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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."
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? ;)
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.
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.
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.
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 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'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"
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.
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.
Bullshit.
The following reportkey's contains the word heroin:
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The following contain the word poppies:
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