New Wikileaks Dump is Unconscionable

I'm not 100% sure, I missed the start of the news report so I just herd it was that it was being call "a terrorist act"

 

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Well articulated. Diplomacy is a good thing, but should integrity and good faith not be part and parcel of international relations and diplomacy? The crux of US outrage seems to be that their flippant arrogance and disdain for all and sundry has been exposed. Of course its embarrassing, hence the shrill outcry and attack of the messenger. However I am still not certain regarding the exact motive behind this release? Interestingly its caused much more US outrage and threats against Assange than the leaks exposing the war carnage. What does that imply?

Yes, that makes perfect sense, but I bet there are a couple of foreign governments who given the leak, may choose to revise their level of co-operation with the US.

Agreed, thus we need to understand the motive better.

IMO this type of reaction is desired in regard to transparency. Again, lack of integrity and good faith is exposed. Upside - at least we know our partner is cheating. Downside - our partner will endeavor to upgrade secrecy. :m:

 

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Wikileaks is not about just harassing the US government. They will take leaks from anywhere. Wikileaks is not the friend of America's enemies. Wikileaks is the enemy of secrecy wherever it exists in the world.

The difference between the US government and the rest of the world's governments, corporations and NGOs is that the US government affects everything and therefore is of global interest.

Fuck privileged information. If you get somebody's name you can get their social security number and a whole lot more information from Lexis Nexis. Privacy for the people is becoming more a thing of the past every year.

What is privacy for? It is to protect you from having anything that you do or say used against you. I think I like Governments, corporations and NGOs being subject to having anything they do or say potentially used against them.

The only reason that it is more important to deny the US government privacy than to deny the other institutions privacy is that the US government is so huge that it throws it's weight around without fear of retribution and is involved in everything.

As a primitive cave person you are unusually vulnerable while shitting or fucking so it is good to do those things in private. Governments give us a little protection from bad people using our lack of privacy against us but who protects from governments? It is our job to protect ourselves from governments.

An example: The junk food industry organized the "salt institute" to protect themselves from the potential government crack downs against salt as a cause of high blood pressure. The Salt institute sues the government to get private government information to discredit the government's campaign against salt. The junk food industry thoroughly researched all the weak spots in the campaign against salt so that they can fight back.

What do the people who think US foreign policy hurts them have comparable to the "salt institute" to fight back against the direction of US foreign policy? We opponents of US foreign policy are so disorganized. Chavez does not give us money and the US would try harder to overthrow Chavez if he did give us money. We have Wikileaks. I presume it is the US government or more likely unofficial intelligence networks like those that conducted the illegal by US law Contra wars with money coming indirectly from US taxpayers and from US sanctioned drug trafficking that are sending Wikileaks a message by subjecting it to cyber attack. Of course anybody like you CountZero who is loyal to the US national apparatus could be doing the cyber attacks on your own.

So our basic disagreement Countzero is that you think the US government plays a positive role in the world and should be supported in functioning as it has since WW1 while I think that the US government while perhaps playing a net positive role is also holding the world back from becoming something better by reinforcing Machiavellian politics and instead of embracing democratic idealism.

Freedom in the USA even while slavery persisted inspired people around the world to seek freedom for themselves. As the US became a power it emulated the ugly roles played by England and France and externalized the ugliness of it's own policy towards it's native Americans. New people in US foreign policy don't repudiate past US foreign policy they just tweak it. Past US foreign policy needs to be seen for it's failures as well as it's successes so that the successes can be repeated and the failures can be avoided.

Us habitual failures:
1 Allying with any shitbag that wants to be our ally like Bin Laden or Hissène Habré of Chad or the oligarchs of Haiti, or the Vietnamese catholics who collaborated with France against Vietnamese independence, or Freeport-McMoRan as they screw the people of Papua or the Indonesian government as it attacked the people of East Timor, every rich antidemocratic elitist creep anywhere in the world who has contempt for the majority of the people in his nation and who opposes left leaning democracy movements, Israel, and anybody who for whatever reason sucks up to US foreign policy makers and tells them how necessary and good they are.

You go go in depth into the history of 75% or more nations in the world and find bad US government behavior that the US people never would have approved of if they had to know about it. Now just because Wikileaks exists does not make the US people (including people like you who like being informed but don't want to think negatively of US foreign policy) know when the US government is behaving badly.

I did not want to be hostile to my government's foreign policy. I would rather be a happy patriot. The problem is that some early events opened me to the possibility that the government might behave stupidly or cruelly and once I was neutral the evidence that US foreign policy is not what it publicly pretends to be became overwhelming. I still believe that what the US government pretends to be could work though even what the US government pretends to be is more intrusive globally than I think would be most effective and most affordable. Let the foreign people screw up by themselves and only help them when a clear majority in an area want help or when something horrific is happening. These foreigners despite their poverty and backwardness are not children and will resent being treated like children. The US should not take lightly the resentment that meddling in other nations internal affairs as if they were lessor people would create.

These foreigners are not children and we Americans are not the adults. When we intervene we better be absolutely sure that we are overwhelmingly correct and they are overwhelmingly incorrect. The US government and many of it's people share the belief that we know best. We condemn Muslim modesty as oppression of women yet we fail to see that our leg shaving high heel and make up wearing culture with sexy women being used to sell everything and exploit the male weakness of natural male sexual obsession is also an oppression of women. Until the US can do better than promoting out of the frying pan and into the fire the US should refrain from trying to impose it's will and ideas.

2 The US thinking it knows what it is doing when it does not know what it is doing. This ties into what I said above. It is sort of an issue of vanity and stupid pride. When you are as dominant as the USA you have the luxury of believing whatever you want to believe and this inevitably leads to problems as whoever has this luxury will be prone to believing whatever they want to believe rather than believing the truth because believing what we want to believe is more fun. On a personal level this phenomena can lead to things like Kobe Bryant raping a girl without ever fully understanding that he was raping a girl. On an organization level this can lead to Microsoft engaging in an unethical attack on Netscape without understanding they were doing anything wrong. Wall Street by flattering itself blinded itself to the housing bubble that it created and before long will blind itself to the fact that it was Wall Street more than anybody else that created the housing bubble. The US government as the most powerful force in the world is deeply susceptible to blinding itself and I believe the government has blinded itself repeatedly and Wikileaks is a partial treatment for this blindness.

3 Being overly influenced by the voices they hear mainly campaign contributers and foreign governments and organizations capable of mounting public relations attacks against the government. These groups that have the government's attention have an agenda to warp the government's policies for their own selfish interests and they are successful at warping the government's agenda to serve their selfish interests. Once they have warped the government the government then normally partially blinds itself to the fact that it has been warped and pretends to itself that the public interest is aligned with the selfish interests of the powerful so that the government does not need to feel shame for what they have done. It is the Job of us people to make it difficult for the government to delude itself and Wikileaks helps. If you want to know how badly the government can delude itself understand that many kings and government forces actually believed in the divine right of kings and actually believed that the wealth of the "Nobility" was justified even when it was derived from very coercive enforced serfdom bordering on slavery.

4 Erring on the side of action rather than inaction. This again comes from self flattery in which the people in any job exaggerate the importance of their job. Dentists may attempt root canals that they know will probably fail because they exaggerate the importance of saving the tooth. Teeth may move after an extraction or they may stay still. Whether to do the root canal rather than a cheaper extraction should depend on what the patient can afford and on the likeness of the root canal to be successful. Nobody is more qualified than dentists at assessing whether the root canal will succeed but because they don't care about the patients financial health, and because they overvalue saving the teeth they often make the wrong decision. US foreign policy usually errs on the side of being excessively active because the people who work and teach in the field like their own feeling of the importance of their field and therefore delude themselves in favor of thinking that action is needed or advisable.

.........................................................................................

Hillary Clinton says that leaks endanger lives and harm US foreign policy which harms US national security.

First Freeport-McMoRan's security is not the same as the security of the American people and until people like Hilary Clinton can get that straight they are not qualified to speak on the subject of what does or does not endanger US National security. Al Qaeda is a threat to the national security of the American people because the US government's foreign policy put it in opposition to the self determination and therefore Al Qaeda's aspirations. Even in the Muslim world I have doubts that organizations like Al Qaeda would have 1/10th the power that they have had the West not attempted to usurp their self determination and corrupt their governments in the context of either fighting the cold war which was sort of justified or helping western corporations which was just criminal. When one nation's government aids in the corrupting of another nation's government to help a few corporations that should be considered an international crime and should be punished. It does not matter that the corrupted nation was going to be corrupt anyway, you should not participate in the corrupting. A dope dealer can't defend himself by saying if I did not supply the dope somebody else would have.

Any damage that Wikileaks does to US national security will be more than offset in the long run by Wikileaks helping to align US foreign policy with the true long term national security of the American people, which will enhance the long term national security of the American people. By inserting itself in the internal politics of all nations the US government makes enemies for the American people. If the public exposure deters US government questionable behavior that will enhance the national security of the American people. The people around the world already believe the US is messing around in their nations and often think the US is worse and more sinister than it really is. Giving these people hard evidence of what the US is doing does not concern me. Having these people know how the US actually behaves may help a few of these people realize that the US is not quite as sinister as they thought it was.

Our Enemies have their intelligence sources. Our enemies don't have as much need for Wikileaks to learn what the US government is doing as the American people have a need for Wikileaks to learn what the American government is doing.

Hilary says Wikileaks will cost the lives of some Americans or America's allies or assets. This is true, but in the long run Wikileaks will save more lives than it will cost by deterring US government involvement in questionable behavior and the resulting backlash. The government position may be that the government will not be deterred but rather just less effective and with a higher casualty rate. I have seen evidence that openness is a deterrence. I am willing to let the government's assets pay the price for openness because I am unwilling for the American and World's people to pay the price for secrecy.

 

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Nothing would excuse what was shown in the video, so there's little else to day. They willingly fired on a civilian child, and blamed the driver for bringing the child to a fight. It was only a fight from the POV of the guys with the gun, the Apache crew. The civilians were trying to pick up the dead and injured. Gunning down civilians in cold blood is NOT how you win hearts and minds.

 

You need to consider that the War Logs released previously contained nothing newsworthy, and only served as additional confirmation of things anybody paying attention to Afghanistan would've already known. This is entirely different. There are potentially serious ramifications to releasing a ton of sensitive diplomatic information pertinent to relationships between states.

While this is mostly correct, you've missed several key events that led up to the attack and provide a ton of context. In no particular order: the ground element was in near continuous contact for several hours before air support arrived and was taking small arms fire from the same general area the Reuters crew was filming from, the Reuters crew did not positively identify themselves as journalists to the coalition units (who had no idea they were there since the journalists hadn't coordinated their operations beforehand), the ground element and Apache crews positively identified RPGs and other heavy weapons on scene and EOD was called in to remove RPG tubes and rounds from the scene after the attack, and it is highly likely that the journalists were embedded with the insurgent cell the ground element was engaging at the time.

The video you were allowed to view, through the prism of hindsight and from the comfort of your computer chair, was edited to include captions for things that were unknown to the Apache aircrews at the time of the attack. My first reaction to seeing it was similar to yours, however, after reading the official investigation CENTCOM conducted after Reuters requested it (available here in PDF) I have a hard time faulting the actions of the aircrews, much more questioning their worth as human beings.

 

Why? They invented an excuse for their killing of the children. If you watch it, it's a very obvious case of denial and redirecting of blame -- the way they tell each other "That's right" when another say it's the civilians' fault that they were there. As though they were actively trying to make themselves feel less guilty.

They also celebrated the running over of a person in the tank, the shooting of people through the windshield, and gleefully shouted "Nice!' when a whole bunch of people were dead on the ground. It is as though they were googley-eyed kids in plastic helmets playing a video game.

That demographic is widespread in military men.

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More on topic: the military is purely for the losers of life. People who feed from the public trough because they couldn't cut it in their real, everday lives.

 

A battle field is intrensically a risky place to be. Most of the US casualty incidents in the first Gulf war were self inflicted. Having served in the US military, these men and women that wear the US uniform are not monsters. They have no wish to kill innocent bystanders. The US goes to great lengths and expense to avoid civilians and non combatents. We have even passed up opportunities to get Bin Ladin because of collateral damage.

The bottom line, being on a battle field is dangerous. And mistakes do happen.

 

If a battlefield opened up at your home, that'd be a risky place to be too. It would be rather monstrous for your killers to blame you for being there, though. It's risky because the soldiers made it that way. This argument is a rationalization.

 

That's a disgusting comment that says more about you than about the people you are attempting to Slander.

A large number of posters on this site routinely pop off about wikileaks without ever really understanding what is actually in the leaks, how original that material is and whether it is useful. In that sense, the leaks have become a kind of excuse -- or prop -- for the disenchanted, anti-American crowd to get up and crow about all the things they were crowing about anyway. And to some degree, I think Assange knows this, for he's clearly riding this populist sentiment to fame and headlines.

As a former journalist, I can get behind the theory of wikileaks, too. The problem is in the practice. I took pains to avoid gossip-journalism when I was on the job, and that's beginning to feel like what this entire effort really is. What "good" is really being advanced here? Bells points to four cases from the Iraq leaks, to which I would say, if Assange gave two fucks about justice and seeing it carried out, he would have highlighted those examples when he turned them over to the Media to put pressue of military.

Instead, he dumped the documents and highlighted the dubious helicopter attack, because that's more sexy, right?

As I've already argued, I have even more of a problem with this latest batch, which so far as I can tell, has absolutely no news value whatsoever. It's simply interesting in the way gossip is interesting -- and, as I already mentioned, it lets the usual crowd bang on about their favorite topics. Nothing like the public good is being achieved and the rhetorical cartwheels people like the NYT's Bill Keller are undertaking to attempt to justify publication are beginning to defy gravity. Keller's comments last night on NPR amounted to this is "history in real time" and we have a right to publish so we publish. Not terribly powerful is it?

 

Wow, you are so naive, as if only a certain small segment of the population is capable of finding war thrilling. It's a human trait. They thought they were killing an enemy, they didn't get a thrill from killing innocent people. And so what if people enlist because they couldn't make it in regular life? Those people need something useful to do.

 

Julian Assange should get the Nobel Peace Prize, but he would
have to go to Sweden to collect his medal.

:runaway:

 

As of last April WikiLeaks had relesed 10 million pages of information.

I must confess that I have not read all the pages yet.

Right, what movie star is dating what other movie star is newsworthy but there will be nothing newsworthy in 250,000 State Department cables.

I don't think Wikileaks or anybody else has read this stuff yet.

Don't blame Wikileaks for what the media thinks is newsworthy.

Basically this comes down to do you trust or do you distrust. If you trust you don't mind people knowing your information and you don't mind the government and everybody else keeping their information secret.

I don't respect or trust US foreign policy but you do respect and trust US foreign policy.

Wikileaks does not leak information; Wikileaks makes information that other people have decided should be leaked accessible to the rest of us.

The US government is not the only organization who's actions wikileaks enables us to know about.

I don't think Wikileaks has enough money to read most of what they release.

If you want to shut down WikiLeaks you might as well shut down the whole media and we should convict everybody who tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth of espionage for giving exposing peoples secrets.

 

Sure, along with dissembling, double-dealing, threats, rewards, bribes, coercion, subversion and warfare. The essence of diplomacy being the employment of appropriate tactics in appropriate times and places. This is international relations we're talking about here, not some after-school debate club.

Surely you're aware that the adjective "diplomatic" means an ability to tell people what they want to hear, without actually giving away anything?

 

This is interesting.

What does he mean here? Will whistle-blowing be outlawed? Will freedom of information be effected? :m:

 

Wikileaks = true LIBERAL democracy. If it makes warfare obsolete....too bad, so sad.

 

Ethical behavior performs better on longer time frames and unethical behavior is better for short term time frames. People don't like being screwed and over the long term it is not cost effective to screw them and then pay to protect yourself from the backlash unless you are going to significantly plunder the people you are screwing and the British and French eventually found even that to be not cost effective.

Ethical behavior can be done publicly even if it is ethical aggression and ethical coercion.

I am not satisfied with the sleazy amoral zero sum competition conventional approaches to foreign policy. We need practical systemic structures to help idealism triumph over thinly disguised versions of "the law of the jungle"/"might makes right".

 

Idealism is by its nature incompatible with practicality.

All politics - everywhere, at all time and scopes - is a dialectic comprised of a realist/practical/economic component and an idealist/ideological/moralist component. It is not possible, even in theory, for either component to "triumph" over the other in any permanent, complete sense. And this is a good thing, for such is not desirable: it would represent the total breakdown of politics and so be fatal to human organization.

The desirable thing is for the dialectic to produce useful outcomes by checking the assumptions of idealists and impelling the realists to higher causes.

 

You must be moving in much better informed circles than I am - counting this forum as one of mine.

It was not that long ago that the assertion of victory already won in Afghanistan - years ago - was common here, for example. The assertion that the "Surge" of extra soldiers and more active fighting in Iraq was predominantly responsible for the drop in killings there, and therefore a "success", is still found here from some posters. So clearly some people have a lot to learn, from these leaks or some other source previously overlooked by them.

As far as the diplomatic dump, it will of course interfere with sound and beneficial diplomacy in many ways, and that is a serious cost. But the situation obtaining is not easily dismissed as justification - exposure of great evils being perpetrated under cover of illegitimate secrecy, concealed by being wrapped in various flags and patriotic dissemblings, is a difficult matter, and worth a high price.

 

I haven't given this thread a close examination yet. Once I was privy to the precedent networks that Bradly Manning exposed. I was often tempted to do the same as he did, but thankfully in my personal case, the technology was not as convenient. I didn't open up. I was cowed by the personal dangers and balked.

Rather than fixating on the technologists such as Assange who have facilitated the dissemination of the inside, pertaining to internal communications of the US military, diplomatic, and financial hydra, I think that we who value transparency in world events owe a debt of gratitude to the people like Brad Manning who offer their lives in the service of truth. But Manning is a hero that no Rambo movie will likely applaud. Give thanks and support to this lowly enlistee, if you understand his sacrifice. Bradly Manning has given his freedom for yours.

Offering our lives in a firefight is in many ways more instant, an easier leap than offering a wider view of the classified world- a world that in my experience was surprisingly blinkered. Hollywood facades of valor still overshadow the notion that agents of truth are far braver than agents of death.

In the USA, there is a popular assumption that daddy knows best, and that our bloodied soldiers are the guardians of good. It's not a unique construct, but it's very dangerous one.

In the wake of what Brad Manning has revealed by mouthing GaGa and burning a simple CD, there will be a constriction of the "intelligence" community among the US empire and allies. after these leaks I hope that there will come a wide realization that there really is not a plane of higher knowledge directing the trajectory of great powers.

You can discern the truth. Keep an open mind, including the knowledge that no society has exclusive franchise on what is true and just. Sometimes a glimpse is sufficient to realize that the truth lies not in what we are told either through mainstream or fringe channels- it's somewhere in the middle.

There in the middle, there arrives the realization that all people of all nationalities and creeds share the same intrinsic desires and needs. There really is a higher calling to an allegiance that transcends tribes, cultures, and nationalities. There endures a defining core of human recognition that can overcome the bloody conflicts that we are seduced into participating passively or actively in.

I know it sounds very idealistic, but the glimpses that Wikileaks affords are part of a greater and more historic and humanly defining conflict, that involves the struggle between those who are shaping our aggressions and frustrations, and those who understand that there is a simpler truth and reality: We all want to live and love.

We are all victims of illusions. Yet, we can become the champions of these illusions, if we take courage to see through them. We are being set against each other for narrow profit. We can stop it, if we will simply see the big picture, and refuse to serve our elite (yet human, self-serving, fallible) masters.

History is accelerating. Technology will enable our present insecure masters to stymie us with the speed of events- unless we join in resisting a pattern and pace of perception of events that the powerful are attempting to automate. In every age, we define the human race in our collective reactions. The greatest test in this epic is Now, with you and with me.