Wikileaks

[Toothache]

Wikileaks.org is a website which has, as of 23rd October 2010, leaked over 400,000 secret reports and documents on the war in Iraq, from 2004 to this year. I've been having a look over some of these reports today, and some of them I've found pretty fascinating, especially the 'friendly fire' incidents, but also very chilling, when you read the murder reports.

The US government are obviously not happy about the leak, claiming that this information will make the troops over in Iraq less safe. Of course, the same rhetoric was put out in the media when over 90,000 documents about Afghanistan were also leaked via Wikileaks, and later investigation suggested that this information did no harm to the troops over there.

Some of these Iraq documents were declassified, but most of it was not (nearly 380,000 was classified as SECRET). It is fascinating that this information should come out now, so close to the US Midterms, but also how much of it was classified.

 

[jrrrrrrr]

The worst part about all this is that the news media seems to be more content with attacking Assange's person instead of the information that WikiLeaks just exposed. "Our government is doing bad things with our money in our name? Look over there! That guy might be a rapist!".

One of the biggest intel leaks in history surfaces (if not, the biggest) showing that the military outright lied thousands of times, and nobody in this country even cares. It's pathetic. You would think that a story of this magnitude would be all over every American news source, but the only place I could find reliable information on the topic was al-Jazeera English. This is why we have stupid ignorant politicians being elected into office, because our voter pool is filled with stupid ignorant people who care more about American Idol than their neighbors being sent to die for profit.

 

[Eraddd]

The worst part about all this is that the news media seems to be more content with attacking Assange's person instead of the information that WikiLeaks just exposed. "Our government is doing bad things with our money in our name? Look over there! That guy might be a rapist!".

One of the biggest intel leaks in history surfaces (if not, the biggest) showing that the military outright lied thousands of times, and nobody in this country even cares. It's pathetic. You would think that a story of this magnitude would be all over every American news source, but the only place I could find reliable information on the topic was al-Jazeera English. This is why we have stupid ignorant politicians being elected into office, because our voter pool is filled with stupid ignorant people who care more about American Idol than their neighbors being sent to die for profit.

Reminds me of a comedian who said as a joke they should turn elections into a danceoff so that America would pay more attention to it.

And I've seen a few of the facts shown by the wikileaks and yeah, the American Military has lied to the entire nation and the world for the past 5-6 years. Great. Remind me why I was against the entire Iraq War from the start...

I found it sadder that everyones focusing on the people who leaked the data, instead of focusing on the number of civilian deaths. I felt horrible when I looked at that total. And then I read about the parts of the prison conditions and the treatment prisoners get. Oh God.

 

[Toothache]

There's a great quote by the once-governor (and wrestler) Jesse Ventura - "America has practised terrorism for over 50 years, we just call it foreign policy." America does have the largest army in the world too, which is crazy with the disparity in casualties. In the first Gulf War, Iraq suffered 150,000 casualties. And the US? 79.

Even now, in the UK parliament, each time a soldier is killed in action, each name is read out during Prime Minister's Questions. They obviously can't do that to the thousands more lost on the opposing side, in any medium - another faceless enemy as far as we are concerned. With the rise of IEDs and suicide bombings, the longer this war drags on the more casualties will occur, but it will not be the army which suffers the majority, or the people they oppose - it will be the regular citizens, stuck between a rock and a hard place.

 

[Trax]

The worst part about all this is that the news media seems to be more content with attacking Assange's person instead of the information that WikiLeaks just exposed. "Our government is doing bad things with our money in our name? Look over there! That guy might be a rapist!".

News Media is run by wealthy businessmen.

Wealthy businessmen do not benefit from the truth being out there.

They do benefit from war boosting the economy though..

 

[Ancien Régime]

This is why we have stupid ignorant politicians being elected into office, because our voter pool is filled with stupid ignorant people who care more about American Idol than their neighbors being sent to die for profit.

who's up for monarchy!!!

but yeah, people don't care because people trust government still, or at least, they trust the part of government that makes money based on how well it murders people. 50 years of state propaganda telling us how great we are, and how our military fights for freedom (even when it's napalming the villages of brown people) is going to do that to a culture.

Every time I think this "government" thing has a shot at working, something happens that makes me think we need to at least give anarchism a try. Fact is, any institution that abrogates to itself the right to kill people and take their stuff whenever it feels like just isn't a good thing.

On the other hand, even if people DID care, what could they do, short of armed insurrection? Our "leaders" can simply go "LALALALA I'M NOT LISTENING" because even if we vote them out, the corporate-industrial-military interests will simply pay them more than enough to compensate, and they'll get some cushy job on some think tank which will be presented to the public as a dispassionate center for policy analysis.

 

[Broth3r]

Kinda posted it here a while ago.

I mostly agree with you. But you'd be surprised at how many people want to have Wikileaks shut down and Assenge tried for treason (even though he's aussie). It's not just the media (I reckon most of them are too intelligent to be brainwashed by it).

I'll give them one thing though, Assenge needs to leave. As of now, he's doing more harm than good to Wikileaks, regardless of his intentions.

 

[cantab]

the military outright lied thousands of times, and nobody in this country even cares. It's pathetic.

Given the military is essentially part of the government, it's really not newsworthy.

 

[Deck Knight]

There's a great quote by the once-governor (and wrestler) Jesse Ventura - "America has practised terrorism for over 50 years, we just call it foreign policy." America does have the largest army in the world too, which is crazy with the disparity in casualties. In the first Gulf War, Iraq suffered 150,000 casualties. And the US? 79.

150k to 79? Sounds like good news to me. You fight wars to win them not so you can feel like you had a fair fight. Overwhelming force makes wars quicker which reduces civilian deaths. Our present problem is we're doing too much counterinsurgency and nationbuilding. The actual takedown of Saddam's army only took a few months. If you're going to go to war your aim should be to end it as swiftly and decisively as possible or never go in the first place. As to your stance on weather the war was justified or neccesary, that is your right, my only point is it exists independent of the notion that once you go to war you want to deliver a defeat as swiftly as possible, for the sake of both sides.

Even now, in the UK parliament, each time a soldier is killed in action, each name is read out during Prime Minister's Questions. They obviously can't do that to the thousands more lost on the opposing side, in any medium - another faceless enemy as far as we are concerned. With the rise of IEDs and suicide bombings, the longer this war drags on the more casualties will occur, but it will not be the army which suffers the majority, or the people they oppose - it will be the regular citizens, stuck between a rock and a hard place.

IEDs and suicide bombings are done by cowards aiming to maximize collateral damage toward the citizenry (usually their own!). The US military gains nothing by shooting random civilians, in fact the rules of engagement we have over there are insane. They can't even defend themselves until after they get shot at.


Now to the rest of the thread at large:

As far as propaganda, the left has done a better number on that then the US government. I wonder if anyone can point to me to "brown people we've napalmed." Napalm was banned a long time ago, after WWI if I recall correctly. Moreover the US Military wouldn't use it because it's so stupidly ineffective compared to our other weapons. Napalm and chem weapons were the kind of stuff Saddam was keeping in his bunkers and they found tons of the stuff from when he was gassing the Kurds. But hey "The US Military are dogs who bomb brown people" is good propaganda so there's always somebody willing to suck it up like a sponge.

Just some news for anyone who thinks our military exists solely for killing; When Indonesia had that massive tsunami and when Haiti had that devastating earthquake we sent aircraft carriers down there. Not to finish off the brown people the anti-military propagandists are so obsessed with (never having met one, usually), but because aircraft carriers are basically a mobile power plant that can supply large quantities of power for emergency services onshore. They can also send out rescue helicopters that can reach inaccessible areas. Btw. they also have large capacity for food, water, and supplies storage. Did I mention we have enough of them where we can rotate them out to create an uninterrupted continuous supply stream? Forget UPS, The United States Navy is Logistics.

So in point of fact Mr. Assange probably thinks he's a hero, and I have no real problem with him leaking documents in this matter that are mostly going to provide proof that war isn't a simple matter of military = always bad and anti-military = always good. That will be what some people pull from it because that's been their cause celebre all along.

In the meantime the documents do show that just being "brown people" doesn't make you a moral exemplar or a helpless victim. Plenty of stuff the Iraqi police did to their own people was deplorable, but none of that has anything to do with profit or oil or whatever garbage is being generated as a pretext. There is no moral high ground in simply not being an American.

btw. how is that "war boosting the economy thing" going? Things are great here in the 'ol USA. We've got 2 wars going on and as of January 21st 2009 we had Democrats in control of the Executive Branch with a Supermajority in the Legislative Branch. I'm just loving this economy run by "the adults," as they call themselves. Aren't you?

These leaks have nothing to do with "bombing brown people" or "boosting the economy" or "wealthy businessmen not liking the truth." And your neighbors are supposed to be the stupid ones? Give me a break.

 

[vonFiedler]

Really? Is anyone here actually surprised that in a war we should have pulled out of years ago that civilian casualties and isolated incidents of soldier brutality occur? Is anyone REALLY surprised when when the same things happened in Vietnam on a larger scale? No. You can look at this two ways. Either the government is incompetent, or the government is evil. I already thought the government was incompetent (and that a government this size CANNOT be competent), and several people itt already thought the US was evil (whether they want to dance around the exact words or not). There's successful propaganda at work here, and it's not the government's.

 

[Veedrock]

I don't like wikileaks because it's there for the sake of being there (fight the power blah blah blah), but at the same time they don't do anything significant, so 'whatever.' I think it's funny that they exaggerate things and people eat it up (woo propaganda), but anybody that reviews the unedited material knows its not a big deal. "Secret" documents are overrated anyways. The level of clearance for such things is rather low. Not entry level low but it's nowhere near Chief of Staff material (for the record though, there are classifications above Secret). The release of such documents really doesn't hurt anything, even if officials say so. They only care because there's a compromise in intelligence, which is never good.

btw. how is that "war boosting the economy thing" going? Things are great here in the 'ol USA. We've got 2 wars going on and as of January 21st 2009 we had Democrats in control of the Executive Branch with a Supermajority in the Legislative Branch. I'm just loving this economy run by "the adults," as they call themselves. Aren't you?

This comment is both unnecessary and misguided. This is off-topic but it's worthwhile to note that the war and economic problems began before January 21st 2009. I will agree that the war boosting economy comment is incorrect, 'war' hasn't worked well for the economy since it became global police operations.

 

[WaterBomb]

Please explain to me how we know all this information is credible and not propaganda or a hoax? Not trying to be ignorant or anything, but it seems to me that I would be suspicious of anything posted on a website named "WikiLeaks". Remember, articles on Wikipedia can be anywhere from slightly inaccurate to blatantly false, so how is WikiLeaks any different? Can any of this information be reliably confirmed?

 

[cantab]

Please explain to me how we know all this information is credible and not propaganda or a hoax? Not trying to be ignorant or anything, but it seems to me that I would be suspicious of anything posted on a website named "WikiLeaks". Remember, articles on Wikipedia can be anywhere from slightly inaccurate to blatantly false, so how is WikiLeaks any different? Can any of this information be reliably confirmed?

The authorities haven't denied it, in fact they may have confirmed it to be true. (I'm unsure.) And Wikileaks operates in a very different fashion to Wikipedia. Wikileaks isn't a wiki.

Of course, the US government could be lying - they could have faked the leak to begin with, in order to create an excuse to shut Wikileaks down. But if that was their goal, they're doing such a CRAP job of it as to be implausibly incompetent.

However, one thing I've noticed: Where the hell is the rest of Wikileaks? There's these "Iraq War Diaries", but everything else that was on the site seems to have gone! This seems fishy. There are US interests that don't give a damn about the Iraq leaks but have other things they're far more worried about. It's midterms soon - suppose there was due to be a leak about planned electoral fraud? Could this whole Iraq War diaries be a smokescreen to ensure that info is suppressed until after the election?

 

[WaterBomb]

I'm just saying that the whole thing could very easily be fraudulent and propaganda designed to serve some other purpose. I don't really see any credible (and proven) sources listed there, at least from glancing through it. Just seems odd that, if the leaks were real, that the website wouldn't have been completely shut down and deleted almost immediately upon discovery. It wouldn't be hard to do for the government, so the fact that it's been left operating tells me they aren't terribly concerned with the information therein, erego it's not accurate.

 

[Firestorm]

I'm just saying that the whole thing could very easily be fraudulent and propaganda designed to serve some other purpose. I don't really see any credible (and proven) sources listed there, at least from glancing through it. Just seems odd that, if the leaks were real, that the website wouldn't have been completely shut down and deleted almost immediately upon discovery. It wouldn't be hard to do for the government, so the fact that it's been left operating tells me they aren't terribly concerned with the information therein, erego it's not accurate.

Ironically, I'm going to link to Wikipedia so you can maybe understand what Wikileaks is before continuing this line of thought:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks

 

[Hipmonlee]

Really? Is anyone here actually surprised that in a war we should have pulled out of years ago that civilian casualties and isolated incidents of soldier brutality occur? Is anyone REALLY surprised when when the same things happened in Vietnam on a larger scale? No. You can look at this two ways. Either the government is incompetent, or the government is evil. I already thought the government was incompetent (and that a government this size CANNOT be competent), and several people itt already thought the US was evil (whether they want to dance around the exact words or not). There's successful propaganda at work here, and it's not the government's.

On the other hand, the government is not a single entity. It is made up of many people, I have no doubt some of these people are incompetent and some of them are evil. Either of your suggested two ways of looking at the government is a gross oversimplification.

Have a nice day.

 

[vonFiedler]

The fact that it is made up of many people (and I'm not suggesting it shouldn't be), and we are talking many, many people in the case of the US government, is what makes the government inherently incompetent. Every competent person is dragged down by an incompetent person, or to avoid "gross oversimplification", dragged down by other competent people with different goals and ideas. Further, I'd argue even referring to "some people" as evil is a gross oversimplification itself.

 

[Hipmonlee]

Evil has some meaning to whoever uses it as a term. It may not be entirely clear, but it can be used to describe a person. To say that Vineon is short is accurate, even though it doesnt fully explain every action he ever makes. It isnt an oversimplification.

I am sure there are psychopaths in the government, as well as just run of the mill bigots and the corrupt and whatever else. Even these terms fail to accurately describe a persons actions, so I might as well use the term evil. I cant thoroughly psycho-analyse every government employee..

My point is, I dont think it helps anyone to look at the government as evil or incompetent or corrupt. The government tries, and it could be better or it could be worse. When the government is found to be doing something retarded it should come under criticism. And in this case, even if the news isnt bad (I havent looked at it at all, from this thread it just seems to confirm what I already knew), it has been kept secret. Government secrecy is not something I support, unless it is absolutely necessary.

Have a nice day.

 

[cantab]

the website wouldn't have been completely shut down and deleted almost immediately upon discovery. It wouldn't be hard to do for the government

Actually, it's basically impossible for the US government to shut down a website not hosted in the US. At best, they could try and get the DNS record changed, but there's no lawful way for them to do so, and if they did then Wikileaks' IP address would become the best known number on the internet.

Of course if the Israelis didn't like something Wikileak's published, they'd send Mossad to kill Assange. But the USA doesn't operate like that.

 

[jrrrrrrr]

btw. how is that "war boosting the economy thing" going? Things are great here in the 'ol USA. We've got 2 wars going on and as of January 21st 2009 we had Democrats in control of the Executive Branch with a Supermajority in the Legislative Branch. I'm just loving this economy run by "the adults," as they call themselves. Aren't you?

...you're not seriously blaming Democrats for Iraq and Afghanistan after yelling for 5+ years to stay the course, are you?...

The worst part is that I agree with the rest of your post. Our low casualty rate is a good thing, it shows that at least our obscene military budget is going to something. Most of our casualties are friendly fire. And of course our rules of engagement are "insane", we invaded a country to overthrow their leader (for what turned out to be false premises)...not to punish the civilians. Obviously the military isn't always a bad thing, but in this case they have now been caught doing bad things and lying about it. How the military handles these leaks will be its defining characteristic of this generation. Let's hope they come clean before it's too late.

 

[WaterBomb]

Ironically, I'm going to link to Wikipedia so you can maybe understand what Wikileaks is before continuing this line of thought:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks

lol fuck me. Still that article IS on wikipedia so there's still like a 1% chance my thoughts are valid!

 

[Trax]

btw. how is that "war boosting the economy thing" going? Things are great here in the 'ol USA. We've got 2 wars going on and as of January 21st 2009 we had Democrats in control of the Executive Branch with a Supermajority in the Legislative Branch. I'm just loving this economy run by "the adults," as they call themselves. Aren't you?

Take a bit of a look at http://www.tradingeconomics.com/Economics/GDP-Growth.aspx?Symbol=USD and note the GDP growth relative to major troop deployments.

 

[cantab]

LOL, those graphs are all the same. You need to fix them Trax.

 

[Trax]

LOL, those graphs are all the same. You need to fix them Trax.

Son of a bitch, the URL doesn't update with the graph ><

I really CBF remaking them all again so just take a look into it for yourselves if you like.

 

[Killah]

Well, I'm sure many of you have heard about the [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cables_leak]leak of the diplomatic cables[/url] over the past week.

As many of you can imagine, the consequences of such leaks have been pretty controversial in several ways. I'm not very well versed in the topic, but files that have been released include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asking US diplomats to essentially "spy" on people, accusations against China being involved in computer hacking against other countries, and other such files. There's plenty more, but the fact of the matter is that wikileaks has essentially attacked the international community by releasing these files.

One of the most interesting stories surrounding the whole release is an encrypted file located on the wikileaks website. Supposedly, this single file is larger than the entire Iraq War Logs leak, and has been described as a "doomsday file" and other such names. The file, named "insurance.aes256" is encrypted in a seemingly indecipherable way, with the site threatening to reveal the encryption should it be shut down.

Of course, the repercussions on wikileaks alone have been immense. Most websites that ran donations for wikileaks have ceased doing so under political pressure, and wikileaks has been under several DDOS attacks that have caused the site to shut down. "Fortunately" several mirrors of the site have been created, and the information remains on the internet for anyone to look at. Interestingly enough, the group Anonymous (4chan doing something, lol) has led a DDOS attack against Mastercard's website due to Mastercard being among several companies who stopped collecting donations for wikileaks, with other websites *supposedly* going to be targeted. The founder of the website, Julian Assange, had been lying low to avoid media attention, until he was arrested yesterday, on charges involving sexual misconduct in Sweden (which, interestingly enough, came out after the cables leak...). It's entirely possible these charges were fabricated in order to bring him in to be charged with other crimes, but of course we can't be entirely sure.

I'm not entirely sure where I stand in this situation. It's unsettling for a country to withhold information, as often files that are only incriminating for US officials get tabbed with the designation of being important to national security. Still, some files that have been released (Such as a list describing the locations of worldwide facilities considered important to the United States) could be potentially harmful to the country. Supposedly, only about 1000 of the ~250000 cables have been revealed so far; meaning, of course, that we'll be hearing about this for a long time.