WikiLeaks Set To Release Unpublished Iraq War Docs

Tootech writes with this snippet from Wired: "A massive cache of previously unpublished classified US military documents from the Iraq War is being readied for publication by WikiLeaks, a new report has confirmed. The documents constitute the 'biggest leak of military intelligence' that has ever occurred, according to Iain Overton, editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit British organization that is working with WikiLeaks on the documents. The documents are expected to be published in several weeks. Overton, who discussed the project with Newsweek, didn't say how many documents were involved or disclose their origin, but they may be among the leaks that an imprisoned Army intelligence analyst claimed to have sent to WikiLeaks earlier this year."

Comments

motivation

[nten]

I feel like the site has developed (and in part always had) a primary purpose of attacking U.S. foreign policy. The site needs to be more than that if it is to be a true data haven. Some have said Cryptome comes closer, I am not well read enough to agree or disagree. The problem of editing is a big one. Failing to edit out the names of informants for instance. The easiest way is to be neutral and edit nothing, allowing the posters to retain responsibility for all that is posted. That would flood the site with false data though, and part of the service wikileaks provides is at least rudimentary verification. If wikileaks wants to be what it claims it set out to be, it needs a larger diversity of leaked content.

Re:I like the concept, not the implementation

[ptbarnett]

How much time will we have before groups start to release faked documents to it in an attempt to discredit their rivals?

To measure that interval, your clock would have to run backwards.

Fake, but Accurate

do you live in a hole? citation is easy.

[conspirator57]

read some Glenn Greenwald. Yes, the same Greenwald that excoriated Bush. It's called consistency in pursuit of your beliefs.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2009/10/06/obama

But perhaps you missed the recent decision and its history.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/09/08/obama/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/opinion/09thurs2.html?_r=1&hp

for those who say it wasn't Obama, it was his Justice department, for which he appointed Holder, "champion of civil rights"... except when it matters.

Horse puckey

[copponex]

I'm too lazy to entirely rewrite what I wrote last time someone made this assertion:

1) The Taliban are using missiles we gave them back in the 80s to try and shoot our copters down (officially denied until the leak)
2) Many accounts given by the military to the press were wrong and underreported how many civilians died, according to the original reports
3) It exposed the "killing squads" -- also known as Task Force 373 -- recently in the news for mutilating Afghan bodies and keeping their body parts as trophies
4) It exposed the fact that many of the military operations are now classified and under the direct control of the CIA
5) It documents the rise of Taliban military capability, directly contradicting public statements made by the US military

I'll leave my snarky commentary on the press and you, the credulous American public, intact:

But you guys wrap all that up with "No Big Deal," and feed it to all the media outlets who depend on you for access to government officials? Fucking. Brilliant. They don't even have to pretend to have reported on those things before. They just say, basically, the emperor has clothes, and then Joe Sixpack nods his little beer storage unit up and down and switches back to WWE. I know, and now they're all uppity about this Australian guy possibly getting innocent people killed when we're laying civs out left and right - with secret police and secret budgets! God bless the US of Amnesia.

Re:I like the concept, not the implementation

[FriendlyLurker]

Improve accountability? No, all this will do is force the decision-making process further away from the prying eyes of public scrutiny.

How I wish you were wrong - but this weeks major, (incredible, unbelievable, and under-reported) news proves you very very right....

Re:I like the concept, not the implementation

[Scrameustache]

Improve accountability? No, all this will do is force the decision-making process further away from the prying eyes of public scrutiny.

How I wish you were wrong - but this weeks major, (incredible, unbelievable, and under-reported) news proves you very very right....

Apparently it's now legal for the government to kidnap and torture anyone and there's nothing the courts can do about it if the government calls "state secret". Horrible. Just... horrible.

Re:I like the concept, not the implementation

[Smidge204]

From the "Most Read Countries" category:

Pages in category "Iraq" - 1,746 total
Pages in category "United Kingdom" - 384 total
Pages in category "Afghanistan" - 382 total
Pages in category "Germany" - 278 total
Pages in category "China" - 215 total
Pages in category "Canada" - 159 total
Pages in category "Australia" - 134 total
Pages in category "France" - 128 total
Pages in category "India" - 120 total
Pages in category "Poland" - 83 total
Pages in category "Sweden" - 73 total
Pages in category "Denmark" - 70 total
Pages in category "Russia" - 57 total
Pages in category "Israel" - 49 total
Pages in category "Thailand" - 42 total
Pages in category "Greece" - 38 total
Pages in category "Iran" - 11 total
Pages in category "Italy" - 3 total

Pages in category "United States" - 9,719 total

Note that there is a great deal of overlap here. For example, a majority of articles in category "Iraq" are also (for obvious reasons) in the category "United States."

But you really think that even ignoring the huge overlap, the US's shenanigans outweigh all those other countries combined by a factor of nearly 2.5? Clearly I'm the one turning a blind eye to the rest of the world, right?

Or maybe the US is just really bad at keeping things secret. I guess that's also possible...

And none of that addresses the fact that he admits to editing documents and videos for impact. It's basically impossible to do that without introducing some sort of bias.
=Smidge=

Re:Non-sequitur

[Stradivarius]

I think the idea is this:

Since politicians reward their favored special interests by means of exemptions to the income tax, if you change to a consumption tax you have removed a potent source of political favors. If the tax were fixed at a flat rate, then you wouldn't have a place to insert special tax favors. Even if they started putting in favors, they would have to be in the form of exemptions for certain types of consumption. It's harder and more politically dangerous to insert, say, a consumption tax break for buyers of multi-million-dollar yachts than it is to give that same demographic an income tax break. And folks only buy so many yachts, so you'd need a larger number of favors to get the same dollar value of special-interest goodies. Hence the politicians are more limited in their power to favor certain groups.

It doesn't completely eliminate such favors, but it might prune it back a little bit.