New Wikileaks Dump is Unconscionable

adoucette is correct, that no U.S. Congressman has explicitly and publicly called for the assassination of Julian Assange. We can note this, while also recognizing the shrillness of anger and frustration from within the Washington/Wall St. establishment being directed at Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

This technicality does not impede us from considering whether it is appropriate for the US government to conceal its most controversial actions and relationships from the public, and to the degree that has become customary. Obviously, there is much insecurity and reckless rhetoric in evidence on the part of members of the US government who are alarmed at what the public is capable of learning in the information age. Rather than quibbling over rhetorical minutia, I hope that we (here in this discussion, and broadly in U.S society) can maintain a productive focus on the much more important debate over the boundaries and limitations of state secrecy in a functional democracy.

"Information is the currency of democracy."- Thomas Jefferson.

 

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From what I can tell, nothing of any particular importance was actually released in the Wikileaks dump.

Was there anything of significance that I missed?

More to the point, was there anything significant that you think should have been released to the public that wouldn't have been released if it wasn't for Wikileaks?

Arthur

 

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I think so. Societies mostly ramble along in a generally thoughtless collective way. But occasionally (definitively in my opinion) the sharpest jolts of reality prompt many citizens to question the integrity of our ships of state.

Such doubts are routinely squelched by platitudes that "Father Knows Best". WikiLeaks is the most prominent contemporary challenge to dangerous public apathy and wishful-thinking unquestioned government secrecy.

History is replete with examples of how obsessions with state secrecy are preludes to the conversion of advanced societies into juggernauts of inhuman intent, when state organisms turn rogue.

 

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So what?

No. You're mangling my very simple metaphor, twisting it and recasting its meaning so you can make another iteration of the same point. This is what you do consistently with whomever you're speaking. Indeed, you've done the same thing to Quad in this very thread.

It's a rhetorical game, and I haven't the time or inclination.

 

A remarkably common assertion/question from the Fox faction.

It's hard to know what to say. On the one hand, no - the stuff in the wikidumps more or less reaffirms what has been common knowledge or generally accepted likelihood among the lefty crowd for years, and that has been available to the public all along. So nothing really new.

On the other hand, for all those years a whole lot of these "nothing new here" people have been asserting things such as "the Surge was successful in Iraq" and "the US has been winning in Afghanistan (or even: the US has won the war in Afghanistan)" and "the government of Iraq/Afghanistan is an elected/popular/legitimate established entity" and denying (with prejudice) such claims from observers as: the client state in Iraq appears to be failing or falling into Iran's sphere of influence; the "government" in Afghanistan appears to be an unusually corrupt narcotics based operation similar to (but even worse than) what the US aligned itself with in Colombia, Nicaragua, Panama, maybe Mexico, et al; and so forth.

So are we to presume that these people knew better than what they were saying, all along?

 

But has there been anything in what has been released that has caused such questioning of the integrity of our government?

If so what?

Be specific.

Arthur

 

Well I don't watch any TV news.
Yahoo is my home page and they keep me generally informed about breaking events, but any news I get by my own investigation over the internet.

I've not dug deep into the Wikileak results but still I must admit, I've not seen anything in the leaked materials that supports your assertions like:

That the surge wasn't successful.
That the Gov of Iraq wasn't elected and legitimate
That Iraq government is failing.

Please provide SPECIFIC wikileak data to support these broad assertions.

Reasonable compilation:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11914040

Arthur

 

Maybe start by following back from these, take your pick:

Wikileaks dump on the surge, four views:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/102410.html

http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/pos..._dump_puts_the_surge_decision_in_sharp_relief

http://wayneb-1247232.newsvine.com/...3-josh-stieber-an-iraq-surge-vet-on-wikileaks

http://www.aolnews.com/2010/10/22/wikileaks-iraq-the-4-most-shocking-revelations-so-far/

 

Ice, stop boring everyone with your surge didn't work crap. It's tiresome.

And read your own links sometime, too:

There is a cottage industry among academics and some pundits attempting to discredit the surge as either a total failure or as irrelevant to what progress there has been in Iraq. The latest Wikileaks dump poses a real problem for them, and I haven't seen any of them yet adequately rise to the challenge: how would any of their preferred options in 2006 have dealt with the Iranian challenge in Iraq more successfully than did the surge that President Bush ordered?

 

Someone else who apparently could learn from the wikileaks dump. We're seeing a lot of this.

I did. Always do. Now, about the argument being made - anything relevant to say?

Or do you see nothing new in the reframing of the criteria of success for the Surge? - now, by this guy's estimation as revealed in Wikileaks, it is supposed to have been all along aimed at the Iranian operations and encroachments.

That's not how it was being sold as an operation or success two years ago.

And the current encroachment of Sadr's influence and forces into the Iraqi government indicates at least partial failure, by that criterion.

One of four links, each referring to a different aspect of the Iraq Surge.

 

Ah, none of those links suggest the surge wasn't successful.
The first one suggests that other things besides just the surge led to the reduction in violence in Iraq, but that isn't the same as saying the surge didn't work.

Try harder.

Arthur

 

Glenn Greenwald provides a decent run-down here.

For those of us who are customarily critical of authority, there were no surprising revelations. But for those who take the bias of the mainstream corporate media as gospel, the corroboration from within the US government of concealed and glossed-over state crimes and deceptions is causing (and should cause) many to think twice.

A pattern of abuse of state secrecy is in much clearer evidence today, thanks to WikiLeaks and other encouragement of insiders revealing deadly deceptions in U.S. government. There is scant basis for buying into the argument that whistleblowers are undermining our security. There is a growing preponderance of evidence that increasingly secretive government has been doing exactly that (undermining the security, and even the legitimacy of the United States).

Please show some comprehension and acknowledgement of the many WikiLeaks-derived and WikiLeaks-corroborated stories of U.S. government crimes and cover-ups. The official and public responses to WikiLeaks have been highly significant because the content does call the accountability of the U.S. government before the law and to the consent/consensus of the governed seriously into question.

 

I deal in reality, not bullshit.

Yeah. Read your fucking link. It says people like you are full of shit. And it's right.

No, it was about reducing violence. And part of that violence was fueled by Iran via Shia militias. None of this is news, you're just pretending it is.

Two are questionable opinion pieces, the other makes you look even more clueless, as it affirms Bush.

4. Iran played a bigger role than previously disclosed
Though critics of the war claimed the Bush administration overemphasized the involvement of Iran in the conflict, the newly released documents show that Iraqi militants received weapons and explosives training in Iran, The New York Times reported, and that Iran actively smuggled weapons across its neighbor's borders.

Your clutching at straws and failing to find any.

 

Here's a handy aggregator of WikiLeaks news: wlcentral.org

 

Is this topic not weird enough for you? Then read this:

Salon: The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired

 

From the outset, a matter of perspective

Some of our neighbors disdain Mr. Greenwald to such a point that they seem to consider facts in his discourse either irrelevant or completely fictitious.

Thus, to save them the trouble of reading links they might rather avoid, the condensed version Greenwald's recap:

• Killing of civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in 2007, by U.S. military.

• Willful American support of Iraqi torture of detained suspects.

• At least 15,000 Iraqi civilian casualties not previously acknowledged by the Pentagon.

• State Dept. espionage against UN officials.

• Obama administration's efforts to stop international torture inquiries (e.g., Spain, Germany) targeting American suspects.

• Yemeni, American governments lied to public about missile strikes against terror suspects.

• Pentagon lied to pretty much everyone about the state of affairs in Iraq during the lawless years following the invasion.

• UK government (under Brown) colluded with United States government to protect alleged American wrongdoing from British inquiry.

• American troops on ground in Pakistan.

• US government overstating progress in Afghanistan.​

And those are just the ones pertaining to the US government's integrity; a partial list, at that.

I think, in the end, the question of what has been revealed that might denigrate the integrity of our government is a matter of two points:

• How one perceives the integrity of the American government, anyway.

• How much of what we learn through the WikiLeaks releases actually surprises us.​

Many are cynical toward the American government, anyway. The idea that our government appears two-faced, fork-tongued, or otherwise dishonorably silly from time to time is common. Some people believe that's the every-day way of governing.

Additionally, the ideas that we have troops on the ground in Pakistan, or were behind missile strikes in Yemen, or conducted and supported torture, aren't exactly new. To what degree one suspected such things were going on anyway, or believed the United States government is as lily-innocent as it pretends, will affect how one perceives the continuous flow of leaked information.

I have a hard time believing anyone can credibly claim to be shocked by what we're learning from the WikiLeaks releases. The only real question is whether the affirmation of what many already knew suspected means anything to a given individual.

 

edit: Post deleted

As for those for whom it means nothing, all nuance in politics is likely reduced to incomprehensible meaninglessness: They are dumb followers, who would likely do what they are told by perceived authority, under any regime of any quality of character or legitimacy.

 

I only just read the Manning/Lamo chat logs pertaining to WikiLeaks. Wired released these excepts back in June, and hold more. The chat logs offer some interesting glimpses of Manning's personality and motives.

 

shame on you

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wired also did a profile on the snitch, lamo

 

Lamo, Manning, Poulson, Assange, Ardin, Wilen- this bunch makes us seem downright sophisticated here at SciForums

:unashamed: