blame should go to Bradley Manning. He is the moron who did what he did after swearing an oath. He is the moron who then went to Adrian Lamo of all people and openly compromised himself further.
Bradley Manning should of never have had Top Secret clearance. Julian Assange should have never have had those documents. Those documents should have never have been stored on any computer system including names and locations. That stuff should be code names no matter what.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Agee
Because he basically received stolen property from a guy who should be tried for treason. He then put it up for all the world to see in the form he received it in. The fact that names weren't redacted prior to him receiving the documents is immaterial because he never should have had them in the first place.
This isn't evidence of illegal dumping or insider trading. People are going to die because of this.
I highly suggest you read up on the spying business before you make a comment. You assume people in these situations have much choice in the matter as of who to associate with, as if there are human rights and as if there isn't torture going on, or bombs dropping on them, or the fact that they are starving. In some cases the only group capable of helping them is the USA. There literally is nobody else. The Taliban is not going to give these people a better life. The Taliban wont give them freedom. The Taliban won't give them food, water, medicine, education, limited human rights, and honestly having limited human rights beats not having any. The warlord or the US government, which do you think would give you a better life if you had to choose?
We complain enough about government bloat. Would you like have to hire 1,000 auditors to review all this information, and another 100 vetters to vet them, and another 10 vetters to vet those vetters? Most of the documents released by wikileaks were the sort that are compiled quickly at a debriefing, and just thrown into a 'classified' bin, often never looked at again. To have the government review everything by default, is kinda psychotic. The FOIA gives the public a means to review classified documents of interest and see if they they should still be kept secret. It might be understaffed with years of backlog, but it's a lot of information.
"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations..." -Winston Churchill
You may complain about government bloat, but I would rather see them hire the number of people needed to get the job done right. An informed public is the bedrock of a qualified electorate. If that's what it takes to make sure that people can make an informed vote and not be manipulated by the people in power, then do what needs to be done and stop scrimping.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Do you really believe that any law would stand in the way of military objectives? Look at US law. Look at the fact that a US citizen is currently on the governments hitlist. The US government has the capability to capture or kill anybody anywhere in the world if they become an armed combatant.
I don't think that will happen to Julian Assange, but lets not pretend like the US government wouldn't do it.
It isn't really the wrong way around. That is how you wrote it first. Today is August 9th, 2010 ... 8/9/10.
?
Sorry, which people have been named/harmed from the leaks? Can anyone point them out or are we just supposed to believe whatever the Dead Tree Media repeats? I don't believe for a second that any of the hacks which pass for journalists these days have actually gone through the thousands of documents that have been released.
Furthermore, people here are questioning the value of the leaked material on...just what exactly? The word of the government spokesperson? The vacuous opinion pieces in the media? Releasing the material may well have prevented or altered some course of action which only the leaker and/or the actors involved know about.
As for the uninformed moralising on the cost in lives, let me just point out that more blood is spent deliberately every single day in our names for significantly more questionable purposes and less tangible benefits. I find it particularly galling that those calling for Assange and co to be charged with treason are the very same people who sent troops to die in Afghanistan knowing that their blood would be spilled by the hands of our supposed Pakistani allies and their Afghan mercenaries. Treason indeed.
Nobody is asking you to trust the US government. Nobody is asking you to trust the entire entity. There are some people in the US government who are trusted because they have Top Secret clearance and have been vetted. We have to trust those individuals, not the US government itself. Bradley Manning is a failure for having betrayed the trust of his country.
But the most spelled-out format would be "the ninth day of August in the Year of our Lord two thousand and ten." So 9 Aug 2010 (NATO standard) is logical.
Already posted so I can't mod you up but I agree totally. Manning could have uploaded his stuff to wikipedia, megaupload, whatever. It could have gone up on torrent sites and been linked to on /b/. There are lots of ways to do it and wikileaks is possibly the safest place for people mentioned in the released content in the sense that some filtering was done.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Stephen Colbert is not funny. His jokes are predictable. Stop repeating what he said 5 years ago. It wasn't very funny then and it's trite now.
It could be because there is no one single proper way to write the date.
I personally prefer the yyyy-mm-dd format myself. That makes the most sense to me.
This space unintentionally left blank.
Assange had the power to say "no, we will not release these". He also had the power to wait to release until the documents had been carefully scrutinized to remove names and identifying details of anyone who might be endangered. At the very least, he is accessory to any crimes that might have been committed by the sources of leaks.
Makes for easier sorting too without having to parse the string.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
I prefer 2010.09.08 (yyyy.mm.dd) because a simple descending/ascending textual sort
preserves the chronological order of the dates this way (esp. in similar filenames containing the dates).
P.S. I'm an "American".
I don't think that will happen to Julian Assange, but lets not pretend like the US government wouldn't do it.
You think that they aren't going to do it, but let's not pretend like they aren't going to do it?
With their encrypted servers, Julian Assange & Co have a very powerful tool at their disposal. But they're really not doing their credibility any favours by taking a naive "publish everything" stance. Wikileaks have to be held responsible for the results of their publishing.
This is not a perfect world and I do believe there is a place for wikileaks as "sunlight is the best disinfectant".
Wikileaks simply need to accept responsibility for the written bombs they are dropping, just the same as the US Army and the Taliban have to accept responsibility for theirs.
(apologies for the Spiderman quote - see http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2005_10_06.html
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
SETI@home can get over 3 million volunteers to scan the sky, but Julian Assange, in an Internet positively filled with people who would love to be a part of something like this, can't find a thousand people to help review documents and redact names that aren't needed and somehow this is Amnesty International's fault? Climb off the cross, Julian, the Taliban needs the wood to build fires and burn alive those you named.
It's okay for people to be killed, atrocities to be committed and covered up if it's part of the US military's agenda, but it's not okay for people to be killed as a result of exposing these atrocities?
Is there a list somewhere of what counts as acceptable collateral damage and what doesn't?
How many lives would be saved in the governments of the world knew that any and all deaths at their hands would be exposed for all the world to see?
Which thousands of people do you trust to do this without exposing the data themselves?
Wikileaks represents an externaliy of sorts. Sure, some nation-states provide essential freedoms with which it operates, but none of them are both willing and able to support it financially to correct for this externality, for the same reason that other nation-states are not able to use legal frameworks to control its spreading of information without severe repercussions for others unrelated to this matter. Therefore, Wikileaks have two strategies from which to choose to fund themselves:
1. Monetize the leaks, and
2. Solicit donations.
The first is probably too distasteful to them. I'm not sure I would support that either, though it would depend on how they implemented it. However, donations at their pre-Collateral Murder levels apparently could not support the site, as evidenced by the January shutdown of its archive of documents. They had no choice but to up the bet and make Really Big Deals out of something that no one could possibly ignore, and I think that they've found that right now, the big media players act according to rules not unlike the various versions of the Rules of the Internet: "All of your carefully picked arguments can be easily ignored. Anything you say can and will be used against you. Anything you say can be turned into something else [...]." Furthermore, any mistake made will be amplified far out of proportion to its real significance.
As the saying goes, don't bring a knife to a gun fight. But that's exactly what they're doing. The arguments being made against them for which there can be a factual disproof (not being able to individually check each document may have just endangered informants and their families) requires resources Wikileaks does not have. The US government may not have to resort to black ops (as so many blood-lusting authoritarians seem to seek) to impair Wikileaks significantly, if not permanently: they could simply wait for it to starve.
Help for them will not come from any nation-state. It will not come from moneyed corporations or their wealthy officers and investors. Help will not come from existing large media outlets, unless they are somehow compelled to do so (see option #1 above). Help may not come from those who supported the organization before the press offensive but were offended by it. Help will only come from those of us who continue to support Wikileaks.
I should disclose that I myself have not (yet) donated to them. They've jumped to the head of the list, as I have either already donated to the other organizations, or the other organizations are not of the same significance as this. As with "public" radio in the US, every time I listen, I note to myself that I ought to donate to my local station, and yet I do not. I apparently choose to freeload. It's reinforced by the fact that others manage to give enough to cover the bills. Hopefully, I won't do the same thing with Wikileaks.
As for Amnesty International, an organization whose mission is also well worth supporting, I guess I can only say that the suffering of people living in Afghanistan is pretty much assured at this point, and it had nothing to do with Wikileaks up until this point, and it may yet have nothing to do with it, now or in the future, since AFAIK, no one's come forward with the evidence. If armed forces stay, more innocent bystanders will probably die, and this will cause more insurgency, and so on in that deadly cycle; if the armed forces leave, the Taliban may return with a vengeance, and they might just harbor terrorists again, but who knows?
(So, did I sound astroturf-y enough? I sure think I do. I also lost steam at the end.)
Of course, the more people with access to secret documents, the more likely they are to get leaked. Easier to just keep everything secret.
Needs to be hauled to the woodshed for this.
I don't care if you want to call this a war, a police action or an occupation it is ongoing and peoples lives are at risk.
This is not a game people. This is the real fucking world. What WikiLeaks and Julian Assange did is pretty much indefensible especially now that a person is dead because of it.
Even if that person named is NOT dead I can pretty much guaranty that some people are going to die because of this. The Taliban or whatever group that does not want the US in their country is doing everything they can to resist and that includes killing people they consider to be spies or traitors. What Julian Assange thinks does not make a bit of difference to them, they are going to go over these documents with a fine tooth comb and kill in the most horrendous way anyone they think has betrayed them. Remember there is no such thing as due process over there. Some guy who has a bunch of guys working for him is simply going to say, "kill him" and that is how it is going to go down.
As many have mentioned information is classified for many reasons one of which is to protect those people who obtained the information. When I was in the military I listened to a lot of audio recordings and all of those started with a classification and a tag line that went something like, "Warning sensitive sources and methods involved". It was telling you that people who are risking their lives and those of their family obtained this information for us because they believed in US the United states and that we would protect them.
Now some fucking E3 ( third from the lowest pay grade in the US military ) decided that this should be public and because of that people are going to die as in dead as in ain't coming back, as in widows and orphans or maybe whole families. Perhaps putting that asshole along with Julian Assange up against a wall and giving them a lead overdose might just make the next group of people think before they divulge unfiltered military intelligence documents. It is one thing to expose government or big corporations since normally no one dies because of it, but when this shit happens people fucking die.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
totally right. order by significant digits.
lightspeedius is +5 insightful, mod it up
My first reaction is similar to yours and the other similar posts, in that there is at least an implied responsibility to being a journalist. But let me play devil's advocate here.
Wikileaks is all about publishing documents. Many "news" organizations use many different rationales (some more valid than others) for holding back information or not publishing a story. In many cases this causes a spin or bias on the news that has gotten out of hand in recent times. The current journalistic environment has created and somewhat encouraged an endeavor such as Wikileaks by losing the public trust. If we could rely on the major news organizations to reliably perform the public service of responsible investigative journalism, wikileaks would likely lose it's appeal and relevancy. Finally, if they released redacted documents. they would lose the credibility they have gained by releasing ALL the facts, no matter the consequences. Then people could (rightfully) question what they redacted and why.
Mr. Assange probably should have made this point himself.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
So because Wikileaks asked the Pentagon for help in disclosing classified documents, and the Pentagon declined, this *absolves* Wikileaks of any responsibility for the outcome of the publication of these documents? No, that's not realistic. That's stupid.
Wikileaks is high on their idology, huffing and puffing about moral high ground, well the fact is the addition of many names to the Taliban's Hit List are Wikileaks responsibility. They can't pass it off, they and they alone are responsible for these deaths that will certainly happen.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
huh? today is 10/8/9..
now it's 20100810
Greetings and Salutations.
I have read a number of the opinions posted here, and, my first reaction is "Have any of these people actually even LOOKED at the documents posted on Wikileaks?"
I have read quite a number of the documents available on line, and there are a few things that have popped out at me.
1) the only names that I have run across in the documents have been known taliban, insurgents and supporters of the insurgency.
2) A huge percentage of the reports are recording general suspicious activity picked up by routine patrols both on the ground and in the air.
3) There have been some interesting notes about aerial vehicles being shot at with missiles positively identified as stingers ( a little fact that has been, shall we say, downplayed, by the official military sources).
4) On the other hand, there are quite a number of reports of Afghan nationals (so far, all un-named) with war-related injuries being flown out for medical attention. Pretty much all the ones I have read have apparently been civilians caught up by accident.
Now, there may be some military usage in the times and dates and such listed with each event, but, I suspect that any decent intelligence service will already
HAVE the time and location details listed in the reports.
I was also interested to see the number of times when fairly suspicious behavior, or serious weapons of war were observed, yet, no action was taken to kill the enemy, or, destroy the weapons (tanks, howitzers, etc).
Overall, it seems to me that the biggest issue with Wikileaks is that they have dumped out a bunch of information, concealed by our government, that shows that some of the positive spin put on the situation in Afghanistan is a bit thinner than they would have us believe.
Pleasant Dreams
dave mundt
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
Wikileaks Assange claims to have a core team of 40 and 800 'volunteers'.
But the problem may lie in that he does not trust many people within Wikileaks itself. So, all these hundreds of volunteers never get a chance to help out.
Assange has only uploaded 2 anti military videos. Don't you think anyone with so many volunteers should be uploading more than 2 anti American articles on to Wikileaks?
So many things about Wikileaks do not add up.
Information needs to be available to the public at large. If one of the informants gets killed or whatever, well then maybe we should retaliate, or protect them.
Otherwise, we're just letting people get killed for no fucking reason, which kind of sums up most of the wars we've run since WWII.
Wikileaks are fucking heroes. Anybody assailing the people who bring us REAL INFORMATION are just idiots, nazis, or some sick combo of both, like Rush Limbaugh.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I prefer 2010.09.08 (yyyy.mm.dd)...P.S. I'm an "American".
I'm guessing you were also educated in the public school system?
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
According to Newsweek, a man named Khalifa Abdullah was killed [newsweek.com] after the release of these documents.
The linked article only says he was killed after the documents were leaked. It doesn't say anywhere that he was killed because of the documents. It doesn't even give any evidence beyond the fact that he was killed after the documents were leaked, not even a statement by the Taliban. The only thing this article tells me is that so far they have no evidence of the Taliban successfully using the documents to find spies.
Of coarse so many documents were leaked that sooner or later the military will find someone who was killed and also mentioned somewhere in the documents. Amnesty international is making this statement so that when the inevitable happens they can avoid loosing donations.
...with the names of your critically placed Agents? How hard would it be for an intelligence organization to infilterate Wikiileaks or Amnesty? How are they erasing the names? Where and how are the original documents kept?
I like the idea of WikiiLeaks but they need to clarify their policy for releasing potentially dangerous information.
He's not mentioned in them according to this.
Why is it "unknown" to Newsweek when a random internet commenter can figure it out in just a few minutes? Do people still employ fact checkers these days? And they say it's "clear" but they don't say how they know that?
If they're just going to report their own opinion on the matter, they ought to be a little more direct about it.
According to the ISO standard, it should be written "2010-09-08".
(ISO 8601)
There is ISO 8601
Newsweek can allude to one death "being caused by" the information release, but that's only because it comes in chronological order.
Of coarse[sic] so many documents were leaked that sooner or later the military will find someone who was killed and also mentioned somewhere in the documents.
Coincidental and inevitable.
Let's look at this in a different direction: here we have an (informant?) to the US military, presumably native to the area, who must have chosen sides, and his side was against the Taliban. He knew what the consequences of his actions could be, and instead of sticking his head in the sand and saying nothing to nobody, he stuck up for what he believed in. It's unfortunate that he died, but I wonder how many American Revolutionary War vets would have done the exact same thing. It's truly the personification of the Patrick Henry quote, "Give me Liberty, or give me death!"
The information release doesn't change the fact that he made his choice knowing the possible consequences. It only puts a face on the faceless Afghans who are fighting against the Taliban.
And you be speaking in American, and you gotz ur browser saying EN-US, and you only WISH you was a AMERICAN.
Geeknet, Inc.
Mountain View, Calif. USA
Why dont u go to ur freaking EURO florem and speak in whatthefuk EURO languge is insteed of coming to the AMERICAN FOREMS. THats right you fuktard ERUO trash doper, there aint any worth skwat!
HAHAHA! Laff N UR FACE EROTARD!
Even if they remove all the names from the leaked documents, there is still the risk of the Canary trap
And yet, they could have redacted ALL of the names and geographical information, and released that. A dragnet-style "Names have been changed ...." disclaimer would likely have prevented all of this crap.
Actually today is 10/8/10.
Silly little Americans, stuck in yesterday.
Signed +8 GMT
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
But the most spelled-out format would be "the ninth day of August in the Year of our Lord two thousand and ten." So 9 Aug 2010 (NATO standard) is logical.
No, the military standard is NATO DTG, which is DDHHMMz MMM YY -- which is even harder to parse than the usual US convention. I, personally, prefer the ISO 8601 DTG, strictly in decreasing order of precedence.
Not your call sunshine, Julian Assange is Australian and if I (an Australian) ran into him right now, I'd shake his hand and tell him he's got more guts then all the Nato generals combined.
Starting a war in Afghanistan got a lot of Afghani's killed. Including the ones mentioned by Wikileaks, failing to secure Afghanistan and going to Iraq made things worse. The failure here was not Assang's
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Nobody said democracy was about doing the easy things. The easy thing is probably not to have democracy at all. An educated public and an accountable government require effort, and are necessary for an effective democracy.
And yet they did, and what did they do when they had them?
They could have just released everything, unredacted to the world yet they did not.
They did the responsible thing(as a news agency) once they had the sensitive info.
They voluntarily redacted information themselves and even tried to do so in the most effective manner possible.
How many times when a newspaper is leaked sensitive info do they then contact the organisation the documents are from and give them a carte blanche to remove anything they want provided it wasn't obviously scandalous?
I mean this is into above and beyond territory, the pentagon were handed the chance on a platter.
Yet they they reacted like petulant children.
Mr Assange is a westerner. He lives with the privilages that being a westerner provide. He has some wealth, some prosperity, and the freedoms and privilages that living in the 'west'. Unfortunately, Mr Assange like many people in the west today does not understand or comprehend his position. He does not understand that with freedom comes responsibility. When in WW2 Churchill and Roosevelt made the atlantic agreement: -
The Atlantic Charter established a vision for a post-World War II world, despite the fact that the United States had yet to enter the war. The participants hoped that the Soviet Union would adhere as well, after having been attacked by Nazi Germany in June 1941 in defiance of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
In brief, the eight points were:
1. No territorial gains were to be sought by the United States or the United Kingdom.
2. Territorial adjustments must be in accord with the wishes of the peoples concerned.
3. All peoples had a right to self-determination.
4. Trade barriers were to be lowered.
5. There was to be global economic cooperation and advancement of social welfare.
6. Freedom from want and fear.
7. Freedom of the seas.
8. Disarmament of aggressor nations, postwar common disarmament.
This has been a base operative of the free world. Its fair to say that not enough has been completed. However, the US and the UK are still policing the world because frankly there is no one else to do it. And plenty who shirk. Decades later, these post WW2 decisions and building blocks are nominally carried forward and have been built on decade over dacade, and have provided the openness and freedoms where 'the freedom' of the press exists. And where 'HUman rights exists to an extent that human rights NGO's and organisation span the globe. But these have been built off the back of American and British and Allied lives. They were not free. They did not prosper. Many have paid the ultimate price so that people like Mr Assange can have a good life.
Mr Assange has now gone so far, that he claims he has some moral responsibility to out the mixed forces of good in this world, because as he claims, it is for the force of good.
Well Mr Assange, I don't take kindly to you or your antics. I don't take kindly to people of the left who do all their work off the back sof the forces they hate. I hope the Guardian newspaper is ever so proud to be associated today with wikileaks. They deserve each other. I don't take kindly to western citizens who have all the freedoms that it brings, betraying the men and women on the ground who daily fight for every inch to provide the freedom that lets scum like Assange have his nice cosy life. If anyone in our society has an issue with political decisions, one of the things the same men and women on the ground fight for, and die for, is the right for you, and anyone like you who disagrees, to partake in your country's free democratic life. You can become a politician, you can take part in politics and you can change the world. That is the right they go to the worst places in the world and stand in the mud and shit to present and protect. If you do not agree with your politicians, then mr Assange, spend your time hunting down material to base your case and to make it. But you will not and do not make the case by betraying troops on the ground, and placing many people in very dangerous places in pure, unlimited danger by your obscene and stupid obstinate belief that you need to leak this information.
Frankly, you are now getting people murdered. Not just the military personnel - but you are now placing civilians, aid workers, doctors, and many others in danger. People in the west like you Assange have an arrogance that your freedoms and privilages simply exist, and you think that your actions support your freedoms. You claim a serious motivation for you Mr Assange i
We`re all equal
Cut it up into small enough pieces.
Yep, easier - right up until it goes fubar. Then you're six under and no shovel.
Funny thing is; it wasn't ever really meant to be funny, which is why it really is funny.
- These characters were randomly selected.
You can't predict how many civilians may die in such a fluid situation tomorrow if US forces have to act quickly. What you can predict is the extremely high probability that every single solitary last informant/source in those documents will take a dirt nap after the Taliban locates them.
People have already been dying for years, because those whose job it was to do it right the first time repeatedly and deliberately failed to do so.
Should wikileaks have redacted the names? Yes. Should the military have admitted the civilian and friendly-fire deaths, etc, in the first place? Yes. Should the politicians have admitted they lied about the WMDs, and resigned, or better yet never lied in the first place? Yes.
Anyone who calls for wikileaks or its sources to be tried for treason should be calling in the same breath for similar charges against those who have withheld information that the public needed to know.
What else call the decision to deliberately deceive your fellow citizens into voting for an unworthy candidate or cause, for your own personal gain, if it not treason?
Amnesty International is an incredibly infiltrated organization.
As are the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières.
Their members are almost the only people not suspect in a war-zone, making them ideal.
All of these organizations have been used as cover by British, French, American, German and Russian secret services, going back to the second world war, and those are just the known cases. I would trust them with my life if I lay bleeding on the ground in some hell-hole.
Their opinions and motivations not so much.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Absolutely. Hire 2000 auditors. If the people knew what was going on then (hopefully) we would not be involved in these wars anymore and the addition of those 2000 people to payroll would allow the removal of many times that number of military personnel.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Amnesty International condemning the release of information and Verizon pushing for open networks.
Did I miss the memo that April Fools was going to run a few months late??
"Hello mr(mrs) so and so from (insert obscure human rights orginazation here) nice to finally meet you in perso....." phut!!! phut!!
"Several human rights organizations contacted WikiLeaks and pressed them to do a better job at hiding information that endangers civilians
How many of these `human rights organizations' are fronts for the US security services. Why is it they have not spoken up on the lack of human rights of the thousands of Iraqi civilians killed since the US invasion, or is it they don't count.
".. 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 hands. These two men arguably are wading in the blood from those wars
Which they wouldn't have if the country whose actions are being exposed hadn't decided to go on a wild goose chase with all their military might and start a war which can last decades, killing loads more people other than THOSE THAT DECIDED TO JOIN IN.
What else call the decision to deliberately deceive your fellow citizens into voting for an unworthy candidate or cause, for your own personal gain, if it not treason?
That's called politics. Also, please note that I'm not necessarily for the war, I'm just against Wikileaks. The difference is subtle yet profound.
What a coincidence that subsequent to U.S. Intelligence plotting to discredit Wikileaks, we have a number of concerned people and organizations popping up to do just that - discredit Wikileaks.
U.S. Intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks
Slashdot Article
No, it was 10-08-09 or 2010-08-09. Don't cause even more confusion by yet another slash notation, when you have ISO8601 standards.
Are you sure about that? - the FOIA in my country allows me to request any document. But classified and above documents are on the list of things that are to be refused.
AFAIK there is no way to see classified docs before they are declassified - apart from wiki-leaks of course.
Manning is a hero, not a traitor. The real traitors are people in the US who are blindly following their leaders and military into murdering people in their thousands overseas.
So you have trouble with "quarter to three a.m." being written 0315, too?
Things change when you go from "spoken" or "prose" to number format. The rest of the world uses the day month year, and there is an ISO as others have pointed out which is year-month-day. But only one country insists on month day year...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
...for attempting to validate the hypocritical and nonsensical talking points of the US gov't. If Wikileaks has blood on their hands, what does that mean for the US and the 221 documented civilians they had killed the first 6 months of this year? Or the various armed groups/individuals who have killed multiple times that number? When the US isn't busily killing the civilians themselves and covering it up (as the leaks demonstrated further) they're doing a piss poor job of protecting civilians. And they want to piss and moan about Wikileaks having blood on their hands. Ok. Go ahead stack the bodies. Let's see who's really got blood on their hands.
To make matters worse is that civilian casualties had already shot up in Afghanistan before any of this happened, with the primary cause being the armed groups/individuals incorrectly labeled "The Taliban". A 31% jump in the first 6 months of the year will no doubt be made the responsibility of Wikileaks, all with the aid of the "independent and free press" and now human rights groups like AI. Pathetic.
So true. This one time when I tried to rob a bank, I asked the cops for help so that I could do it safely without hurting anyone. But the fucking pigs just wanted to stop me. Clearly it wasn't my fault that people died.
"This one time when I wanted to reveal that the cops had shot up a bunch of hostages I asked the cop to tell me who were the robbers and who were the hostages so I could blur out the innocent faces in the video, but the cops refused to help and when I revealed their deadly mishap they said more hostages would be shot because of me."
This is the honest version of your allegory. The way you say it you've conflated Wikileaks and the Taliban, because you're biased against wikileaks and are actively trying to smear them, apparently.
You can't take the sky from me...
Repeat after me: WikiLeaks is not a "news agency." Wkileaks is an activist group.
The most effective manner possible allowed the Times of London's reporters to find names, GPS coordinates, and family names & village names of numerous informants... within 2 hours? That's a pretty ineffective method for redacting information if someone can find something that shouldn't be there that quickly. As such, I'd say it's quite likely that WikiLeaks favored the "rush to publish" approach far more than they favored the "responsible and thorough redaction of details that are unrelated to our larger activism, but which could put other lives in danger."
*tried*
They *tried* to get the pentagons help to redact the info.
The pentagon went instead with the old fashioned "lets sit with our thumbs up our arses".
So wikileaks went with a best effort.
Wikileaks may not be a news organisation but they've managed to break more significant news stories than any "real" newspaper in the past couple of years.
Yes, *tried*. And failed. Spectacularly. They therefore richly deserve criticism of their methods and policies, because of that spectacular failure.
If they wanted to be a "news" organization, they wouldn't have published a data dump like they did, they would have reviewed the documentation, and published an investigative report, linking isolated operational reports to larger events.
Instead, we have a data dump that puts informants at risk, and we have this vague, hand-waving assertion that "there's probably evidence of war crimes in there."
So far, no substantiation of that assertion has come to light, and in fact I suspect very little will be found in there that constitutes a smoking gun. Instead, it'll fuel the deluded, paranoid fantasies of conspiracy theorists and other nutters, and do nothing to substantially affect the course of this war.
Other than kill a few *more* afghan civilians via the time-honored method of Taliban executions, of course.
In 90K documents how many people have been identifiable? do you even know or are you trusting the hand waving by the newspapers that weren't let in on the scoop that the entire population of afghanistan will now be shot in the back of the head?
The even more time honoured method is, of course as the diaries confirmed, to just open fire on a bus or someone who looks shifty.
So you have no proof to offer?
we didn't need to have these informants named in these documents, champ.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/04/ap_afghanistan_kandahar_041210/
That your bus incident? Already plenty well-publicized, if the ARMY TIMES is distributing the AP coverage of the incident. I don't exactly think that's evidence of some sinister coverup that we needed these leaks to reveal.
But then, of course Americans are to blame for every civilian death there, right? How inconvenient that six people died about a week ago to a roadside bomb (I think it's safe to say that's not an American device that did it). Or another ~30 killed in another incident months back by another roadside bomb? Or 25 dead about 2 weeks ago?
Yes, you're right. American forces are clearly just killing untold numbers of civilians, and getting away with it there. Fuck off.
But the most spelled-out format would be "the ninth day of August in the Year of our Lord two thousand and ten."
I dont think so
Yes there is is!
http://www.iso.org/iso/date_and_time_format
See you were right.
You bolded the Month and Year, But you failed to take into account that he may have actually been referring to September, and not August....
Your Sig may have summed it up...
ICRC
ICRC = International Committee of the Red Cross
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
according to the wikileaks twitter:
Amnesty International spokeswoman Susanna Flood confirms there was no authorized statement on WikiLeaks.
So you have trouble with "quarter to three a.m." being written 0315, too?
Well, it does seem like an odd way to write 2:45 am, so yeah.
you actually believe that bullshit you wrote. I almost feel sorry for you.
It could be because there is no one single proper way to write the date.
I personally prefer the yyyy-mm-dd format myself. That makes the most sense to me.
There is no single accepted way to write a date, but there is a standard. Congratulations. You seem to be following it.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I was talking about a different bus - one of the cases brought to light was that French troops strafed a bus full of children .
not everything is about the US after all.
In the UK there are also some serious questions being asked about a particular british unit involved in a large number of civilian deaths.
So ya, everything in the universe is about the United States because that's the only country in the world that matters.
How many children died in that bus full of children?
Whoops, zero. Thought we were talking about civilian deaths, tiger?
I can't even finish the first paragraph. I really hope you're not a native English speaker.
Or is his sin that he is impolite?
How about accessory to murder? I consider that a sin.
(That said, somebody closely associated with wikileaks messed up -- big time. It might not have been Mr. Assange personally.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Doh! :)
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
And if you drop the time, you get DD MMM YY, which is what I had (well, I went with YYYY because it improves comprehension and from my experience is common military practice).
right, cause kids getting holes shot in them doesn't count unless they die, the occasional arm or leg is no biggie.
That's a nice straw man you've got there, how much does it weigh?
As awful as injuries to children are (did you really just ask us to think of the children, too?), injured children are out of scope in a discussion of civilian DEATHS.
I'm sure you can figure out why on your own, sport. (hint: injuries heal. Know anybody who has recovered from death?)
Know anyone who's regrown a limb?
Irrelevant to this discussion of civilian deaths , chief.
You were the only one who decided that getting maimed doesn't count, nobody else.
The entire point of this discussion has been the "civilian deaths" that have been caused by the NATO militaries there.
If you really mean to suggest that a bullet wound that someone survives is somehow the exact same thing as a bullet wound you don't recover from, well, we have precious little common ground for rational discussion, don't we?
I hope that arrogant asswipe suffers the same fate as the civilians, trying to help rid terrorists from their own homeland, will face after he "outed" them. His arrogant, beyond belief, attitude goes beyond the limits of any rational thinking. All politics aside, no matter what you think about the ongoing war, there is no reasonable explanation for this. If one civilian is killed, because of his arrogance, then I truly hope he suffers the same fate. I'm hoping the U.S. Army also gives the rat PFC who leaked the documents the death penalty, but that is an extreme rarity withing the UCMJ (uniformed code of military justice), and not likely now. But he'll spend the rest of his life in the military barracks of Fort Leavenworth, and I hope he never sees the light of day again.
Well here is my theory on this. This might sound crazy, but anyone that knows how the U.S. government has done things in the past I wouldn't be surprised if I'm right.
For a long time I have had my suspicion that Wikileaks was a just another front from the government. I mean, seriously, a website that leaks important documents and no country is doing anything about it? And why are there so many low profile and lame "secrets" leaked out? Where are the big bombshells of information that many countries store. To me it just seems like an easy way to attract whistleblowers into the honeypot. "Haha, gotcha, and you thought you were going to tell on us" says big brother. Second point is that it becomes a source of misinformation and disinformation. The governments use Wikileaks as a means to convince people that they are the good guys telling on the bad guys. People then gain the trust of Wikileaks and are fed information that otherwise wouldn't have been trusted. Third, by creating an enemy image you can go after all those that associate with that image. For example, lets say Wikileaks is blamed for spreading out "secret information", activist groups and governments lash out against it, new laws get created to prevent such things from happening again, and anyone trying to disclose information will fall under the same category as Wikileaks. These laws could expand to include conspiracy theory websites. Cuz you know people thinking that something is not quite right are a danger to society *sarcasm*.
The one true datestamp is YYYYMMDD. Why? Because if you stick it on the FRONT if your filenames, and sort, they come up on chronological order. Its also the same way other numbers work - most significant digits first. DDMMYYYY and MMDDYYYY are BOTH broken.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You're right that the Taliban formed after the Russians gave up on Afghanistan.
However, the US was arming the people who became the Taliban, the mujaheddin. They just weren't called the Taliban yet. WHen the vacuum came the guys we armed stepped up (with the arms the US gave them) and took over as the Taliban.
So yes, the Taliban was armed by the US and we did it (at the time) as a counter to Russia.
Wrong. Only a fraction of the mujaheddin became the Taliban, with the bulk of their troops being children by the time of the Soviet pullout (and many of them actually having been born in Pakistan as refugees.)
Many Mujaheddin were based on Herat, others were up north under Dostum's command, others grouped into ethnic armies (like the Hazaras) or like the predominately Tajik Northern Alliance under Massoud' leadership.
Only a portion of the Pashtun mujaheddin (in combination with Pashtun born in Pakistan as refugees) becoming the Taliban. There, some historical clarifications for ya.
Reading all these posts about people finding it an irresponsible thing to do, what exactly would have been the right thing to do? Wikileaks had information about a war that the general public isn't told much about. They knew that releasing these documents could out civilians who helped kill taliban, so they asked the pentagon to help remove some names from the list (The pentagon could have easily removed more names than there are supporters to not point out possible helpers directly if someone at wikileaks was supporting the taliban). They didn't help, so they were still sitting one some information that's pretty important for the public to see, and they cleared it the best they could.
Now, do you really think they should have waited until the war is over to release these documents? That can't be the right choice if the countries waging the war are democracies where the decision to go to war ultimately lies with the (badly informed) public. Just as an example, if the documents had confirmed the involvation of German troops in attacks on the taliban, this could have ended Germanys support pretty easily because there is already a large percentage of our people who dislike our involvement in this war, and it's even in our constitution to not engage in combat in a war where we are the attackers.
"The entire point of this discussion has been the "civilian deaths" that have been caused by the NATO militaries there."
Since when?
I rather thought the topic of discussion was wikileaks, unreported incidents and general army fuckups.
And if you really mean to suggest that losing an arm, losing a leg, being blinded or rendered deaf or any of the other interesting and horrible permanent injuries are irrelevant or no big deal then well, we have precious little common ground for rational discussion, don't we?
Those pussies can just walk it off... oh snap.
Let me quote my own post which you replied to:
To which you responded:
The discussion was about civilian deaths, you retort with "Oh yeah well some kids got injured!"
So I'd say that up until the point you decided to completely change the focus, the discussion was deaths, not injuries.
Once again with the strawmen? How unfortunate. I'm not going to dignify this by addressing it - you can actually go back and read what I've wrote so far to see that none of that is what I've said or claimed to believe.