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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."
"He said he had 'no comment' about his current whereabouts."
Free Martian Whores!
They are already risking the lives of our soldiers by simply posting their tactics and secrets.
By your twisted logic nobody would have a right to know anything about any war until it was over.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Since when did being wrong make anyone LESS American? ;)
Assange is only publishing what was already in the wild for several months, released there not by Wikileaks but by an unrelated wistleblower. You have a problem with that? Do you not understand that, for all we know, the Taliban already has the full text?
And since wars are never really over, nobody should have the right to know anything ever.
There are many roads to an Orwellian future, no need to take the highway.
True.
And the US is acting an aggressor and illegal occupant at various places all over the world.
Expect resistance.
He isn't a US citizen and therefore can not commit treason against us.
this has been covered elsewhere, and it's basically crap.
a: the information was already out there and b: the gov't was supposed to release it via FOIA but has never done so. We're talking a 3+ year old FOIA request. Oh and c: that particular article has been covered before.
This is just straight up bullshit criticism because guess what? Assange is doing a better job than other news reporters because he's, you know, actually reporting news!
Posting names of informants risks the lives of both the informants and the soldiers who interface with them. It's entirely possible that a squad of US soldiers could show up at their informant's home a month from now to find a nasty little surprise waiting for them. If there is only a single type of information divulged with these leaks that should have been kept secret, the names of people helping the US military has to be it.
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.
I wonder how many relatives/friends of MIA soliders will comb through these archives looking for clues as to their fate.
Or find out that their loved one was actually killed by friendly fire, as opposed to what they were told.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
They are already risking the lives of our soldiers by simply posting their tactics and secrets.
You know what else risks the lives of our soldiers?
Unnecessary War!
The elected representatives are elected to be our representatives so they can know for us. It's not a direct democracy.
Yes, but when our elected representatives tell us they are waging a just war on our behalf, waging it well, and not killing very many innocent bystanders, we need some knowledge of how truthful they are being so we'll know when to vote them out.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Afghanistan and Iraq.
Look, I don't like watching TV either, but you gotta keep up with the rest of the world here, mate. :-)
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Reporters w/o Borders is a blatant propaganda front for the US Government. Proof & References: "Reporters Without Borders Unmasked"
"Reporters Without Borders seems to have a geopolitical agenda"
"Source Watch: Reporters Without Borders"
Reporters w/o Borders are also trying to trap potential leakers and activist bloggers in their thin veil: https://encrypted.google.com/search?num=100&q=Reporters+Without+Borders+shelter
The military, especially in times of war, doesn't work that way. There are risks and benefits to every action, getting in touch with an informant who may be compromised could easily provide enough of a benefit to be worth the risk, and that's even assuming the people with feet on the ground are aware that their source is compromised. If nothing else, Wikileaks denied the US military the intelligence that those informants could have provided, a consequence which, in an of itself, puts American soldiers are greater risk.
Convince someone on the inside to leak 15,000 verifiable documents on any of those situations, and I bet WikiLeaks would jump on it. They aren't necessarily "focused" on the US, as much as that is what's mostly been made available to them. If the Taliban had a structure that required and kept comparable records, WikiLeaks would probably publish those, as well.
What?
I think the whole problem with that kind of stuff is that the U.S. seems to have a highly emotionally charged "hero cult" around their soliders. On that background, who would want to tell a grieving mother that her son was hit in the back by a machinegun in a stupid accident and bled out before he got to intensive care, instead of dying valiantly in a final stand while severely outnumbered by enemy forces?
Emotions! In your brain!
A spy? Cut the bullshit.
He's no more a spy than the editors of the guardian or the new york times.
Wikileaks received a large number of documents, what did they do? they released most of them to the public with some redaction.
The guardian received a large number of documents, what did they do? they released most of them to the public with some redaction and wrote a load of stories about it.
If some chinese person emailed you classified chinese tank plans and you published them on your website for the public to see would that make you a spy?
unless you're in china, no, it would not.
Intelligence analyst? In the US military?
Let met tell you something: if there were any intelligence analysts who had any pull in DC, we certainly wouldn't have given the region to Iran on a silver platter by taking out Saddam Hussein, or held Afghanistan responsible for a Saudi Arabian terror group's actions.
The pieces of shit who architected the war thought
1) We'd be greeted as liberators.
2) Troops levels of several hundred thousand were "way off the mark"
3) The war cost would be less than 100 billion dollars and paid for by Iraqi oil revenues.
My favorite is Rumsfeld's quote: "The Gulf War in the 1990s lasted five days on the ground. I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”
Scapegoating Assange is the equivalent of yelling at the vet doing the necropsy on the horse.
Others are calling for Pvt Manning's execution.
I wouldn't call for execution, but he's certainly due some discipline for disobeying orders. However, Julian Assange has done nothing wrong and the US shouldn't be hounding him. Instead, they should be investigating the abuses Manning and Assange have brought to light.
Free Martian Whores!
If you don't think of them as an "asset" and instead think of them as a human, then you'll find that you do indeed show up at their home after they've been outed. This kind of behavior is called "not being a complete fucking douche" and is quite intelligent. And if you just can't find it in you to be respectful and to care about the people who you come in contact with, then perhaps there are other reasons for doing the right thing that you might find compelling. How about this: if you just wash your hands of the travails of the people who help you out, you'll find out that fewer and fewer people are helping you out. So, even if you are a complete fucking douche, it still makes sense to take care of your "assets."
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.
Assange doesn't care. His "harm mitigation" only covers people he believes are deserving of such protections, which does not include the US military. He has responded to criticism about outing Afghans who had cooperated with the US by saying that they had done unsavory things that may have constituted war crimes, as though he was judge, jury, and execution.
Who watches the watchmen? Seriously.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Do you even understand what you're yelling about?
The person replying said that operational security (i.e., denying your enemy information about your troop locations, troop movements, supplies, and other capabilities) has been a fundamental tenet of good strategy during wartime since humans climbed down out of the trees and began fighting one another with pointy sticks. The less you know, the harder it is for you to anticipate the actions of your opponent, to guess what their capabilities and motivations are, and to guess where they're going to attack you next, or how they'll respond to your next attack.
Stating that this does not "make sense" or that it somehow is inapplicable just shows your tremendous naivete about anything related to military operations. Furthermore, your assertion that a web page where documents may be leaked heralds some profound change in our times also shows that naivete. Leaks during wartime have been around for almost as long as the "keep your information secret" rule. Wikileaks might make it easier to disseminate the information, but they are not doing anything new.
And for the record, I'm pro-responsible-leaking. I don't like that wikileaks rushed to publish this information and did a shitty job of redacting information that puts people at risk, but I don't fundamentally begrudge their right to report the information, so long as its done in a responsible & ethical fashion.
1) Invade and occupy another country
2) Dethrone the current government
3) Get your own government/puppets in charge, especially easy if you can hold a "democratic" election where not everyone's represented
4) Get new government to ask for your help
SEE WE'RE NOT ILLEGALLY OCCUPYING [anylonger]
Sorry, but how stupid do you think the rest of the world really is?
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
Sometimes, strategies that might otherwise be the optimal path to success are discarded because they violate your core principles. I'm sure that there are times and places where complete eradication of an opposing ethnic group/national population might be the way to gain dominance in a situation, but that doesn't mean that we should let ourselves devolve into that kind of animal.
Our country is founded on the concept of being a Representative Democracy. In order for that system to work, it requires the population to be fully informed of what is going on. Hiding operational details such as the actual count of civilian casualties works to keep American voters in the dark in a manner that ensures that they can't make a truly informed decision. "Just trust us" is only, ever, supposed to work until the end of a single term in office.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Whoa, it's not like he outed Valerie Plame or something.
I'm confused how you talk about the callousness of a general that would risk the life of soldiers to check in on an informant while in the same breath saying it's perfectly OK to let an informant who has risked his life to help your forces in the past hang in the wind.
But beyond that, yes, the soldiers lives do belong far more to the General to risk than some civilian from another country. Maybe you're confused about how an Army works, but there's these guys called officers and they make tactical decisions that risk the lives of soldiers. The soldiers don't generally get to volunteer for each mission individually and they enlist expecting to be commanded by officers into dangerous situations.
I have a better solution: if your military's activities can't stand up to the scrutiny of the people who pay the bills and elect the leaders, maybe you shouldn't be involved in those activities.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
So you don't cónsider the removal of a barbaric religious dictatorship cause in and of itself?
I'll leave that to the ethicists. But if we decide that's what we should do, we have to be consistent about it.
To take a different example. Saddam Hussein was a murderer, a warmonger, a war criminal, and all-around asshole. Did that justify us going in and nailing him? Perhaps so, but look how many other dictators behave the same way while we totally ignore them - if not actively giving them our blessing. (Hussein pretty much had our blessing until he f'kt up with Kuwait.)
If we're going to appeal to principle to justify our actions, we have to be consistent about it. Otherwise "principle" is just a convenient string to pull.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I always see this "list of civilians" or "number of civilians" retort but never have seen such a list. Please provide a source that shows this list of outed assets or please stop spreading misinformation.
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."
You'll have to point out to me the treaty all nations signed giving up the right to ever engage in war with another nation thereby making it "illegal". you do realize the term illegal implies that there is a law that is being broken right? That's the point I'm getting at here, that there's a difference between what you think is wrong, and what is actually illegal.
We gave the Taliban 43,000,000 dollars in May of 2001. This is because of their help with the War on Drugs. Only after 9/11 did we suddenly care about the Taliban's internal policies towards their population.
That's why wherever we go, we will be fought. The local population knows we'll only be there as long as is politically necessary. As soon as they are out of the local news, we'll be back to funding dictators and kings and not caring about who they are torturing to maintain order. Historical examples include Iraq (1980-1990), Iran (1953-1979), Saudi Arabia (present), Egypt (present), and unfortunately, I could go on.
Every war of aggression is illegal according to international law. Unless you think China could have legally invaded if they disagreed with the 2000 Supreme Court decision about the election, your argument does not hold water.
Do you actually know how many names where published in the previous part of the leaks of informants? You don't probably so I'll tell you. 3, only 3 names where present. 1 was already dead, 1 was a double agent for the Taliban. The 3rd I couldn't find info.
Letting informants live and continue to inform risks the lives of freedom fighters trying to shake off the bonds of occupation.
What makes the US military and its sympathizers and collaborators so much more important than other factions in this idiotic and unnecessary war?
Lets not forget, if the tables were turned, and we were Afghani, these people would be "traitors".
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
No. They are elected to decide for us. Knowledge, and making decisions based upon knowledge, are two very different things.
Implicit trust in your leaders is a recipe for disaster.
As Reagan (far from one of my heroes) once said: "Trust, but verify".
It is the verification that makes representative democracy (a form of delegated power) work.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
So you are saying that Valerie Plame Wilson's name should have been kept secret? And that the leak of her name and status is a crime?
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
Here: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread598661/pg1
Mind you, this is the ONLY thing you can read, that actually HAS any numbers. Just check all the propaganda around and you see it's just "maybe putting in danger, countless lives", etc. None of those US newspapers, none, mentions any numbers. Says a lot about how uninformed or tendentious are the journalists writing those articles.
He effectively released a hit list
I keep seeing people referring to this list, yet I never see any names.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Secret classification is one step up from Sensitive (SSNs, addresses, phone numbers, etc...) and it isn't very well controlled.
False. "Sensitive" but Unclassified -> Confidential -> Secret -> TS/SCI
Secret can get people killed. That it clearance is handed out to degenerates is a failure of the investigators, not evidence that Secret material is harmless.
Nice attempt at dodging the question. Are you seriously saying you would help someone who took your personal documents in redacting them so they could leak them on the Internet?
Not that I'm taking a stand either way, but to realistically expect anyone to want to willfully help someone redact information from documents that were stolen from you so they can leak them to the Internet is absurd.
And for the record, I'm pro-responsible-leaking. I don't like that wikileaks rushed to publish this information and did a shitty job of redacting information that puts people at risk
I agree IF that's the case, but do we actually know that wikileaks put people at risk? I keep hearing over and over and over that there are all these Afgani sympathizers that have been outed but...where's the list? Who are these people?
The redacted docs are public for the whole world to see, yet I still haven't seen any list. It's just "US government officials say it's possible that...blah blah blah".
Can anyone find this info? Seriously, not trolling.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Bullshit.
The following reportkey's contains the word heroin:
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The following contain the word poppies:
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"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
Julian Assange is acting a spy really, getting stolen documents about operations and publishing them.
I'll say again, this is simply a case of assassinating the messenger to disguise the message. Assange didn't collect these documents nor release them to anyone outside their zone of secrecy. Someone else did that. After the first time these were divulged, confidence no longer existed to be broken.
You're not alone in this opinion. The US government has come out and said basically the same thing, for likely the same reason. If we can make the man into a monster, we'll forget the good being done. Remember all the Scientology 'tech' they posted? Was that spying as well? Were they not exactly as monstrous on that day as on this one?
This quote that you've copied is from an 1999 Frontline documentary, discussing events that happened in 1998 or before. You have to remember that a lot of things happened between the failure of the 1998 inspections and 2003. Operation Desert Fox was one such measure. The guy who said it is Scott Ritter, who back in 2002 also stated:
There is no doubt that no significant WMD capacity existed in Iraq, we know this for a fact for two reasons: 1. The US military wouldn't have went in if anything like that would have existed. 2. Noone found any WMDs in the past 7 years.
The case for war was thoroughly fabricated by supressing intelligence that didn't agree with the war and magnifying or fabricating intelligence that did. My favourite bits are:
The fact that Iraq's foreign minister under Saddam was an agent paid by the French who confirmed that no WMDs existed was completely ignored:
What did the French get for their first hand intelligence that no WMDs existed in Iraq in 2003? Freedom fries, that's what.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say