Julian Assange To Write For Swedish Tabloid 337
An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has signed on as a columnist for Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet. Why such a move? Maybe there's something more to be found in Swedish law when you are employed by a newspaper." Here's an account in English, including a translation of the interview that forms part of the linked Aftenbladet article.
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Relevance??? (Score:1, Insightful)
So his site hosted some content provided by someone else, and now we care what he does in his personal life?
I know, I know, I'm a troll, blah blah blah.
I'm MUCH more interested in the people who provide the CONTENT for Wikileaks. This guy is just another Drudge.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A Swedish tabloid? (Score:1, Insightful)
Aftonbladet is mostly famous for not being able to use a headline that does not contain at least two of the words death, shock, naked, sex and storm.
You can hardly write an article on alien raindeer with that limit.
Re:Swedish Law (Score:4, Insightful)
You'd have to make an argument that the Afghan state presents a clear and present danger to Sweden. Just imagine - a mostly tribal society, who scarcely make $500 per year per person, massing a military force and successfully overpowering the Swedish defense forces. After marching through either through Russia, or attacking via air corridors through Europe, or getting permission from Iran or Pakistan to build a naval base, and then building a navy to be stationed there.
The only people credulous enough for that argument are American voters.
Re:This Guy (Score:4, Insightful)
Assange didn't release the information. His source did, and could have posted it raw on the internet.
Re:This Guy (Score:5, Insightful)
You sound angry, but your anger is directed at the wrong people.
Instead of asking for the extradition of Assange, you should be asking for the court martial for the officers (high and low) who are in charge of IT security of the US army.
You should be asking for hefty refunds from the companies (undoubtedly laced with a lot of former brass) that were paid money to supply the hardware and software for the said information processing. Maybe they should cover part of the costs for helping your informants.
Those "heroes" are the people who are responsible for the data leakage and for the danger to everyone who is assisting them in Afghanistan.
Re:This Guy (Score:2, Insightful)
I am sure the informants thought they were providing the information anonymously.
The information the informants provided us also led to lost innocent lives. Are they despicable traitors with no common sense too?
Funny how Assange is a despicable traitor "journalist" who gets compared with a Nazi.
But you probably view the informants themselves as heroes yet they are no different. Think about that for a second. Informant: by definition they are people embedded within within a group, informing that groups ENEMY information about the group.
Suppose it were an american telling the taliban information -- he would be an 'informant' too. If a person leaked documents with his name... what exactly would you say about THAT?
Remember that the information our informants provide us runs do lead to innocent people getting killed too. They give us names and addresses and the locations people will be... and we drop a bomb... and maybe we hit the guy we're looking for. Maybe we kill some innocent children near by too... or maybe the information was bad and we bombed a factory making bed sheets killing a bunch of innocent people.
Re:Relevance??? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure the CIA is also much more interested in the people who provide the content for Wikileaks. Unfortunately, that's harder to find and publish.
Re:Tor Worm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Swedish Law (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahh, but you're using the actual definition of defence. I would be unsurprised if endangering troops in Afghanistan was considered a detriment to the defence of the realm, in that, if the soldiers were killed in Afghanistan the "defence force" as a whole would be weakened.
Re:This Guy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sold Out (Score:5, Insightful)
A democracy becomes nothing more than a mob if information is not released, if the government wouldn't release it, I applaud Julian Assange for having the balls to post it so the world can make a rational decision on whether it is worth it to continue the war.
Re:This Guy (Score:5, Insightful)
It is important to end imperialistic wars because it -always- bites us in the ass later on. These ever so evil Taliban fighters? Oh wait we supported them against the "evil" USSR. Saddam Hussein? Oh wait we helped him too...
If you think the US supports human rights you are sadly mistaken, imperialistic wars like the wars in the middle east and Vietnam have -always- ended up in a net loss for human rights and a net loss for the world.
Re:Swedish Law (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. All of those middle class Saudi Arabians committed a horrific crime. I'm really glad we forced the Saudi government to help us bring the remaining criminals to justice, and root out and prosecute all of their enablers. Oh wait: we didn't punish Saudi Arabia at all, or even get them to sign an extradition treaty. And where did all of the money come from?
Financing of the Plot [9-11commission.gov]
To plan and conduct their attack, the 9/11 plotters spent somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000, the vast majority of which was provided by al Qaeda. Although the origin of the funds remains unknown, extensive investigation has revealed quite a bit about the financial transactions that supported the 9/11 plot. The hijackers and their financial facilitators used the anonymity provided by the huge international and domestic financial system to move and store their money through a series of unremarkable transactions. The existing mechanisms to prevent abuse of the financial system did not fail. They were never designed to detect or disrupt transactions of the type that financed 9/11
Oh man. We totally nailed that one. It's a good thing Al Qaeda are so dumb, or they'd keep finding friendly states with zero infrastructure, and using them to launch attacks so we get stuck in intractable war after intractable war, eventually bleeding our treasury dry.
We'd never be dumb enough to fall for it, though. Right?
Re:Sold Out (Score:2, Insightful)
The sooner we end the wars the better it is for the US and the rest of the world.
Re:This Guy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sold Out (Score:5, Insightful)
But carry on. Keep obsessing and feeding the vain egotistical schmuck. Keep giving him the power to dictate and jerk you around like a dog on a leash. Put him on a pedestal as an authority and praise his name like he's some new messiah. When you find out you've been wasting your time and people get hurt you might learn.
Yes, because we all know that imperialistic wars historically have always been great, right? Oh wait... they haven't. Explain to me how by using facts and reason I'm being led like a dog on the leash.
FACT The US helped arm and fund Islamic radicals in the 80s.
FACT The US is wasting tons upon tons of money in these imperialistic wars
FACT The US has killed many civilians in this imperialistic war
Explain to me how using facts and reason is making me be a sheep? Lets see here the argument in favour of the war and the "troops" goes as follows:
We were attacked by Islamic terrorists on 9/11 THEREFORE we must invade 2 countries, kill lots of civilians, cause mass chaos and waste money and if you don't support this you are "Un-American" because terrorists are bad.
Now granted, 30 years ago the argument was:
The Communists have an atomic bomb!!! THEREFORE we must invade countless countries, support various Islamic organizations and right wing dictators and waste money if you don't support this you are "Un-American" because COMMUNISM IS EVIL JUST PURE EVIL
These documents only echo history, imperialistic wars waste taxpayer money, kill innocents, support murders and decline standards of living.
Re:This Guy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This Guy (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you actually comprehend what sort of people the Taliban are, and what they do to people who, for example, teach their daughters to read?
They are certainly no worse than serial killers in America. When was the last time police justified killing innocent American's in order to reach a serial killer by saying "Do you actually comprehend what sort of person he is. What he does to people? Sure I got a bunch of innocent children killed... but you don't understand... he was really bad."
You've never heard the police say that because it goes against everything we stand for. It ridiculous on its face. Yet if those innocent people aren't American's its somehow different? Who's moral compass is broken?
Oh wait... we're at "war" with them, right. And that makes it right how?
Are we at war with them because they are bad people who treat there daughters poorly and violate what we feel are their essential human rights? Of course not, we were even happy to SUPPORT them and PROVIDE THEM WEAPONS AND MONEY when they were serving our political interests... they weren't "nicer" back then, and they haven't really changed at all.
There is plenty of brutality in the world... Darfur springs to mind. Are we doing much about the genocide there? Hmm... nope. Genocide is bad too, right? I'd say it's even worse than medieval thinking about the education of women and outdated policies on beard length. Only a complete idiot would seriously argue that we are in afghanistan because the taliban are 'bad people'. The world is full of bad people. Yet we are in afghanistan while we write 'stern letters' to groups who are much worse.
If we were in Afghanistan to make it a better place, you might have leg to stand on. But we're not, and we're not going to make the world safer as a whole by invading other countries. Even if you WIN more innocent people have died due to the invasion than you would ever have saved by invading.
So far 15,000 to 30,000 *innocent civilians* have died in Afghanistan as a result of the war we are waging in Afghanistan. According to multiple sources we are actually killing more civilians than the Taliban are.
Good thing we are there making things better. Although I'm not sure exactly how killing innocent people more effectively than the 'bad people' makes us the 'good people'. Maybe we should stop.
Re:This Guy (Score:4, Insightful)
Democracy can only work if people have access to -all- the information available to make an informed decision.
Really? All or nothing, huh? Then how do you work out the need for secrecy and intelligence which, in turn, has proven to be a major part of any nation's security
I can agree that we need good information. We need to be wary of propoganda. We need proof to back up claims. And we need oversight of all aspects of government. But that is hardly access to all information available.
It is important to end imperialistic wars because it -always- bites us in the ass later on. These ever so evil Taliban fighters? Oh wait we supported them against the "evil" USSR. Saddam Hussein? Oh wait we helped him too...
If you think the US supports human rights you are sadly mistaken, imperialistic wars like the wars in the middle east and Vietnam have -always- ended up in a net loss for human rights and a net loss for the world.
Ahhh. You're one of these people who believe that the US operates in a vacuum; that there are no other players on the world stage. You believe that the US elects to get involved just out of a mean spirit. And if the US would only bury it's head, nothing bad would ever happen in the world. Just like in the 1930s.
Re:How has he made his living (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll absolutely bet he flies coach. But that's not the story, is it? The story is that we're supposed to want to kill the messenger for showing what lots of us would prefer stays hidden in the shadows.
We're not supposed to know about all the greasy things our government does in the name of "national security" and we're supposed to like it that way. Any challenge to this tacit agreement between citizen and government is met with extreme prejudice, because what kind of society would we be if we actually had to account for our collective actions?
I don't think the fact that Assange is still alive should give us any indication of his personal security. There are lots of ways to neutralize a threat to the power structure. We have lots of examples of how actual assassination is no longer necessary to remove a threat. Have you noticed how much news space has been taken up demonstrating that Assange may in fact may not be a perfect human being? I don't think those stories are materializing out of nowhere. Very few news stories do any more. So the main focus becomes Assange and his human foibles instead of the massive fuck-up in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
I hope dozens of wikileaks copycats spring up around the world. This responsibility should not be in the hands of any one person. I think this is a more worthy use for the Internet than just more commerce. In a decade, things like wikileaks won't be possible, especially without a world-wide movement toward net neutrality. Some people prefer not knowing about war crimes, and I guess I can understand that, unless you happen to be one of the victims.
Re:Sold Out (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you know Communism was evil? I'm an atheist, I don't have the same "right" or "wrong" moral view you might think I have. But under any definition the Soviet's were fucking evil. Stalin = GWB? You're fucking insane if you go that route. The Taliban did blow up the Towers. The US should have gone in there. Iraq is more muddled, but at the same time Saddam never should have been allowed to stay in power. You know, France loved financing his regime, but whatever. Imperialism is bad. Tell that to the Moors when they tried to conquer Europe. If the world was all hippy's I'd love to stop military spending. But you know, until that happens I'd rather the US be the power then say Iran. I know I know. 6 of 1 half a dozen of another. Just two sides the same coin. Be glad there are people that make sure you have internet access if though you shit on them.
Yes, the Soviets did do evil things, so did the US, so did the UK, so did Germany, etc. All governments are corrupt by definition. If you look at the reasons why the Taliban had the resources to blow up the towers is because we funded it yes, our tax dollars went to support the very people who we are fighting.
Theres nothing wrong with defending a country from foreign attacks, but defend it, don't go out looking for a fight. When we go out looking for a fight, we end up paying for the bullets that they use to shoot at us with. I'm not a "hippie" I'm not a pacifist, I do however know history and history isn't on the side of those who wage imperialistic wars, especially the US. Get out of the middle east and the rest of the world, cut military and domestic spending by a lot, decrease taxes and watch the economy grow leaps and bounds.
Anonymous Coward (Score:2, Insightful)
Reading this, I am stricken by how many people refer the the US as a democracy. IT'S NOT A DEMOCRACY!!! Never has been, never will. Our founding fathers made sure of that.
It's a Constitutional Republic.
Now back to your local news.....
Re:This Guy (Score:3, Insightful)
Come on, if you are a minor clerk in a local office of a large international bank, there's no way in hell you'll end up with all the sales and PR communications of the bank over a 5 or 6 year period. NO WAY AT ALL.
So, how is it possible that a lowly bolt (or nut) in the mighty US army machine did just that? Only one way - criminal negligence on the part of his superiors, and those who work for them.
I am sure that the of the people who are responsible for this are the same people who are leveraging all their Pentagon power to shift the blame from the sick sheep to the healthy one.
They, and not Assagne are at fault and should be blamed for eventual harm done, because keeping those data safe is squarely THEIR responsibility, not Wikileaks'. Wikileaks' responsibility, whatever their agenda is, is leaking data.
Too bad the lot of you people who pay for those jerks are ready to bend over and swallow whatever BS they dump your way, when, instead, you should be thinking something along the lines of "OMG HOW MANY LOWLY SOLDIERS HAVE GOTTEN RICH BY SELLING THIS SHIT TO PEOPLE WHO DONT LEAK IT"
Alas, patriotism kills reason.
Re:Tor Worm (Score:4, Insightful)
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids places looking for child pornography now? I would've thought that'd be a matter for the FBI, since they have primary jurisdiction over child pornography investigations & enforcement.
Sorry, but this story sounds pretty sketchy.
Wow, easy on the kool-aid (Score:5, Insightful)
We saw the video. It showed very clearly how the US deals with unarmed civilians. Only a total fool would deny it.
The truth, it hurts doesn't it?
gosh, go undercover with the US army. You mean emigrate to the US, enlist, be assigned to afghanistan, film? Oh you mean go with some US troops who know they got a reporter with them and capture them on video behaving as if there was a reporter present?
Just how big a fool are you?
Re:This Guy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This Guy (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I personally always thought that if we'd tread a little more softly instead of trying to find someone to go to war with about 9/11 we might have avoided the whole thing, though I understood how we got into the war once we'd gotten to that point.
Why we did our usual proxy fighting using the so called "Northern Alliance" who were really a bunch of opium growing warlords who weren't really all that much better than the Taliban they were replacing I don't really know. I would have thought that the whole Osama/Sadaam thing would have taught us that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
I'm even more surprised that anyone is shocked that after supporting the expansion of a bunch of warlords and then installing a corrupt puppet(who we lost the strings for) didn't result in economic and governmental stability. Or for that matter why we keep insisting that we want people to have democracy and then trying over and over again until we get democratic results we like.
Man at least someone is paying attention (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I the only one who looks around these days and wonders where the hell we went wrong? Look around you folks, because we the geeks are the last remaining american product this side of hollywood. The guy in the white house is too cool to solve pretty much anything, and the last guy was about the dumbest, most self-interested shill in history. At least this Assange guy is trying to preserve some semblance of the truth, so people of the future can learn from it (not that knowing the truth has really helped much before). I think the guy deserves protection, and good for him if he back-doors his way into it. He is serving the public whether they like it or not, which is ballsy and will probably end badly, but hey more power to him.
I find it fascinating that we are losing Afghanistan to the most primitive people on earth, and at the same time ONE GUY is able to stymie the entire Intelligence community by telling the truth about it. So with these facts before us, what exactly is worth 700$Billion per year that we spend on defense? Oh and lest we forget, even with google maps we haven't found Bin Laden's cave either. I think we as a country are wasting our time, and letting our best resource (young people) learn lessons in war and imperialism that we should have learned from Vietnam years ago. 10 years... my god.
Re:Sold Out (Score:3, Insightful)
Look back 30 years, how the hell do you think the Taliban got into power? Oh wait, back then Russia was the "bad guy" and fundamentalist Islam was the "good guy" so we ended up supplying them with guns, bombs, etc.
The Taliban as they are now didn't exist 30 years ago. The US supported various mujahideen factions. In the power vacuum left by Soviet withdrawl, those factions fought each other. Pakistan wanted both influence in the region and to stop hijacking of their trucking routes in to the country so they put heavy support behind a small student group that, in turn, fought various mujahideen who causing problems. That's how the Taliban got in to power.
The notion that the US is behind the Taliban is, at best, a very loose interpretation. Certainly, US influence was felt in the region and armaments were probably left over from the fight with the Soviets. But ironically, if the US was truely involved in an imperialistic war, there would have been no opportunity for the Taliban. As it is, the US lost interest in Afghanistan as soon as the Soviets left and left it to fall in to chaos.
How do you think Hussein got into power? Oh wait we helped him get into power...
Saddam got in to power by being a major political leader in a group that overthrew the former government via a coup. He then consolidated his power over several years before managing to take the leadership reins from the ailing leader at the time. He further cemented his position by having a number of members in his political party denounced as traitors and executed.
Saddam managed to get Soviet support early on. However, Iraq later cracked down on Iraqi communists and Iraq began to favor the West. The French were major supporters and consequently the vast majority of Iraq's military armament comes from Soviet and French sources.
The US certainly supported Saddam's Iraq. It was a modernized, secular government in a region that lacked many similar examples. It countered Iranian influence in the region. And, to some extent, supporting Iraq helped counter Soviet influence as well. However, the notion that the US put Saddam in to power is absurd.
The sooner we end the wars the better it is for the US and the rest of the world.
I completely agree. But it would seem the world is not that kind of place and won't be any time soon.
Re:Proper translation into Swedish- (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This Guy (Score:3, Insightful)
"but currently, he is the only one not being punished for his part."
I was not aware that the superior officers of Mr. Bradley Mannings were arrested and facing court martial or other disciplinary action. Can you provide a link?
"There is simply no reason why Assange should go unprosecuted."
Under the laws of which country could that happen, and what would be his crime?
Re:This Guy (Score:3, Insightful)
So PFCs (which I understood to be Private, First Class) are high-ranking people in the US military, are they?
Re:This Guy (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, it is written in the first paragraph - his job was to support his _immediate_ command.
Anything that doesn't support his immediate command is quite obviously outside of the scope his duties.
Re:Swedish Law (Score:5, Insightful)
"There is no parallel there because neither Bin Laden or Al Qeada faced such a threat if prosecuted in the US in 2001."
of course, they wouldn't torture them on US soil, they'd have sent them over to gitmo or some other facility first.
If you don't remember the UK stopped sending prisioners to the us a while back because
"Given the clear differences in definition, the UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture " - Foreign Affairs Select Committee
Remember a while back when the US government decided that it's not torture, it's freedom tickling as long as it's the US doing it?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7515517.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Lets make the situation clearer for you- say American terrorists killed a lot of people in another country.
Random scenario, lets say some crazy chirstian sect who think the muslims are taking over the world blew up the Royal Méridien Hotel and killed a few thousand people.
Lets say the people who carried out the bombing were mostly mexicans with a few canadians in the mix but no americans took part.
So the UAE demands the united states turn over the leader and members of one of the crazy terrorist chirstian organisations, probably the ones responsible but not certain.
The UAE offer no evidence, they offer no proof at all that people they're demanding are responsible.
At this point what should the US do?
1:Just hand over US citizens with no proof that they've committed any crime?(Would this even be constitutional?)
2:Demand proof that they're actually responsible rather than just hand over US citizens on the good word of an unfriendly forgien government?
3:Tell the UAE to fuck off.
Now lets say the UAE had a much stronger military than the US.
Now lets say the US has demanded proof, would the correct course of action for the UAE now be to
1: Give proof?
2: Bomb the shit out of some US cities to show that they really mean buisness?
Re:Or they could board a plane (Score:2, Insightful)
As of today, nearly 9 years after 9/11, we still do not have an extradition treaty with either nation. Even if we had discovered evidence to charge someone with, we could not extradite them to face charges for their crimes.
Are you sure you really want an extradition treaty with them? Put another way, if a US citizen travels to Saudi Arabia, violates local laws there and then returns home, do you really want the FBI to come in and arrest him and put him on a plane to Saudi Arabia so he can be tried there?
Or do you mean that it should only be *us* being able to have *them* extradited?
Re:How has he made his living (Score:5, Insightful)
And what exactly did he tell us about what [...] "war crimes" are you talking about? Care to cite any examples?
And yet, I haven't seen anything that justifies [...] quite clearly putting lives of our Afghan allies and our own soldiers a risk.
(Pardon the elisions, I wanted to contrast those two statements. I don't think I've altered your intended meaning.)
Do you see the contradiction? You have accepted without evidence the claims that the leak "quite clearly" puts soldiers at risk, but you won't accept claims that the reports detail unlawful civilian killings, instead demanding proof.
Shouldn't you extend the same skepticism to the government's claims?
That said, I think Wikileaks screwed up the release by dumping it all at once. Since the US Gov was primed for it (after the arrest of PFC Manning) they were ready to counter-attack by making the issue about the leak itself, not the contents of the leak.
It would have been better doled out in smaller event-specific lumps. (Such as the Polish mortar attack on a village. Or the US Marine panic killing of civilians.) And better to have first privately, then publicly, approached other governments (UK, other NATO, Afghan, etc) to request help with hiding names of Afghani informants. They'd probably refuse, but you'd have media reports of the attempts before anything was released.
Re:How has he made his living (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's not focus on the wrong question. Which is the greater risk to lives, both those in our services and those of innocent civilians, and to the health and standing of our republic: that posed by information released in these files or that posed by the state of the war being mis-represented to the body politic?
If some informants die or similar because wikileaks didn't scrub the data well enough, that is a tragedy. However, the magnitude of that loss is much less than that implicit in hiding the poor execution of an ongoing war effort.
Which is the more applicable truism in this case, "Loose ips sink ships." or "Democracy dies behind closed doors."? Comparing the lack of sudden tactical reversals and the upsurge in authoritarian posturing since this development, it seems to me that the latter is more apropos.
Re:Relevance??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Good point. I was just thinking the other day that, say, the US government could release "leaked" "Iranian" papers on their "nuclear weapons plans" to WikiLeaks. The leak would be more credible coming from a third party than if the US government said they obtained them. Iran would deny that the papers are real...just as they would if the papers WERE real. And this could help justify the US going to war with Iran.
But luckily that won't happen as the US is chin-deep in two other wars at the moment. But a technologically capable group of nutjobs ("fuck up their shit" anarchists/right-wing militia) could do the same thing just to stir up some shit.
Israel, on the other hand, probably has the available resources...
Re:Man at least someone is paying attention (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, there's your problem, right there. If you go around dismissing people as "primitive" without bothering to spend even a minute finding about these so called "primitive" people then don't be supprised when they kick your ass.
Re:Wow, easy on the kool-aid (Score:1, Insightful)
So, you're saying that the U.S. military helicopters have the right to kill random people on the ground with guns, without any identified threat, without warning. I don't have any problem with that, as long as you don't resort to the moral rhetoric as the justification of this war. This is an ordinary aggression of a power to subdue its opponents.
The "no identified threat" part isn't true though. They, ahem, identified a threat to the 'copter -- the camera equipment (so you're either wrong or go back to the above paragraph). An honest mistake. Until you start killing the civilians who try to help the injured, that is.
We were able to see this, because it has been recorded. And because a reporter to a western agency was killed. And because the agency wasn't content with the excuses given and didn't give up the case. And because somebody had the courage to risk this much to leak the video.
Can you guess, going backwards through this list, multiplying the possibilities, how much cruelty must have been done? (This came to me when I first saw the leaked Abu Gharib abuse pics.)
Re:How has he made his living (Score:3, Insightful)
(It's a bit late in the thread, but if there's anyone with mod-points left wandering around, please reverse the -1 Flamebait mods to Clarkkent09's two messages. It's obvious he's expressing a genuine belief, not trying to provoke a mindless flamewar. Suppressing a poster you disagree with isn't a fair use of mod-points. Hell, we're even sort of almost vaguely on topic.)
I think it is "quite clear" that publishing the names of Afghans who, in Taliban's view, collaborate with the enemy puts their lives [...] at risk without any further evidence needed.
Accepted.
Same for publishing operational details, even coordinates of ground bases etc. Basically any information that helps the enemy be even a little bit more effective in fighting us obviously also puts lives at risk.
No. You have to work out the net effect. Unnecessary civilian deaths drive potential allies (and neutrals) towards the enemy. That puts a hell of a lot more lives at risk than two year old patrol routes. Or long established bases.
(The reports shows such effects. Apparently the US Marine shooting I mentioned was followed by civilian rioting and had local authorities begging the US to stop patrols in that area because they feared mixing angry-shouty relatives and panicky Marines. Such events provide aid and comfort to the enemy and should be treated as such. Failure to do so is to harm the US and its allies. Any commander that covers up a civilian killing should be publicly executed.)
Btw, accidentally shooting some civilians is not a war crime. You have to show intent.
Wilful disregard is enough. (Not that anyone ever enforces that one.)
My point, however, stands. You've placed unquestioning faith in unsupported claims that the reports will get soldiers killed at some hypothetical time in the future, but won't accept claims that the reports contain records of unlawful civilian killings, unless someone details it for you. (And be honest, would you even accept it then?)