That your bus incident? Already plenty well-publicized, if the ARMY TIMES is distributing the AP coverage of the incident. I don't exactly think that's evidence of some sinister coverup that we needed these leaks to reveal.
But then, of course Americans are to blame for every civilian death there, right? How inconvenient that six people died about a week ago to a roadside bomb (I think it's safe to say that's not an American device that did it). Or another ~30 killed in another incident months back by another roadside bomb? Or 25 dead about 2 weeks ago?
Yes, you're right. American forces are clearly just killing untold numbers of civilians, and getting away with it there. Fuck off.
Perhaps if enough people knew then maybe the U.S. would pull out and that would prevent most of those deaths. There certainly weren't that many deaths before the U.S. invaded. The overall importance, coward, is that you can point to the documents and say 'harm is caused' but the harm being caused is much less in the wake of the harms said documents are trying to bring into light.
Newsflash, genius: people KNOW that civilians are being killed. It's a war-zone. An unfortunate side-effect of war is that innocent people will be killed accidentally *by both sides* during the course of operations. It is unfortunate, and it is to be prevented as much as possible, but it is impossible to prevent 100% of the cases.
So the real question is - what evidence of war crimes is there in these documents? And honestly, the answer so far seems to be "none."
Given that the release of these documents has not ended the war, and there is no reasonable probability that it will end due to these documents, the real question of weight is:
50-100 dead civilians (without the leak) vs. 51-101 dead civilians (with the leak).
How this got an Insightful mod, I'll never understand.
What makes you think that *I* bear the moral responsibility for the consequences of *YOUR* actions? "Help us vet this info, or people will probably die," is extortion, plain and simple.
If the DoD was to redact this information, every single page would come back completely blacked-out, *because it's fucking classified information that was stolen from them.* They have no interest, or responsibility, to help somebody who obtained them in legally questionable fashion publish them for public consumption. At that point, Assange would have probably said, "Too bad, guess we publish the whole thing, I need to get some donations flowing."
Why, exactly, do you think the DoD would be interested in helping them publish even a word of these documents?
Yes, *tried*. And failed. Spectacularly. They therefore richly deserve criticism of their methods and policies, because of that spectacular failure.
If they wanted to be a "news" organization, they wouldn't have published a data dump like they did, they would have reviewed the documentation, and published an investigative report, linking isolated operational reports to larger events.
Instead, we have a data dump that puts informants at risk, and we have this vague, hand-waving assertion that "there's probably evidence of war crimes in there."
So far, no substantiation of that assertion has come to light, and in fact I suspect very little will be found in there that constitutes a smoking gun. Instead, it'll fuel the deluded, paranoid fantasies of conspiracy theorists and other nutters, and do nothing to substantially affect the course of this war.
Other than kill a few *more* afghan civilians via the time-honored method of Taliban executions, of course.
He who would sacrifice liberty to gain a bit of safety...?
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin.
And yet nowhere does he suggest that it's appropriate for Mr. Assange to make this decision on behalf of other people, when he himself is under zero risk to his own safety. Assange isn't forced to choose between "liberty" and "safety," because neither of those values are at risk - FOR HIM.
Perhaps another adage would be better suited here: "It is better to keep silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubt."
Problem is, he'll probably end up at 1 or 0 with mostly "Troll" mods. His commentary flies in the face of conventional wisdom here on slashdot, and his mods will no doubt reflect that.
They did the responsible thing(as a news agency) once they had the sensitive info
Repeat after me: WikiLeaks is not a "news agency." Wkileaks is an activist group.
They voluntarily redacted information themselves and even tried to do so in the most effective manner possible.
The most effective manner possible allowed the Times of London's reporters to find names, GPS coordinates, and family names & village names of numerous informants... within 2 hours? That's a pretty ineffective method for redacting information if someone can find something that shouldn't be there that quickly. As such, I'd say it's quite likely that WikiLeaks favored the "rush to publish" approach far more than they favored the "responsible and thorough redaction of details that are unrelated to our larger activism, but which could put other lives in danger."
"Hi Pentagon, would you help me redact these documents?"
"Sure, they're all classified. Why don't we shred these, and just return some blank, all-black paper to you, and call it a day?"
This is not a matter of these documents being available via a FOIA request - they are operational reports, and they are classified. Asking the organization that *owns* them and *classified* them to help you prepare them for publication is ridiculous.
also consider that there are probably a number of people intent on killing Assange right now.
Like who? This seems wildly speculative - what purpose would killing him serve? The documents have already been made public. I'd say that Mr. Assange is at worst in danger of being dragged into court somewhere.
In other words, his balls aren't "on the line" over an important matter. He seems, however, to have very little issue with putting the balls of afghani informants on the line in order to further his own causes. Maybe he should have asked them how they would do having their balls on the line?
I don't know... this is just blue-sky solutioneering here, but maybe they could... redact the documents properly before releasing them, rather than rush to publish and then go "oops, we missed some names"? Review the documents, and build a journalistic report outlining the "abuses" and "war crimes" he claims are in there using the documents, and release only the supporting evidence for that report, with appropriate redaction?
You know, I keep seeing references to "the things found in the leak," "the incriminating documents," and "the evidence uncovered by these documents."
Can somebody answer me a simple question: WHAT INCRIMINATING EVIDENCE HAS BEEN FOUND IN THEM?
It seems to be accepted conventional wisdom that these documents have all sorts of evidence of awful war crimes, but I've seen no evidence to support that conventional wisdom at all. I haven't heard of anything new being uncovered by these documents, so I'm curious why people are making these claims.
Would you do me a favor and go back and read what I wrote?
In the context of this discussion, "Infrastructure and Social Services" can be just as easily classified as "non-military spending." The question at hand was whether or not "wars" are the only thing we're spending money on, and the answer to that is definitively "NO," as Non-military spending programs (i.e., those which are "infrastructure and social" in nature) account for the majority of our federal spending.
"Comparatively large" in this case meaning just shy of the rest of the world's defense budgets combined.
That was never in question. What's the point?
The question was not "Do we spend lots of money on the military?" The question is "Do we only spend on wars and the military?" And the answer to that question is, and remains, "No, we spend far more on non-military spending than we do on the military."
Pray tell - how exactly do you "pay in" to Social Security? Medicare? Medicaid?
Think deeply for a moment, I can wait.
Give up? You pay into those systems with TAXES which are imposed on your paycheck (and in some cases, your employer), by the government.
Thus your tax money, paid into those programs, (plus a little interest that's been earned when & where the government hasn't been too busy raping the general fund for pork barrel spending) is being paid back out. It's all tax money, and it's all collected & spent by the government.
If you want to parse "spending tax money" to mean "spending some fractional percentage of tax money that the government collects from paychecks", then sure, the "only tax money" we spend is on the military.
I'm not arguing that the money we spend on infrastructure is sufficient - I live outside Boston, and I see plenty of shitty bridges and roads every day on my drive to work. But to claim that the only thing we spend on is the military is completely incorrect, and does nothing to help your argument that "more" should be spent on bridges and other infrastructure.
And look at the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(disambiguation) -- disambiguation! Totally misleading and completely unwarranted that you would unilaterally claim the name "Brazilian" to describe natives of the Federative Republic of Brazil.
(Or alternately, you could get a fucking grip and get over yourself. That's probably a little easier.)
I don't disagree with that. The point was, the person who simply opined, "Talk to your rep or stfu with your complaining" is offering a pretty simple (and ultimately insufficient) solution to a fairly complex and nuanced issue.
FACT: the original point I was discussing was that, and I quote, "War is about the only thing we're willing to spend tax money on at all."
My point was that other non-war-related things made up the bulk of our federal spending. In NO reality is it correct to say that "war" is about the only thing we spend our tax money on. That is, and was, the ONLY point I made. So, what can we conclude here:
1) Infrastructure and Social Programs are both *Non-Military* spending; 2) Infrastructure and Social Programs make up "the bulk" of the spending in the budget that is NOT accounted for by the military; 3) Infrastructure and Social Programs (or, "Non-military spending", if you are an anal retentive jackass) are therefore the majority of the federal budget.
This whole point is aimed at the conclusion that "all we spend on is war and the military." This is demonstrably false by comparing what we spend on the military versus what we spend on "everything else". Infrastructure and Social Programs are two broad categories that cover "just about everything else" in the federal budget.
You are arguing against a point I never made, and doing so quite poorly, I might add.
There you go again. VA programs are NOT infrastructure. For some weird reason, you keep trying to slap infrastructure and social programs together, when they're obviously two very different things.
For god's sake, what is wrong with you? In the context of this discussion (military spending vs. other spending), "Infrastructure and Social Programs" are lumped together because they describe the bulk of non-military spending.
Tuition and other VA benefits like that can certainly be well-argued to fall in the category of "non-military" spending, as they have no specific military application, and in fact serve to build an educated workforce - thus falling into the "infrastructure and social program" categories, rather than the "military and war" category.
I truly fail to see how you can be so monumentally dim-witted as to not understand the context of this discussion, yet argue so vehemently for any side of it.
Your original statement was that the US spends most of its money on social programs and infrastructure.
Do you need a refresher in elementary math & logic?
Social Programs Budget + Infrastructure Budget > 50% -- thus, "a majority"; AND Social Programs Budget + Infrastructure Budget > Military Spending -- thus "significantly more money being spent on the first 2 than the last."
The original post I responded to made the statement that "the only thing we're willing to spend on is war." I responded that this was false, because stuff outside military spending accounts for much more than military spending. In fact I offered NO statement as to whether or not I felt the infrastructure spending was "enough".
Then a second person came along and said, "NUH UH, Infrastructure is a small part of the budget." In essence, arguing (like you) against a point I never made, because I never said that Infrastructure was better-funded than the military, or that it comprised a larger part of the budget on its own.
VA programs aren't infrastructure. Infrastructure is things like roads, pipelines, bridges, etc.
And I said that VA programs such as the GI Bill could be considered at least as much "infrastructure / social program" as they could "military spending." Did you bother to read my post before you decided you were a lawyer, or do you just fire from the hip and hope that something you say is relevant?
Unless you're the original AC, how can you divine what he meant to say? Are you psychic? If you are the original AC, why wouldn't you say what you meant in the first place? And why would you defend yourself by speaking of yourself in the third-person?
I think you missed the point by a country mile, son.
Pro tip: Go back. Read his post. I'm responding to specific accusations he made in his post, and the Glenn Beck comment was specifically directed at his - dare I say - ironically Glenn Beck-style rant.
Please explain what mathematical system you're using where 68% of the budget (by your math - 65% social programs, 3% infrastructure) does not constitute "the majority of our federal budget?"
I'm not arguing that we're taking adequate care of our infrastructure by spending what we do on it, I'm saying that we are not "spending everything we have" on waging war. The vast majority of what we spend on has very little to do with the military. And the VA funding you're talking about includes a lot of tuition money for GI Bill students and ROTC programs. So I think it's fair to call VA programs at least as much infrastructure/social program as it is to call them defense spending.
I was specifically addressing GP's "we're only willing to spend tax money on war" comment, which is demonstrably false, when the majority of your budget is spent on things that are completely unrelated to war and the military.
It doesn't "require" that much, you can own property and live on significantly less than that. But, people being people, they usually want "the most comfortable/spacious house their money can buy" - and so, we spend more than we need to on our living space.
I could afford a hell of a lot of house on my income in a rural area outside the Northeast, but instead, since I prefer being near a city and the comforts & conveniences a city offers, I pay more money for a more modest place with what I consider to be a better location. Problem is, millions of other people also want those conveniences and comforts, so the property values go up.
Bare-bones survival, I could survive in a cave, with no running water, no electricity, and no heat/cooling... but really, who wants to do that?
I don't think it's all that ridiculous... if you don't want to spend that much, you don't have to. The 28% figure is a guideline for the "maximum" you should expect to be able to afford. It's a lot of money in today's dollars, but it's 1/4 of your effort... so figure 10-15 hours a week of your work go to paying for your house. Is that really that much work to have a comfortable place to live for you & your family?
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So you have no proof to offer?
we didn't need to have these informants named in these documents, champ.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/04/ap_afghanistan_kandahar_041210/
That your bus incident? Already plenty well-publicized, if the ARMY TIMES is distributing the AP coverage of the incident. I don't exactly think that's evidence of some sinister coverup that we needed these leaks to reveal.
But then, of course Americans are to blame for every civilian death there, right? How inconvenient that six people died about a week ago to a roadside bomb (I think it's safe to say that's not an American device that did it). Or another ~30 killed in another incident months back by another roadside bomb? Or 25 dead about 2 weeks ago?
Yes, you're right. American forces are clearly just killing untold numbers of civilians, and getting away with it there. Fuck off.
Newsflash, genius: people KNOW that civilians are being killed. It's a war-zone. An unfortunate side-effect of war is that innocent people will be killed accidentally *by both sides* during the course of operations. It is unfortunate, and it is to be prevented as much as possible, but it is impossible to prevent 100% of the cases.
So the real question is - what evidence of war crimes is there in these documents? And honestly, the answer so far seems to be "none."
So what end is served by releasing them, exactly?
Given that the release of these documents has not ended the war, and there is no reasonable probability that it will end due to these documents, the real question of weight is:
50-100 dead civilians (without the leak) vs. 51-101 dead civilians (with the leak).
Which outweighs which?
How this got an Insightful mod, I'll never understand.
What makes you think that *I* bear the moral responsibility for the consequences of *YOUR* actions? "Help us vet this info, or people will probably die," is extortion, plain and simple.
If the DoD was to redact this information, every single page would come back completely blacked-out, *because it's fucking classified information that was stolen from them.* They have no interest, or responsibility, to help somebody who obtained them in legally questionable fashion publish them for public consumption. At that point, Assange would have probably said, "Too bad, guess we publish the whole thing, I need to get some donations flowing."
Why, exactly, do you think the DoD would be interested in helping them publish even a word of these documents?
Yes, *tried*. And failed. Spectacularly. They therefore richly deserve criticism of their methods and policies, because of that spectacular failure.
If they wanted to be a "news" organization, they wouldn't have published a data dump like they did, they would have reviewed the documentation, and published an investigative report, linking isolated operational reports to larger events.
Instead, we have a data dump that puts informants at risk, and we have this vague, hand-waving assertion that "there's probably evidence of war crimes in there."
So far, no substantiation of that assertion has come to light, and in fact I suspect very little will be found in there that constitutes a smoking gun. Instead, it'll fuel the deluded, paranoid fantasies of conspiracy theorists and other nutters, and do nothing to substantially affect the course of this war.
Other than kill a few *more* afghan civilians via the time-honored method of Taliban executions, of course.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin.
And yet nowhere does he suggest that it's appropriate for Mr. Assange to make this decision on behalf of other people, when he himself is under zero risk to his own safety. Assange isn't forced to choose between "liberty" and "safety," because neither of those values are at risk - FOR HIM.
Perhaps another adage would be better suited here: "It is better to keep silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubt."
Problem is, he'll probably end up at 1 or 0 with mostly "Troll" mods. His commentary flies in the face of conventional wisdom here on slashdot, and his mods will no doubt reflect that.
Repeat after me: WikiLeaks is not a "news agency." Wkileaks is an activist group.
The most effective manner possible allowed the Times of London's reporters to find names, GPS coordinates, and family names & village names of numerous informants... within 2 hours? That's a pretty ineffective method for redacting information if someone can find something that shouldn't be there that quickly. As such, I'd say it's quite likely that WikiLeaks favored the "rush to publish" approach far more than they favored the "responsible and thorough redaction of details that are unrelated to our larger activism, but which could put other lives in danger."
"Hi Pentagon, would you help me redact these documents?"
"Sure, they're all classified. Why don't we shred these, and just return some blank, all-black paper to you, and call it a day?"
This is not a matter of these documents being available via a FOIA request - they are operational reports, and they are classified. Asking the organization that *owns* them and *classified* them to help you prepare them for publication is ridiculous.
Like who? This seems wildly speculative - what purpose would killing him serve? The documents have already been made public. I'd say that Mr. Assange is at worst in danger of being dragged into court somewhere.
In other words, his balls aren't "on the line" over an important matter. He seems, however, to have very little issue with putting the balls of afghani informants on the line in order to further his own causes. Maybe he should have asked them how they would do having their balls on the line?
I don't know... this is just blue-sky solutioneering here, but maybe they could... redact the documents properly before releasing them, rather than rush to publish and then go "oops, we missed some names"? Review the documents, and build a journalistic report outlining the "abuses" and "war crimes" he claims are in there using the documents, and release only the supporting evidence for that report, with appropriate redaction?
You know, I keep seeing references to "the things found in the leak," "the incriminating documents," and "the evidence uncovered by these documents."
Can somebody answer me a simple question: WHAT INCRIMINATING EVIDENCE HAS BEEN FOUND IN THEM?
It seems to be accepted conventional wisdom that these documents have all sorts of evidence of awful war crimes, but I've seen no evidence to support that conventional wisdom at all. I haven't heard of anything new being uncovered by these documents, so I'm curious why people are making these claims.
Would you do me a favor and go back and read what I wrote?
In the context of this discussion, "Infrastructure and Social Services" can be just as easily classified as "non-military spending." The question at hand was whether or not "wars" are the only thing we're spending money on, and the answer to that is definitively "NO," as Non-military spending programs (i.e., those which are "infrastructure and social" in nature) account for the majority of our federal spending.
That was never in question. What's the point?
The question was not "Do we spend lots of money on the military?" The question is "Do we only spend on wars and the military?" And the answer to that question is, and remains, "No, we spend far more on non-military spending than we do on the military."
Pray tell - how exactly do you "pay in" to Social Security? Medicare? Medicaid?
Think deeply for a moment, I can wait.
Give up? You pay into those systems with TAXES which are imposed on your paycheck (and in some cases, your employer), by the government.
Thus your tax money, paid into those programs, (plus a little interest that's been earned when & where the government hasn't been too busy raping the general fund for pork barrel spending) is being paid back out. It's all tax money, and it's all collected & spent by the government.
If you want to parse "spending tax money" to mean "spending some fractional percentage of tax money that the government collects from paychecks", then sure, the "only tax money" we spend is on the military.
I'm not arguing that the money we spend on infrastructure is sufficient - I live outside Boston, and I see plenty of shitty bridges and roads every day on my drive to work. But to claim that the only thing we spend on is the military is completely incorrect, and does nothing to help your argument that "more" should be spent on bridges and other infrastructure.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I presume you're from Brazil, given the name Abreu? I'll assume anyway.
Assuming that, the "official name" of your country is "República Federativa do Brasil", or, in English, the "Federative Republic of Brazil."
Is it okay if we start calling you RFians? or FRians? Because frankly, I object to your use of "Brazilian" to describe people from your country, when you can't even come to a consensus over how you got the name in the first place.
And look at the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(disambiguation) -- disambiguation! Totally misleading and completely unwarranted that you would unilaterally claim the name "Brazilian" to describe natives of the Federative Republic of Brazil.
(Or alternately, you could get a fucking grip and get over yourself. That's probably a little easier.)
I don't disagree with that. The point was, the person who simply opined, "Talk to your rep or stfu with your complaining" is offering a pretty simple (and ultimately insufficient) solution to a fairly complex and nuanced issue.
FACT: the original point I was discussing was that, and I quote, "War is about the only thing we're willing to spend tax money on at all."
My point was that other non-war-related things made up the bulk of our federal spending. In NO reality is it correct to say that "war" is about the only thing we spend our tax money on. That is, and was, the ONLY point I made. So, what can we conclude here:
1) Infrastructure and Social Programs are both *Non-Military* spending;
2) Infrastructure and Social Programs make up "the bulk" of the spending in the budget that is NOT accounted for by the military;
3) Infrastructure and Social Programs (or, "Non-military spending", if you are an anal retentive jackass) are therefore the majority of the federal budget.
This whole point is aimed at the conclusion that "all we spend on is war and the military." This is demonstrably false by comparing what we spend on the military versus what we spend on "everything else". Infrastructure and Social Programs are two broad categories that cover "just about everything else" in the federal budget.
You are arguing against a point I never made, and doing so quite poorly, I might add.
For god's sake, what is wrong with you? In the context of this discussion (military spending vs. other spending), "Infrastructure and Social Programs" are lumped together because they describe the bulk of non-military spending.
Tuition and other VA benefits like that can certainly be well-argued to fall in the category of "non-military" spending, as they have no specific military application, and in fact serve to build an educated workforce - thus falling into the "infrastructure and social program" categories, rather than the "military and war" category.
I truly fail to see how you can be so monumentally dim-witted as to not understand the context of this discussion, yet argue so vehemently for any side of it.
Do you need a refresher in elementary math & logic?
Social Programs Budget + Infrastructure Budget > 50% -- thus, "a majority";
AND
Social Programs Budget + Infrastructure Budget > Military Spending -- thus "significantly more money being spent on the first 2 than the last."
The original post I responded to made the statement that "the only thing we're willing to spend on is war." I responded that this was false, because stuff outside military spending accounts for much more than military spending. In fact I offered NO statement as to whether or not I felt the infrastructure spending was "enough".
Then a second person came along and said, "NUH UH, Infrastructure is a small part of the budget." In essence, arguing (like you) against a point I never made, because I never said that Infrastructure was better-funded than the military, or that it comprised a larger part of the budget on its own.
And I said that VA programs such as the GI Bill could be considered at least as much "infrastructure / social program" as they could "military spending." Did you bother to read my post before you decided you were a lawyer, or do you just fire from the hip and hope that something you say is relevant?
Unless you're the original AC, how can you divine what he meant to say? Are you psychic? If you are the original AC, why wouldn't you say what you meant in the first place? And why would you defend yourself by speaking of yourself in the third-person?
I think you missed the point by a country mile, son.
Pro tip: Go back. Read his post. I'm responding to specific accusations he made in his post, and the Glenn Beck comment was specifically directed at his - dare I say - ironically Glenn Beck-style rant.
Wait, what?
Please explain what mathematical system you're using where 68% of the budget (by your math - 65% social programs, 3% infrastructure) does not constitute "the majority of our federal budget?"
I'm not arguing that we're taking adequate care of our infrastructure by spending what we do on it, I'm saying that we are not "spending everything we have" on waging war. The vast majority of what we spend on has very little to do with the military. And the VA funding you're talking about includes a lot of tuition money for GI Bill students and ROTC programs. So I think it's fair to call VA programs at least as much infrastructure/social program as it is to call them defense spending.
I was specifically addressing GP's "we're only willing to spend tax money on war" comment, which is demonstrably false, when the majority of your budget is spent on things that are completely unrelated to war and the military.
It doesn't "require" that much, you can own property and live on significantly less than that. But, people being people, they usually want "the most comfortable/spacious house their money can buy" - and so, we spend more than we need to on our living space.
I could afford a hell of a lot of house on my income in a rural area outside the Northeast, but instead, since I prefer being near a city and the comforts & conveniences a city offers, I pay more money for a more modest place with what I consider to be a better location. Problem is, millions of other people also want those conveniences and comforts, so the property values go up.
Bare-bones survival, I could survive in a cave, with no running water, no electricity, and no heat/cooling... but really, who wants to do that?
I don't think it's all that ridiculous... if you don't want to spend that much, you don't have to. The 28% figure is a guideline for the "maximum" you should expect to be able to afford. It's a lot of money in today's dollars, but it's 1/4 of your effort... so figure 10-15 hours a week of your work go to paying for your house. Is that really that much work to have a comfortable place to live for you & your family?
And the difference is one of small degrees, not one of fundamental makeup.