Wikileaks Vows Release '7x the Size' of Iraq Leak 491
CWmike writes "WikiLeaks has promised to release a load of information seven times bigger than the Iraq War Logs, which raised the Internet group's profile around the world and caused some nations to take notice of the issue of leaks of top-secret documents online. In a note on Twitter, WikiLeaks said, 'Next release is 7x the size of the Iraq War Logs. Intense pressure over it for months,' and asked supporters to continue donating to the cause. WikiLeaks did not say what the new release of information would be about."
Have All The Other Pages Been Read Yet? (Score:3, Insightful)
Donating (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikileaks accepts donations by mail. If you're paranoid, and you should be, buy a postal money order with cash and drop it in a mailbox. No return address!
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where does "idiots with good intentions possibly causing harm" fall in to the Good or Bad scale?
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps part of the problem making such a determination is the asymmetric nature of their leaks. They haven't been leaking any secrets from the Taliban or Al Quaida.
It's more a function of the people involved in the leaks and the amount of digital information available to send electronically than any editorial bias, but nevertheless, the benefactors of such leaks tend to be the same people rather than being evenly distributed.
7x the size or 7x bigger? (Score:1, Insightful)
Maybe (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:5, Insightful)
That depends on your personal views.
There are those who are of the opinion that these leaks are costing lives of both Western and Middle Eastern Soldiers AND Citizens - and thus releasing this information to the public essentially gives it to our enemies who then use it against us. That these leaks are causing more deaths than necessary. Opposing that some people view that essentially partaking in this conflict, by either signing up with the army or aiding with it's intelligence you've already forfeited your right to reasonable safety. The idea being they could have stopped being an informant at any point and moved far far away - so being an informant is similar to volunteering to be a soldier.
There are those who are of the opinion that the public needs to be made aware of what our military and government are doing. That indecent acts against humanity are not justified by the goal of national security. Those who think that by exposing what is going on during the wars might bring them to an end sooner, similar to the Vietnam war. There are those who think that the safety of themselves and their family are best left up to the military, and that there are some necessary evils. They might believe that those under harm from our military are rightly deserved so based upon their previous acts of violence or terrorism.
So - evaluate it how you will, theres a reason why this contraversial issue is contraversial. Make up your own mind about it.
It essentially boils down to whether you believe in the War on Terror or not.
Re:Donating (Score:3, Insightful)
No, just that the FBI would create a file on you, and your name would figure on various watch list. All of these would have nothing to do with your donation though, which would be a mere coincidence.
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:3, Insightful)
So with my admittedly meager research (reading Slashdot and other sites), I can't figure out if the Wikileaks people are good guys or bad guys. Which is it?
You can't figure it out? You like governments and corporations around the world keeping secrets from citizens at their expense?
The only problem with this years Nobel Peace Prize is that Wikileaks was a better candidate for it. (Tianmen Square was limited to China, while Wikileaks has the potential to change the world.)
For Wikileaks to possibly be in a "bad" category, it would have to do something bad. By what twisted reasoning can you find anything that Wikileaks has done somehow fit into the category of bad? The only people who could possibly suggest that there was anything bad about Wikileaks are bad people who don't like their secrets revealed. They make up lies about the consequences of revealing the secrets. They even have resorted to a smear campaign against Julian Asange. But at the end of the day, you can't find any shred of anything that Wikileaks itself has done that could be in any way construed as "wrong" or "bad".
On the side of "good" it is almost a stupid question. They do the job of reporting what governments are too cowardly and craven to face the public on. They are the megaphone for a conscious' of the myriad whistle blowers who see corruption all around them and are exasperated by the fact that nothing can be done about it, short of this desperate attempt to let the world know what is happening. Wikileaks makes it possible -- it gives whistle blowers the anonymity they need to execute their exposures.
Your question is hardly recognizable as even remotely rational.
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong. They care about doing what they think is good. What they don't care about is if you agree with what they think is good.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:4, Insightful)
Free speech is causing harm!
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:5, Insightful)
It essentially boils down to whether you believe in the War on Terror or not.
In other words, it essentially boils down to whether you're an indoctrinated drone or not. All that the government has proved lately is that terrorism works. The people lose many of their freedoms in exchange for a false sense of security, and they just accept it.
7x0 = (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't recall anything interesting coming out of the last release. I don't follow this closely at all, but I would think if there was anything really interesting it would have been picked up by enough mainstream media outlets that it would have been difficult to avoid.
So I suppose they could say that they are releasing 100 or 1000 times the amount of interesting information this time because any number multiplied by zero is...
Leaks are Symmetric (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps part of the problem making such a determination is the asymmetric nature of their leaks....It's more a function of the people involved in the leaks
No - it is more a function of how best to release the information to stop the organization. If you worked for the Taliban et al and were disgusted at their behaviour your best bet to stop that behaviour would be to secretly leak information to western governments who will then act to stop attacks. If you released it via Wikileaks your own organization would know that the information has been released and switch the attack to somewhere else and after an attack the information is public anyway.
Compare that to someone disgusted with the behaviour of a western government. The only people to whom these governments are somewhat accountable is their electorate. Hence, to stop the behaviour you are unhappy with the only choice you have is to leak the data publicly so that their electorate get to see it and demand an explanation and changes. So I would argue that the leaks might well be symmetric but that the terrorist leaks are more effective when kept secret and western government leaks more effective when made public.
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Donating (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:NO! (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't that happen recently in the Capitalist/Corporatist world?
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:3, Insightful)
heya,
The KGB is the FSB these days, I believe (more or less).
And yeah, they will find a creative way of killing you - whether it's stabbing you with a poisoned umbrella, or poisoning you slowly so you die from radiation sickness, in excruciating agony...lol.
It's kind of funny, all these silly DOWN WITH THE US IMPERIALIST jokers going around about how evil the US is - if the US were actually half as evil as you say they are, and half the cock-brained conspiracies you talk about were true, then you'd probably be lying in a shallow unmarked grave somewhere instead of ranting on like you do.
Whilst I may not agree with the recent US administrations and their various actions as such, I'm hardly gullible enough to think it's part of some far-reaching global conspiracy for world domination.
Most of what they've done has been fairly reactionary:
Afghanistan: Ok, so you bomb the WTO and kill a few thousand, we'll come over and hunt you down, and oust the government that gave you sanctuary and thumbed their noses at us.
Iraq: Ok, so you've been goading us for the past decade to give you aid, and blackmailing us with alleged WMDs - now we're fed us, we're going to come over and oust you.
Whilst neither actions may have been the wisest in terms of short-term regional stability (or fidicuary duty, for that matter - the US is plouging moutains of cash into this), it's hardly a global conspiracy - it's more a case of, you keep on throwing rocks at a dog, eventually it'll get up and bite you. Idiots.
And the Wikileaks people are a bit of a joke, at the moment.
Firstly, their alleged "war diaries" were nothing more than public domain knowledge, covering a rife of friendly-fire incidents, and well-document US military screw-ups. Sorry, but this is war - and if you're going to to retarded things - like driving *into* a US vs. insurgents firefight, you can expect to cop some flak. The lengths to which people will go to defend some obvious stupidity astounds me.
And Julian Assange seems to trying to cement his reputation as an attention-seeking little boy. I (and most people) don't know what really happened with the whole "rape" allegation, but based on his antics in the press, and his past history, whilst I seriously doubt he actually raped somebody, I don't have much trouble believing he's an arrogant little twat who probably overstepped the bounds of decency with a few girls. It's hardly like he's actually denied sleeping with them, he's just denied actually outright raping them. Poetic justice, if there ever was any.
Cheers,
Victor
WikiLeaks scared of a real challenge (Score:2, Insightful)
It's easy to pick on democracies. I'd love to see them blow the lid on countries like Iran, Syria and North Korea. They are consistently targeting the wrong guys.
Re:Have All The Other Pages Been Read Yet? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not by slashdotters. They don't even RTFA, sometimes not even RTFS.
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:0, Insightful)
Much like the hundreds of thousands of Catholic churches.
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:4, Insightful)
So with my admittedly meager research (reading Slashdot and other sites), I can't figure out if the Wikileaks people are good guys or bad guys. Which is it?
It's subjective, but in general when they reveal the cost of civilian life in the war that the government has tried to conceal that is generally viewed as them being the good guys. Conversely when they name informants/defectors within the enemy forces they would generally be viewed as bad.
Sometimes secrecy is necessary and other times it is not, it seems both sides want to for an absolute on this though.
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well I don't think they are idiots, and I'm also not sure they have good intentions. I mean what they are doing may be somewhat dangerous and certainly stirs shit up, but that doesn't make it idiotic. Doing things for the public good, even at risk to yourself, can be something very noble and necessary. So brazen perhaps, but not idiots in my opinion.
However I'm also not sure they have good intentions. To me it seems like Wikileaks is more of an ego stoke sort of things for Assanage. Leak pretty much any and everything, just to be important.
What I mean by that is it is quite clear that not all those diplomatic messages had anything to further the public good by being released, and certainly not enough to outweigh releasing classified material. There is just no way that all of them were:
1) Things people didn't already know.
2) Things they really needed to know.
3) Things that didn't have the potential to cause harm to innocents if released.
4) Things where the public's need outweighed the government's right to keep things secret.
I'm not saying some weren't I have read them, though if there were any like that in there nobody has pointed them out to me, I'm saying not all were. That Wikileaks dumped them all out says to me that it was more of an ego stoke "Look how badass we are," kind of thing more than a "Wow this is really important and the public really needs to know this," kind of thing.
So personally I think they aren't idiots, but aren't well intentioned.
Re: just stop it now. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sick and tired of rape jokes. Rape is not funny. Just don't.
The other day I overheard a 12 year old repeat a rape joke from family guy. It takes a lot to appall me but that did.
Re:I really hope it's not more US stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
You've proved your point - the US is far from perfect.
Where "far from perfect" equals "war criminals". But this is really illustrative of the ultimate futility of what Wikileaks is doing. Most Americans don't give a shit if the military is committing atrocities, either out of sheer apathy or because they actually approve of murdering civilians who are the wrong color and religion. And of those who do care and disapprove, there are people like you, who are tired of being bothered by unpleasant facts.
At the end of the day, if it involves fewer than six million Jews, hardly anyone gives a shit. And quite likely no one would give a shit about those six million Jews if the survivors and their descendants didn't work overtime to make sure that people remembered. Do you know who the other half to two-thirds of the victims of the Holocaust were? Or that they even existed?
The fundamental misconception that Julian Assange and his supporters -- including, to some extent, myself -- have about the world is the same belief that Anne Frank might have been disabused of when she was murdered in the camps: that despite everything, people are basically good. The truth is that, despite everything, hardly anyone can be bothered to pay attention unless it's painfully obvious that it affects them. And people being murdered on the other side of the planet seldom falls into that category.
The next leak is going to be seven times as large? Great. It's still going to be outweighed by public apathy by several orders of magnitude.
Re:Have All The Other Pages Been Read Yet? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think your definition of "embarrassingly large" is embarrassingly small.
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:2, Insightful)
"It's kind of funny, all these silly DOWN WITH THE US IMPERIALIST jokers going around about how evil the US is - if the US were actually half as evil as you say they are, and half the cock-brained conspiracies you talk about were true, then you'd probably be lying in a shallow unmarked grave somewhere instead of ranting on like you do."
Evil isn't necessarily for its own sake. It can be simply opportunistic. Why kill powerless dissenters when you can just ignore them and use that to show how oh so very tolerant you are? Meanwhile, the slaughter halfway across the globe continues. Evil is not disproved by the fact that someone isn't silenced when pointing it out. Evil is any terribly immoral action and the US government has no shortage of that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X78CYn_F6b8 [youtube.com] (long video, mostly reading stats but also includes judgments and conclusions based on those facts)
Your argument is flawed for that reason: evil isn't limited to quieting dissenting forum posters so the fact that they aren't silenced isn't proof that the US isn't evil.
Re:I really hope it's not more US stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
How about YOU go and find some secrets from PRC, Russia, Iran or NK and send them to Wikileaks?
Isn't that what OSS proponents do? As in "write your own patch"?
I mean, really, we are sitting here in our lazy asses, doing nothing. Yet you have the gall to complain about Wikileaks not giving out what you want to see?!
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:2, Insightful)
Regardless of what their agenda is, the exposure of ANY truth is beneficial.
New rule: anyone who makes that statement from now on has to type out their full credit-card number at the bottom of the comment.
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:5, Insightful)
That Wikileaks dumped them all out says to me that it was more of an ego stoke "Look how badass we are," kind of thing more than a "Wow this is really important and the public really needs to know this," kind of thing.
Interesting.
Why would your gut reaction to an NGO transparently presenting facts, instead of selectively filtering and editorialising, be "an ego stroke"? For me, it's the exact opposite. I see ego stroking in media organisations to the extent which they don't reveal their raw data and instead try to present me a filtered, massaged, sexed-up commentary.
But then, perhaps you're assuming that the United States military has some kind of ethical high ground by default? Me, I look at the world since 2003 with the awareness that the US President began a major war of choice, which is a war crime, by point-blank lying to the United Nations - and the people responsible for this disaster have never been prosecuted. So my assumption is that the United States military has lost all its credible need for secrecy and the people need to know the full extent of their crimes so even if it's too late for justice to be done, at least awareness of the awfulness of what was done in our name won't be buried forever.
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:5, Insightful)
> The government has no right to keep secrets.
Yes and no. Leaving aside the rather massive issue of where rights come from, there is still a little more nuance here.
First, clearly there are times when information can't or shouldn't be publicly disseminated. Perhaps the name of a teen who was raped should be withheld from the local papers; perhaps prosecutors should not tell the media everything they know about an investigation so that they will not contaminate a jury pool; perhaps police officers should withhold a lurid detail from the description of a crime so as to tell the real criminal from a copycat or imposter.
There are more controversial areas of secrecy: the placement of agents within foreign governments or industry; cryptanalysis techniques developed at NSA that make cracking certain codes easier, or the mere fact that an old code has been cracked; the exact position of every defensive emplacement in Korea; the technology used in the F-22. The public dissemination of this information at the time it is acquired will, to some extent, compromise our ability to predict or respond to threats to the nation.
That being said, I agree that the government should not be able to keep any secret indefinitely, and that in the meantime, all government secrets should be subject to civilian oversight. Anyone who legitimately encounters classified information should also be able to bring an action against the government arguing that the information should be public, if they believe it is being classified erroneously, negligently, or with reckless disregard of the people's interest in knowing the information. A jury should be used, and the procedure should be sealed unless the claimant wins, or after a default period of several decades. Some other procedural safeguards should also be employed.
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why don't you quote the rest of what he said, he explains right there in what he meant. If you have a problem with it, address that.
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:3, Insightful)
Would depend on what facts they were presenting. No matter what they'd never be presenting the whole story, nobody ever has the whole story. But let's say, for example, the facts they were presenting were my facts. All my personal information, my medical records, my tax records, my e-mails, my letters, etc. I'd be pretty fucking pissed. There is stuff in there that isn't for everyone to know, it is private. What's more it is stuff that is not of public interest, releasing it is not for the public good. Some of it is public already so releasing it is silly. Other parts are not public, but there is still no benefit to the public knowing them.
Now when it comes to the government since they are a public entity, that means that a lot more needs to be public. While my financial information is between me and my bank, theirs is something for all of us to see. However that doesn't mean that everything should be public, that the government should have no right to have information that is its own.
What the balance is? Hard to say, it is a tricky situation. However "Reveal everything," is not the right answer.
Also as for this particular leak, I've yet to be shown the smoking gun(s). I've yet to have someone show me the information that was not previously publicly known, that came to light because of this, that was so important for the public to know. The only two things I've been pointed to is:
1) There have been civilian casualties and the government knows. To this I can only say: DUH! It is war, it is nasty business. There will be collateral damage and civilian lives will be part of that. If you didn't know that it was willful ignorance on your part. That has been a part of every war in history.
2) The gunship video. If you think that's a war crime, it only shows your ignorance of the rules of war. I see nothing in that video illegal. The soldiers are cold and callous, but that is just what happens. You have to have a cold, detached, professional manner to do the job right.
As such I'm really starting to question the value. I'm not interested in reading through them all myself, but that nobody can point me to these things that so needed revealing, the information that the public needed makes me question if any is there. It makes me think the leak was just about leaking, not about any public good.
Re:Donating (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm puzzled why you think that illustrates inefficiency? What it illustrates is 1) changing demographics, and 2) refusal of voters to elect representatives who will put taxes and benefits in line with each other. It would be "inefficiency" if the government had collected enough taxes to pay the benefits, but wasted it on sales commissions or management overhead or something, but that's not the case.
Aging demographics create difficulty because the ratio of producers to consumers decreases. Social security is one way that manifests. But even if there were no government program at all, the same problem would still manifest, though in a different way - children of the elderly would bear more burden directly, poverty among the elderly would increase, etc. It's not as if the problem would magically go away.
An actual example of inefficiency in Social Security is fraud, such as collecting somebody's benefits after they die. That must certainly be combatted, but unfortunately it's just a drop in the bucket.
Re:I really hope it's not more US stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong: any soldier deliberately killing innocents, or even thieving, ought to be shot. But that's a problem with particular individuals, not the military as a whole. There may be problems with them keeping it quiet, or not punishing enough for it, but "conspiracy to conceal after the fact" is a far, far cry from the Holocaust.
My point was that Assange and his organization is losing it's independent status. So far, all their major leaks have been strongly anti-US. That hurts their credibility big-time, enough to cast suspicion over all their documents. Because it makes them look like they have a specific agenda beyond "letting information be free".
It's not like there's a lack of things worth exposing. China has enough corruption and abuse of government to last Wikileaks for years; I suspect Russia has the same. Even if you want to keep it in the Anglosphere, just look at the UK's surveillance programs. Hell, you don't even need to target governments - corporations might be an even juicier target. After all, everybody knows that soldiers aren't always nice (to put it mildly), but expose the RIAA's protection racket scheme, or exactly what Google tracks about you, or how biased the media is towards non-eventful stories. Do that, and Wikileaks starts looking more like an actual leaks site, and less like a specifically anti-American, anti-war propaganda site.
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:3, Insightful)
Firstly, their alleged "war diaries" were nothing more than public domain knowledge, covering a rife of friendly-fire incidents, and well-document US military screw-ups
Then why did US military get so upset? And why was Assange arranged to be character-assassinated while in Sweden?
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:3, Insightful)
"It's kind of funny, all these silly DOWN WITH THE US IMPERIALIST jokers going around about how evil the US is - if the US were actually half as evil as you say they are, and half the cock-brained conspiracies you talk about were true, then you'd probably be lying in a shallow unmarked grave somewhere instead of ranting on like you do."
Or even abducted, waterboarded at a US run facility, and then eventually chucked in a CIA plane, and flown to somewhere like Morocco to be more brutally tortured, before being chucked in another CIA plane and flown to guantanamo, where you will be held without trial for 7 years
before your abductors finally realise you're actually completely innocent of any wrongdoing, and then sent back home to the UK like Binyamin Mohammed? I like the fact you think the US is a beacon of justice or something, your naivety is like that of an innocent child.
"Iraq: Ok, so you've been goading us for the past decade to give you aid, and blackmailing us with alleged WMDs - now we're fed us, we're going to come over and oust you."
Goading for aid? Sorry what? This makes no sense, you don't give someone aid in this context because they're goading you, you do it because there's some tactical advantage in it for you - i.e. winning over the civilian population, preventing destabilisation, that sort of thing. What blackmailing was this regarding WMDs exactly? the allowing of inspections by UN weapons inspectors who were pretty certain that Iraq didn't have any WMDs just as it claimed? You didn't go over because you were fed up, you went over because Cheney wanted to see some improvements on his Halliburton shares and Bush wanted to try and finish off what daddy failed to do all coupled with a bit of believing their own bullshit about the war on terrorism. You're right it wasn't a global conspiracy, but I don't think anyone other than crazy conspiracy theorists would seriously suggest it was, but then that doesn't stop it being a conspiracy by a select few to cash in on their position of power to fulfil some personal agenda.
"Firstly, their alleged "war diaries" were nothing more than public domain knowledge, covering a rife of friendly-fire incidents, and well-document US military screw-ups."
It wasn't public domain that Taskforce 343, a US' "special" forces group in Afghanistan was such a fucking joke, that they'd launch salvos of missiles into a civilian compound in the hope they might just hit a few insurgents. It wasn't public domain the extent of civilian casualties the US actually had on record and in fact, denied having at all. The diaries (which presumably from your comments you haven't even looked at) expose hundreds of fuckups that never even made it to the media.
"Sorry, but this is war - and if you're going to to retarded things - like driving *into* a US vs. insurgents firefight, you can expect to cop some flak."
It's a war that these civilians never asked to be in, it's a war your country and my country took to Iraq, it's a war that's been forced upon their neighbourhood - they didn't drive into a warzone, you created a warzone in their back garden. If they see no current sign of gunfire (because Apache's sit at a fair distance away) when they drive into an area, but see injured people crawling around, then why the fuck wouldn't they help them? Are you so fucked up that you think if someone started a war in your back yard and you saw people dying slowly the first thing you should do is turn around and drive off leaving people who weren't even armed and were civilians themselves to die?
"The lengths to which people will go to defend some obvious stupidity astounds me."
Indeed, which is why it's quite ironic that you got a +5 insightful moderation. Your post is full of ignorance and stupidity throughout. Grow the fuck up, drop the patriotism and learn a bit about the world, maybe then you wont be so stupid as to demonstrate to thousands of internet readers just how ignorant some people actually are.
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree. By your own metrics:
>1) Things people didn't already know.
People knew there was torture and civilian deaths in Iraq, prior to the lead nobody had any idea of the true scale of it. Iraq Bodycount added more than 15000 to their number based on that particular leak. There had been isolated reports (Abu Ghraib) and such - but the reality of torture as a near-daily occurrence by the Iraq Army and the regular and frequent deaths of civilians at road-stops was not truly known before.
>2) Things they really needed to know.
I'm sorry but last I checked the military was funded by the civilian taxpayer and accountable to the civilian authority and thus indirectly to the civilian public. It's sort of a cornerstone of republican systems of government. If the military is condoning torture by their allies, and killing civilians without provocation at roadblocks, executing targets AFTER they surrender - then those are things the public indeed DOES need to know. It's the public's money that pays for those bullets, the public needs to know what those bullets are hitting.
>3) Things that didn't have the potential to cause harm to innocents if released.
Wikileaks spent several months working over the documents and released them in a heavily censored format. The censoring was done deliberately to ensure it could not be used to harm or locate any particular individual within the armed forces. That sounds like due diligence to me. In fact, I daresay that bringing the realities in those documents to light did not endanger innocents - but offered a significant increase in the safety of thousands of innocent civilians who have never been guilty of anything except an accident of geography - they happened to be born in a country that America is now at war with, one that never even represented a credible threat to America in the first place.
>4) Things where the public's need outweighed the government's right to keep things secret.
The government has no such right, they do however have such a need - so we occasionally and with a very limited sphere allow them, under the understanding that it must not be abused and that some sort of watchdog system must be in place. I know Bush tried to convince you all otherwise but that's how a republic is supposed to do it. The governments *need* to keep a secret must outweigh the publics RIGHT to know, and this can only ever held to be possible in a specific circumstance over a short period of time. Any other conclusion and you have absolutely no discernible, practical difference between a republic and a dictatorship.
Furthermore, I would say that any information which meets your first three metrics must by definition meet the 4th.
Re:Good Guys or Bad Guys? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've yet to have someone show me the information that was not previously publicly known, that came to light because of this, that was so important for the public to know.
The Iraq War leaks [wikipedia.org] provided details of 15,000 previously unknown civilian killings, along with the location and circumstances. That kind of information is invaluable to the Iraq Body Count Project.
That Wikipedia article contains many more "previously unknown or unconfirmed events that took place during the war". One that stands out is:
A number of the documents, as defined by Al Jazeera English, describe how US troops killed almost 700 civilians for coming too close to checkpoints, including pregnant women and the mentally ill. At least a half-dozen incidents involved Iraqi men transporting pregnant family members to hospitals.
I can't recall the U.S. military admitting to killing 700 civilians.
And what about this leaked report:
"On May 14, 2005, an American unit “OBSERVED A BLACKWATER PSD SHOOT UP A CIV VEHICLE,” killing a father and wounding his wife and daughter, a report said, referring to a Blackwater protective security detail.
The military never publicised that soldiers had observed Blackwater contractors shooting up civilian vehicles. Or the numerous other indiscriminate killings by Blackwater [nytimes.com] that the troops observed. What about this incident report, after contractors drove into a neighborhood in the northern city of Erbil and began shooting at random, setting off a firefight with an off-duty police officer and wounding three women:
"“It is assessed that this drunken group of individuals were out having a good time and firing their weapons,”"
Did the military ever voluntarily reveal that drunken contractors had gone out to have a good time shooting in a civilian neighbourhood, resulting in women being harmed?
There have been civilian casualties and the government knows. To this I can only say: DUH! It is war, it is nasty business.
Well, it wasn't supposed to be a war. The war was supposed to have been won, and this was supposed to be a peacekeeping and nation building operation. The troops and contractors and other actors are not meant to be operating under war time rules of engagement. But the leaks show that, amongst many individuals, there is a disregard for life and the rule of law.
The gunship video. If you think that's a war crime, it only shows your ignorance of the rules of war. I see nothing in that video illegal.
I've already commented on the legal issue. [slashdot.org] It is not as clear cut as you seem to think. But here's the most important issue: it is not for you or I to determine whether these men are guilty or innocent. That is a job for judges in a military court. Where is the prosecutor in this case? In any reasonable judicial system, a prosecutor would decide whether or not to pursue a court case against these individuals, and he would have to justify this decision to the public. Consider if an identical situation happened in the United States - a group of individuals, some armed - but in a state where open-carry is legal - are shot up by a police/army helicopter. A group of passing "Good Samaritans" stop to help a few minutes later, and they also get shot up. And not only is there no prosecution, there is not even an attorney general giving a reason for not pursuing a prosecution. At the very least, that is what we would expect from a civilised society that follows the rules of law.
Re:NO! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure that there ARE any more capitalist countries, except for maybe Somalia
What a great idea, let's buy all the fucking libertarians and dog-eat-dog capitalist weenies a one-way ticket to Somalia.
Re:Have All The Other Pages Been Read Yet? (Score:4, Insightful)
We're not talking about mistakes made in the heat of battle.
Re:NO! (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a silly definition of capitalism. Every dollar any government spends is a social service. Defense? Social service. Police? Social service. Etc.
The metric concerning money should not be percentage of the federal budget that is social services expenditures; the metric should be percent of income that is kept by private actors. As capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production and the means of production being operated for private profit. Seeing as how there is no type of income in the United States that is taxed greater than 50%, you'd be hard pressed to refer to the economy as socialist.
Instead, at best, you could call the US a capitalist-socialist hybrid, with it lying on the strong-capitalist side of the continuum (to borrow nomenclature from atheism classification). And, as it turns out, pretty much every country in the world is a capitalist-socialist hybrid lying on the strong-capitalist side. Perhaps there are a couple purely socialist countries or C-S hybrids lying on the strong-socialist side (too lazy to actually do research into exactly what %age of ownership in N. Korea, etc., is private).
But to call the US not capitalist based on the percentage government expenditures that are social services is just plain silly.
Re:I really hope it's not more US stuff (Score:2, Insightful)
Many sheeple run their mouths about wikileaks' anti US bias. None of them really know what they're talking about. All recent leaks came from 1 man. That one man was able to dump this much "anti US" data is a striking indictment of pentagon security policy. Neglecting the recent video, afhgan, iraq, and ensuing state dept. leaks, you will find a much more equitable distribution of leaks on the site. So STFU.
Other people running their mouth about how wikileaks has revealed nothing of merit, claiming that "of course civilians die in war, of course friendly fire costs lives," These people should be f*cking lynched. I don't care how stupid and apathetic you are, but the REVELATION of JUST ONE death that the US has denied or covered up is essential to a functioning democracy. OF course war is hell, but that in no way justifies the propagandizing deception practiced by the US.
Excuse me, back to my patriotic duty to exploit tax loop holes, enrich myself at the expense of others, and shit all over every piece shit subhuman who holds me back. It's the American way! you're either with me or under my boot you wretched lower class slime!
Re:I really hope it's not more US stuff (Score:1, Insightful)
It doesn't hurt their credibility in the slightest. The mistake you are making is to assume that Wikileaks has some sort of active role in what information is leaked. As fun as it is to imagine, Assange does not have a crack team of ninjas hunting down classified information the world over. He can only release whatever is leaked to his site, and if the current crop of leaked documents is primarily US-related (and no more "anti-US" than releasing classified documents is "anti-" whoever they were leaked from), then that's really all he can release. Exposing the RIAA or Google requires that somebody from within those organizations disclose something about them to Wikileaks.
Either you are jumping the gun here, pouncing on assumptions of what you want to see, or you have a vested interest in discrediting Wikileaks, and are pushing the anti-US angle specifically for that purpose. In any case your criticisms are invalid except to point out the possibility that many will perceive a bias that isn't there.
Re:I really hope it's not more US stuff (Score:1, Insightful)
It doesn't hurt their credibility in the slightest. The mistake you are making is assuming that Wikileaks is actively collecting this information, rather than passively receiving it. As fun as it may be to imagine, Assange does not have a crack squad of ninjas pilfering classified information around the world 24/7. The only information that exists to be published on Wikileaks is that which is leaked to it. I'm sure China, Russia, Google, and the RIAA have plenty of juicy secrets, but that doesn't make them show up on the site unless somebody within those organizations decides to send them over. As that doesn't happen on any sort of regular timetable, it is rediculous to demand that Wikileaks conform to some preconceived notion of regularity.
This should be obvious. Either you are reading what you want to see into the recent disclosures on Wikileaks without any regard to the circumstances that may have caused them, or you are actively attempting to discredit them, either out of vested interest or ideological opposition. The only legitimate point you might have is to demonstrate what impression Wikileaks might inadvertently be making on people who are paying attention but not thinking too hard, which Assange might want to take pains to clear up.