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Wikileaks To Publish Remaining Afghan Documents
Albanach writes "WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange has been quoted by the Associated Press as stating 'the organization is preparing to release the remaining secret Afghan war documents.' According to Assange, they are halfway through processing the remaining 15,000 files as they 'comb through' the files to ensure lives are not placed at risk."
My favorite feature of this round of Wikileaks is how it divides us. We now have the privilege of mostly being sorted into two rather neat piles:
A) This stuff should never have been secret, and anyone who would hide it is un-American
or
B) These secrets are property of the government, and anyone who would divulge them is un-American
The framing is succinct, and I doubt there will be another issue of this type within my lifetime. No matter which camp you're in, from a certain point of view, you're right. Personally, I hold that nothing need remain secret for very long, and that our government should be in the business of printing this material itself. Others are calling for Pvt Manning's execution.
Amazing times to live in...
Yeah, I really wish he'd asked the White House or Pentagon for help in redacting these documents.
After all, they're the ones who are best placed to check that sort of thing, right?
Surely they would have wanted to minimize damage to the troops, right?
Surely they wouldn't want to just cover their asses, right?
Oh wait he did and they said no.
Hmm.
but not much talk in the corporate media or from our governments about the war crimes committed & subsequently covered up by the USA & UK
Actually, you hear plenty about it. It is spun into stories like "bringing democracy to Afghanistan," "fighting the terrorists who wish to hurt us" (and its utterly moronic sibling "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here"), "defending America," "helping Afghans resist the Taliban," and the rest of the claptrap promoted in the commercial media.
We had no reason to go into Iraq, now we're apparently saddled with decades of military occupation. We went into Afghanistan, ended Taliban rule, but allowed Al Qaeda top brass to escape into Pakistan. We are still fighting the Taliban, who represent no threat to us. If they once again become a threat, we remove them again. Why, however, did we not approach Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates about official and unofficial support of the Taliban and a variety of other extremists? What about Pakistan, funded officially and by means of private donations by SA and the Emirates to support the Taliban and other extremists? How do they end up being our allies in all this? Al Qaeda is still operational in Pakistan, apparently.
The War on Terror is a scam, backwards and forwards. It cannot withstand even cursory quetioning of its purposes or the means used to achieve them.
Unless say, your house was the one documented in an artillery strike and such a document could give you evidence that it was one specific faction or another that blew up your house and killed your family.
Or say that local Taliban leaders have been claiming that deaths were caused by the Americans, but no artillery or mortars were used by US forces in that immediate vicinity. These documents could show that the US is not to blame for everything.
In either case, when you're talking about the specific coordinates of small arms fire and an air strike from 5+ years ago, there is no risk to current operations.
Informants names shouldn't be in documents classified as 'Secret' anyway, they should be in 'Top-Secret' or above. As I said in the last thread on this. 'Secret' clearance is insignificant in the military. When I was active duty I knew an individual who was in under don't-ask-don't-tell, a couple of alcoholics, and even one enlisted guy that wound up getting convicted of dealing drugs, all with secret clearance. None of them were over the age of 21.
Secret classification is one step up from Sensitive (SSNs, addresses, phone numbers, etc...) and it isn't very well controlled. How else do you think some lowly E-3 is going to get his hands on tens of thousands of documents?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I'm sorry, I don't like the fact that we are there either, I wish we had never gotten into either, and I agree on your assessment of Iraq, but...
The US had (and still, to my knowledge, HAS) UN approval and support to occupy Afghanistan. Our prime suspect in a major terrorist act, one Osama Bin Laden, was strongly suspected to be in Afghanistan and the then-current government, the Taliban, was refusing the US entry to go find him and arrest him. The US, supported at the time by most of Europe, Australia, Britain, and a generous mittenful of others (many of whom also pledged troops in support of the mission, and some of whom still have troops there) entered Afghanistan to find Bin Laden. The force then met resistance from the Taliban and (under UN authorization) removed the government.
What went horribly wrong was twofold (and I'm sure my oversimplification is glossing over a lot of detail, too bad):
- Bin Laden then (almost certainly) fled over the border to neighboring Pakistan, possibly even before we invaded, and there was too much resistance to allowing the UN force to cross the border. There still is, and there's a strong suspicion he's still there. The invasion of Afghanistan might never have had a chance of accomplishing its stated goal due partly to the delays in getting UN approval and making it all legal. Making it legitimate probably made it ineffective. There's irony in there somewhere.
- Once the chase was done, there was little reason to stay in Afghanistan except to clean up the mess, and there's little political capital to be gained from cleaning up - successful invasions get votes, holding maneuvers get called "Vietnam III" and "Korea II" and get your ass thrown out of office. Unless, of course, you can have a successful invasion to cover it up.
Oh, yeah. Iraq.
- A false connection was drawn between OBL and Iraq, seemingly because George W Bush wanted to be able to resolve a problem (Saddam Hussein's long-running game of cat and mouse with the UN) that neither his daddy nor Clinton was able to resolve, and almost certainly because Afghanistan needed to stop being mentioned on the headlines. "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED", as they say.
- That invasion dropped visibility of Afghanistan in the eyes of the American public so we could forget we had a Vietnam going on. It also had the unfortunate side effect of reducing available resources to handle Afghanistan, and in many ways the job there was largely ignored and the country was allowed to degenerate further until we needed lots more resources on the ground to fix it all up.
The focus is on Afghanistan at the moment, since Barak Obama obviously wants to focus on the invasion that at least once had legitimate UN support and would rather not have people talking about Iraq.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Dishing out some charity (financed by heroin sales and foreign donations) in order to win over population is not the way to build a sustainable economy. The job of the government (same applies to Afghanistan as does to US) is primarily to provide a stable rule of law (not arbitrary executions at the whim of the local mullahs). If the country has poor resources and is unable to produce anything worthwhile then it is probably going to be poor. There is no magical way for the government to change that and to conjure up wealth out of the rocks and sand. Taliban is a fundamentally inhuman organization that would sacrifice a million people in a blink of an eye if they thought that's what Allah wants. Their first concern is with their religious fantasies not with actual human beings. So please don't defend them.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
heya,
Err, no, I think they're both pretty s*itty situations. But if you're a women, living under Taliban rule was much, much worse.
You say that Afghan women were "safe" under the Taliban? What are you smoking.
I mean, the most recent copy of Time magazine floating in my house has a photo of an Afghan women with her nose cut off. Apparently she ran away from her wife-beating husband, and the Taliban went after her, held her down while her husband watched (and I assume cheered), and cut off her nose. She's currently residing with some care organisation, I believe, after they left her for dead.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2007269,00.html
Oh, and just look here for some classic examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban_treatment_of_women
I mean, the Taliban would rather they die slowly than get medical aid, because *gasp* male doctors can't treat female patients. Oh, and since women are denied education after the age of 8, it's hardly like they're going to become doctors, is it?
The thing is, any society like this is eventually going to run itself into the ground, or degenerate into some pre-Industrial revolution tribal free-for-all. The thing is, as developed Western countries, many of us find it somewhat difficult to stomach something like that happening in our backyard. That sort of widespread damage being caused to people...I think we have a phrase for that...hmm...human rights abuse?
Now, that wasn't the primary reason for ousting the Taliban - their support and harbouring of Osama Bin Laden, and continued funding for Al Qaeda was, but hey, it's not that bad a thing, what we're doing in Afghanistan, giving them the vote, and emancipating their women.
Also, it's funny how now that the American public has revealed themselves as spineless and without enough stomach to see things through to the end, and the US government has opened up the possibility of negotiating with the Taliban. Guess who's screaming the loudest "NO! NO!" - gee, gosh, how about the Afghan people themselves? I think most of the 22 million people in that country wouldn't want that pack of sadistic and heartless sycophants back.
Cheers,
Victor