Wikileaks to release secret Iraqi war docs

Great Debates
1

According to this CNN article, Wikileaks will be releasing 400k+ secret documents related to the war in Iraq. Leaving aside whether this is something that should or shouldn’t happen (that’s already been debated to death when they released the Afghanistan documents, IMHO), what I’d like are 'doper thoughts on what might be in this lot? What do you think might be in there? What do you hope is in there? What do you fear is in there? Do you think that it will have any impact on your stance concerning Iraq and the Iraqi war? What political impact do you think this will have? Do you think that something substantial might come out of this release (‘substantial’ defined as possible legal actions of some sort, or political fallout that hurts or helps in a large way one or the other political parties in the US, or in other countries that participated in the war)?

-XT

2

Judging by the significance of the leaks relating to Afghanistan, there will be nothing of strategic significance.

There will probably be loads of details which have an impact on the security of the 50,000 troops we still have there, but will contain no useful information to the average American.

Hopefully this time, Wikileaks will take some steps not to release the names of Iraqis who could be targeted for informing on violent extremists.

3

I thought you just said nothing of strategic significance?

You imply that they didn’t take such steps before. They contacted the Pentagon to try to discuss the best way to deal with it, and were ignored.

4

Any political fallout for the midterm elections will be marginal. Everybody’s focused on the jobless rate.

5

Yes. Nothing of strategic significance. No smoking gun that Bush lied about WMD. No secret plans to control Iraq’s oil. No plot to have US troops in Iraq for a hundred years.

I have little doubt that there will be new information such as, “US vehicles are vulnerable to attack when the enemy does (blank).” This information has no use to the general public, but revealing it does harm to the safety of the troops who remain there.

No, they didn’t try to contact the Pentagon. Wikileaks asked a reporter to forward an email to the White House. The reporter forwarded the email and commented that he did not believe that Wikileak’s offer to redact sensitive information was made in good faith.

6

Can you point to any information in the Afghanistan leaks that demonstrably put anybody in harm’s way? Because the SecDef can’t, despite all of the unsubstantiated accusations against and outright harassment of the WL folks.

7

I don’t think that there’s going to be a lot of stuff that really causes a sensation. Like last time the story will be all about Wikileaks and what a terrible/dangerous/irresponsible thing they’ve done by giving us some facts to go with the endless propaganda we get from our governments.

As far as the Afghanistan stuff goes :
CNN, July 29, 2010:

        **Top military official: WikiLeaks founder may have 'blood' on his hands**     
 The top U.S. military officer said Thursday that Julian Assange,  founder of WikiLeaks, was risking lives to make a political point by  publishing thousands of military reports from Afghanistan.
 "Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is **they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family**," Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference at the Pentagon. . . .
 In equally stern comments and at the same session, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said the massive leak **will have significant impact on troops and allies, giving away techniques and procedures.**
 "The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents  are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and  Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships and reputation in  that key part of the world," Gates said. **"Intelligence sources and methods, as well as military tactics, techniques and procedures will become known to our adversaries."**
             [*The Guardian*, July 26, 2010](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/26/wikileaks-condemned-by-white-house):
          
 The White House today condemned whistleblower WikiLeaks, **accusing the website of putting the lives of US, UK and coalition troops in danger and threatening America's national security** of the US after it posted more than 90,000 leaked US military documents about the war in Afghanistan.
             [Sen. Carl Levin, CNN, August 1, 2010](http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1008/01/sotu.01.html):
          
 **CANDY CROWLEY**: I want to turn you to WikiLeaks,  which also comes under your bailiwick to a certain extent. Some 90,000  documents with secret information or top secret information. Can you  quantify the damage?
 **LEVIN**: Not yet. I think that's being assessed  right now as to how many sources of information that gave us information  that was useful to us are now in jeopardy. That -- that determination  and damage assessment is being made right now by the Pentagon.**But there quite clearly was damage**.
             [DoD Spokesman Geoff Morrell, August 5, 2010](http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=53001):
          
 WikiLeaks's public disclosure last week of a large number of our documents has **already threatened the safety of our troops**, our allies and Afghan citizens who are working with us to help bring about peace and stability in that part of the world.
             [The Heritage Foundation's Conn Carroll, August 24, 2010](http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/24/wikileaks):
          
 Julian Assanage -- you know, molesting charges aside -- is a criminal. He broke the law.**He is, you know, a murderer of American and Afghani people. His carelessness has killed people.**
             [Steven Aftergood, self-proclaimed transparency advocate and leading WikiLeaks critic, August 16, 2010](http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2010/08/a_bad_name.html):
          
 Wikileaks has failed to demonstrate similar discernment in handling classified records, and it will be up to others **to try to repair the damage it has caused**.
             [Liz Cheney, August 2, 2010](http://www.icenews.is/index.php/2010/08/02/president-obama-should-take-wikileaks-on-directly-with-or-without-the-help-of-the-icelandic-government/):
          
 Dick Cheney's daughter, Liz Cheney wants the government of  Iceland to stop its Wikileaks support. . . . "Our Government should make  sure that Mr. Assange, Wikileaks founder and spokesman, never gets a  U.S. Visa -- **He has blood on his hands,**" Liz Cheney said.
 She didn't stop there. She went on to say: "What he's done is very clearly aiding and abetting al Qaeda. And as I said, **he may very well be responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Afghanistan**," she concluded.
             [Newt Gingrich, Newsmax interview, July 31, 2010](http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/wikileaks-newt-gingrich-treason/2010/07/31/id/366209):
          
 **Q:** What does that do the Afghanistan war effort, and **how does that put our men and women at risk?**
 **GINGRICH:** The release of these documents should be regarded as an act of treason. When you release 70 or 80,000 documents, **you don't know how many people you're going to kill**  . . . . Frankly, I think we should be very aggressive about the website  that was set up, WikiLeaks, and I think we should be very, very strong  on the condemnation of the newspapers that published them.
             [Paul Rieckhoff, August 2, 2010](http://bigthink.com/ideas/22861):
          
 At the end of the day I think Admiral Mullen is right. I think **Julian Assange and WikiLeaks already probably have blood on their hands.**
             [](http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/10/16/wikileaks.assessment/index.html?hpt=T2)








CNN, today:

 The online leak of thousands of secret military documents from the war in Afghanistan by the website WikiLeaks **did not disclose any sensitive intelligence sources or methods, the Department of Defense concluded. . . .**
 The assessment, revealed in a letter from Secretary of Defense  Robert Gates to the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee,  Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan), comes after a thorough Pentagon review of  the more than 70,000 documents posted to the controversial  whistle-blower site in July. . . .
 The defense secretary said that the published documents do  contain names of some cooperating Afghans, who could face reprisal by  Taliban.
 But a senior NATO official in Kabul told CNN that **there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak**.
8

They gave the names of informants and information sources in Afghanistan. If this doesn’t constitute putting people in harms way then I’m unsure what that term even means. They also gave tactical information about what was hurting us, and operational information about battles and troop movements…again, all of this has the potential to hurt us, our operations, and puts our own troops at a non-zero risk of additional ‘harm’s way’ type stuff.

And, frankly, the information given wasn’t worth risking even one informant, or even putting one troop at an additional risk of .0000000000001%.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a security specialist to realize that keeping real peoples names in the documents for folks giving us intel information in Afghanistan is a Bad Idea™…at a minimum, if they REALLY wanted be conscientious, they would have redacted the names of everyone in the documents. They didn’t need to go to all the trouble of asking a reporter to ask if they could maybe contact the government to possibly discuss redacting some of the info in order to come to this conclusion, so I’m guessing that it wasn’t a good faith effort on their parts. Or they (at WL) are complete idiots.

-XT

9

I said over the summer that I felt they were endangering Afghan informants by putting those names out there even though I supported the leak by and large. On the other hand if the Defense Department concluded that nobody was harmed or endangered then that shoots down that argument pretty thoroughly. Of course I expect them to make it again this week just the same.

10

I am not allowed to read the documents, so everything I know of the case is what has been reported in the mass media.

What is entirely clear from your cite is that you do not know the difference between “sources and methods” and other threats to security. I’m not being insulting, it’s just that you probably have no reason to understand the difference.

Sources and methods for gathering intelligence could refer to specific means of gathering intelligence – perhaps something along the lines of, we have an informant in Bin Laden’s inner circle, or this aircraft has this capability that nobody knows about. None of this extraordinarily sensitive information would be in anything classified at the level of the leaks.

What would be in the documents are things like incident reports – the enemy used this tactic and it was successful/unsuccessful – or that this neighbor called to report that he knows someone who was making IEDs, or something like that. That stuff is probably completely boring and meaningless to the average American, but it’s the kind of stuff that can do harm to our efforts if it is exploited by the enemy. That’s why it’s classified.

So, if you understand the context of Secretary Gates’ remarks, he is not supporting your conclusion at all.

11

Exactly. What civilians have a hard time understanding is that classified material is 1) boring, and 2) classified for a reason. No good can come of releasing these documents. It will be mined by the enemy for any value it contains, which will be a hell of a lot more than the average American will find.

12

Why does it have to be one or the other. Can’t they be assholes and stupid at the same time?

13

Its not that the Average American couldn’t find it or wouldn’t understand it. They wouldn’t care. The identities of specific informants are not really very relevant to us. There just wasn’t anything that Americans would be interested in while there was plenty that the Taliban would be interested in.

14

Human actions are usually a continuum, instead of all one thing or the other. But I’d say that it’s mostly one or the other…not because they are mutually exclusive (look at Bush et al for instance).

-XT

15

Persuasive argument on its face.

OTOH, that was definitely not the case with the Pentagon Papers. They revealed things of great importance to the average American, and nothing, AFAIK, of strategic (as distinct from political) value to the enemy.

16

Nothing startling or alarming or worthy of leaking in the last batch.

Look dudes, these leaks are not the Pentagon Papers:

“The Pentagon Papers, officially titled United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, was a top-secret United States Department of Defense history of the United States’ political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The papers were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of the New York Times in 1971.[1] A 1996 article in the New York Times said that the Pentagon Papers “demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance”.[2]”
But there’s nothing of interest to the general American (or Australian, or UK, or other Allies) Public in the wikileak documents. There does appear to be stuff that will put dudes on the front line in danger. Note that term above "a subject of transcendent national interest and significance’.

No-one claims the wikileaks docs have anything which even approaches *“a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.” *Now, if the docs were of critical political importance that showed lies, malfeasance or cover-ups at the highest levels (as the Pentagon Papers allegedly did), then sure, leak them. We have a need to know about subjects of transcendent national interest and significance.

But this is just leaking for the sake of leaking, leaking info that no-one but Bad Guys want to know, and which will help the Bad Guys kill the Good Guys.

17

That presumes that we are the “Good Guys”, which we aren’t.

18

‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ are all a matter of perspective. In general, most sane people think that their ‘side’ is generally on the side of ‘Good’ and that those opposed are on the side of ‘Bad’. Nazi’s, after all, didn’t think of themselves as the ‘Bad Guys’, after all…they thought they were doing the right stuff.

I realize that you are once again off on one of your little ‘America is teh EVIL!’ thingies, but surly even you concede that there are sides, and it’s generally not a good thing (even if you are the ‘Bad Guys’) to give the other side information that helps them, right?

-XT

19

That’s nonsense. If that was true there’d be no such thing as anti-war movements or civil rights movements. Plenty of people think “their side” is in the wrong and should change. Nor is automatically assuming your side is in the right “sane” - quite the opposite, since that’s a position that explicitly ignores reality.

“The Nazis agreed with me” is your idea of how to bolster an argument?

I concede no such thing. I want the “Bad Guys” to lose, “my side” or not. I’ve said in the past I’d be perfectly happy if the Iraqis somehow managed to kill our forces there down to the last soldier. It would be a victory both for the Iraqis and the human race.

20

I said ‘in general’. In general, even people who were protesting against the US’s involvement in Vietnam didn’t think we were the ‘Bad Guys’…they thought we were doing bad things. There is a difference. It’s situational, not a structured world view where they think that their side is ALWAYS wrong, and that their side is composed of The Bad Guys™ in all things…because if they thought that way, really thought that way, then the idea that they were on that ‘side’ is ludicrous. They aren’t…they are, for all intents and purposes, on the other side (as you are).

And even at it’s peak I’m unclear that the majority of US citizens were either anti-war protesters OR would have thought the US was in all cases and in all things the ‘Bad Guys’. To be sure, there were narrowly focused folks such as yourself who are always going to think the US is the font of all evil and go through any number of contortions and logical torture to make reality conform to your own world view, but this isn’t going to be the majority viewpoint.

sigh And do you feel that your view is the norm, that your perspective is the majority? Seriously? Because, if not, then you are simply arguing to argue, while putting your fingers in your ears and going ‘nanannananan…I can’t HEAR you!’, over and over again.

I realize that YOU (and possibly 5 other people in the country…maybe 6) feel as you do. But “In general, most sane people think that their ‘side’ is generally on the side of ‘Good’ and that those opposed are on the side of ‘Bad’” is going to be the majority view for most people about their country or nation.

ETA:

Not enough rolley-eyes for this statement. If you truly think that was the point I was making then all I can say is that the disconnect between us is to vast to even facilitate even rudimentary discourse on the subject. We are not only speaking different languages but you aren’t even of the same species as I am, sadly.

To clarify, I’d say that HUMANS agree with me, in general, since this seems to be the way most of us are wired. Even Nazis.

-XT