WikiLeaks Set To Release Unpublished Iraq War Docs 411
Tootech writes with this snippet from Wired:
"A massive cache of previously unpublished classified US military documents from the Iraq War is being readied for publication by WikiLeaks, a new report has confirmed. The documents constitute the 'biggest leak of military intelligence' that has ever occurred, according to Iain Overton, editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit British organization that is working with WikiLeaks on the documents. The documents are expected to be published in several weeks. Overton, who discussed the project with Newsweek, didn't say how many documents were involved or disclose their origin, but they may be among the leaks that an imprisoned Army intelligence analyst claimed to have sent to WikiLeaks earlier this year."
Re:I like the concept, not the implementation (Score:2, Informative)
motivation (Score:4, Informative)
I feel like the site has developed (and in part always had) a primary purpose of attacking U.S. foreign policy. The site needs to be more than that if it is to be a true data haven. Some have said Cryptome comes closer, I am not well read enough to agree or disagree. The problem of editing is a big one. Failing to edit out the names of informants for instance. The easiest way is to be neutral and edit nothing, allowing the posters to retain responsibility for all that is posted. That would flood the site with false data though, and part of the service wikileaks provides is at least rudimentary verification. If wikileaks wants to be what it claims it set out to be, it needs a larger diversity of leaked content.
Re:Good (Score:1, Informative)
I have every faith that Wikileaks would reveal congressional documents if they had them. At some point they can only reveal the documents that are leaked to them, and at some point those in a position to leak things are going to find the value proposition simply too low. There aren't a lot of disgruntled congressional staffers out there that have enough personal clout with an individual congressperson and are willing to release private and sensitive communications. The Army is far bigger and filled with far more people disillusioned with their current mission.
Re:I like the concept, not the implementation (Score:5, Informative)
How much time will we have before groups start to release faked documents to it in an attempt to discredit their rivals?
To measure that interval, your clock would have to run backwards.
Fake, but Accurate [wikipedia.org]
do you live in a hole? citation is easy. (Score:5, Informative)
read some Glenn Greenwald. Yes, the same Greenwald that excoriated Bush. It's called consistency in pursuit of your beliefs.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2009/10/06/obama [salon.com]
But perhaps you missed the recent decision and its history.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/09/08/obama/index.html [salon.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/opinion/09thurs2.html?_r=1&hp [nytimes.com]
for those who say it wasn't Obama, it was his Justice department, for which he appointed Holder, "champion of civil rights"... except when it matters.
Re:Kinda makes you wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe you should be more concerned about how the US.mil takes care of it's own informants and translators?
http://www.vetvoice.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2636 [vetvoice.com]
Also, try getting the US.mil to take any sort of responsibility for things like no-bid contracts, friendly fire, civilian deaths or even it's own injured vets...
Easier to close your eyes and blame WikiLeaks I guess.
Re:Shatters Confidence of Control (Score:2, Informative)
and here's one for his persecution of whistleblowers:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/05/25/whistleblowers [salon.com]
Re:what about the dude in prison? (Score:3, Informative)
Maximum sentence under the UCMJ for the charges he's facing is 52 years. It's possible that some will be dropped, or he won't be found guilty on some - or all - charges, and receive less.
He's awaiting an Article 32 hearing right now - similar to a Grand Jury, in which the determination is made whether or not enough evidence is available to proceed with a court martial. Charges could be changed, or dropped as a result of that, as well.
My expectation based on what I've heard of the case so far is that there will be a court martial, and that he'll get a pretty stiff sentence as a result - maybe less than 52 years, though, since that would require evidence that he's guilty on all charges.
Horse puckey (Score:4, Informative)
I'm too lazy to entirely rewrite what I wrote last time someone made this assertion:
1) The Taliban are using missiles we gave them back in the 80s to try and shoot our copters down (officially denied until the leak)
2) Many accounts given by the military to the press were wrong and underreported how many civilians died, according to the original reports
3) It exposed the "killing squads" -- also known as Task Force 373 -- recently in the news for mutilating Afghan bodies and keeping their body parts as trophies
4) It exposed the fact that many of the military operations are now classified and under the direct control of the CIA
5) It documents the rise of Taliban military capability, directly contradicting public statements made by the US military
I'll leave my snarky commentary on the press and you, the credulous American public, intact:
But you guys wrap all that up with "No Big Deal," and feed it to all the media outlets who depend on you for access to government officials? Fucking. Brilliant. They don't even have to pretend to have reported on those things before. They just say, basically, the emperor has clothes, and then Joe Sixpack nods his little beer storage unit up and down and switches back to WWE. I know, and now they're all uppity about this Australian guy possibly getting innocent people killed when we're laying civs out left and right - with secret police and secret budgets! God bless the US of Amnesia.
Re:I like the concept, not the implementation (Score:5, Informative)
Improve accountability? No, all this will do is force the decision-making process further away from the prying eyes of public scrutiny.
How I wish you were wrong - but this weeks major, (incredible, unbelievable, and under-reported) news [salon.com] proves you very very right....
Re:do you live in a hole? citation is easy. (Score:2, Informative)
the eff thinks otherwise.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/jewel-v-nsa-roundup-media-obamas-position [eff.org]
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/04/06/obama/index.html [salon.com]
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/04/expert_consensus_obama_aping_bush_on_state_secrets.php?ref=fp1 [talkingpointsmemo.com]
tpm says it's the same, but there are new claims made by the Obama DoJ which Bush never had the audacity (pun intended) to make. to me, that's enough to make Obama worse in an objective sense. but moreover, he's subjectively worse in that he's poisonous and harmful because he both says the right thing (excessive secrecy is bad) while simultaneously cementing the bipartisan consensus and legitimizing Bush's radical and harmful policies. This is simply a grievous blow to the rule of law in America.
Re:I like the concept, not the implementation (Score:0, Informative)
Hi, I'm a terrorist cell leader with an internet connection! First day on the job, too! /really/ a terrorist, quite the contrary)
(disclaimer: I'm not
Things I learned from the Collateral Murder video alone:
-Apaches will circular orbit a point of interest while deciding what to do
-Their engagement angle will probably be about 15 degrees
-They will confirm with their TOC before receiving firing clearance
-They will not fire on me if I appear to be crawling to cover in an injured state
-They *will* fire on me if I am being medevac'ed by someone
-Their gun cameras are thermal/IR, and they can't see through walls/ceilings
-They will observe until they can positive-ID what they think is an attempt to fire a weapon
-They will fire on a group even if some are unarmed
-Ground troops must confirm kills and photograph the strike site after action
Knowing this, I think I'll go get Ahmed and the other 3 new guys to go set up a mortar site in the village square. After a few shots they'll either get hit by counter-battery or get caught by a few gunships. From their altitude and angle in the video I know the approximate radius that they previously orbited, so I think I'll set up a heavy machine-gun position and shoulder-SAM launch site below it so that I can have a higher chance of getting a successful 6 o'clock engagement with my SAM, or zone of fire engagement with my machine gun nest! Then me and Habeeb will double back after we take out the first 1 or 2 gunships and engage the ground force that responds to the initial incident site. If anything goes south I'll just pretend to be wounded until I can crawl somewhere and wait for the helos to go off-station. Then I'll just put on another outfit and stash my AK in the neighborhood somewhere and walk out right under their noses. I can just trace a wall when I hear him fly the right direction since I know his observation angle will probably be similar and my position will be obscured.
Guess what? I know you feel cool knowing super-secret classified, and you think we just stamp 'SECRET' on anything to cover our asses in the press. But there's 2 guys in a gunship, up to 12 in a blackhawk, 5 in a humvee, and all of them just got taken out so you could watch a video of journalists getting killed because their friends had AK's and they didn't report their position to the press desk (yes, there is one and no, they didn't). The truth is, the analysts who make these calls to classify things have been looking at shitty, grainy images of TLIBs (tiny little iraqi bastards) for anywhere from 2-10 years, so have most gunners. And fun fact: we don't give a shit what the press thinks, or what you think. We have been schooled for 12 months to recognize tonal pattern, shadow, radar parallax, angular distortion, and other shit that you've never heard of. Wikileaks thinks they are knowledgeable enough to determine what is of harmful intelligence value, but in reality they have absolutely no clue how much damage a piece of intelligence will do, and how much it has done already.
But hey, makes for great bleeding-heart diatribes on the internet. Bad guys watch this shit. They watch this shit and they use it, and I have literally watched people die because of information they gleaned on our tactics, techniques, and procedures. /stupid/.
Anyone willing to blow themselves up for an invisible deity obviously isn't smart, but they aren't
Re:I like the concept, not the implementation (Score:4, Informative)
Improve accountability? No, all this will do is force the decision-making process further away from the prying eyes of public scrutiny.
How I wish you were wrong - but this weeks major, (incredible, unbelievable, and under-reported) news [salon.com] proves you very very right....
Apparently it's now legal for the government to kidnap and torture anyone and there's nothing the courts can do about it if the government calls "state secret". Horrible. Just... horrible.
Re:I like the concept, not the implementation (Score:4, Informative)
From the "Most Read Countries" category:
Pages in category "Iraq" - 1,746 total
Pages in category "United Kingdom" - 384 total
Pages in category "Afghanistan" - 382 total
Pages in category "Germany" - 278 total
Pages in category "China" - 215 total
Pages in category "Canada" - 159 total
Pages in category "Australia" - 134 total
Pages in category "France" - 128 total
Pages in category "India" - 120 total
Pages in category "Poland" - 83 total
Pages in category "Sweden" - 73 total
Pages in category "Denmark" - 70 total
Pages in category "Russia" - 57 total
Pages in category "Israel" - 49 total
Pages in category "Thailand" - 42 total
Pages in category "Greece" - 38 total
Pages in category "Iran" - 11 total
Pages in category "Italy" - 3 total
Pages in category "United States" - 9,719 total
Note that there is a great deal of overlap here. For example, a majority of articles in category "Iraq" are also (for obvious reasons) in the category "United States."
But you really think that even ignoring the huge overlap, the US's shenanigans outweigh all those other countries combined by a factor of nearly 2.5? Clearly I'm the one turning a blind eye to the rest of the world, right?
Or maybe the US is just really bad at keeping things secret. I guess that's also possible...
And none of that addresses the fact that he admits to editing documents and videos for impact. It's basically impossible to do that without introducing some sort of bias.
=Smidge=
Re:Non-sequitur (Score:4, Informative)
I think the idea is this:
Since politicians reward their favored special interests by means of exemptions to the income tax, if you change to a consumption tax you have removed a potent source of political favors. If the tax were fixed at a flat rate, then you wouldn't have a place to insert special tax favors. Even if they started putting in favors, they would have to be in the form of exemptions for certain types of consumption. It's harder and more politically dangerous to insert, say, a consumption tax break for buyers of multi-million-dollar yachts than it is to give that same demographic an income tax break. And folks only buy so many yachts, so you'd need a larger number of favors to get the same dollar value of special-interest goodies. Hence the politicians are more limited in their power to favor certain groups.
It doesn't completely eliminate such favors, but it might prune it back a little bit.
Re:Non-sequitur (Score:3, Informative)
"... how does implementing [a flat tax or consumption tax] take power away from politicians?"
It wouldn't really take away their delegated powers, but it might curb their exercise of those powers. If every single voter had to share some of the pain when government raised taxes, elected officials might just think twice about establishing big new entitlement programs or embarking on foreign military crusades. I'm sure that many voters would still be too myopic to realize that runaway deficit spending is going to bite them in the arse down the road, but with this sort of tax system, any new government spending plans would certainly be met with increased resistance.
Re:Non-sequitur (Score:3, Informative)
Forgetting the fact that a flat tax and/or a consumption tax system is a stupid idea, how does implementing that take power away from politicians?
Initially, that was sort of built into the Constitution, but quickly ignored. I'm also not going to get into a discussion regarding the benefits/drawbacks of a flat tax system outside of your question.
Right now politicians have a HUGE amount of power that they are not authorized to have (by the Constitution). They are able to do things which they are not normally allowed to do by not directly implementing such laws, but by using taxation (or tax breaks) as incentives to encourage the actions they cannot legislate.
As an introduction, Congress really has no authority to set a drinking age. That IS left up to the states. However, by using funding, they can threaten to withold funding from the States unless certain conditions are met. Even though if they tried to set a 21 year old drinking age directly, it would be found unconstitutional, this method has been determined by the Supreme Court to be constitutional because the states can always opt out of receiving the funds, and thus are not actually bound by law. That sets the premise for how you can get around the constitution and perform actions which you normally are prohibited from doing.
So you have taxes, and you can't tell people that they must do this, or they can't do that, or even if you could, it wouldn't have the votes to actually pass an all out ban. So you create a tax break for behavior that you want people to do, and a tax for behavior you don't want people to do. If you take away the power of politicians to put all these little tweaks into the tax code and only modify it on very general terms with a lot of public scrutiny, you VASTLY limit their power.
You don't need a flat tax to do so, but you would remove a great deal of power from them if you limited the ways in which they can manipulate the tax code for political gain.
That just addresses the 'power' aspect of it. I also object to it because it can be a very unjust tool. Since it is circumventing the constitution, it essentially allows almost anything to be done. If you were to sufficiently raise taxes to the point where living without certain tax breaks is a sufficient burden, you have the ability to pass 'laws' which don't have the same oversight yet essentially penalize people for behaving in legal, but not approved ways.
People think it sounds good now when it's just applied to 'Nasty, things people should know better, sins' (Smoking, Drinking, etc) but it slowly gets applied to lifestyles (Eating, exercise, Cars, homes) and eventually will become the 'official government way of life' and we won't have enough disposable income after taxes to do otherwise.