Here.
Hooray! Viva la whistleblowers. If they didn’t have to fear losing their careers or even their lives, we could have their testimony from the human side, also.
Hmmm…this seems to have garnered less attention than it deserves!?
I’m continually stunned these days by how little the American public seems to care about our foreign wars.
Well, we all support the troops, as long as we don’t have to think about them.
It might get some more attention in Great Debates, so I’ve moved it there. I also corrected the number in the thread title - WikiLeaks published around 92,000 reports, not 19,000. And it was really them alone - they shared the documents ahead of time with the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel. Each of the papers published some of the material and used it in articles.
And the prime movers behind the whole clusterfuck are moaning about Wikileaks releasing this info, as it could endanger US and coalition troops. No, sending your men and women thousands of miles to fight a war they cannot win, is what is endangering them. And besides, that is what they joined up to do; nobody forces these people into their uniforms.
Being cynical, I think this is one of Obama’s tactics to justify withdrawing from Afghanistan.
the leaked documents are devastating-they refute all of the propaganda being produced to justify this disaster. McCrystal’s exit is also suspicious-I think we will see some image-enhancement of the Taliban, which will lead to “peace talks”, and a face-saving exit.
I’m all for this, the longer the war goes on, the worse it will get.
Cynical? How about wrong. He made a point of saying the Afghan war is a good war and escalated it. He added 40 ,000 troops and funding. Doing that would not suggest he is trying to get out.
As far as the leaks are concerned . I am for them. The American people are supposed to vote for leaders. How do we make an intelligent decision based on administration propaganda? When the truth comes out, we are all better off.
What’s the debate? Though, I suppose this blows out of the water the truther (and other CT nutters) case about how good the US is at keeping secrets…
(If the debate is ‘How do you feel about a site like WikiLeaks encouraging the disclosure of sensitive US military documents?’, then I suppose I have mixed feeling about it, though they tend to be negative over all. I don’t really see the need for sensitive information to be publicly available…after all, that’s what our elected officials are for. Now, if it can be demonstrated that the folks in Congress or the President weren’t aware of the gist of what was in these 90k documents, then that’s a problem)
-XT
Neat! Our generation’s very own Pentagon Papers scandal - complete, I’m sure, with soon-to-come criminal charges and litigation. 
More seriously - I’m usually in favor of whistle-blowing, and it does seem that there was a lot of information in this data-dump that the public should know about. However, I do have some misgivings. As NPR’s coverage pointed out this morning, much of this stuff is fairly low-level and unverified intelligence reports. In other words, while a lot of this information is going to be both important and accurate, a lot of it is going to be flat-out wrong - and most of the individuals and groups pouring through it won’t have many good ways of sorting the wheat from the chaff.
The result may be that, instead of getting a better-informed American domestic political discourse on the Afghanistan war, we’ll get a mess - in tens of thousands of pages, there are bound to be fragmentary or uncorroborated reports to support any number of bizarre theories or ideologies, on any end of the political spectrum. Raw intelligence is sort of like raw eggs - it can be used for interesting and tasty things, but it can also give you a nasty case of the (metaphorical) runs.
Or, I could be way off here - the Wikileaks dump may be all to the good. People are often fairly smart, and plenty of them still get their news from newspapers that do have the wit and resources to figure out which bits of information are probably worth reporting on, and which are the equivalent of “Pfc. Smith was approached by an anonymous informant who claimed that the Taliban would attack Kandahar with UFOs.”
It’ll be interesting to see what the Administration does with/to Wikileaks. I’m certain there are a number of DOJ attorneys drafting memos on possible criminal charges as we speak - must be fascinating stuff. (Note that I’m not saying the Administration will bring charges - just that the AG would be daft not to have someone laying the research groundwork in case that’s how they choose to go.)
“Devastating?” I haven’t reviewed the leaked articles, but nothing I have seen so far really changes anything. As the New York Times wrote, “Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war. But in some cases the documents show that the American military made misleading public statements — attributing the downing of a helicopter to conventional weapons instead of heat-seeking missiles or giving Afghans credit for missions carried out by Special Operations commandos.”
We know that Afghan civilians are killed in this war. We know when we lose a helicopter. We know that Special Operations commandos are sneaky people. We know the Taliban has been gaining strength. Call me jaded, but I haven’t read anything in the press about these leaks that have shocked or surprised me.
Honestly, ralph, I think you’d be inclined to call any news coming out of Afghanistan a devastating rebuke to the war which you oppose.
It shows that it is damn near impossible to keep a secret that involves the deaths of thousands, doesn’t it?
More like the Democrats he opposes.
Damn near impossible doesn’t quite cut it. When you get to “absolutely impossible”, give us a shout.
Deleted post-wrong thread.
What groundbreaking news are being unearthed? It seems to me the most important point being “revealed” in the documents, is Pakistan’s close involvement with the Taliban. That Pakistan has financed, armed, trained and shared intelligence with the Taliban – all the while receiving billions of US dollars in aid is however not really news. It only strengthen my belief that the West should cut all attempts to form any kind of meaningful cooperation with Pakistan and cut all aid to Pakistan and instead try to involve India in stabilising Afghanistan.
Maybe you are right.
Is it absolutely impossible that all those leaked documents were fakes designed by the Illuminati to discredit our government? Can you prove that it didn’t happen?
I’m just asking questions.
I was assuming there would either be a debate about the war, or a debate about the ethics or merits of leaking documents the government wants to keep secret for national security reasons. We’ll see how it goes. As far as the leaks go, I’m always glad when this kind of stuff becomes public.
And let’s keep the conspiracy theory arguments (at least as they pertain to September 11th) out of this thread and in the other one.
So far there doesn’t seem to be any major “WTF?!” revalations… just a confirmation that things are going pretty badly and that we’ve not quite had the whole story given to us by the military.
The fact there are e.g. covert teams trying to take out top Taliban commanders isn’t exactly earth-shaking, nor is the fact that official reports don’t mention them explicity.
One of The Guardian’s splashes is a list of all the IEDs between 2004-2009, with a nice little graphic to show you them all. Apart from going “wow, what a lot of IEDs” that doesn’t actually tell us much about the war as a whole.