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WikiLeaks Releases Cache of 400,000 Iraq War Documents
Caelesto writes "Today around 21:00 GMT, WikiLeaks declared an end to their media embargo of over 400,000 Iraq War documents after Al Jazeera released their story 30 minutes ahead of schedule. These documents, which have been kept under wraps by WikiLeaks for months, may reveal tortures and murders ignored by coalition forces during the fighting and occupation in Iraq. The Pentagon maintained that releasing these documents represented a danger to US troops, but already dozens of news outlets are scrambling to report on what could be a devastating blow to the US Armed Forces' already tattered image." Reader Entropy98 points to the BBC's coverage, as well. If you care to download the collection of files, it's available as a torrent.
...of people like this complaining about "collateral damage" is so thick you could drive a truck across it.
But I just donated 50 EUR to WikiLeaks.
It's too bad Wikileaks has such an obvious agenda. I like the idea of them, but that the same time, knowing they have such a clear agenda, makes me wonder what they decide not to release because it doesn't flow with what they want the world to think.
Title says it all. They summarize the leaked documents with articles on 1) Iran's involvement, 2) Civilian deaths, 3) detainee abuse.
The US around the world (and its mini me Israel) stand for only injustice, pain, suffering, oppression, torture, murder, evil.
Americans are complicit in all their government does since they do not stop it.
Elections are coming up... if you vote for a Democrat or Republican you are guilty of all the crimes revealed in these documents (and more). Stop voting for the single party rule which just equals more of the same. If you want your vote to count, vote Libertarian, Peace and Freedom, Green, independent, etc.
Posting these may be wrong but it does bring to like some abuses by all the groups involved which have either never been discussed or their existence never known before. Personally bringing abuses to light which were previously hidden makes this partially right.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
troll
Iraq War Logs
It is getting WorldDotted at the moment though.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Whoops...updated Link. Here is the most direct link I can find. Iraq War Logs
It is still getting WorldDotted at the moment though.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Is that you can just categorize based on Slashdot's summary, and just vaguely use it to go on a soapbox about what you want to make a bunch of noise about.
Even the summary uses phrase "Iraq war documents". Good reason - the Wikileaks release dealt with documents that often referred to what the Iraqi police/forces were doing, and what the US forces knew about. Not that the US forces were doing those actions themselves (though you could argue that allowing such actions were as bad as doing the actions themselves...) Nevertheless, we can't on one hand say we should withdraw and then say that we should keep the Iraqis from doing things we think are bad - good or bad, Iraqis hurting Iraqis is a possible outcome of self-government.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
this and worse happens in every war, its called war, its par for the course
revealing this information doesn't endanger troops, because its not a secret, its war, its what always happens, only the dishonest pretend it doesn't
Grow up you fucking hippie. The world isn't the Garden of Eden. Every war in history has horrible tales and stories of beautiful survival. Propaganda reigns in these situations.
I'm not advocating current protocol but there is no room for idealism.
"scrambling to report on what could be a devastating blow to the US Armed Forces' already tattered image."
Am I the only who didn't think the first release left the US Armed Forces with a tattered image? These are huge volumes of reports from the US Armed forces about the actions of the US Armed Forces (good, bad, etc) the fact that all actions of the armed forces are so carefully logged leads me to believe that despite issues and anecdotes the US Armed Forces are actually pretty damn professional... Top level officials not wanting these documents publicly released is unfortunate but the fact that these documents even exist is a testament to professionalism on the part of the Armed Forces.
I'm curious why we've not seen any releases of Russian actions in Chechnya, by these folks.
As some one said "all are guilty, but all are responsible". I am ashamed and feel complicit in that which enables our fellow human beens do great evil to each other and yet find some solace that they are those who are willing to risk their lives to expose lies fed to us all by the US government. Kudos to WikiLeaks for doing what they do.
Americans are complicit in all their government does since they do not stop it.
I do what I can: I vote for candidates who are not from the demonstrably corrupt main parties, or who have a proven track record of doing good (despite their party allegiance). As such, I reject your accusation that I am complicit in my government's actions.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
The US around the world (and its mini me Israel) stand for only injustice, pain, suffering, oppression, torture, murder, evil.
Same could be said for a dozen other countries. China. North Korea. Iran. Somalia. Uganda. Etc
Americans are complicit in all their government does since they do not stop it.
That is vague. Americans in general are not for the above statements. It is the global interest and reigning plutocracy that has led us to the state of New Rome. Because of the wealth gap, money buys power, and the wealth distribution controls what really happens in America. I am not talking about middle upper class folks, I am talking about the old money families with hundreds of millions. New money not so much, but old money, they do what ever they can to really maintain the status-quo and expand their empire, and they do it through lobbyist and all the classical 'morally corrupt' things you can think of.
You may argue that my counter is vague as well, in response I provide my citation, read The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy. It summarizes our situation (the world as well) and sites hundreds of legitimate references.
Elections are coming up... if you vote for a Democrat or Republican you are guilty of all the crimes revealed in these documents (and more). Stop voting for the single party rule which just equals more of the same. If you want your vote to count, vote Libertarian, Peace and Freedom, Green, independent, etc.
I agree. Now why couldn't you be as civil in your first paragraph? The immediate soapbox flaming is a good way to get modded into oblivion.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
> The Pentagon maintained that releasing these documents represented a danger to US troops
Yeh, but the last time they said that, they lied:
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/10/17/170227
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Actually it's the Iraqis that are the butchers. Clearly you didn't read the article.
Now that opens up the question of what exactly the US Army is supposed to do if the local Army is up to no good. Are we supposed to "reconquer" them again and start over from scratch and prolong the occupation of Iraq even longer than it would be otherwise?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Wikileaks released 400,000 more dox that will shake the very foundations upon which the Middle East War rests upon and the news organizations will just sit around masturbating over "Was this ethical? Are people really endangered? What does this mean in regards to bloggers vs. journalists" but never looking at a single document or citing it for the sake of delivering news instead of the storyline which has been perpetuated for the last ten years.
The Pentagon says releasing the documents will endanger US forces, I believe that it will because those families/clans that had some of their members killed for no reason will want retribution and I can clearly unmderstand them wanting the US military to pay (in lives) for killing their loved ones!
I just tried to post the link to the torrent on my facebook, and got this:
This message contains blocked content that has previously been flagged as abusive or spammy. Let us know if you think this is an error.
Hmmmm... the link hasn't even been up that long, has it? Me thinks Zuckerberg and company are staying on Uncle Sam's friendly side...
...the scumbag behind wikileaks would be behind bars. Before you say he's immune because he's hiding in Sweden, read this: http://opiniojuris.org/2010/08/21/can-the-us-prosecute-wikileaks-founder-sure-if-they-can-catch-him/
People who are all for releasing these documents only have the foresight until their next bm. If you think putting hundreds, thousands of peoples lives at stake because of your own skewed sense if curiosity and lack of geo political understanding will be the eventual fall of a once great nation. No matter what I say, you will continue to believe ' change is what we need' will be blindsided by what's about to land in your front door.
You broke it, you bought it
- Colin Powell
http://michaelsmith.id.au
many of us think this is a key point in history where freedom is clashing with government invasion of privacy. we see escalating levels of snooping on the part of 'the officials' and the people are forced to endure this treatment under the guise of 'making us safer'. we know its not for that purpose but we are told we have to give up our privacy to the government.
well, wikileaks is giving them a taste of their own medicine. not for that reason primarily, I don't think, but its in there to some extent.
its a statement of: if you are going to dish it out, you BETTER be ready to take it.
the governments (all over the world) are trying to limit free speech (the internet) and seem to have fallen in love with keeping detailed data on all its citizens. they want a one-sided arrangement.
its not fair but there was nothing the little guy can do, no matter which country you are in. (name one that is really 'free' these days. please.)
wiki is sort of a dose of 'fuck you right back'. again, even if not fully intended, it kind of comes off that way.
sort of like a big bully getting a dose of medicine.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
If you read TFA with fewer mental filters you'll see that the US Army is guilty in a direct fashion as well.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
This is the American war in Iraq. It only exists because the Americans started it.
Clearly you drank the cool-aide
"Actually" apparently means different things to different people.
I've grepped the documents themselves, and they tell a different picture. The colour designations indicate that there are far more "blue white" than "green white" incidents, which is scary considering that there are far more green than blue people.
(And there more "blue blue" and "blue green" casualties than "red blue" (a.k.a. "friendly fire") incidents, which is even more frightening. Most of which are marked secret with the justification of potentially inciting public/media unrest, which is downright chilling)
For those who don't know the colour designations:
Blue = US and allied forces
Green = Native "friendly" forces: military, police and mercenary
Red = Enemies
White = Civilians
"blue white" or "blue on white" means an incident where US and/or allied forces engaged a civilian target. One is one too many.
I don't really think that the US military will be able to stop leaks, Wikileaks itself could go under but the underlying mechanisms might simply grow more sophisticated. The people who leak this information are not enemies or "unpatriotic"---if they were, the more effective way to use sensitive information would be to surreptitiously hand it over to Iran/"insurgents"/whoever, like an old-school spy might. Publicizing classified information is more or less a call for transparency. Maybe the military needs to recognize that it needs to have a greater degree of transparency, or transparency will be imposed on it.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
You broke it, you bought it
- Colin Powell
Colin 'Saddam Hussein has WMDs, honest' Powell. LOL.
In the old days kings used to lead their soldiers into battle. In modern times this is impractical and counterproductive.
But you can still have leaders lead the frontline in spirit.
Basically, if leaders are going to send troops on an _offensive_ war/battle (not defensive war) there must be a referendum on the war.
If there are not enough votes for the war, those leaders get put on death-row.
At a convenient time later, a referendum is held to redeem each leader. Leaders that do not get enough votes get executed. For example if too many people stay at home and don't bother voting - the leaders get executed.
If it turns out later that the war was justified, a fancy ceremony is held, and the executed leaders are awarded a purple heart or equivalent, and you have people say nice things about them, cry and that sort of thing.
If it turns out later that the leaders tricked the voters, a referendum can be held (need to get enough signatures to start such a referendum, just to prevent nutters from wasting everyone elses time).
This proposal has many advantages:
1) Even leaders who don't really care about those "young soldiers on the battlefield" will not consider starting a war lightly.
2) The soldiers will know that the leaders want a war enough to risk their own lives for it.
3) The soldiers will know that X% of the population want the war.
4) Those being attacked will know that X% of the attackers believe in the war - so they want a war, they get a war - for sufficiently high X, collateral damage becomes insignificant. They might even be justified in using WMD and other otherwise dubious tactics. If > 90% of the country attacking you want to kill you and your families, what is so wrong about you using WMD as long as it does not affect neighbouring countries?
At least the money would be very welcomed, since it seems no corporation wants fund such organization.
And, of course, it would be fun to see they winning the same prize Obama won a few years ago.
Let's take you up on that idea. Suppose I vote for Green Party. Oops, since I didn't vote for the Democrat, the Republican got more votes and won. Now the Congress is taking up a motion to drop out of the UN and back out of treaties. Great.
I understand your frustration, but the problem is quite large. I'd favor better education in schools on US foreign policy and international issues and history, the creation of instant runoff voting and election law changes to favor third parties. While I blame general ignorance, I don't know if I can blame every American, especially since I see so many trying to fix the problems.
Why is everything posted by wikileaks seen as fact? Even if they modified a few entries or slipped a few new ones in, would anybody notice? If the US gov't then said "These things aren't true." - would anybody believe them? By just assuming everything wikileaks releases is incontrovertible truth, you're giving them license to fabricate whatever "reality" they choose.
President Barak Hussain Obama has mandates regarding ethical, moral and legal rights.
President Barak Hussain Obama has Executive Order prievalige to assinate Enimes of the State.
The actions of frm Pres. George Walker Bush, fmr Vice-Pres. Richard Cheney, frm Sec.State. Condelesea Rice and the entire Cabinet Officals and appointees require assination action orders on them, ordered by President Barak Hussain Obama.
In order to help the current budiget deficet Mr. Obama could open up bidding on the assinations!
Hay, ... who could pass on killing Dubya or Dick for a measly 1M.
The result of doing nothing is that ...
1) the Senate and House become Republican (not the Republican Sopholocans Admirant of GWB!).
2) Obama looses re-election.
Actually I favor Obama doing nothing and loosing re-election.
Let Dubya and Dick wollow in their dillusions and hallocinations of grandour and Kingdom ... in a managened care facillity ... far away from the rest of us ... far far away.
Good ridense.
The file in the torrent is a 355mb csv file with 4437707 rows. And neither Open Office or Gnumeric can open it. They just chug away forever and ever taking more and more memory (up to 3.7gb atm). I wonder if anyone using any other spreadsheet application has more luck... It shouldn't be that damn hard loading a 355mb csv file.
Football Odds
Hi MR AC! Only problem with your theory is either way your vote is a complete and total waste because the MSM is owned by those same D & Rs and therefor NO third party unless they have Perot money has a snowball's chance in hell. Quick, and without doing ANY research, can you tell me which candidates in the above parties are for term limits? Can you tell me which ones are for less government? Hell can you even tell me the name of the person they are running or what their beliefs are?
You can't, and neither can the populace, and THAT is the problem in a nutshell. The MSM is one of the most dangerous creations in the history of this country, simply because thanks to deregulation the keys to the eyes and ears of the public are owned by a handful of multinationals who have NO loyalty or allegiance to this country. Therefor they WILL continue to marginalize, ignore, and if any gained traction most likely outright slander, any that didn't follow the current "You want a new law? Give me a check" corrupted rotting system we have now.
For all it matters you can vote Communist party for every single election, because they are NEVER gonna win anything higher than state office, ever. Because they will NOT be allowed to attend any meaningful televised debates, they will NOT be invited on national shows to tell their beliefs or takes on the issues, and thanks to this marginalization and ignoring they will NOT be able to raise the funds required to get the word out or compete. Sorry MR AC, but the entire election system is currently a rigged game, and any vote at all is simply a waste of time at best, a sham at worst.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
But we knew that for a long time. There were many, many articles about US troops shooting A LOT in all directions at all times in Iraq.
I recall even reading about bullet shortages and ammo price increases in the US due to the heavy (read totally indiscriminate) weapon usage over there.
So, while this is a confirmation, it is a confirmation of a known phenomenon.
What would be interesting is to know if documents answer the question WHY there was so much shooting.
Since you have already read some -- does it?
If you care to download the collection of files, [and have no intention of travelling to or within the United States] it's available as a torrent.
I do what I can: I vote for candidates who are not from the demonstrably corrupt main parties
And that's how we got a second term for GWB instead of Al Gore - all you folks who voted for Ralph Nader and so on handed the White House to the Republicans.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
after the 2009 SOFA, i was told that i was to "advise" IP and IF that torture was counter productive and then promptly leave the area so as not to be involved with anything the did. it's their rules, once we give them self government. sure makes the bad guys pine for the days when the "evil" americans were in charge.
We are a brutal species, held in check by a thin webbing of civilization.
The fact that mercenaries are bundled in with the native friendly forces really bugs me because they are technically US forces or acting under or along side US military and/or US contractors.
These documents, which have been kept under wraps by WikiLeaks for months, may reveal tortures and murders ignored by coalition forces during the fighting and occupation in Iraq.
While there's been some speculation that Wikileaks has an anti-US bias, I don't see that. You're not going to get leaks from non-democracies. Nor are you going to get incriminating leaks from democracies that aren't engaging in significant combat (especially with an insurgency that blends in with the general population). So it'd be natural for them to get such documents from the US.
Having said that, the Slashdotter who submitted the story had a blatant anti-US bias. Hyping the release as "may reveal" bad things (even worse, "ignoring" bad things which somehow got documented anyway) is irresponsible, not that we had any expectation of responsibility from this guy. It's almost like the Slashdot editors picked the juiciest bit of flamebait they could find to dangle before the slavering hordes.
The soldier responsible for leaking these docs in the first place should be hung on the white house lawn for treason.
And that's how we got a second term for GWB instead of Al Gore - all you folks who voted for Ralph Nader and so on handed the White House to the Republicans.
And vice-versa. All you folks who voted for Gore instead of Nader handed the White House to the Republicans.
In fact it doesn't matter who says what !
"you broke it, you own it"
- pure propaganda; I wonder if Powell even came up with it.
This is not a business... well, in a way our wars are big business and that dictates our policies; but corruption aside, comparison of geopolitics to crap like that is just false reasoning. We have no obligation to fix Iraq because we made a bad situation even worse by trying to fix it. Clearly, by "fixing it" we made it worse! Common sense says do not continue to fix the mess you made if you just make it bigger.
Since when did ethics really become part of our geopolitics??? its just propaganda. Even then, we are not required to repair nations we break - the morals went out the window when we attacked in the 1st place.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Second term election for GWB was GWB vs. John Kerry.
Drink yourself.
And vice-versa. All you folks who voted for Gore instead of Nader handed the White House to the Republicans.
In a practical sense, complete bullshit.
Gore lost by a very slim margin, where Nader and the rest of the fringe had no chance at all.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
That's only true if the people are from Florida. If you're like me and From California, it doesn't matter who you vote for until you get such a large percentage voting for the third party that they might actually become viable.
Besides, how do you know he wouldn't have voted for Bush?
Qxe4
Who's to say that Al Gore would have been better? Obama has basically been a continuation of Bush's policies so far. He has even extended the reach of some of the more heinous policies. The only apparent difference is his knack for public speaking.
Yes, the 40 million or so people who voted for Dubya had nothing whatsoever to do with his win.
But could you explain to me again how it is Ralph Nader's fault that the Democrats have the White House, the House of Representatives and a super-majority in the Senate and still can't get much of anything worthwhile done?
...all you folks who voted for Ralph Nader and so on handed the White House to the Republicans.
Oh shut up! All you folks who voted for George Bush handed the White House to the Republicans. Wouldn't have mattered anyway so all of you should quit your bellyaching.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
And that's how we got a second term for GWB instead of Al Gore - all you folks who voted for Ralph Nader and so on handed the White House to the Republicans.
Yeah, I mean - it's not like the guys who voted for GWB are to blame...
The scorn heaped on Nader's voters by the Democrats that I've seen in person is several orders of magnitude greater than that heaped on the Bush voters. The guy who votes for Nader is lampooned and criticized to death, but the office colleague who voted for Bush gets a free pass, usually.
How typical of Democrats: Can't take on the guys in power, so they pile it on to a weaker crowd.
Beetle B.
Ah, the old "evil media marginalizes us" argument, a favorite accusation of the extremely unpopular.
I looked at a lot of non-mainstream party stuff - directly at their own websites. You know what? The reason no one votes for them isn't lack of (or negative) media coverage - it's because they're mostly a bunch of crazy idiots. The few that manage to get any serious support are the ones that are, surprise surprise, not as crazy. But those parties tend to be single (or very few) issue parties, and they make a lot of classic newbie mistakes like always dumping money into losing the Presidential election.
If you want to displace one of the big two, you've got to 1) offer workable solutions the others are avoiding, 2) put forth respectable candidates, and 3) work your way up from the local level. There's no media conspiracy to marginalize all but the big two, but there is the simple logistical problem of having about 30 parties (no kidding, and those are the ones trying to be national parties), which makes covering any of them in depth or having a useful debate impossible. Win a seat in congress - come on, there are 538 of them, 438 of which are small districts on a two year election cycle - and you'll get some attention. Win a state governor campaign and you'll get a LOT of attention, even if it's a small state. But you've got no chance in hell - nor should you! - of getting the presidency right away if you've got zero involvement at any other level; people don't know you, you've got no record, and you've got no leverage in the legislature. Trying to go directly from nothing to President of the USA is like waking up one day and deciding to be rich; blaming the media for your failures only makes you look immature.
Perot-money, by the way, is the worst way to try. You need an awful lot of votes to become President, and you're not going to get them if 90% of the country thinks you got rich by twisting the law in your favor and are now trying to buy power.
In particular the helicopter video, the one people tried to use to vilify them, I felt did the opposite. Was it disturbing? Yep, but war is disturbing business anyone who expects otherwise is. Were the airmen callous? You bet, but then soldiers get that way, as can we all. However it showed professionalism, and restraint. The engaged targets per the ROE, which remember are not the same as civilian rules. They did their job, they didn't just kill random people.
That's what I expect. I do not expect perfection from our military, it is made of humans and they are flawed like all of us. I expect professionalism, and I expect that when someone is not they are punished.
And one of the reasons I don't like the release. As far as I can tell, these documents were not released for the public good. They don't show the public anything they didn't know, and anything they need to know. When you are given classified data, you promise not to release it. It is a matter of trust, and for good reason (usually). As such, as with any trust, I think it is important to uphold it EXCEPT if there is a greater good in betraying it. In the case of classified data, that good would be the public good. If it is both something that the public is not aware of, and something they need to be aware of, something where the good in revealing it outweighs the harm, then you do it.
Nobody showed me anything in the first set of documents like that and I have to image if it was in there, it would have been major on the Internet, if not the news. That to me means that the documents never should have been leaked.
Actually it's the Iraqis that are the butchers. Clearly you didn't read the article.
Whoever wrote the article wants us to know that the Iraqis are butchers, which may be true.
What if it turns out that the government is running wikileaks as part of a disinformation campaign? Scary huh....
Two things at work there:
1) They are just learning from other journalists. You may notice the media LOVES bad stories, loves speculation, and generally loves trolling. Fox News may be the most egregious but they all do it. Why? Gets viewers. For some reason, people eat that shit up. Slashdot is just emulating that, trying to get page views. I don't agree with it, but I can understand why they do it.
2) A lesser factor is just that you may have noted there are a lot of US haters on Slashdot. They believe the US government sucks and so on. They are just catering to a part of their fan base.
Unfortunately Slashdot does not have what you'd call good journalistic standards.
Kudos to you for actually looking at the documents. That puts you miles ahead of the average slashdot poster - and probably significantly ahead of the average journalist, unfortunately.
What's more scary is that the disinformation campaign includes agents who infiltrate popular website to spread this "theory" in order to discredit it as yet another conspiracy theory.
Hold on guys, there's someone at the door.
400,000 documents? We couldn't get people to read the 1000 page health care bill. Who's going to read these?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Not everyone who sends something to wikileaks is a noble whistleblower with the purest of intentions. Say someone with bad intentions wants to damage the US. Couldn't they use the reports as a template and just start faking true-looking reports that make up terrible-er, un-true things?
Fake report: "This report (I made up) from Commander TotallyTrue says we tortured 100 innocents!"
Actual situation: "Two innocents were injured in crossfire."
What is the US going to do to refute the lie? Release the actual report, exposing troops' names and actual activities, and perhaps some culpability? I hope it is obvious why they can't reasonably just go releasing their own versions of everything they do for the public's general review. Time, expense, security, safety, fuel for enemy propaganda. Releasing our mistakes eventually might be the right thing to do- but we already do have a chain of oversight and reporting on such things. Of course nothing that big is perfect.
But it feels a little like saying "An anonymously released report from someone who hates you accuses you of raping your wife. Unless you provide us videos of all your sexual acts with her, including specific proof of her consenting in every case, we will have no choice but to assume you did rape her. Failure to provide proves guilt!" The right answer may be "I'm not going to dignify that with a response," which many people take as proof of a giant, complex conspiracy and/or proof of guilt.
How do you combat wild accusations and innuendos like that? How do we know the credibility of anything "leaked" to wikileaks? How can we tell truth from lies? Assuming it is all true simply because it has been leaked to wikileaks is as dangerous as assuming it is all false for the same reason.
The leak highlights the high numbers of civilian, military, and Iraqi casualties. If the war in Iraq had been worth it, then maybe none of this would be so bad. But I have yet to see one political leader, including the former President Bush, explain why the war in Iraq was necessary or worth it. My advice to future Presidents is if you're Generals and pollsters are advising you to go to war, ask yourselves this question. "Are we all willing to send our own children out on the first wave?" If the answer is no, then the war is probably not worth it and we should stick to diplomatic means. I am an American and a veteran who served in Iraq. I was personally all for invading Iraq. The American people wanted to invade Iraq, and President Bush did what at the time was a very popular thing. Now every one wants to criticize the last President for doing that they themselves advocated. Some day America needs to come to terms with this. Or will America just ignore the lesson and blame it all on Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. and bumble on to the next mistake? Americans are not famous for self reflection, so I expect America to just blame the Bushies and move on.
Please enlighten us clueless ones on this "geo political understanding" thing of yours since you have such great understanding of it.
Are you for real, are you that naive and simple?
Do you know how much money war makes? So what are you talking about?
Majority of people think that the portion of their income taxes that goes towards SS actually stays in the coffers as some investment fund, making more money in the process.
Those people are deluded, simple, naive creatures, very silly, mostly ignorant of the world around them.
Money that is taken from you in form of income taxes, payroll taxes are used up by the government immediately on government programs.
Politicians promise their constituency everything under the sun and that is why they get voted into the office. However these politicians never tell the truth and the truth is, in order to PAY for the promises they make there is no money.
So in order really to pay for the politicians' promises taxes must be raised. However that is not part of the platform on which these politicians run, they are not talking about increasing your taxes to give you more of these things they promise to you.
Of-course there is no money, so to pay for the promises politicians take the money wherever they can get them from and what is there? Income taxes, SS, borrowing, printing into inflation.
So the SS money is NOT kept in some investment fund, it is NOT being multiplied by some investment, it is a huge lie. SS money is being immediately spent on all the entitlements, on wars, on all the government programs and on various government agencies.
So the war is never about the war itself, it is always about the money.
Money. Cash. Dollars. That is what drives the wars. SS is a pyramid scheme because there is no money there, so it is a promise to pay for the old people by robbing the young people, nothing else.
WHY must young people tolerate this insanity? Obviously they are getting an increasingly shorter and shorter part of the stick, they are getting robbed. Because it is the old people who voted in the politicians to get the spending without paying for it, the SS that the old people paid was spent long ago and now it has the be the young serfs who'll pay for the quality of life of the old.
This is the same across the world. Greece. France. UK. USA. You name a country with a budget hole, with a huge trade deficit, with an enormous government and spending - that's a country that wants to make the young to be slaves of the old, who have created this system in the first place.
Well, the old will find out that the young are not interested in being slaves. The young will emigrate, will leave to go to countries that have no trade deficit, that have no insane policies of taxing income to pay for the promises of politicians that cannot be kept to the old.
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It is always about money. Politicians lie to get into office. Income taxes and SS are a pyramid scheme. If it wasn't a pyramid scheme the money would have been there, actually in investments of some sort making interest, which implies the gov't wouldn't be running huge spending programs, running wars, inflating the money.
This is all a lie.
Do not pay your income taxes, your slave taxes. Leave.
You can't handle the truth.
I saw one document on here which really disgusted me. The American troops had someone detained, some soldier walks in, pulls out a browning and fires 7 rounds into the detainee for no apparent reason. That soldier then gets detained for a while then he's let of. WTF, this is bullshit.
My problem with Nader is that he lied to Congress to get safety standards passed he knew would kill infants and purposefully didn't warn anyone because he didn't want bad press for airbags. He's a baby killer, and anyone that voted for him supports a baby killer.
Learn to love Alaska
I liked this one:
I think the whole world already knows how we operate. This only proves the point.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The documents reportedly also tell about incidents of torture by coalition forces, and of civilians being killed at checkpoints (for speeding to get their wife to the hospital). There is an incident described where a single terrorist on the roof of a building caused the military to obliterate the entire building and everyone in it (civilians).
Time to queue up the politicians whining about how evil it is releasing secrets about the torture and murder or civilians and at no time admitting the real evil was in the acts themselves.
Well, this is what happens when the U.S. military starts to *not* act as the world's police force. What did people expect? Happy joy bubbles to break out between the various Iraqi factions?
I read the Guardian's overview article ... they focused quite a bit on the so-called "murders" as reported in the documents: cases where the Iraqi army or police tortured and killed prisoners. Apparently, the official military policy on this, according to the Guardian, is for the military to take any report and feed it back to the Iraqui army or police for investigation. The military will formally investigate if one of their soliders is reported as abusing a prisoner, but they push it back to the Iraqis if it's one of their soliders/police doing the abusing. Again, this is my summary of the Guardian's reporting.
I'm surprised so many people are so upset that the US (and UK) are turning a blind eye to this. I mean, really -- the meme that's been repeated incessantly these last nine years is "The U.S. shouldn't be the world's police" and "The U.S. should get their nose out of other people's business". So here we have documented evidence of the U.S. doing exactly that -- having the Iraqis police themselves and getting their nose out of the Iraqi's internal issues -- and people are now complaining because the U.S. is not doing enough? WTF people, make up your minds -- either you want the U.S. to be the world's police or you don't!
This is how the Iraqis police themselves, apparently. The interesting thing in this case is that there's a 3rd party on hand (the U.S. military) to document the abuse/butchering the Iraqis are inflicting on themselves. Is the U.S. innocent? No - and the U.S. military still hasn't pulled out completely. But everyone who said the U.S. should stop being the world's police should be applauding them now.
If they lie about how our heroes die, how are we to trust them on how our enemies died or were treated.
Your arguments only help them get away with it.
If you speed through a checkpoint, you are going to be shot. Bringing your wife to hospital? Did you grow up in a movie? In reality, there is no emergency. Labour lasts hours even with mothers who had babies before. There is no need to break the rules of traffic and speeding or trying to run through an armed checkpoint in a war zone... well, it is a darwin award. Or can you only say that when white people foolishly get themselves killed.
The sniper? It is war. Always been part of war, always will be. Read up on Monte Casino. Countless europeans were killed by the liberating american forces. War is hell. Get used to it.
The REAL problem is that because the left is so outraged that war ain't nice, they scream at the wrong things and then allow the really bad things to be hidden instead. It is the old "do aliens exist" problem. The nutcases who scream that Aliens are controlling the UN make it very hard for any serious study to be done into UFO's and other things because if you do, you get labelled with the nutcases.
War is hell, accept that. Civilians are going to be killed especially in wars were the enemy has no qualms about hiding among them.
THEN you can go and question why so many died, why it needs to be kept hidden. Remove the left fringe and you can then force a real discussion and demand that REAL figures are always shown because then the pentagon wouldn't claim they need to hide them to keep the radical left from using the horrors of war against them. We ask the pentagon to go to war, then we have to accept the results. But we can then also demand to know the full results and ask, if there was no other way.
Brutally honest answer: Sniper? No. Checkpoint killings of people speeding etc. No. Hiding rape and torture. Yes. Rape and torture are not valid military tactics. But you, skipped them. Instead you focussed on acts or war, not acts or terror. See the problem? By claiming the president is an alien pod from mars, you make it impossible to ask exactly what some radar blips were. In a way, those that wanted this war are thankful for you. All you do is drive a wedge, between you and the lunatic left and the right. The more outraged you are that a war ain't nice, the more people fall to the right of you.
And right now, the right is on the rise. All your outrage is doing nothing to stop them. Because you went to far, focused on the wrong things.
But hey, everyone does it. it seems to be human nature andbefore long we got two camps so opposed to each other, there is no way they can ever agree on anything. Cue Iraq. Groups of muslims killing more of each other then the so called hated invader. Human nature is hell.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yes, as the US created this situation in the first place by supporting Saddam Hussein.
The US is responsible for the little dictators it helps to power and keeps there as long as they are US-friendly. It is the US that bestowed this on the Iraqi population and it is the US that allows atrocities to continue after they got rid of their no-longer puppet. Yes, IT IS THE FAULT OF THE US. Only when the US starts understanding this and changes its course peace may come to the region -or any of the other regions that were devestated by the US on this planet in the name of peace, freedom and greed.
That'll tend to happen when the other side a) like to kill you and b) don't wear uniforms. Have to hassle everybody. Duh, that's why the rules about unlawful enemy combatants got started.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat
Samizdat (Russian: ; Russian pronunciation: [smzdat]) was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader, thus building a foundation for the successful resistance of the 1980s. This grassroots practice to evade officially-imposed censorship was fraught with danger as harsh punishments were meted out to people caught possessing or copying censored materials. Vladimir Bukovsky defined it as follows: "I myself create it, edit it, censor it, publish it, distribute it, and get imprisoned for it."
What are the new international rights for Americans?
Now let's suppose a group of Canadian terrorists bombs a building a China. You couldn't complain if the Chinese consequently invaded the USA because you are harboring Canadians. The Chinese could march up to Washington, catch Bush, Obama and friends from pits in the ground, and execute them after a fake trial. While hunting the terrorists, they could kill innocent civilians with a ratio 5:1. These events, they could hide them actively from the media and from being ever discovered, because it is the patriotic thing to do and to protect the Chinese freedom fighters. If your family was killed at a checkpoint, you could witness people on Chinese internet forums discussing that it is irresponsible to have information about this incident released, that this would be anti-Chinese and evidence of a strong bias and sensationalism of the person of organisation releasing that secret info. There will be much torture, and those who expose it will be branded traitors, while the torturers walk. Many Americans and Canadians will be shipped to a remote prison. The new Chinese ruler who will keep everything the same will get the Nobel Peace Price.
I find it amusing that otherwise rational Slashdot crowd does not see a logical fault in accusing the US army and the government for the tortures and crimes that Iraqi government did.
Healthcare reform. Getting the troops out of Iraq. The Dems are doing what they set out to. What do you think they're failing to do?
I am trolling
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1835400&cid=33995054
By making the horrors of war itself unacceptable, the pentagon feels forced to hide them but WITH that hiding they can hide far more. Area 51. If you even dare ask what is dare, you are quickly put with the alien nutters who think marsians are everywhere. A very effective cover.
If you scream when you see some blood in a butchersshop, they will sanitize the meat production until meat is something that comes in little containers with tissue to soak up the blood. But that makes it very hard to question food production practices if you somehow expect your daily meat but don't want any blood. That allows real cruelty, unneeded cruelty to animals, to be hidden. If you want beef, a cow has to die. Once you accept that you can ask how the cow should be killed. It doesn't have to made to suffer endlessly or be transported hundred of miles to do so. BUT those who want their meat AND not see blood allow a curtain to be raised behind which darkness can reign unchecked.
The Iraq war is often claimed to be for resources. Fine, lets assume it is. Then do YOU not claim those resources? Anyone who drives a car about a single metric ton, is in need of the Iraq oil to do so. The US needs oil because its people want oil, but they don't want the nasty truth that wars have always been fought for resources.
The real horror of this story is that for all the outrage, when the prices of petrol goes up, resistance against the US protection its supply lines will go down. It is a whole sordid deal that begins with YOU wanting to drive a 3 ton SUV goes through a president who doesn't want high fuel prices and ends up with some country being invaded or the CIA supporting yet another dictator. Just see the mess the US is causing in Mexico right now. All because the US can't deal with its drug issue. Iraq happened because the US can't deal with its oil needs. It would be far simpler if it didn't have to appease the Arabs to keep oil while also wanting to support Israel for the sake of freedom. No oil dependence it could simply tell the Arabs to go to hell and this would never have seen Sadam in power or supported in the war against Iran. Iran would have no money to cause a fuzz. No oil, the arabs would be the backward nations their faithful wish to be. Sucks for all the other Arabs but hey, at least our hands are clean.
World politics are not nice. There are so many intrests fueled by a public that wants it fuel.
And then we send rednecks who couldn't get a job anywhere else to deal with johny foreigner in a fair and even handed manner after they just been shot at...
Sadly, I am to cynical to be outraged because I can see how the outrage at the "simple" crimes allows the extreme right, the powers that be, to hide behind the wall of the middle who might be outraged if only they didn't worry about fuel prices more. The teabaggers defend the indefensible because they feel forced into a corner. And the fact the teabaggers are here already shows how deeply divided the US is. Left and right, pro and anti-iraq war are so deeply divided that both sides feel compelled to side with their own, even if they are inside deeply against it. Got to support the troops, is a battle cry behind which covering up mass rape and murder are allowed to happen. Out of Iraq is a battle cry that allows an attitude that you got to tolerate everything in the world no matter what because someone might get hurt.
I am old enough to remember all the lefties in Holland demanding the world interfere in Iraq to stop the gassing ot the koerds. When finally the world did interfere, that was bad... but with the same breath they also demanded the world went into Darfur... can't have it both ways.
I have no solution for all of this. The US powers that be have allowed themselves to get once again dragged into a war, have its string pulled by people banned from Iraq to support them, believes that these people could hold power, believes that democracy can be enforced, demands for low petrol prices, etc etc. And in all that, countless forces make their own struggle for power. Hard to see how to get out of it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Because democracy is only good when it's on your side. If it's not then you have two choices: live with it or whine about how people voted "wrong".
Sadly opposition almost always chooses the latter one instead of bringing something constructive to the table.
You don't know what you don't know.
There is no real legal mechanism to make the people responsible for this mess account for their actions.
The only option left is for corageous individuales to expose those actions and allow them top speak on behalf of the perpetrators of any attrocities.
How is it that Chenney and Rumsfeld are still walking free ?
I grew up on the "northern front" in Europe during the Cold War with both eyes open and a working mind, as well as with adults and peers around me that also had open eyes and working minds.
As a result I was and in some ways still am very pro-American even though I currently think the US of A is in incredibly deep shit as a society, I think your government is thoroughly corrupted, your Senate and House of Representatives are filled to the brim with crooks and idiots (with a few exceptions that I know about (there could be more), about 5 across party lines), and any character of your Presidents no matter how "good" will not suffice to set things right.
I'm also worried that the coming clean-out will only provide a new batch to be corrupted i.e. that the corruption and idiocy is systemic, guess time will tell, at the very least Americans are aware that something needs to be fixed.
And yes even though the main cultural traits of Americans often seems to be arrogance and superficiality I still think Americans (not only white ones) are generally good decent people --one has to take the bad with the good and the cultural divide is pretty amazingly huge despite things seeming very much alike at a superficial level. Not just between white Americans and white Europeans but also between for example black Americans and black Europeans, and when it comes to latins/hispanics the cultural distance between many/most in the US and for example Spain seems (to an outsider) so astounding large it boggles the mind.
But the US Army, the US Navy, the US Air Force, the US Marines, and the Pentagon does not have a tattered image to me at all, to the contrary.
Yes I know there are flaws, I know there are crimes that have been committed, and in some of those crimes I think the sentencing has been too lenient by far (I've been told I am/can be ridiculously strict).
But still beyond such things as should absolutely be avoided and which will always be a struggle to avoid I have to say that the various armed forces and the Pentagon/Department of Defense are doing well. Not just well but far far better than many of their critics claim.
I would say the same of my own country's armed forces that fight alongside them. The boots on the ground are doing extremely good despite the often mediocre and sometimes dismal performance of their political and military masters (though once in a while something brilliant shines there as well).
So no you are not the only one, I don't even think you and I are in the minority. Iraqis themselves most likely agree as most of them them likely know to differentiate between the various groups of people truly responsible for the various deaths and injuries. Iraqis are not dunces they're just as smart or smarter than anyone commenting from Europe or the US or Australia, they know every person has a mind and a heart and has to take responsibility for their own actions no matter whether it's someone in Al-Qaeda & affiliates or the Iraqi police force or US troops or an Iraqi citizen who might be doing something incredibly stupid.
P. S. I'll point out that the Slashdot submission does exactly the same as mainstream media does: it oversimplifies to such an extent that anything and everything becomes a bad thing no matter what it is. As for the leak most people aren't interested in context nor understanding it, actual knowledge or attaining it: they will simply grandstand on their opinions while hiding their ignorance behind cherry-picked numbers and unreasonable demands devoid of realism. Real discussion on the topics in civil society at large has been made completely impossible as everyone has been demeaned into nothing more than trolls (and if this situation of nearly pure noise is a product of intentional manipulation it is the biggest propaganda victory of all times: my bet is a lot of professionals all over the world are attentively watching and learning from it as if it was).
Do you even understand the concept of democracy? Nowhere it says tha democracy is better than dictatorship because you double exactly the amount of candidates you can chose from.
They are supposed to report the issue, and then the politicians should have made as much noise as possible to embarrass the Iraqis.
They didn't do this because the top brass in Washington belived in the effectivness of criminal actions in order to supress their common enemies.
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IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... dissenters end in jail or dead.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There's something to be said for spoiler effect, but frankly if Gore couldn't convince enough people to vote for him, then that's on him.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Give me one fucking valid reason why you need your troops anywhere outside your own territory murdering people.
Do you mean right now, or ever?
Pacifism only works if everyone is a pacifist.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
The American documents seem to show folks trying to accomplish a goal without getting killed in the process. It's chaotic with most operations taking place in the fog of war. Some folks go over the edge and some folks do whatever they can make sure they get to go home. Bad shit happens. There have been voices in the American military that have tried put more order in the chaos. That has been offset by the fact that their opponents know all civilian casualties will be laid at the feet of the Americans and by the fact that US forces.
Show me the documents that describe how "the other side" planned to blow up markets and mosques. Show me how the various Iraqi neighborhood "tribal cleansing" on their own. Lets see the numbers for the numbers of people beheaded and dumped in the rivers. Then we'll have an idea how much of the operations were a counterbalance to the activities of others.
If you're like me and From California, it doesn't matter who you vote for until you get such a large percentage voting for the third party that they might actually become viable.
A viable third party in California? I'll believe it when I see it! If such a magic unicorn came into existence, I'd give ten to one odds that they'd be more liberal than democrats and just as beholden to special interests. (To be fair, both parties are destroying the state.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Everyone in the news seems to be focusing on blaming Wikileaks for releasing the documents or blaming the Pentagon for being lax in security and letting the documents be leaked. On the nightly news, the story is all about the Pentagon apologizing for the documents getting out. Where is the outrage at the atrocities that have been condoned and covered up during this war?
You mean: to stop favoring the duopoly.
Instant runoff, et al, aren't about favoring third parties, only about allowing them to thrive, unfettered by strategic voting. (OK, unrestrained by the absolute worst of strategic voting. To be clear, I'm a proponent of the Smith Criterion.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Afaik, wikileaks agenda is maximizing the impact of their leaks. They've released documents that benefited the U.S. by embarrassing Iran, China, etc. and helped us catch U.S. citizens hiding income in Swiss bank accounts. If wikileaks suppressed an interesting leak, we'd just see that leak on cryptome.org with the subheading "Suppressed by Wikileaks".
You are of course correct that we need more organizations like wikileaks, ideally run by less flamboyant people. In fact, all the "real" news organizations around like Independent Media Center, Al Jazeera, BBC, etc. should be racing to set up separate but similar blind document submission networks.
In any case, I'm fairly happy that Julian Assange is playing wanna-be martyr chicken with the U.S. intelligence services. Americans must eventually choose between our freedom and our empire.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I find it very funny, that a believer in UFOs decided to post about what is fringe and what is not.
In this case there are no "fringe" arguments - any and all travesties commited by the troops in Iraq should be mentioned - time and time again.
The truth is that the war in Iraq was caused by the US. Therefore, the US cannot just brush away accusations of civilian deaths by saying "well, it's a warzone". It is a warzone only because the US made it so, and therefore it should now accept the responsibility and admit to the real number of casualties caused.
Human nature is hell, but when you provoke a war, don't pretend that it's not your fault when all hell breakes loose.
And even as far as warzone behaviour goes, the US' is pretty extreme. Read the Guardian article about US troops shooting up the British - on a regular basis. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/american-troops-friendly-fire-iraq
And the facts are that one human HAS KILLED one or more humans. Period.
The fact that most of those killings were perfectly legal doesn't bring any one of them back to life.
Feel free to argue whether an executioner is the same as a serial-killer.
Or which one would be a murderer and which one a killer.
Try the same mental exercise with mercenaries and soldiers.
Add some of "our mercenaries" vs. "their soldiers" for flavour.
And that is not including the deaths from the draconian sanctions that the US forced over the last couple of decades and the corresponding systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure like water, power and sewage systems. Estimates for these reach over a million, a staggering proportion of which were children.
Those were japs. That was more like aggressive hunting than killing. It was perfectly A-OK to kill those. Or round them up like cattle and pack them into "interment camps".
It's not like they were actually human... you know... like Germans and Italians. Neither of which needed "protection" during that time. Funny that...
A coalition of groups in the U.S. wanted the Iraq war:
The U.S. government has killed an estimated 11,000,000 people since the end of the 2nd world war, by invading or bombing or causing political problems in 24 countries.
Are we going to demand the arrest of policy makers? Military leaders?
Or just watch The Daily Show and shout "yeah take that government!!" all day?
I'm serious about this...I see a lot of passion, but what is anyone going to do?
You say that pointing out the bad things that happen in war is wrong because in war they are inevitable, well they are not. The real issue is that the war was illegal, injustified (unless lies are currently a justification for anything), and in direct violation of international law. Even enemy soldiers getting killed is a tragedy and worth speaking up about, let alone pregnant women on their way to hospital, and for the record labour is quite often an emergency, especially where poverty and bad hygiene are involved. Ask a doctor if you doubt this.
I have a joke for you: A man breaks into a house and starts raping a woman living there. Her husband interferes. In the ensuing struggle the husband and wife are both killed. In court the rapists lawyer says: "Rape is a messy business, that's the reality. People get killed sometimes." So the judge lets him off the murder charges.
Also, the idea that you should silence the critics of war in order to have a rational debate about atrocities committed is absurd, I hope you realise this.
Now that the silliness is out of the way, can we talk about REALity?
There is no shortage of politicians from both parties who claim to be for term limits! By a strange coincidence, they almost always happen to be running against an incumbent who has held office for a long time. For example, George Nethercutt defeated the sitting Speaker of the House in a campaign with term limits as a central issue. In the course of that campaign, Nethercutt solemnly promised to serve no more than three terms (six years), unlike his long-serving opponent. Opposition to term limits was a major reason for his victory, and the people spoke!
Nethercutt served in that office for five terms (ten years).
Are you saying Americans were directly liable of detainee abuse? Sorry. It's not there. Would you prefer another foreign military to take people out of American prisons because we have the death penalty or notify authorities and allow the American process to fix that? And if America chooses not to change that position you don't agree with (death penalty is legal here. In Iraq, DETAINEE ABUSE IS ILLEGAL), do you declare war again to correct this problem? New sanctions?
Most people in America would rather foreign governments to respect our sovereignity and just bring any serious infractions of humanitarian standards to public notice after allowing the government time to fix it themselves. Even the broad generalizations from (most) websites pointed out that ALL of this detainee abuse was pointed out to different levels of authority in the Iraqi government and still the Iraqis chose to do nothing about it. What is America's recourse then? Snatch the detainees away? Hold onto more detainees when public opinion at the time was so adamant we shouldn't hold on to them? Where would we send them if we're to withdraw: Guantanamo? Maybe try an Iraqi in American courts for crimes committed in Iraq? Think through your assumption and then get back to the internet.
This is a statistics question, not a policy question. Americans didn't report all Green on White incidents because there was not a 1:1 parity of people reporting incidents with the number of Green patrols, raids, etc. We don't have a complete record of Green on White incidents because we can't have a complete record. Sectarian violence played a big role in how those things played out.
How is it Ralph Nader's fault that Obama is busy bombing the fuck out of the Afghans and is letting circa 50,000 mercenaries from US-based firms continue the brutal occupation of Iraq?
Even if you want to reduce it to "Democrat or Republican - forever" voting for a third party is still useful; its a way to identify a vote as up for grabs. Perhaps about the only way under those circumstances. Consider it a form of what England did in their elections. LibDems were not even close to actually taking majority for themselves - but because they decided who would they wielded (and wield) a disproportionate effect.
A 'Third party' vote is likely the *best* vote you could make.
I'm one who believes the war in Iraq was entirely motivated by profit and the availability of oil. Oil is essential to the world economy, and our government wanted that oil to be pumped out of the ground.
So with that being said, just how much of our oil now comes from Iraq? Probably not any greater than it was before the invasion. Sounds like a piss poor plan to drum up business.
I guess we all knew this sort of stuff was happening, but to see the actual reports with photos and all is horrifying.
Kudos to wikileaks for having the balls to actually cover the war like the mainstream media should have been doing from the start. Every single person in our country is complicit in these crimes. If you haven't actually looked at the raw documents, please do so. It's your duty as a citizen to see what is done in our name.
I voted for Bush in '04. I've never been so ashamed of anything that I've done, and like most people I've done some pretty shameful things. If you're an American citizen, please go out and vote in the upcoming elections. Unfortunately the scumbag politicians will never get what they truly deserve, but we can throw every single one of these lying, murdering motherfuckers out of office.
He's a baby killer, and anyone that voted for him supports a baby killer.
Assuming, purely for the sake of argument, that what you say is true.
So anyone who voted for Bush is in 2004 supports a people killer, as well as favors the Patriot Act.
Anyone who voted for Obama in 2008 favors the Patriot Act, and supports a people killer (he continually voted to fund the war).
Boy, if I think long enough, I could make a huge list.
You remind me of a friend who in 2008 announced that he didn't like McCain or Obama, and was in search for a viable independent candidate. He went through each one, and found something in them that he didn't like, and ended up voting for Obama. I asked him: "What? You didn't find anything in Obama you didn't like either?" The complaints he had against the independent guys were petty ("Too feminist"). The original complaints he had against against McCain and Obama were much more serious.
Why are independent candidates held to a higher standard?
Beetle B.
Actually - China seems to be getting a huge portion of Iraq's oil. Now - think. How does that benefit the US and the rest of the west? Think. China has a supply of oil, and they have less need to look at oil which we are pumping. It's the old "supply and demand" thing - the greater the supply, the less the demand. Iraq's oil doesn't need to flow in our direction to benefit us.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Instead of playing the "This Information Could Endanger American And Iraqui Lives", which only has a limited number of uses, the Pentagon should just announce "Julian Assange is a HUGE asshole!" That would probably play better in the blue states and will win more street cred, which they can cash in later ("Don't leak our documents or we'll call you a HUGE asshole!")
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Troops were scheduled to leave Iraq by Dubya. They are leaving on Dubya's time table.
So... ummm, Hope about getting them troops out of Afghanistan?
No! I noticed that the New York Times is saying that these documents show that the death toll is around 100,000. They do no such thing. They simply report this number of deaths. This is not the same as determining that this number has been killed, since these documents didn't set out to report all deaths. There have been very few comprehensive studies on the actual death toll, but it is much higher (see http://web.mit.edu/CIS/pdf/Human_Cost_of_War.pdf).
I have two eyes, I have two feet.
What are you talking about? A lot of the Democrats voted for the war. And now that they have the government, all those nifty patriot act powers ain't so bad.
That's what the insurance companies spent burying health care reform. How the fuck is Obama suppose to compete with that kind of money? Fuck, 70% of Americans want socialized medicine but we can't have it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I do what I can: I vote for candidates who are not from the demonstrably corrupt main parties, or who have a proven track record of doing good (despite their party allegiance).
Really? Voting is all you can do?
Are you running for office? Are you a political activist? Are you trying to convince others of the need to unite and get organized in the struggle for justice? Are you actively working in any way to achieve your goals?
Nobody is forcing you to do any of that. But don't say you're doing what you can if you said no to all the above questions.
Proud member of the Ferengi Socialist Party.
I'm not saying that Americans were directly responsible. If you read the article, I believe it says that while the majority of cases were prisoners in Iraqi hands, that a few cases were for prisoners in our hands. It also talks about misreported and underrepresented civilian casualty counts when those casualties were caused by US troops, and a specific case in which US troops were ordered to fire on someone trying to surrender.
And I disagree that we can't be held at all responsible for what the Iraqi police and military did. We were supposedly rebuilding their country after toppling their existing government. The behavior of their police and military are our responsibility during that time. I fully agree with you that in other cases sovereignty issues take precedence, but Iraq is a special case (like Japan was for a few years after we won WWII).
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
That's all fine, but I draw the line at lying to purposefully kill babies.
Learn to love Alaska
It's not being divisive to diagnose the problem correctly. AC is spot on.
The problem with the radical left wing is that it is measured in distance from the right. Which keeps moving to the right. In the 1960's you had to be a hippie in a minivan or a communist or a black panther to be called radical left wing. These days all it takes is for you to say "gee blowing up children might not be a good thing."
If you want a serious dialog on this, I'll tell you what. We of the left will happily become more centrist. Just as soon as you put down the Fox news driven fear and paranoia, and really think about what is best. A good start would be to just simply head to youtube and watch a few recordings of the Dalai Lama speaking.
I've done my part. I'm a registered Democrat and I'm pro second amendment. And guess what? My head didn't explode. So that's my first step. What will yours be?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
One of the best incoherent posts I've read. Lots of interesting ideas, lots of sense, could be structured into rather a good article.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
And not ONE addressed the ISSUE: The fact that this imbicile is walking freely. Seriously... you can "flamebait" it all you want and you can defend your Obamassiah, but what about the fact that no one is bothering to bring this punk to justice? I guess no one here is bothered by classified military info. being released. Let's just hope none of you loses a friend or loved on overseas because of this piece of human debris.
It won't matter who is elected, as long as the people want both high services and low taxes. California will be destroyed anyway.
Qxe4
This is the result of the previous war in Iraq - started by Saddam invading Kuwait. More precisely, it's the result of the complete failure of the coalition (not just the US, but also many European nations, and many Arab nations) and the UN to address the problems of the time.
Of course, it's super convenient for them to all try to pin everything on the US retroactively. But no, none of the arms dealers in Russia, Germany, and France that were propping up Saddam have any blame at all for the accusations that Saddam was rearming! And Iran has no blame at all for the sectarian violence they fomented after! It's all, 100% to the last drop, entirely the fault of the USA, and it all started exactly on the day the invasion began! No one else sent any troops to either war, either.
Ok, my sarcasm gland is running dry now, I'd better stop here.
So as long as nobody knew about it, all these things were ok?
Hiding the truth makes abuse possible in the first place. The revelations themselves demonstrate that.
You missed the point that the USA's economy is based on war.
A retired Marine with 34 years of service and 2 Congressional Medals of Honor gave us the answer to this riddle in the 1930s.
"War Is A Racket"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4377.htm
the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives .]
[. .
- How to smash this racket
It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.
The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted.
Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories[...]and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted - to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.
gewg_
What's the best CVS Software for windows to read this with ?
A) I supported Nader and would not have voted for either of the two parties, if he were removed from the ballot I would not have voted.
B) Irregardless of who I voted for my State's electors pledged their vote(s) to Bush
Maybe Gore should have won Nader voters over if he wanted their votes?
Saddam did none of what you have described i your first paragraph.
This is not entirely true. I have to stress that the post you are replying to is absurdly wrong in almost every possible way and you deserve many mod points for pointing that out. Having said that, at least the ephasis on 'none' is wrong, if not the word itself. Saddam may have been responsible for the 1993 attempt on bush senior, as DougF said. Such a pity really.
Anyone not suspecting(even just a little bit) that the data leaked may be a psy-op is too trusting. These documents do nothing but assist long term US goals. Even the civilian and blue on blue statistics probably massage the figures to about 20% of the true figure. For all we know these caches of documents have been configured for greatest effect/manipulation value by teams of psychologists and public relations experts and may have been part of an ongoing strategy that may even predate the wars. This isn't an attack on Julian. He may be the kindest and best intentioned man on the planet for all I know. It's the data that smells not the pipe.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Don't forget the financial waste and abuse. If the system ran efficiently, we'd still need to cut some things to begin recovering, but the concessions could be far fewer. We really need to stop buying things on credit (bonds). Were CA like a car, we'd get 5 mpg or less. It's pathetic.
When California declares bankruptcy, everyone will wish it was a mere mortgage meltdown!
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Is it allowed for states to declare bankruptcy?
Qxe4
I don't see why not. Cities can. If they spend more than they can repay, they will default somehow, whatever you call the mechanism. I don't think the Federal government has any enumerated powers they can play, but it might not stop them from trying...
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
1. Voting for the lesser evil is still voting for evil.
2. The Ds are not any more or less evil than the Rs, they may be evil in different ways, but usually they just take turns.
3. For every useful idiot on the D side, there is an equal and opposite one on the R side. They do cancel each other out, and will continue to do so if both get an epiphany and vote Green/Pirate/Independent instead. If that is brought to its logical conclusions, the only people left to vote D or R will be those that truly believe in what these parties do.
And the files show the US kept records of civilian deaths, despite previously denying it. The death toll was put at 109,000, of whom 66,081 were civilians.
...
A US Department of Defense spokesman dismissed the documents published by the whistleblowing website as raw observations by tactical units, which were only snapshots of tragic, mundane events.
When nearly 2 out of 3 deaths are civilians and it's considered mundane I think it's time to do some serious soul-searching about who we are placing in positions of power. Out prison population has far more compassion than this...
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I not only read the article, I read 15 other versions, ranging from the Guardian, Washington Post, the original AP news most places are reporting, and Der Spiegel's international translation. I commented elsewhere on the other matters you mentioned. I was also stationed there from Sept 2008 until Dec 2009 in Tikrit working in a Division level job with oversight of detainee processes.
The people who tried to surrender then fled capture again before ground troops could arrive. Look at the actual source. The underrepresented civilian casualties are a product of soldiers on the scene not knowing which were combatants or which were innocents in many cases. Not all, but many.
For the period of time there was a sovereign run Coalition government, we would be responsible for the actions of the Iraqi police and military while they rebuilt. But sovereign control of the country had been handed back to Iraq in 2004-2005, and we're talking many of the events in the source leaked documents occuring into 2010, when America has been "withdrawn" (despite still having over 50,000 troops there). There's got to be a cutting off point for liability. Japan took years to get a government running, like you said, but once set up, they took responsibility. Claiming Iraq is a distinct case from Japan is not sufficient. We still have troops in Japan. Japan has a known history for having an unrealistic criminal confession rate of about 95% due to police "coercion" for people to "confess." Are we liable for those acts since we helped set up a country with that kind of cultural practice? Of course not.