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WikiLeaks Set To Release Unpublished Iraq War Docs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"A massive cache of previously unpublished classified US military documents from the Iraq War is being readied for publication by WikiLeaks, a new report has confirmed.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."
"They're really cute puppies too," said a CIA spokesperson. A Swedish prosecutor immediately filed charges of animal cruelty against the Wikileaks founder, then retracted them, then filed them again.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The concept is nice: A tool for exposing corruption
But the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Even as someone who is very strongly in support of open government, the methods used by Wikileaks just feel a bit too... cowboyish?
I don't really know, perhaps someone can explain better, but I just get this bad feeling the way they are going about this.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Not the fact that Wikileaks is publishing information like this. Not the possible side effects from "inside information" being released.
No, what bothers me the most is that something like Wikileaks needs to exist at all.
Living With a Nerd
This is a war not monday-night football. We don't need arm chair commanders making political hay over day-to-day operations.
I'm for an open government, but I don't see how knowing intimate details about operations will make the government more open about the war. Sure you can point to the effectiveness of the ground forces, but your totally disregarding the defense contractors who are really raking in the money. In fact I believe these documents will serve to focus our attention on old field reports and distract us from Haliburton, Blackwater (Z), and others who are profiting from the war. Worse these documents are really just increasing Wikileaks visibility at the risk of endangering US troops and worse the Afghans that helped.
Now if wikileaks could disclose documents between congressional leaders and these contractors, then I would be very impressed.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
There is no other option. You are providing evidence against a powerful wrongdoer. One that holds a special right to employ physical force against you. You cannot play "let's make a deal" with them. They will bury you. The only option is to be aggressive, just as government was aggressive in hiding their wrongdoings in the first place.
I salute those who engage in whistle-blowing and hold the highest respect for them. They are the ones making personal sacrifices to help us all, not the elite at the top of the power pyramid.
Anyone doing anything for him? If he wouldn't have taken a stand on this, nobody would have known anything.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I don't really know, perhaps someone can explain better, but I just get this bad feeling the way they are going about this.
For better or for worse, this is going to seriously shake any confidence a person or country is going to have when offering sensitive information to the United States. The United States conducts a lot of operations both good and bad throughout the entire world. If you think that overall the United States' actions in other countries is good then you would probably have a bad feeling about this. Let's say I know where a warlord is hiding out in Sudan but if I tell US forces about it and anyone finds out that it was me, I'll lose my life. After being able to peruse their entire set of documents from Afghanistan and Iraq, how much confidence can I have in them?
Hopefully bringing in Bureau of Investigative Journalism is a way to protect those people but at the same time relaying the important information to the public in a way it doesn't further jeopardize lives.
My work here is dung.
*ENGAGE SARCASM MODE*
When you are blowing the whistle, you got ask permission first. Because I am SURE the pentagon would happily lend a hand and help with releasing video of its soldiers slaughtering unarmed civilians complete with audio track of the soldiers enjoying the slaughter as if it is a game.
*END SARCASM MODE, SWITCH TO QUIET DESPAIR*
The above post is sadly a growing movement of "don't rock the boat" people who just don't want to hear anything that upsets them. If you tell them their house is on fire, they blame you, not the fire. Shoot the messenger, so you never have to hear anything disturbing. Trust the state, keep quiet and all will be well.
Reagan did this well, soothing voice, zero policies zero convictions. No wonder people want him back. No matter that he killed the economy. All is well because he said it was.
If you read the news and your blood doesn't boil every other article, you ain't reading news, you are reading entertainment.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
This is only happening because the US war on Iraq was whipped up unjustly for motives that are still not clear. In a free and open society you should expect this kind of fallout when so many lives are destroyed and so much debt incurred for no apparent reason.
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.
It sure does look that way. Assange clearly has political goals that go beyond exposing corruption, fraud, and the like. How can I trust him to not be selectively suppressing things or even editing things?
Originally I recall there was an emphasis on corporate wrongdoing. So-and-so just dumped 50000 gallons of dioxin in the Mississippi River, some OS keyword searching your email and forwarding some of it to the RIAA, etc.
That "collateral murder" thing removed any doubt I had. First of all, "murder" is a specific type of killing; it is a particular class of unlawful killing. Neither accidents nor acts of war qualify, of which the events were both. Before even releasing the original video, he made a short version of of the video which lacked much of the context. He stripped out pictures that showed people running around with AK-47 and RPG-7 weapons. He also stripped out scenes that might remind viewers that there is much confusion in battle.
I thought the general argument was that they release this information because the US citizens (and indeed, the world, since the US likes to romp around with its army) should have got these facts from their government in a more safe way. However, since they did not, it falls to wikileaks who tries their best to censor it safely, and even (so I hear) gave the US gov't a chance to censor the names further.
Am I wrong?
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.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
But countries like Iraq should not be allowed to exist in the modern world. And for that matter there's dozens of other countries we have all turned our back on and their citizens are forced to live in fear and ignorance of a brutal government.
This is patently false. Only the citizens living under that dictator have the right to rebel against him. Further only they will ever be able to actually succeed.
What we've witnessed/been witnessing in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan really should have taught us this lesson by now. This isn't a matter of just finding the right way to do it, this is a matter of logical incongruity.
In short, if the people aren't willing to rise up and overthrow this leader, then why are we? And what happens when we leave, and a new power takes over?
The entire premise is deeply, deeply flawed, and if this were our first failed experiment in it I might be more forgiving. But this clearly never, ever works.
Well said, but unfortunately this weeks ruling means it is only going to get worse , much much worse..
Quotes from above:
"The ruling handed a major victory to the Obama administration in its effort to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy power."
"The distorted, radical use of the state secret privilege -- as a broad-based immunity weapon for compelling the dismissal of entire cases alleging Executive lawbreaking, rather than a narrow discovery tool for suppressing the use of specific classified documents -- is exactly what the Bush administration did to such extreme controversy."
Rulings like this passed with little to no media coverage[1] show that the US is more little down the slippery slope to our Orwellian future. And people here are worried about wikileaks? The mind boggles.
[1] Slashdot posts old old news on Wikileaks instead - like there was ever a doubt that the remaining documents will be published
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.
A 'representative republic' is a democracy. It may not be a 'pure democracy' but it's a democracy nonetheless. No country is a 'pure democracy'. It's just ludicrous word-games masquerading as intelligent analysis and fabricated history. It's part of the problem.
There's no panacea to fix all the world's problems in one fell sweep either. Or even just to fix the USA's problems.
Try reading less demagogic opinion and more actual analysis.
"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance." - G.K. Chesterton
from being a "mob rule" type of government.
This is specifically why they only wanted land owners to be able to vote. The rational is land owners are typically more educated, have a vested interested in their community, are better informed, and are far less susceptible to "mob rule" mentality or easy manipulation. The day that was abolished was the day the US immediately began a downward spiral.
These days the uneducated (typically poor) are commonly manipulated for their vote come election. Its so prevalent they are frequently considered tipping votes. This means the uneducated, who have no idea what they are doing, are frequently the tipping voice in our elections. This means the ignorant and uneducated and often responsible for setting policy in the US. Our forefathers would absolutely be disgusted. And if you think about it, you should be too. I know I am.
The easiest way to take away their power is to completely overhaul the tax code./i.
No, the easiest way to take away their power is to finally shed the delusion that money == speech. Campaign finance should be tightly regulated by a neutral third party so that institutionalized bribery can finally be eliminated.
'course, this is about as likely to happen as your ridiculous flat tax idea...
That would be propaganda talking.
I had the good fortune to be able to talk at length with an ex-pat Iraqi who had a very different reality to report. He came from a long family line and described his father's life and his own. Essentially, life in Iraq wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as the Western press dictated, that so long as you didn't speak against Saddam, everybody could go about their days at a high standard of living.
A "brutal dictator" to us is a "king" to others. And the West, given its lack of wisdom and total inability to govern itself with any degree of humanity, has no business marching about trumpeting who should and should not be allowed to exist in the modern world. We preach democracy, but we haven't got one. We live as peasants under a ruling class, except our kings and dukes and princes have zero interest in maintaining a happy populace. In this bankrupted economy, a small percentage of Americans are making more money than ever before. And we know why that is. Corruption. That's our system.
-FL
Isn't the notion of 'landowners only' a bit more palatable during the colonial era? Back when they wrote that particular rule, all one had to do to be come a land owner was build a cabin. It's a tad more complex today, and I'm not at all sure that they would want it to have stayed the same.
I hate to break it to you, but land owners weren't particularly vested in the interest of the country as a whole nor really the welfare of the local community. Southern land owners wanted to continue slavery, holding medium or large land stakes for farming which left it uneconomical for most people to own land; and the cotton gin basically demanded either very cheap or free labor (or machinery which only became viable after the exploitation of fossil fuels) to remain competitive. Meanwhile, Northern land owners wanted to have dormitories where hundreds of workers made finished goods, working 7 days a week (they could only get 6, thanks to the Bible), 16 hours a day for a penitence that would at best be sent home and with multiple other workers be enough to cover rent and food for the parents; in short, think a sweat shop but worse (since all of this was above board at the time, they could charge what they liked for the room and board (a non-negotiable aspect of the work), further decreasing effective wages. Hence, Southern land owners wanted high raw good tariffs, low finished good tariffs and Northerners wanted the reverse.
Funny. It general holds true that more urban areas are better educated (on average) and vote Democrat (ie, the east and west coasts) and rural areas are inferior educated (on average) and vote Republican (ie, the middle of the US). Meanwhile, urban areas tend to have higher renting (because land prices are so high, urbanization tends to require more job switching which encourages more resident relocation through the years which encourages renting) and rural ares tend to have higher land ownership (because land prices are relatively cheap, the job market is a bit more stable, and with distances as far apart as they are most people already expect to drive long distances and hence are more intent on investing in property).
Now, it could reasonably be argued that the average people doesn't vote and the less educated or more inclined to vote. But, that says more about the apathy of the masses than it does about the stupidity of the minority or their bad voting habits. To that end, it doesn't really explain the voting behavior in the middle of the US which shouldn't see such swing voting behavior with many more land owners.
PS - Yes, I realize a lot of those "land owners" are really "mortgage holders". But, a great debt is also of rather deep concern and I think would still fit all your qualifications on why such individuals should vote better.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Those were governments with standing armies. That era is over.
Of course. Think of the soldiers. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
The elite at the top of the pyramid are precisely the people who put those soldiers in danger. Not only did they put them there, but they further endangered them with policies that explicitly allow the killing of innocent civilians.
Let's call a spade a spade here. The releasing of government secrets does not put soldiers in danger -- it puts the war agenda in danger, along with the billons of dollars the war agenda is valued at. Am I implying that the elite at the top of the pyramid are motivated by money alone, and money alone is the reason they sent those soldiers to war? You're damn right I am.
Well that's a grand notion but I don't think landownership should be the qualifying principle by which we separate the ignorant, uneducated, unwashed masses and the elite, rational, intelligent voters as you put it. You see, I am a college graduate. I work as an engineer and earn a steady, respectable wage. I keep myself up to date and educated regarding various political and social issues. I read numerous sources of philosophy, thought, culture, etc. I travel and meet new people so that I can gain new perspectives on my older views. I serve jury duty when it is asked of me. I even help my older neighbors walk their groceries from their car to their condo door. I have a very vested interest in my community. I consider myself rational and educated.
However, I choose not to invest in landownership because, at this point in my life, I have other priorities that I like to invest in (like the education of my friends and family, and some other things). So, should I be restrained from voting? Am I one of those tipping voters that reacts emotionally to whatever the latest media circus issue is? Am I consistently manipulated by politicians to give them what they want? I highly doubt that's the case. I don't vote for politicians in either of the major parties. I hardly listen to any of the crap that politicians spew out of their own mouths (I prefer to research their actual votes and actions and such). Hell, I even make a point to pay my taxes on time, after triple checking everything, to know that I have fulfilled my duty as a responsible citizen. And yet, you would deprive me of my right to vote just because I think investing in real estate, at this point in time, is a losing bet for me?
I think your classification criteria needs revising.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Depends on where you want to live and own land. There are plenty of places in the country where you can get a house for under $50k.
Dig deeper. You're quite likely to find that those places do not offer work opportunities enough to recoup that $50k.
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.