wikileaks

[wnyxmcneal]

Wonder what 909 said before he edited it. Wacko Walrus is the best.

 

[909]

I put that I had already posted this would happen somewhere, but I ran a search and for some weird reason I haven't posted it despite thinking exactly that for months.

 

[wnyxmcneal]

Cool, that's fair

 

[cobainwasmurdered]

It was actually an unfucking called for personal insult.

 

[Sex Machine Gun]

And PFC Manning is brought up again in that New Zealand article. Why hasn't anyone writing these stories questioned how a guy who was in Iraq got documents from the Afghan theater? "He was part of the hacker community" only explains so much. Being in Intelligence could account for part of his access, but not all of it.

 

[devo]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100821/ap_on_hi_te/eu_sweden_wikileaks

Sweden issues warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on charges of rape - only to withdraw it the next day.

Kind of a clumsy jab, all told.

 

[bigolsmitty]

This report on private contractors in Iraq based on the newest wikilieaks docs is a comedy of errors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/middleeast/24contractors.html?_r=1&hp

 

[snuffbox]

Im happy that Obama has put an end to the Iraq War and the use of contractors.

 

[KOAB]

he truly is the first great president of this century

 

[snuffbox]

There have been two presidents this century and he is definitely one of them.

 

[snuffbox]

What have we learned from the recent documents released?

1) Everything exposed is ok because 'everyone else does it!'

2) The leakers & the wikileaks people should be killed anyway

 

[Nightwing]

Most of the stuff isn't too bad, though the DPRK stuff probably should have been held back. It didn't say anything most of us already didn't know, putting it on official stationary makes things much worse in this case.

I've heard they'll be releasing some Russian stuff soon, so I'm very interested in what comes out there.

 

[cobainwasmurdered]

According to a cable from the American Embassy in Kabul, Ahmad Zia Massoud, Vice President of Afghanistan, was found carrying $52 million in cash that he “was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money’s origin or destination”.

This one made me laugh. Even if the money was all in the highest denominations there are it had to be really heavy.

 

[Jingus]

According to a cable from the American Embassy in Kabul, Ahmad Zia Massoud, Vice President of Afghanistan, was found carrying $52 million in cash that he “was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money’s origin or destination”.

This one made me laugh. Even if the money was all in the highest denominations there are it had to be really heavy.

It couldn't have been actual American dollars. In hundred dollar bills, that would weigh over half a ton. A million bucks in all hundreds weighs around 22 pounds. (Once again, Hollywood lied to us: you can't actually fit a million dollars into one skinny little briefcase, like they showed all the time. It actually looks more like the big bulky box that Darryl Hannah was lugging around in Kill Bill 2.) Massoud had to be carrying it in some other form, foreign currency with unusually high denominations or in bearer bonds or something like that.

 

[Sex Machine Gun]

"Carrying" probably meant it was being carted by a vehicle he was in.

 

[Jingus]

It would have needed to be at least a truck, to carry over a thousand pounds of inanimate cargo. I just wonder what the details were.

Today I had the frustrating experience of arguing with my stepdad about Wikileaks. He basically thinks they're all some kind of frauds and thieves who are trying to blackmail people. Even after listing at least half a dozen examples of them clearly doing good work in exposing pure evil, the man still wouldn't listen to me. This guy's a Democrat, and he's still all "back in WWII, they would have just shot this PFC for treason and that's how we should do it now" and shit.

 

[cobainwasmurdered]

It is treason and he should go to prison for a long time. I don't mind whistle-blowing but when you do something like this you need to be willing to pay the price for your convictions.

 

[Danville_Wrestling]

I guess Woodrow Wilson's idea of open covenants is finally becoming true. Might be time to dust off those Fourteen Points and see what else we need to check off.

 

[Dobbs3K]

I really don't think some of this stuff should be coming out. It could be putting American lives in danger. Most of this information was effectively stolen from the government. Just because it's federal government information doesn't mean someone has the right to publish it.

 

[SpiderPoetV3]

My personal feeling is that "transparency" isn't the same thing as, "access to all information in real time," which seems to be the attitude of some when defending WikiLeaks. In a perfect world, sure, we can all be perfectly open and honest with one another when we cross paths while riding our Unicorns through the Mountains of Perfect Safety...

... but I can get my ass mugged going to the Bi-Lo too late if I'm not careful. My neighborhood isn't safe, let alone the world.

Okay, that's rambly. What I mean is that I'm all for the declassification of wartime material after a certain amount of time. But diplomacy and war require temporary secrecy and a level of autonomy. World ain't perfect. The perfect, real time disclosure of information is not only completely impractical, but also dangerous in certain situations. This stuff has to exist on a continuum, in my mind.

 

[Jingus]

My issue is that I think we do absolutely need whistle-blowers who are willing to take illegal actions in order to expose wrongdoing. Because, quite simply, the people in power often make sure that they are protected by the law. Before all the recent corporate scandals broke, don't you think that all that shit was confidential information protected by nondisclosure agreements? Stuff like the civilian massacres in the Middle East weren't classified because they were some kind of security risk, they were classified because they made the military look bad. Telling the truth about our own fuckups should never ever be defined as somehow giving aid and comfort to the enemy. People in power will inevitably abuse that power, and then move the goalposts so that it's forbidden to question their decisions. That's frankly a form of tyranny, and something that we should never be willing to tolerate.

For all the whining about security risks, I've yet to see a single example of a Wikileak actually causing any measurable harm to our soldiers or any innocent person. The best-informed guy here, Spoon, says that the leaks are basically harmless to grunts like himself. So aside from breaking the law (and we have plenty of stupid laws), what are they actually doing that's wrong? Yes, they haven't vetted some of their documents as well as they maybe should have. That's because the entire Wikileaks staff consists of a grand total of five guys who have to edit and display literally millions of documents. They've asked for help in the past, and not gotten it. Clearly they wish they were doing a cleaner job than they are now, but they simply aren't able to with their current limited resources.

1) Everything exposed is ok because 'everyone else does it!'

2) The leakers & the wikileaks people should be killed anyway

That sort of pattern happens suspiciously often with this sort of thing. The people who get leaked on first say "None of that information is true!", and then turn around and claim "and the Wikileaks guys should be prosecuted for stealing our confidential information". Uh, guys, those statements can't both be true. They're trying to deny the shitty things they've done, while simultaneously punish the people who embarassed them by exposing said shitty things.

Issues like this are where my small streak of anarchism tends to come out. People in high power who abuse said power are the worst people in the world. Period. They cause more harm and suffering than anyone else. Serial killers might grab the news headlines, but guys like the Enron execs ruined far more lives. Or, to put it another way: more Americans have died in the ill-advised invasion of Iraq than were actually killed on 9/11, which was used to justify those actions. It's along similar lines that I'm astounded that more credence is given to the critics of Wikileaks, rather than the apparently true and accurate information they've unveiled about evil conspiracy shit.

 

[vivisectvi]

It is treason and he should go to prison for a long time. I don't mind whistle-blowing but when you do something like this you need to be willing to pay the price for your convictions.

Who exactly is he committing treason against?

 

[909]

The private who turned over the files committed treason. Assange has not.

Wikileaks hasn't exposed any relevant information IMO. In fact it makes the foreign policy of the US not seem crazy. I don't think that's their goal but that's what I get out of it.

 

[vivisectvi]

The private who turned over the files committed treason. Assange has not.

This.

I've seen a lot of people saying Assange is committing treason against the USA.. which is ridiculous since he's not an American. Of note would be the amount of times this has been mentioned on Fox News, big surprise.

 

[cobainwasmurdered]

I was replying to Jingus's post where he says the PFC not Assage thus I meant the PFC not Wikileaks.


Perhaps treason is too harsh a term but he stole secret information from his government and people can't be allowed to just get away with that no matter how justified it seems. This time it was leaked to an organization that at least attempts to edit out information that could directly endanger lives but we can't count on that happening next time.

There has to be a harsh penalty for this no matter how much we sympathize with the PFC's motives.

 

[Danville_Wrestling]

The big damage security wise is that some of our intelligence sources in Afghanistan/Iraq are going to be outed and that's going to put their lives in danger. If people know their identities won't be protected they won't cooperate with us and that's going to hinder our fighting over there to some degree.

This is a diplomatic problem more than anything. Not only will world leaders get ticked because of how Washington felt about them (unless your Silvio Berlusconi who doesn't give a damn), but they might not want to share intelligence or other sensisitive information if they think that it's just going to be leaked. This is a big blow to our efforts and could really leave us in the dark. You can't tell me the Saudis are happy that their pleas for us to attack Iran's nuke facilities are now out in the open.

I think some information, though, has been interesting. The disclosure of this bailout stuff is needed and people have been calling for it for a long time.

 

[cobainwasmurdered]

I'd also bet that the North Koreans will be very upset to have it outted that China is willing to accept re-unification with the South on the South's terms.

 

[Sex Machine Gun]

The people that we really get information from wouldn't be outed by this stuff. I'm talking the informants for SF and whatnot. Those are the contacts that give us genuine operational information and wouldn't be revealed via State department leaks of all things. Again, on a day-to-day battlefield basis none of this is harmful.

I compare the outrage over this stuff to hearing about fucked up shit your parents might have done when you were a kid and weren't any wiser. As an adult you should be able to take the news in stride but the image built in your mind contradicts it to such a degree that the information is repugnant and leads to anger at the messenger.

 

[Danville_Wrestling]

The story that many outlets aren't picking up on is the 'spying' of our diplomats at the UN on Secretary Clinton's orders. I'd argue that all diplomats collect intelligence of some kind, but maybe not to the extent of seeking out credit card numbers and such. Since she's a Clinton this will bounce off, but it's still a noteworthy topic that not many outlets haven't devoted a lot of attention to.

 

[Czech]

"Julian Assange" sounds like the name of the villain from a comic book movie. He sort of looks like one, too.

"All is going as planned."