Tag: Wikileaks

The subject title is the one from a Guardian report one of the participants in the Wikileaks document dump and explanations of.

In this first blockquote, and if in the U.S., think of all that you’ve read or especially heard since the three outlets, the Guardian where this comes from being one, helped bring out what the online Wikileaks had obtained and posted simultaneously.

One disappointed paper deliberately provided the Taliban with a to-do list: it drew their attention to specific Wikileaks documents they might inspect in order to take reprisals. The low point was perhaps reached by Channel 4 News, which respectfully quoted a “spokesman” for the bearded murderers, as he uttered promises of revenge on alleged informants. It felt like PR for the Taliban.

Posted July 30, 2010 by Youtube user AntiwarRadio (Antiwar.com/Radio/) – Scott Horton interviewed WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange:

Julian Assange, co-founder and spokesperson for WikiLeaks, discusses the 15 thousand unreleased intelligence reports from Afghanistan, efforts to get the WikiLeaks Garani massacre video ready for public release, the warning from Seymour Hersh that government officials were ready to ignore the rule of law to silence him (Assange), indications that the supposedly leaked 260,000 diplomatic cables never made it to WikiLeaks, the secret rendition program from Somalia to Kenya and how Bradley Manning’s confinement in Kuwait is essentially rendition.

Scott Horton, July 28, 2010 – transcript below

There is also an mp3 version of this interview.

This is just the recent but think back these years and all read and heard or watched, this is what a big part of recruitment looks like {and rise of hatreds and thus blowback}, add in the killing, maiming, destruction and creating refugees from their homes and country,  and add in while in theaters demeaning those that live there and their neighbors and not only in theater but across this country many doing same!

On Sunday Julian Assange through his whisteblower site WikiLeaks released what has been described as more than 90,000 secret internal US military documentary records of US military actions in Afghanistan over the past six years, sparking anger and early attempts at political ‘damage control’ from the US government. In reality the WikiLeaks release may be the biggest leak yet of documented war crimes in US history since the 1971 Pentagon Papers leak by Daniel Ellsberg.

The documents were first published online by The Guardian, the New York Times and Germany’s Der Spiegel, and include details of 144 incidents in which US and ‘coalition’ forces have killed civilians in Afghanistan and how a secret extrajudicial black ops special forces unit hunts down targets for assassination or detention without trial.

The Obama White House’s immediate response came through US national security adviser James Jones.

“The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk and threaten our national security,” ABC News reported that Jones said in a statement, apparently not recognizing that neither he nor the White House is the United States, and that in reality the United States public is who Jones would prefer to keep from knowing what’s happening in Afghanistan.

Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman in their Monday War and Peace report hosted a roundtable discussion about the document release and its ramifications with independent British journalist Stephen Grey, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, former State Department official in Afghanistan Matthew Hoh, independent journalist Rick Rowley, and investigative historian Gareth Porter:

About 59 minutes – transcript below

Also see:

A Reading List to Put the WikiLeaks ‘War Logs’ in Context

Julian Assange On Why The World Needs WikiLeaks

‘Surge’ Smoke Follows Petraeus To Afpak

The recent revelation by Wikileaks of voluminous ugly details of America’s miserable “war” in Afghanistan will provide yet another demonstration of one of our great national illusions: that America is a peace-loving nation that attacks other countries only with the greatest reluctance and seeks peace whenever possible. I predict that the Wikileaks Afghanistan documents will have no impact whatsoever on the course of the war, and that the only political consequences will be the further harassment of whistle-blowers and more moves to criminalize free speech.

For modern Americans, the purpose of war is war. It is the extreme violence we inflict on others that is the end goal of a belligerent and angry nation. The coupling of this violence with rational goals, political, economic, or strategic, has long since vanished, and we are increasingly exposed as the world’s greatest collection of violence junkies. That is why, perversely, the more shocking and ugly the revelations about the Afghan war become, the less likely they are to end that so-called war.

Afghanistan has become a theme park of deadly high-tech force for America. Thrilling GI Combat stories from Afghanistan serve a steady supply of blood and guts to violence-hungry America, and this is well understood by Obama’s mob control technicians. It is simply inconceivable for Obama to give up this war. To do so would be to rob angry America of its last remaining outlet for large scale state-sponsored killing.

This was just coming in on the MSNBC site, only minutes ago:

90,000 Afghan war documents being leaked

Previously unreported civilian deaths among the disclosures by Wikileaks

He may by now be one of the most well known whistleblowers of all time. He generates fear and anger in many powerful people, and publicly makes enemies of those who probably would have no compunctions about ordering his assassination.

He leaks and threatens to leak classified and secret information unreported to and withheld from the American public about US Government and military conduct and actions but known quite well to the victims of those actions in other countries that now has the Pentagon and the US Government “gunning” for him.

His bio at TED.com describes him this way:

You could say Australian-born Julian Assange has swapped his long-time interest in network security flaws for the far-more-suspect flaws of even bigger targets: governments and corporations. Since his early 20s, he has been using network technology to prod and probe the vulnerable edges of administrative systems, but though he was a computing hobbyist first (in 1991 he was the target of hacking charges after he accessed the computers of an Australian telecom), he’s now taken off his “white hat” and launched a career as one of the world’s most visible human-rights activists.

He calls himself “editor in chief.” He travels the globe as its spokesperson. Yet Assange’s part in WikiLeaks is clearly dicier than that: he’s become the face of a creature that, simply, many powerful organizations would rather see the world rid of. His Wikipedia entry says he is “constantly on the move,” and some speculate  that his role in publishing decrypted US military video has put him in personal danger. A controversial figure, pundits debate whether his work is reckless and does more harm than good. Amnesty International recognized him with an International Media Award in 2009.

Assange studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne. He wrote Strobe, the first free and open-source port scanner, and contributed to the book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier.

“WikiLeaks has had more scoops in three years than the Washington Post has had in 30.”

— Clay Shirky

Assange recently talked with TED’s Chris Anderson during TEDGlobal 2010 about how the WikiLeaks site operates, about what it has accomplished, and about what drives him.

The interview includes graphic clips of the US airstrike in Baghdad, taken from the “Collateral Murder” video WikiLeaks released earlier this year of the murder of two Reuters journalists and about a dozen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad by a rogue US Military command structure that runs all the way to the Commander in Chief’s office in the White House and an Apache Helicopter gunship crew who have yet to face any justice or sanction for their crimes.

Full transcript follows…