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Leaked Doc May Have Forced US To Speed Up Bin Laden Raid
cf18 writes "Wikileaks released a set of leaked Guantanamo prisoner files to the public last week. Among them is a document dated from 2008, which mentioned both Osama's trusted courier's name and Abbottabad, the city in which Osama had been hiding. There are speculations that, fearing al-Qaida realized their courier may have been tracked and move Osama, the US administration accelerated their plan and attacked the target site over the weekend. This link highlights the relevant section of the document."
Indeed, it would be better to live in perpetual ignorance. We can trust the Government and Corporations to rule us fairly.
Perhaps you mean something more on the lines of :
For every 1000 documents of embarrassing diplomatic relations, corporate malevolence, and government secrets, perhaps one or two get out that should have been kept secret. What's that official death count from all those leaked afghan cables? Zero? One?
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
The interrogation file was dated "10 September 2008." Is someone seriously claiming that the military was willing to wait more than two years to conduct the attack but then had to rush things by a couple of weeks because of this leak?
Apparently so. We have an article using the passive voice to indicate that someone somewhere is speculating that the military did in fact cut a two-and-a-half year delay down to just 2.5 years minus a week or two because they were worried about the consequences of this leak.
For every improperly classified document they release, they're releasing thousands of things that should be kept secret.
They aren't competent to do what they are doing, and we're not safe as long as they are making these mistakes.
We're not safe as long as the government is improperly hiding vast amounts of information, either. The most practical solution would be for the government to adopt a trustworthy approach to secrecy and build the public's confidence in their honesty. If the people could reasonably trust that classified information legitimately needed to be kept secret and was not just hiding misdeeds, there would be no need for Wikileaks and no demand for the revelation of any classified documents. Until then, Wikileaks serves a need.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
"A courier moved to Abbottabad" is a far cry from "Osama is at 101 Terrorist Way, Abbottabad, and we're confident enough that he'll be there and that we can take him down that we're willing to risk going through with the operation even though he might escape and Pakistan might get annoyed that we violated their sovereignty". Getting from point A to point B takes a little while.
It's a guys name, you seriously think based on a single couriers name they can determine exactly where Osama is?
Or are you thinking they'll magically know in 2008 where Osama is because five years earlier some other guy moved to Abbottabad for a year? Clearly Osama must be in that town in a building that didn't even exist when the detainee in question lived there.
The name is what is important. They were clearly tracking the courier mention (given he was there when they raided), if Osama find out that you know about the guy he has moving in and out of his hiding place he's going assume you are at least close to working it out and so move ASAP and get another courier. He survived for almost 10 years with the world's largest military after him and a $25 million bounty on his head - he had to be paranoid...
The question seems to be, "Should Wikileaks be complicit in the corruption, and be quiet, or should Wikileads expose the corruption, even though someone might be killed?"
Obviously our government didn't mind being complicit.
"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
Well, you're true to your nickname. Only a right wing nutjob is getting what they want in this day and age.
Get it straight: We have nothing like democracy in this country and I'm not convinced we ever have had. Since Teddy Roosevelt there have been only three presidents who have not been total tools of the status quo, and one of them was only out for himself.
Manning is a patriot, Assange is a useful idiot. However instead of being useful to the power elite, he is useful to all of us.
The only way we will get accountability is when men like Assange and Manning do what they have done.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"they planned to raid Osama's hideout on April 31"
I am sure that would have been a surprise for Osama - nobody expects to be raided on April 31
wikileaks grows up and realizes they are endangering lives
The only life they seem to have endangered to date is Ossama Bin Laden's.
You can't take the sky from me...
Apple and Birkshire-Hathaway's success is, for better or worse, truer or falser, tied to the leaders of the company in the mind of most investors. If Steve Jobs or Warren Buffet dropped dead tomorrow without having left clear plans for a successor, and having had the markets get used to the idea, I suspect the value would drop out of their stocks in a massive way before recovering.
Killing Bin Laden has changed the political dynamic in the United States. It's given Obama a popularity boost and an improvement in image which he can leverage in his negotiations on domestic policies. It makes it harder to call him "soft on defense" when he's kept up 2 wars, boosted troop levels in Afganistan, and just sent the Navy SEALS into Pakistan, pretty much unannounced, to bust into a house and cap Bin Laden in the face.
Whether or not getting at Bin Laden is going to have any effect in the "war on terror" is irrelevant. In Afganistan, we've been at it with the Taliban this whole time. There hasn't really been much of a foreign Arab-fighter presence there for several years. The Taliban and Al Qaeda are two different things. The spin-off groups in Iraq and Yemen were basically independent entities which used the name Al Qaeda for brand association hoping that believers in Bin Laden would come fight for them. It's basically trademark infringement.
The fact is that killing Bin Laden put the final cap on the whole 9/11 thing for Americans. Bin Laden can no longer be the boogey man hiding in the wings, because he's gone. Any threat that we might face going forward isn't going to come from him. Killing Bin Laden is a lot like the fall of the Soviet Union, in a way. The monolithic face of terror is gone and now the small operators are going to have to come up with their own spin on things. we'll see how this goes. We all know what a disaster letting the Soviet Union collapse was for us.
Why do left wingers always say that "dissent is patriotic". That's literally an oxymoron."
No, it's not. They're simply not as bloody stupid as you. Neither were the founding fathers. They had few illusions about what governments were and how wrong they could go. The government is a tool of the people, not the other way around. As soon as you think like a fascist, that the state is all that matters, then it's all over. Dissent is how you keep the government in check and ensure that the ideals on which the country was founded persist.
That's what other people understand and you don't.