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Here, have 91,000 classified Afghan War documents

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wdtony:
The vision behind it is really quite ancient: in order to make any sensible decision you need to know what's really going on, and in order to make any just decision you need to know and understand what abuses or plans for abuses are occurring. As technologists, we can see that big reforms come when the public and decision makers can see what's really going on.

I couldn't agree more. This reminds me of the secretive nature of residential treatment programs and how they hide abuses behind confidentiality/patient privacy, etc.

Ursus:
Forgot to include this comment for an earlier article before I posted the interview with Assange...

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Comment left for the above article, "Afghan War Unmasked By Massive Leak Of Military Files" (by Robert Tait, 26.07.2010, RFE/RL, Inc.):


by: Bill Webb from: Phoenix, AZ, U.S.A. · July 27, 2010 01:25
144 incidents that resulted in 195 civilians being killed and 174 being wounded.
The acts of the Taliban and al-Queda approach that number of casualties in single blatant attacks against civilian targets time and time again. They are the ones slaughtering civilians, not the NATO troops.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty © 2010 RFE/RL, Inc.

Pile of Dead Kids:
Ursus. Seriously, man. Stop posting comments on this one. There's a billion trillion bazillion comments on this subject encompassing the entire fucking Internet. You do not need to archive this.

Ursus:
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Afghan War Leak Stirs Intense U.S. Debate


In this U.S. military handout photo, U.S. Army soldiers from Provincial Reconstruction Team-Paktika walk down a street in Sharana, in Afghanistan's Paktika Province, in 2009.

July 27, 2010
By Richard Solash

 As U.S. officials try to contain fallout from Wikileaks' release of reams of secret documents on the war in Afghanistan, U.S. pundits and the public are also having their say.

With doubts already mounting about the trajectory of the nine-year military campaign in Afghanistan, the new information could heighten American disillusionment.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs chose his words carefully when asked by a reporter to describe President Barack Obama's reaction to the leak. Gibbs characterized it as "more than 90,000 top secret documents which are against the law" to provide to reporters.

"I think it would be safe to say it's alarming to find them published on a website," he added.

The classified reports from the Afghan war, released on July 25 by the whistleblower website Wikileaks, exposes unreported civilian deaths as well as allegations of collusion between Pakistan's intelligence agency and the Taliban, among other sensitive revelations.

Meanwhile, "The New York Times" was reporting that leaders in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives were pressing for a vote on a key war-funding bill as soon as today, amid concerns that Democratic support for the war effort could ebb.

Skepticism All Around

While Gibbs said nothing more about Obama's reaction to the leak, the public was voicing its own take on the dramatic data dump.

With doubts already deepening about the success of U.S. policy in the war, the new information is showing signs of causing even more public disillusionment.

Still others chided Wikileaks for the release, as headlines across the United States tried to make sense of it all and the blogosphere buzzed with reactions.

"No news here," read one reader comment posted on the website of the "New York Times." "If you followed any myriad of blogs [by soldiers who had fought in Afghanistan] you would have known many years ago that this was war not winnable."

White House spokesman Gibbs largely agreed with the first half of that statement as he briefed reporters on July 26.

"I don't think that what is being reported hasn't, in many ways, been publicly discussed either by you all [reporters] or by representatives of the U.S. government for quite some time," Gibbs said.

But the "New York Times" letter writer was among many public commentators who saw the newly released information as confirmation that their skepticism about U.S. involvement in the war is correct.

A July 13 Gallup poll showed that 60 percent of Americans believe that things are not going well for the United States in Afghanistan.

According to one "Washington Post" reader, the leaked reports are "an attempt to point out the truth which is that this nation is completely and totally wasting lives, tax dollars and our moral authority on our occupation of Afghanistan, which will end much like the Soviet occupation did no matter what general is installed at the top."

Echoing the sentiments of many of their readers, newspapers from the East Coast to the West Coast described the picture of the Afghan war painted by the leak as "grim" and "bleak."

One "Los Angeles Times" reader wrote, "If I knew that these wars would continue indefinitely, I would have voted [in the 2008 election] for John McCain."

Controversial Whistleblower

In some quarters, there was condemnation or the organization behind the leak, with a number of bloggers calling Wikileaks founder Julian Assange a "traitor."

A page on Facebook called "Shutdown Wikileaks" was created, apparently in response to the recent release. Its creator, who identifies himself as a member of the U.S. Air Force, posted: "They [at Wikileaks] promote freedom of speech, yet they endanger those who fight for it."

At the same time, membership on Facebook's Wikileaks supporters' page mushroomed to nearly 60,000, a number that has jumped markedly since the Afghan report leak.

David Streko, a former member of the U.S. Army, said he doesn't expect the leak to drive public consensus on the war.

"I just think that the people who are against the war now have some more ammunition to be against it and the people who are for it -- who don't want to criticize America -- are just going to blow this off. I don't think it's really going to sway or change anything," Streko told RFE/RL.

But if that remains the case, Streko acknowledges, those who question the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan will still be the majority.

Many readers and bloggers are anticipating the release of thousands more classified documents on the Afghan war that Wikileaks says it possesses. The documents already leaked are being described as the biggest revelation of classified reports in U.S. history.

More than one commentator has taken an ironic tack, describing the release of the Afghan files as a larger leak than the three-month-long gush of oil from a BP well in the Gulf of Mexico.

Rising Voices?

The powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, was the first in Congress to respond, and he did so with a direct challenge to the administration.

"However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan," Kerry's statement said. "Those policies are at a critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right."

His words could have political consequences for Obama, who has faced increasing criticism over the lack of progress in the war. The U.S. president's next review of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is set for December.

Political analysts interpreted Kerry's comments as signaling that he might hold hearings on the reports.

Less obviously, they say, might be his message to the White House that it needs to directly address the failings the reports have uncovered.


Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty © 2010 RFE/RL, Inc.

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Former Spymaster Rejects WikiLeaks Charges As U.S. Pre-Exit Smear


Former Inter-Services Intelligence head Hamid Gul gives a "victory" sign after his arrest under a state of emergency in Islamabad in 2007.

July 27, 2010
By RFE/RL

A former Pakistani general implicated in militant activities by this week's WikiLeaks document dump has refuted allegations of wrongdoing.

Hamid Gul, a former head of Pakistan's premiere intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), told RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal that he does not support the Taliban and accused the United States of using him to ease a disgraced withdrawal from fighting in Afghanistan. He called the leaked documents "fabricated."

A handful of the tens of thousands of U.S. military incident and intelligence reports leaked by the whistle-blower website name Gul, whom former Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardai once famously labeled "the political ideologue of terror," as a key facilitator of Afghan insurgents in Pakistan.

'An Open Book'

The 73-year-old Gul said he left the Pakistani military 18 years ago and lives in retirement in Rawalpindi, a city next to the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, that serves as the military headquarters.

"I am like an open book. Every day scores of people visit me from dawn to dusk," Gul said. "The journalists, media people particularly, international TV crews, come to hear my perspective about American involvement in Afghanistan -- I call it aggression and oppose it on moral grounds."

Reports made public by WikiLeaks accuse Gul of organizing mine attacks against Afghan and international troops. He is also accused of organizing the kidnapping of United Nations officials and attending a meeting in the tribal borderland of Arab jihadists who were planning to send suicide bombers to Afghanistan.

Gul headed Pakistan's ISI from 1987 to 1989, when the Red Army left Afghanistan. In the spring of 1989, Gul engineered a large-scale rebel offensive against the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. That offensive failed miserably because the anti-Soviet Afghan Islamist guerrillas were ill-prepared for a conventional battle against communist Afghan forces. More than 1,000 guerrillas -- including hundreds of Arabs -- were killed in the two-month siege of the city.

Vocal U.S. Critic

After his retirement from the military, Gul became a prominent supporter of Pakistan-based Islamist militant groups that were active in Kashmir and Afghanistan. He opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, and often predicts a strategic debacle for Washington in his speeches and media interviews.

After deadly attacks by militants in the Indian city of Mumbai in November 2008, Washington unsuccessfully urged the United Nations to include Gul on its list of international terrorists over his alleged links to Pakistani militants behind the attacks.

Gul said he regards the WikiLeaks episode as a sign that Washington is preparing to pull out of Afghanistan in failure and is now looking for scapegoats to help it save face. He described it as "a sign of defeat to credit an old retired general [with being] instrumental in [an] American defeat."

Gul suggested that Washington wanted to use the leaks as part of its exit strategy from Afghanistan.


U.S. soldiers en route from Afghanistan (file photo)

"They have decided the timing of their withdrawal [from Afghanistan]. But they are timing it to pressure Pakistan so that they have some victory before the flame [of their power] extinguishes," he said. "They want Pakistan to attack [militant sanctuaries] in North Waziristan [tribal region] -- something that Pakistan is reluctant to do."

Analysts in Islamabad suggest that the information in the WikiLeaks documents is mostly sourced to biased Afghan informants and intelligence operatives. They say those views are colored by hatred of Islamabad's role in Afghan affairs.

Officials in the two countries have a long history of mistrust that has accompanied six decades of acrimonious relations.

written by RFE/RL correspondent Abubakar Siddique in Prague based on an interview by Radio Mashaal correspondent Ahmad Ullah


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