Pentagon Demands Return of Leaked Afghanistan Documents 523
Multiple news agencies are reporting that the Pentagon has demanded the return of WikiLeaks' collection of secret documents relating to the war in Afghanistan. Defense Department spokesman Geoff Morrell said, "The only acceptable course is for WikiLeaks to take steps immediately to return all versions of all of these documents to the US government and permanently delete them from its website, computers and records." According to the BBC, Morrell also "acknowledged the already-leaked documents' viral spread across the internet made it unlikely they could ever be quashed," but hopes to prevent the dissemination of a further 15,000 documents WikiLeaks is reportedly in the process of redacting. "We're looking to have a conversation about how to get these perilous documents off the website as soon as possible, return them to their rightful owners and expunge them from their records." WikiLeaks, predictably, shows no sign of cooperating.
Pentagon Papers Redux (Score:5, Informative)
before that can happen (Score:3, Informative)
Re:At first I thought Wikileaks was doing good (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, too bad Wikileaks redacts identifying names of at-risk persons before publishing, which invalidates your entire comment.
Re:At first I thought Wikileaks was doing good (Score:3, Informative)
He's a nice guy. Soft spoken, almost shy. Not someone I'd consider a fame whore.
Re:They will make them comply (Score:5, Informative)
Obama is? He took three months to consider his general's report, then gave the man LESS than the MINIMUM number of troops the general asked for-- as if to claim that he somehow knew better.
My point is this: don't pin it on W. All of our leaders are rife with incompetence.
That may as be (I certainly think Clinton would have made a vastly better president than Obama--his inexperience is showing rather painfully in many venues), but that is irrelevant to this wikileaks leak.
All of the documentation covers a time prior to Obama taking office, so the grandparent is correct: this reflects entirely on Dubya and his administration, not Obama, whatever Obama's failings may be.
Re:I see a little problem here (Score:5, Informative)
Obligatory bash.org [bash.org]:
Re:Ha,ha! (Score:4, Informative)
Wikileaks relies on stuff people send them. If you have classified information from the North Korea government/military, I'm sure they'll be happy to post it online.
And they do have some reports about North Korea, including about when WMD were traded between NK and Pakistan [wikileaks.org], but they come from the US, which is where they can get that info.
Re:They will make them comply (Score:5, Informative)
He started a war? Amazing, I didn't know he had his own country.
Re:Something I don't understand (Score:3, Informative)
"New York Times reporters met with White House before publishing WikiLeaks story" ie "administration "praised" New York Times reporters for their handling of leaked Afghan war material"
" They also praised us for the way we handled it, for giving them a chance to discuss it, and for handling the information with care. And for being responsible.”
"but the White House doesn't seem to have told the Times that publishing stories based on these documents would in any real way harm our troops."
Re:They will make them comply (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The return of the documents... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They will make them comply (Score:2, Informative)
I say let's see if they'll use their black ops death ray on Wikileaks, or just shut down the entire Internet for a week to punish Wikileaks. You remember, "If that apple isn't back on my desk by the time I count to ten, the entire class will have to stay after school."
"If those Wikileaks documents aren't back in the Pentagon by the time I count to ten, well, then everybody's going to have to suffer".
That's sort of been the foreign policy of US since the Cold War, right?
Re:They will make them comply (Score:5, Informative)
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone [wikipedia.org], especially the section on Criticism. The CIA funded several groups in Afghanistan against the Soviets, but bin Laden's was no among them; he had his own money (inherited from his father's construction business) and funded his own soldiers. There is no evidence to suggest any CIA money ever went to equipping or training bin Laden or his followers.
And even if there were, it would not make one iota of difference. Choosing the lesser of two evils sometimes means you're left with a really evil choice.
What, the pentagon has lost their copies??? (Score:2, Informative)
What's with this "return the documents" crap? Has the pentagon lost their copies?
Maybe wikileaks should send them an invoice for backup services.
Re:The return of the documents... (Score:3, Informative)
The art of misleading people is really a science (Score:5, Informative)
but honestly, the guy is a fame whore who really doesn't care who dies just as long as he has fame. He wants his time in the sun. Even after seeing other press stories about Taliban acting on namesof informants and such he doesn't really seem to care.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, we’ve got to be careful, Amy. Mullen actually was quite crafty in his words. He said "might already have" blood on my hands. But the media has gone and turned that into a concrete definition. There is, as far as we can tell, no incident of that. So it is a speculative charge. Of course, we are treating any possible revelation of the names of innocents seriously. That is why we held back 15,000 of these documents, to review that.
Now, some names may have crept into others and may be unfortunate, may not be. But you must understand that we contacted the White House about that issue and asked for their assistance in vetting to see whether there would be any exposure of innocents and to identify those names accordingly. Of course, we would never accept any other kind of veto, but in relation to that matter, we requested their assistance via the New York Times, who the four media partners involved—us, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and the Times—agreed would be the conduit to the White House so we wouldn’t step on each other’s toes. Now, the White House issued a flat denial that that had ever happened. And we see, however, that in an interview with CBS News, Eric Schmidt, who was our contact for that, quoted from the email that I had relayed to the White House, and that quote is precisely what I had been saying all along and completely contradicts the White House statement.
Re:They will make them comply (Score:4, Informative)
Re:They will make them comply (Score:5, Informative)
That's hard to deny. Bin Laden's express purpose in attacking the US was to goad the US into a counterattack that would precipitate a holy war. GWB did exactly that. He gave Bin Laden everything he wanted.
Re:They will make them comply (Score:5, Informative)
Of course they did.
Then they became republicans.
Never heard of the "southern strategy"? Or just want to keep quiet about it?
Re:Murder (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They will make them comply (Score:3, Informative)
And now you know the part that the right wing leaves off of their explanation of what's left out of the history books.