My HUGE problem with Wikileaks

[JihadJane]

I'm not sure I wouldn't push him myself.

Wouldn't that be murder?

 

[Manopolus]

It provides solid, undeniable documentation and reveals things that have not appeared in the press.



Do you genuinely think that that is the only thing worth commenting on in the documents or are you just aping the latest, politically correct spin?

Well, I'll have to admit that I haven't examined 90,000 documents personally, nor am I part of a team attempting to do so. However, nothing I have heard through multiple media sources since the documents were released has told me anything I didn't already know before they were released.

President Bush, of all people even commented on the situation concerning Pakistan aiding the Taliban, and spoke of their attempts to end that relationship. That was certainly nothing new... and is the most commented upon "revelation" pertaining to these documents. Whatever other general trends may have been revealed could hardly be earthshattering, considering I haven't heard of any... I tend to keep fairly well informed.

 

[Cain]

What I thought was originally a funny joke has been raped so hard the room stinks. This guy says that if the government murders him, he's just going to release more documents. Then I called this blackmail. So... he's blackmailing the government for the right to live. That's what lawyers do to the MOB in John Grisham novels.

 

[rwguinn]

What I thought was originally a funny joke has been raped so hard the room stinks. This guy says that if the government murders him, he's just going to release more documents. Then I called this blackmail. So... he's blackmailing the government for the right to live. That's what lawyers do to the MOB in John Grisham novels.

"Don't laugh at me, You're next!" really old, bad, cheating joke...

 

[JihadJane]

What I thought was originally a funny joke has been raped so hard the room stinks. This guy says that if the government murders him, he's just going to release more documents. Then I called this blackmail. So... he's blackmailing the government for the right to live. That's what lawyers do to the MOB in John Grisham novels.

Good jokes often make the room stink!

 

[geni]

What I thought was originally a funny joke has been raped so hard the room stinks. This guy says that if the government murders him, he's just going to release more documents. Then I called this blackmail. So... he's blackmailing the government for the right to live. That's what lawyers do to the MOB in John Grisham novels.

The alturnative reading is that he is bribing the taliban to kill him.

 

[BenBurch]

The alturnative reading is that he is bribing the taliban to kill him.

Point. Not a very smart guy.

 

[MikeMangum]

No they got leaked. There was an investigation but no charges, and likely there never would be like all the other torture that will never be prosecuted.

The charges only came out after someone leaked the photos to the press, this caused an up roar and they knew they had to put someone in prison for it.

Newp. As RubberChicken pointed out, the charges were filed before the pictures were leaked. They were actually leaked by the father of the one of the men being charged. He leaked them to 60 Minutes, claiming that his son was being railroaded, thinking that the photos supported his son's innocence.

The NY Times

CUMBERLAND, Md., May 7 — Ivan Frederick was distraught. His son, an Army reservist turned prison guard in Iraq, was under investigation earlier this year for mistreating prisoners, and photographs of the abuse were beginning to circulate among soldiers and military investigators.

So the father went to his brother-in-law, William Lawson, who was afraid that reservists like his nephew would end up taking the fall for what he considered command lapses, Mr. Lawson recounted in an interview on Friday. He knew whom to turn to: David Hackworth, a retired colonel and a muckraker who was always willing to take on the military establishment. Mr. Lawson sent an e-mail message in March to Mr. Hackworth's Web site and got a call back from an associate there in minutes, he said.

That e-mail message would put Mr. Lawson in touch with the CBS News program "60 Minutes II" and help set in motion events that led to the public disclosure of the graphic photographs and an international crisis for the Bush administration.

...

The irony, Mr. Lawson said, is that the public spectacle might have been avoided if the military and the federal government had been responsive to his claims that his nephew was simply following orders. Mr. Lawson said he sent letters to 17 members of Congress about the case earlier this year, with virtually no response, and that he ultimately contacted Mr. Hackworth's Web site out of frustration, leading him to cooperate with a consultant for "60 Minutes II."

"The Army had the opportunity for this not to come out, not to be on 60 Minutes," he said. "But the Army decided to prosecute those six G.I.'s because they thought me and my family were a bunch of poor, dirt people who could not do anything about it. But unfortunately, that was not the case."

Yes, there was already a prosecution underway, and there had been a fairly long investigation beforehand as well. The release of the photos did not prompt any new prosecutions, although it did end up ruining the careers of some higher ranking officers who weren't directly involved except for being in the chain of command.

 

[Darth Rotor]

So how does this compare to leaking the abu graib pictures become public and forcing the military to actually look like it cares about what happened?

That wasn't wiki leaks, eh? That was a leak by a defendant in the case in question. You do understand that, right? The people already charged with the wrongdoing (well, a few of the ones at low ranks) were who leaked that story.

And imagine how much more respect that the army would get if they had managed to keep the truth about Pat Tillmans death secret.

No, that would not have earned the army any respect. You might be surprised to learn how many of us in uniform were really pissed off at how that case was handled.

They would have a great hero instead of a very public marker of their failures.

He is still a hero to me, though his death by friendly fire was tragic. What the institution did to his family with that absurd attempt to prioritize some PR game over the simple sad case of blue on blue was just plain wrong.

There certainly are things that need to be kept secret, but it is also used to keep the public in the dark and control public opinion.

It's a difficult balancing act, I can assure you, handling operational security and classified info. One of the weirdest things I learned a long time ago is that a lot of things end up classified that don't need to be. This is due in part to the time it takes to go back and declassify the bits that don't matter.

Damned annoying.

The outrage over wikileaks "revelations" will fade.

The public has a remarkably short memory. Short attention span is an endemic feature of the information age.

 

[Donal]

Can you dig up an example document where they didn't black out names and put Afghani citizens at risk?

The London Times apparently can

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Logs#Informants_named

a 2008 report that includes a detailed interview with a Taliban fighter considering defection and ends with "[t]he meeting ended with [named person] agreeing to meet intel personnel." Both his father's name and village are also included in the report;

And the attitude of Assange is infuriating.

Julian Assange responded to the criticism by insisting that any risk to informants’ lives was outweighed by the overall importance of publishing the information.

Oh, ya, that's top notch journalism right there.

He also asserted that many informers in Afghanistan had "acted in a criminal way" by sharing false information with NATO authorities

So that gives you the right to get them and a bunch of innocent people killed?

and that the White House did nothing to help WikiLeaks vet the data.

and who the hell are you to command an audience in the White House?

Assange also felt that the U.S. should have had tighter controls over sensitive information, saying "[t]he United States appears to have given every UN soldier and contractor access to the names of many of its confidential sources without proper protection

So, it's the government's fault you leaked the info?

This is why I hate the "Hacker Community". I got into it in high school but fortunately saw through their BS quickly enough. All the hypocrisy, cowardice, lies, and unjustified self satisfaction just made me want to beat the hell out of each one I talked to.

 

[Puppycow]

Pentagon spokesman says that nothing they've seen in the leaks compromises intelligence sources.

That was on July 26th, a more recent article says:

The disclosure of thousands of documents by WikiLeaks about the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan set off a storm of controversy. U.S. officials decried the leak for exposing their sources of information. But there is some question about why sources' real identities were in the documents, which appear to have been widely distributed on a classified Pentagon computer network.

Some of the 90,000 classified documents published by WikiLeaks contain the names of Afghans who have provided information to U.S. forces in one form or another.

Speaking on ABC's This Week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the leak put those Afghans in danger, as well as the soldiers they have helped.

"I believe that this information puts those in Afghanistan who have helped us at risk," Gates said. "It puts our soldiers at risk because they [the Taliban] can learn a lot, our adversaries can learn a lot about our techniques, tactics and procedures from the body of these leaked documents. And so I think that is what puts our soldiers at risk, and then, as I say, our sources. And, you know, growing up in the intelligence business, protecting your sources is sacrosanct."

 

[JihadJane]

Yes, there was already a prosecution underway, and there had been a fairly long investigation beforehand as well. The release of the photos did not prompt any new prosecutions, although it did end up ruining the careers of some higher ranking officers who weren't directly involved except for being in the chain of command.

 

[Donal]

Ya, its not like a person's career is a big deal or anything.

 

[dudalb]

Julian Assange responded to the criticism by insisting that any risk to informants’ lives was outweighed by the overall importance of publishing the information.


Oh, ya, that's top notch journalism right there.

One of the things that annoys me about a lot of Journalists is their incredible arrogance.
And if anybody calls them on it they scream "You Are Attacking Freedom of Speech".

 

[Sam.I.Am]

I’m sure the Taliban think tank and research analysts who work there are pouring thru those documents as we speak.

Let me guess. You're one of those people who think that the all of the 9/11 hijackers lived in caves, right? The facts are that there are some very intelligent and western university educated members of the Taliban who are quite capable of sifting through and analyzing the documents for the names and locations of informants and their families. Probably even better than our own people seeing as they would have a much more detailed knowledge of their own inner workings and who knew what and when they knew it.

One of the reasons that seemingly mundane information is routinely classified is because you can't know what someone else that is looking from the outside in might glean from seemingly disjointed reports that were generated generated months, or even years, earlier. Even the most seemingly innocent information has the potential of being used against you even though you don't yet know what an enemy might make out from it on a later date.

I've mentioned this story before but I think that it bears repeating here:

Back during the cold war the Soviets got what amounted to a grocery bill for a special projects boat soon after it left port to go do whatever it was that they were tasked with. The mission itself isn't important to this story other than to say that they might at some point be close enough to Soviet naval forces or shore facilities to observe whatever it was that they were doing.

Now then, you wouldn't think that classifying the fact that people need to eat food would even cross the minds of anyone who was sane right? Wrong. The "Grocery Bill" in question showed a much larger food loadout than normal indicating that one of two things were planned. Either they intended upon a submerged circumnavigation of the earth or they planned on hanging out somewhere for an extended period of time. Based upon that information the Soviets stepped up patrols around sensitive areas, gave their missile boats a constant shadow to look for someone trailing them, canceled long planned war games at sea and generally nullified the boats mission while at the same time placing the lives of the crew at an even greater risk than the planned mission might have created because they didn't know what the Soviets knew. Namely that their boat was probably in the area and that they were actively looking for them.

My point is that you can never know what someone will do with even the most seemingly innocent information. The best defense against that happening is to deny everything to them so that they don't have the chance to analyze squat.

These leaks are specific enough to present a very real threat to some of our friends and their families and will most likely have the effect of keeping someone else from helping us in the future because we can't seem to keep their secrets a secret. Their probative value for us as civilians is essentially useless, as anyone paying attention here already knew the war over there was messy and that the Pakis were already in bed with the Taliban in many ways and that getting them to sever those ties was proving difficult. The leaks will do nothing to change that situation and might even make it harder to do so.

 

[JihadJane]

Ya, its not like a person's career is a big deal or anything.

Ya, it's not like the chain of command is there for a reason.

These leaks are specific enough to present a very real threat to some of our friends and their families and will most likely have the effect of keeping someone else from helping us in the future because we can't seem to keep their secrets a secret.

Let's hope no-one helps the US launch and prosecute any more bloody wars of aggression.

 

[BenBurch]

... The facts are that there are some very intelligent and western university educated members of the Taliban ...

OBL has a civil engineering degree, IIRC.

 

[Darth Rotor]

OBL has a civil engineering degree, IIRC.

Well, his family was in the cement and construction business, sort of follows, eh?

I guess one of his relatives was a proctologist, which explains Osama bin Laden getting his Masters degree in assholiness.

 

[Darth Rotor]

Let's hope no-one helps the US launch and prosecute any more bloody wars of aggression.

NVM

 

[theprestige]

I suppose a body count could be seen as a negative, but what about the revelation that the Paks are aiding the Taliban? Seems to me that a bit of whacking of each other in that scenario might be to our advantage.

Sounds good to me. Why don't you email Assange and let him know that you're qualified to make strategic decisions on behalf of the U.S. and its allies. Better yet, why don't you tell him that you're authorized to make such decisions. I'm sure he'd be very grateful to add such rare and vital competencies to his repertoire.