90,000 classified documents on US war in Afghanistan leaked

So your preference would be what - collective suicide by any media organization that presumes to release war documents like this?

If the billion dollar corporations that manage the American media don't want to chip in a few bucks to the people who are gathering news and information,

doing, you know, reporting and journalism and stuff, about major aspects of the nine years of war in Afghanistan that they seem to have missed out on the whole time,

they can always join the efforts, cultivate their own reputations as reliable places to entrust with what the informant knows will end their own career and wreck their own life.

One story here is, after all, that the US media were none of them trusted by this guy.

 

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Has it happened? They'll probably be treated the same as this boy will, end up in some prison or facing a Jirgah where they have to justify their actions. Nobody likes traitors anymore than they like whistleblowers.

 

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Do you realise how you are projecting? This is Afghanistan, they have their own system of law and order, which they are so attached to that they have followed it for 5000 years, through n number of cultural, political and religious changes. The only thing that has broken this chain is when their community was disbanded and children were brought up in refugee camps instead of the community. That has led to 20 years of war already.

What do you think they will do? And why do you think that?

 

Yeah, its the Afghans we're discussing, not the Americans. Some people still believe in investigations before passing sentence

From your link:

Strange, where are the threats against women and children? Isn't anyone sending drones to wipe out whole villages because one of them might have something maybe to do with something totally irrelevant to what the investigation is about?

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I'm curious, what do you think the Afghans should do about those who gave information to the occupying western military?

What does Australia do with those who leak sensitive information to the enemy in wartime?

In fact what is the Australian position here?

“The leaked documents show that the US has committed numerous war crimes and that the US government and military have lied through their teeth in order to cover up the failure of their policies. These are the revelations that Washington wants to keep secret.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07282010.html

 

But not the Taliban.

Sam, you consistently present the people 'outed' in these documents as "traitors". Vis-a-vis what, exactly? Traitors to what?

 

There probably is something wrong with this guy and his story.

He's no Daniel Ellsberg, for sure, and his motives, circumstances, and actual level of responsibility remain obscure.

But he's done the US an enormous favor, and he is likely to pay a high price for it - I'd be more worried about the lessons to be had from the content being buried in a big controversy, legit or not, over whatever is wrong with this scene and its central player.

One problem is that no one involved had the necessary expertise to clean up the documents. Another problem is that any cleaning up done would have provided leverage to those attempting to deflect the content by accusing the leakers of biased modification and so forth.

Both those problems would have had the same solution, if thing were OK in the official circles and professional media: the information in the documents would have been provided to professional news media by responsible government and military officials, years ago, and published in a less harmful and more informative manner.

But as we all know, that is utopian fantasy. So we have to manage this war, as citizens of a democracy, with the info sources we can find, not the ones we want.

 

With so many documents, it would run into the same problem as securing false testimony from multiple witnesses: how do you crank out that long and complex of a story without inadvertently contradicting yourself?

Now, if all 90k documents are just repetitions, then that's a little bit easier, but if most of the documents describe a wide variety of events, then you'd need an IQ of like 10 million to be able to present that much data consistently, and finish your grand forgery during a single human lifetime. (Have you ever heard of a fiction author writing a 90,000 page book in 2-5 year's time?)

Depends on how many there are. The Taliban only has the time and energy to kill so many so fast. Give them too many targets at once and they would spread themselves very thin indeed trying to run them all down, thus exposing the emptiness of their own threats.

That's only if you believe the myth that secrecy is a valuable military asset.

It's sort of like the myth that prevailed during WWII that soldiers needed to be issued bayonets for their rifles. Repeating rifle technology had made hand to hand combat into such a rare occurrence that mostly all a bayonet served to do was diminish the rifle's accuracy when fired. But... we still spent a lot of valuable money issuing them. Now we live in an age where secrecy is a waste of resources.

When you live in an age where a tactic has become impractical, you've just got to take it out of your play-book, not sit around whining every time it doesn't work.

This is my sentiment also.

If people die from this, it won't be because someone let the information out. It will be because some arrogant buffoon thought he could keep it all hidden to begin with.

 

That's an absurd notion. Why would you think this?

 

Are you serious?

 

Then why did he do his big release through them?

And are you going to answer my questions about what this man exposed? About what was "missed"?

 

He didn't.

Which is part of the problem - actual news organizations have, or used to have, the resources and responsibility to handle the cleanup. Had they been reporting on the Afghan war as they should have been, this info - the valuable information for US citizens it contains - would be available without any such leak. No motive capable of inspiring serious self-sacrifice would exist.

This is going to do far more harm to more people who don't deserve it than timely, professional, responsible reporting of the significant info would have.

 

Yes, he did. The latest release of documents was done in conjunction with several newspapers.

I've asked you twice to illuminate us on what the media "should have been" reporting and did not. I've also asked you what is in the documents that has not been reported, in some fashion, elsewhere. What am I to make of your decision not to respond?

 

It was not done by those newspapers - they are not in possession of the original substance of the leak, because the material was not leaked to them. The stuff will be publicly available whether they print it or not. Their role is secondary.

The role of trusted repository or direct beneficiary of leaks like this one, formerly enjoyed by major newspapers such as the New York Times, is no longer theirs.

Judith Miller's shadow is a long one, maybe.

The motives, attitudes, circumstances, strategies, tactics, consequences, and progress of the nine year direct invasion of Afghanistan.

Which several people on this forum were simply listing, taking for granted, as a successful and victorious US military venture - two years ago. Where did they get that view, if not from official lies and the mainstream media's complicity in spreading them?

To the point that when others on this forum pointed out that the Taliban, far from being defeated, were the dominant political force in much of the country, and that the "government" actually governed little beyond the boundaries of Kabul, that the level of support from Pakistan was such that US money and logistical help and even weaponry was being funneled to the Taliban with US knowledge, that the Afghans were fighting harder against us than with us even after years of training and continual support, that the war was going badly and long since coming to resemble the quagmire predicted in the first place, we were ridiculed and disparaged - by you, among others.

Now you tell us there's nothing new in these leaks, nothing you didn't know all along.

Depends - It's familiar stuff to many here, readers of what you call "fringe" or leftwing info sources, of course; but these are not major media influences, and to others not so much apparently.

Let's see if the info in the documents is greeted with a chorus of "we already said this/ knew this/ reported this " on the major US media news outlets - with examples.

 

I'm sorry, but I am not sure what point you are trying to make? My point was that the wikileaks fellow used the news media to release the papers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/26editors-note.html

I'm sorry, but you will have to be more specific, because I've read shelves of books and reams of articles about all of those issues, and feel pretty informed about them. The fact I -- or anyone else -- comes to a conclusion different than yours does not mean our information for reaching our conclusions was ever flawed.

Um, situations change, buddy. The fact is Afghanistan, on the ground, looked a lot better in 2002-2003 than it does to today, so it was possible to feel a little more triumphant in the past...

That's a typical inaccurate recasting of my position.

It's true that I've argued with you about the scope of the Taliban power, which ebbs and flows, but I've never denied the issues you raise with Pakistan, and Sey Hersh was reporting on them way back in 2004. As for Afghanistan itself, I seem to recall our last bone of contention dealt with attitudes toward the U.S. -- and your denial of polling data that indicates the Afghans support the U.S. presence. On that account, I stand by my position, and have reason for doing so.

Calling the Taliban the "dominant political force" seems a bit of overkill, too, doesn't it? I would say the U.S. is the dominant political force in the country, in Weberian terms, if not more.

There isn't.

Obama has said the documents “don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate in Afghanistan,” and even Frank Rich was forced to concede Sunday that "They contain no news. They will not change the course of the war," though the rest of his column is him pining that they could. So you and Straw and all the other boo boys can jump up and down and act like this is a big deal, but it isn't, really...

Well, I suppose it is in terms of Media Studies -- that is, the whole wikileaks phenomena. But in terms of the war? There is nothing here new or illuminating or remotely scandalous. You've essentially been given the notes of a novel you've already read. It's more detail that fleshes out the novel's substance, but it does not change the substance itself.

Meanwhile, you're in something of a Catch-22.

On the one hand you are smirking and saying these confirm what you said all along, while with the other you are asserting that nobody knew this stuff, because it wasn't reported? Which is it? Or were you, too, uninformed? And your observations just lucky?

So it has been reported then?

 

One would expect a real report to have contradictions and errors. And they would not theoretically have to rewrite the whole thing, just do a few strategic edits. There are computer programs that can seek out key phrases and change them.

 

frakkin awesome, dude!

Triumphalism is the attitude or belief that a particular doctrine, religion, culture, or social system is superior to and should triumph over all others.

* Impaired ability to judge the value or morality of the group's actions;
* Cessation of creativity and innovation within the group;
* Blindness to other groups’ strengths and innovations;
* A tendency to over-reach against the group’s competitors, based on an inflated sense of the likelihood of triumph in conflict.

* The abasement rituals at Abu Ghraib were most generally conditioned by the climate of impunity created by triumphalist strategy, ideology and rhetoric, which led, at least, to dismissive negligence and then cover-ups by authorities. Dr. Michael A. Weinstein, in The Power and Interest News Report (wiki)

We don't want to fight but by Jingo if we do
We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too
We've fought the Arabs before, and while we're Aryans true
The Taliban shall not have Afghanistan.​