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and wikipedia is not an encyclopedia
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/op...exum.html?_r=1
ANYONE who has spent the past two days reading through the 92,000 military field reports and other do ents made public by the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks may be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. I’m a researcher who studies Afghanistan and have no regular access to classified information, yet I have seen nothing in the do ents that has either surprised me or told me anything of significance. I suspect that’s the case even for someone who reads only a third of the articles on Afghanistan in his local newspaper.
Let us review, though, what have been viewed as the major revelations in the do ents (which were published in part by The Times, The Guardian of London and the German magazine Der Spiegel):
First, there are allegations made by American intelligence officers that elements within Pakistan’s spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, have been conspiring with Taliban factions and other insurgents. Those charges are nothing new. This newspaper and others have been reporting on those accusations — often supported by anonymous sources within the American military and intelligence services — for years.
Second, the site provides do entation of Afghan civilian casualties caused by United States and allied military operations. It is true that civilians inevitably suffer in war. But researchers in Kabul with the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict have been compiling evidence of these casualties, and their effect in Afghanistan, for some time now. Their reports, to which they add background on the context of the events, contributed to the decision by the former top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, to put in place controversially stringent new measures intended to reduce such casualties last year.
Third, the site asserts that the Pentagon employs a secret task force of highly trained commandos charged with capturing or killing insurgent leaders. I suspect that in the eyes of most Americans, using special operations teams to kill terrorists is one of the least controversial ways in which the government spends their tax dollars.
The do ents do reveal some specific information about United States and NATO tactics, techniques, procedures and equipment that is sensitive, and will cause much consternation within the military. It may even result in some people dying. Thus the White House is right to voice its displeasure with WikiLeaks.
Yet most of the major revelations that have been trumpeted by WikiLeaks’s founder, Julian Assange, are not revelations at all — they are merely additional examples of what we already knew.
Mr. Assange has said that the publication of these do ents is analogous to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, only more significant. This is ridiculous. The Pentagon Papers offered the public a coherent internal narrative of the conflict in Vietnam that was at odds with the one that had been given by the elected and uniformed leadership.
The publication of these do ents, by contrast, dumps 92,000 new primary source do ents into the laps of the world’s public with no context, no explanation as to why some accounts may contradict others, no sense of what is important or unusual as opposed to the normal march of war.
Many experts on the war, both in the military and the press, have long been struggling to come to grips with the conflict’s complexity and nuances. What is the public going to make of this haphazard cache of do ents, many written during combat by officers with little sense of how their observations fit into the fuller scope of the war?
I myself first went to Afghanistan as a young Army officer in 2002 and returned two years later after having led a small special operations unit — what Mr. Assange calls an “assassination squad.” (I also worked briefly as a civilian adviser to General McChrystal last year.) I can confirm that the situation in Afghanistan is complex, and defies any attempt to graft it onto easy-to-discern lessons or policy conclusions. Yet the release of the do ents has led to a stampede of commentators and politicians doing exactly that. It’s all too easy for them to find field reports to reaffirm their preconceived opinions about the war.
The Guardian editorialized on Sunday that the do ents released reveal “a very different landscape ... from the one with which we have become familiar.” But whoever wrote that has not been reading the reports of his own newspaper’s reporters in Afghanistan.
The news media have done a good job of showing the public that the Afghan war is a highly complex environment stretching beyond the borders of the fractured country. Often what appears to be a two-way conflict between the government and an insurgency is better described as intertribal rivalry. And often that intertribal rivalry is worsened or overshadowed by the violent trade in drugs.
The Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel did nothing wrong in looking over the WikiLeaks do ents and excerpting them. Despite the occasional protest from the right wing, most of the press in the United States and in allied nations takes care not to publish information that might result in soldiers’ deaths.
But WikiLeaks itself is another matter. Mr. Assange says he is a journalist, but he is not. He is an activist, and to what end it is not clear. This week — as when he released a video in April showing American helicopter gunships killing Iraqi civilians in 2007 — he has been throwing around the term “war crimes,” but offers no context for the events he is judging. It seems that the death of any civilian in war, an unavoidable occurrence, is a “crime.”
If his desire is to promote peace, Mr. Assange and his brand of activism are not as helpful as he imagines. By muddying the waters between journalism and activism, and by throwing his organization into the debate on Afghanistan with little apparent regard for the hard moral choices and dearth of good policy options facing decision-makers, he is being as reckless and destructive as the contemptible soldier or soldiers who leaked the do ents in the first place.
and wikipedia is not an encyclopedia
That's a good article.
The leaks did serve to move the forgotten Afghan war to front burner for 15 mintues or so, but it's gone again, like the BP oil spill.
And this op-ed is written in the NY Times, a liberal rag. I don't know who to trust anymore!
It's pretty sad that such a good tool is slanted.
This article comes to a poor conclusion. If anything, the founder of Wikileaks may be biased, but Wikileaks itself has shown no bias. If it can be shown that Wikileaks have refused to release information that may be harmful to the left, sure, throw that charge around.
I can't recall Wikileaks, at least since 2006, ever trying to come across as journalism rather than activism. So what if it's activist? It's strange that the director is now trying to change its perception, perhaps there is more money to find in being thought of as more legitimate.
There is no left or right bias that I can tell, it's just anti-government. Is it ty to release sensitive information about the location of troops and leaders that make it easy for terrorists to exploit? in yea, but the article barely touched on the implications of it. All it says is "if these do ents fell on your desk, you - a simpleton, would not know how to properly read them and extract information." That in itself is pathetic IMHO.
USA Today Propaganda
From the hard copy July 27, 2010, USA Today newspaper
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=254699
...this writer must be living in wing-nut-land if he thinks that these revelations are not 'at odds with the ones that had been given by the elected and uniformed leadership'...in fact, they are exactly that...many of the revelations may not be new to everyone, but when viewed holistically, they are very significant to public opinion about the war...The Pentagon Papers offered the public a coherent internal narrative of the conflict in Vietnam that was at odds with the one that had been given by the elected and uniformed leadership.
The timing of the WikiLeaks', well, leak, was not a bad followup to the WaPo's Top Secret America series. The problem, of course, is the ins utional inertia against any meaningful change abroad or at home is great.
Marcus, I'm disappointed that you didn't have a comment on my Top Secret America post. Of course, it is buried now on the second page, after the great majority of board conservatives had nothing to say about it.
Well, I missed it. As for my opinion on the TSA series, while virtually all of the information was publicly accessible, I am glad that it was aggregated and presented in such a manner. The obvious question is to what does this lead? Ins utional inertia in DC being what it is, this domestic national security behemoth is not going away. When virtually anyone, instead of other states, is deemed to pose an existential threat to this country, the die is cast for a continual erosion of individual liberty in the name of collective "safety" (and in practical terms, for the benefit of the various bureaucratic bosses and sycophantic contractors).
American politics is ruled by an ignorant, paranoid majority. Ideology is fungible. That some seek to force ideological distinctions upon it is pure madness.
War is a big blind spot for soi disant conservatives.
The liberal internationalists got to them, a long time ago.
Defense spending and war is (just another way) how conservatives transfer taxpayer wealth to themselves. Conservatives are blind to war, it's one of their main tools for self-enrichment.
For conservative voters? How so?
When did liberals ever shrink the US military, btw?
Thinking of the DoD as a GOP clubhouse and as being receptive exclusively to Republicans is plainly wrong. The DoD does very well, regardless who runs the show.
ah, dumbass, these guys broke the climate gate emails.
this is like a preemptive strike, for when these guys get the dirt on the bushies.
Had Darrin read the profile of Julian Assange that the New Yorker ran a couple months back, or really, known who the Assange was before a week ago, his take might have been more nuanced.There is no left or right bias that I can tell, it's just anti-government.
Of course, hoping for as much from a s -sucking moron like Darrin is so wildly outlandish it might as well be considered delusional.
Clinton destroyed more than a few military careers.
Cleary neither Afghanistan nor Iraq were really in need a change nor were they a threat to anyone.
9/11? Masood's assasination? Al Qaeda and rampant Talibs? Lies.
Iran War? Attempted Kurdish genocide? Bull .
It was just a great way to pump money into the conservative machine.
PS: Operation Desert Fox? Genius. I love you Bill Clinton.
...with the 'soviet' threat in decline, the GOP needed someone to scare the crap out of American consumers, so they invented Al-Queda and the 'radical Islam threat'...fact is radical Islam was in decline prior to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars....911 gave the military/industrial complex and multinational oil companies the perfect opportunity to suck billion, or trillions of taxpayer dollars and take control of one of the largest oil reserves in the world....
Why are the Chinese, the Russians, the Italians and the Danish getting the monster contracts, if we control the reserves?
"getting the monster contracts"
The Repugs/neo-cons invaded Iraq for oil, but couldn't get all of it. Even if they failed to getting all or most of the oil on the terms they wanted (but no other country agrees to anymore), the US/UK oilcos and oil industry contractors are doing better there now than the would have been if Saddam had stayed in power and excluded them completely as was the case early 2003.
Part of the neo-con hubris was that Iraq would be a castrated puppet govt would gratefully allow US/UK oilcos run the entire show. They were proven wrong, like they and Repugs always are.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 07-29-2010 at 08:55 AM.
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