Wikileaks

Important? I'd be surprised if 90% of those documents had ever been read by anyone, including the original authors.

The United States does not currently have the guts to win the war. Because of this I'm not so concerned of any atrocities I know they won't be committing. While I have no standing to call out an egotistical prick, Julian Assange believes what he is doing is single handedly ending two wars. Like he is THE God descending from heavens and calmly proclaiming to the fighting peoples, "Enough, my children. Here is some paper. It has words on it. Fight no more."

 

This.

Julian Assange in my opinion, is doing this to look like the driving force behind the end of the war. The kicker though is that the documents are from 2004 to 2009... Obama had already read everything relevant here and created a new plan for Iraq and Afghanistan before the leaks. Assange's "victory", if there is one here is simply "Look at me! I know what the president knows!" I think he's a pretentious little cunt and with dozens of friends and teammates deployed or serving right now, I would kill this guy personally if the information he leaked was responsible for the death of one of those guys.

 

It's strange to me that it is unfathomable to many of you that his motivations might be honest.

Why can't he be doing it just becuase he believes the public have a right to know.
The USA got away with so much evil shit in Vietnam at the time, largely becuase the Public did not know. Now with people like this wiki-leaks man around, doing what he does, it's a lot harder for the USA to secretly blow the shit out of countries.

 

In theory I like that there is a way to have a check on the government, especially when it and most of the population as whole is largely isolated from those doing the fighting because of the military and civilian cultural divorce post-Vietnam.

But this is the wrong fucking way to do it. Just dump as much as you can because you can and get a fucking ego boost, even the Pentagon Papers had retractions. Things are classified for a reason. What about the civilians and tribes that have allied with the US to help us get out without a civil war or radical regime. The Taliban has already announced that they have set up a committee to go through the leaks and create a hit list, it already has 1500 names.

Fuck him I hope to god he pays for this shit, unfortunately its going to be some teenager trying to take care of his widowed mother and told us where an IED or cache was and ends up getting waxed by AQI or the Tali.

 

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/secret-war-at-the-heart-of-wikileaks-2115637.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media ... 15637.html</a>

His referring to the other people at Wiki-Leaks as "Peripheral Players" makes his motives clear immediately.

 

Well, Actually

Robert Gates, the defense secretary who made the inital claims that lead everyone who couldn't be bothered to read 70,000 documents to believe that intelligence sources in Afghanistan were being whacked left and right by the vengeful taliban has more recently said -

"the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by the disclosure."

and CNN reports that senior NATO officials have told them

"that there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak."

Despite all the chicken little claims from so many sources, and the melodramatic assertions from Mike Mullen that "Wikileaks has "the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family" on their hands" - not one single case of reprisals resulting from this information has actually been tracked. And given how hard they're looking for a reason to crucify this guy - I don't have any doubt that a lot of resources are being devoted to looking for one, or that it would be all over the news if an incident was actually found.

I certainly don't approve of Wikileaks publishing this material without obfuscating names - but spin machine crap from military politicians shouldn't blind us to the reality of the situation. For christ sake, there's an ongoing push to declare the wikileaks staff as Enemy Combatants so they can be submitted to non judicial actions. Because something bad might happen in the future.

 

Eh, the document dump was probably shitty as most of it was probably irrelevant in exposing anything of value to this country.

However, some people on this thread have said frightening statements such as the media should be banned from war coverage or that we should win wars "by any means necessary" or the like. C'mon people - we have war tribunals for a reason.

Not every war is a simple as "the good guys vs. the bad buys."

Without commenting on the war as whole or the majority of soldiers in general, I can tell you with 100% confidence that atrocities and heinous war crimes have been committed by both sides.

Just look up war crimes in Iraq war on Wikipedia. The more digging you do, the more unfathomable stories you'll hear that will make your blood boil or make you physically sick. This includes actions by Iraqi combatants as well as US soldiers. And not "collateral damage" or "tough decisions need to be made in life-or-death situations" type shit. Cold-blooded, sociopathic shit that make episodes of Law and Order look like Sesame Street.

The document dump was shitty, but let's not get reactionary and move to the other extreme.

And yes, I know you are going to say that there are psychos in civilian life, just like there is the oddball psycho in the military. That's true. But in a war-zone, there simply is far less accountability (not by choice, mind you). You kill someone here in the US for any reason, and there is going to be an extensive investigation. In a war-zone, the nature of the environment make it easier to find a way to hide crimes, like spraying a civilian family's house with a machine gun for sadistic pleasure.

Just saying, sometimes exposure and oversight is necessary, and from a non-military entity to boot.

Although I've said nothing negative about the military, I await the negative red dots and flaming to begin.

 

Damn. I can't believe I missed that, this is the article I was thinking about.

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/24assange.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/24assange.html</a>

Dude I agree with you 100%. These "little wars" have been nastly little fuckers. I really hate the idea of having a shit ton of press trying to find every last little story and convincing the public they have an idea of what it is like through TV, I've literally had tons of people tell me they get it based on a movie/TV show/video game.

With that said oversight is good, I have bitched up a storm about it, but understand the reasons why it is necessary. The average infantryman is in their late teens/early twenties and in a very different culture from most Americans, a measure of oversight can provide a vital reminder of the importance of returning with honor when you've been gone for months with months left to go.

At the same time we are far, far more humanistic than the Iraqi Police/Army are to their own not to mention the insurgents.

 

Going forward, it would be constructive if people would at least glance over the rest of the thread so that we're not simply rehashing arguments or statements that have already been made over the last eight pages. Just a suggestion.

 

I am a Marine and I got back from Afghanistan in April of this year. The war in Afghanistan is completely fucked up enough. Incidents like this one are just going to make everything a lot gayer for those of us in the military. Other than getting briefed about how not to do stupid shit like this a million times, I don't think this incident will affect us too badly. These documents will likely not harm the military nearly as much as the media would like everyone to think from an operational stand point. Most of the stuff that is classified Top Secret, from my experience, is not really anything that most people back home don't know already anyways. With that said, the idiot who leaked all this should definitely be tried for treason.

 

Yeah?
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/taliban-study-wikileaks-to-hunt-informants/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...hanistan-Taliban-hunting-down-informants.html

Looks like the Tallyband is sitting around with their thumbs up their asses with only 75,000 Christmas presents full of tactical plans, spies and information and the rest of us are jumping into another bullshit press panic. After all, it's not like they're admitting they're going to look through the documents... I'm probably just being melodramatic.

Out of curiosity, what do you see as the "reality" of the situation? Someone knowing full well what they're releasing to the public (and the enemy during an ongoing war) under the guise of transparency is trying to throw the horse blinders on the public (like what you're accusing the government of doing). Ignoring the subsequent possibility for loss of life under the pretense of the public "needing" to know about war crimes is complete bullshit. The time for that is after the war, and the ones responsible should be punished accordingly. Those soldiers and informants doing their jobs or service to this or their own country don't need to be thrown into additional hell because some dickhead political idealist feels like he can save the world of US "oppression". The Afghani tribesmen and informants gave information under the idea that their identities would be protected, and that they were working towards a safer Afghanistan; not thrown to the dogs by Julian Assange looking to be a hero to the people.

If this was after the conclusion of combat operations, I would be all for the release of the documents and the consequences that follow. US servicemen having their tactical information and operational plans laid out to the enemy is fucking bullshit. He's no better than the government he's trying to expose.

How much would knowing something like the ETA of helicopter support or artillery fire after the start of a firefight affect the way insurgents fight? Knowing when they could open fire and when to get the fuck out seems like a pretty big piece of information to me, unless it's something they know already? A close friend of mine (a captain in the 175 Ranger Bat. who has done three deployments to Afghanistan) told me that even something small like that can change the entire course of a battle. Could you expand on that?

 

As I mentioned, my opinion as shown in my post was given from my experience. I am not a captain who knows shit about helicopters. I am a CPL who knows shit about ground side combat operations in Afghanistan. It is highly likely that knowing when helicopter or artillery support is coming will greatly affect the way the bad guys fight. That is however, making the assumption that these guys do anything that makes sense to us. Once again from my experience, these people have no rhyme or reason to what they do in a firefight. What I meant by "most people back home know this stuff anyways" was that most of the TS/SCI things that I have seen in my four years as a Marine could be found on Google.

I am clearly not a subject matter expert on how these douments will affect our strategy in the war or future opertaions in Afghanistan. I just wanted to provide a bit of feedback from the perspective of an Iraq and Afganistan veteran who deals with TS information often.

 

In reality? The only harm I see having actually come out of this lead was to the credibility of military politicians.

The most vocal critic of the leaks, The United States Secretary of Defense has said (and I quote again) 'the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by the disclosure'. This guy has done everything short of accusing Wikileaks of being part of sucking Satan's cock in his condemnation of the document publications. Do you think, if any of the people on that list were sensitive sources? Say people who weren't vocally and publicly cheering on the US incursion - he might have used that information to support his argument that Wikileaks is in fact part of Gog and Magog's devious plan?

The NY Times article is interesting. It's 4 months old. The Telegraph article is only 3 months old - and raises some very strongly worded hypotheticals. Yet, to date - there's not a single request for relocation or protection for the named parties. There's not a single tracked incident of reprisals. Not a single announcement for the Taliban that they totally just killed some guy. Just a lot of tough talk about how they're totally going to. You know, eventually.

I understand that the Taliban has used the leak to talk a lot of smack - but if they've actually followed through on any of it - they've been pretty freaking quiet about it. The UN don't know about it. There's no news about it. And given how much they love holding up severed heads for press releases - do you think that if they'd actually done anything about their threats - there might have been something about it in the news? It's not like Al Jazeera hesitates about reporting ugly, distasteful and damaging stories involving severed heads and nasty people talking shit about the decadent west.

When the US pulled out of Iraq in 92 and left Hussein in place, the public supporters of the western military were fucked. And if the western military pulls out of Afghanistan and the Taliban take control again - I'm sure that the public supporters of the current military action will also be fucked. But if that circumstance comes to pass, the wikileaks content will look like piss in bathwater. The people named in wikileaks all appear to have been quite open in their support of the US and cooperation with the anti-Taliban efforts. As far as anyone can demonstrate at this time, any danger that the people named in these documents are currently in, has fuck all to do with Wikileaks.

 

you do realize that these bad guys are building pretty sophisticated bombs out of spare electrics that the most advanced military in he world are having serious trouble countering, right? Do you think that, maybe, they might have access to such complicated devices as watches and can figure out response time without waiting for a classified document to tell them?

The fact that insurgents have been reticent to engage in open combat, and have been known to hide their weapons once a fight starts so that drones can't engage due to the ROEs means they already have a large amount of intelligence on how the US and NATO operates.

I also wanted to mention win reference to journalism and oversight, there are a minority of ( good) journalists whose stories have been quashed by editors or don't have a large audience who do a far better job out there than is seen on CNN. I remember one CBS journalist on the daily show a few years ago who said something to the effect of, "do you know what a dead American soldier looks like? I do, and I feel guilty that more people here don't." not that I dispute oversight and the fifth estate and all that, and we're also largely naive to the carnage that's occurred to the local civilians. But bad journalism has had more victims than finding out the bad things soldiers have done.

 

You know what? Don't care. I don't care what rationale Assange has for releasing the documents. I want the data in someone's hands, because the Washington Post concluded a couple months ago that the intelliegence agencies our government and private sector are ginormous.

This, at least, is 400,000 somethings that people can actually sift through. And you know what, at 400,000 you can get rid of a lot of random acts. Then you can actually see trends, and um, act on them.

It would be nice if the 100+ people Gates has working to make sure that the documents "aren't a threat," could take the same time and actually analyze what they say. Because we don't have a good picture of what's going on because of people who say, "90% of the people who write these probably haven't read them." And I'd like to have one. Not of the atrocities that have happened, but what the whole war looks like. With data, not a cacophony of people saying, "Bad strategy." Then maybe someone will listen. Or not.

 

As I responded to this argument before: what is the point of the American way* if you go against every facet of it for the sake of winning? What is the point of winning then if you don't win for the right reasons (the reasons you started fighting for, for instance)? Isn't that inherently anti-American?

To form the question less existentially: Would you kill an abortion doctor to save the fetuses? Would you ban Mein Kempf from being sold, read or published because it's anti-Semetic? Would you swap teams with a rival just to win a championship?

...no, because it's against the American way, and if you do you're a douchebag.

The posters here/members of the media who claim that winning is all that matters are deluded. If you fight, you have to have the right reasons and if you continue fighting you have to win for the right reasons and the right way. I'm totally against military action (economically it makes very little sense for Canada) but I sure as hell don't want them to pull out right now with the job incomplete but I don't want them to start shooting at civilians who look at the troops cock-eyed, do the job the right way or don't do it at all.

*I'm Canadian but I subscribe to the notion too.

 

//

 

Yes and no. And there isn't a lot of TS level stuff being leaked.

All of the named programs I have ever been read onto were SCI for a reason, and NOT public knowledge in any way.

 

Isn't this really a no-win situation? It's national security vs. national oversight.



Checks and balances my ass.