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A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.

 

The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history. The files, which were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, give a blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years, which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and more than 1,000 US troops.

 

Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama's "surge" strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US naval personnel captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.

 

The war logs also detail:

 

• How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.

 

• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

 

• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

 

• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/2...-military-leaks

 

Huge coverage of this at the guardian. Running a live update blog for reaction around the world...

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/...-logs-wikileaks

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What an awful shame the BBC take the official angle on this...

 

US says Wikileaks could 'threaten national security'

 

The United States has condemned as "irresponsible" the leak of 90,000 military records, saying publication could threaten national security.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10758578

 

The occupation is going worse than anyone imagined, the enemy are stronger and causing more damage than anyone in office will admit, the number of civilians killed and the lack of due process are exposed....and the BBC think the headline story here is that the the US aren't happy about the leak.

 

Disgusting.

Edited by Happy Face
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Jay Rosen at NYU highlights the glaring contradictions in the White House response....

 

• This leak will harm national security. (As if those words still had some kind of magical power, after all the abuse they have been party to.)

 

• There's nothing new here. (Then how could the release harm national security?)

 

• Wikileaks is irresponsible; they didn't even try to contact us! (Hold on: you're hunting the guy down and you're outraged that he didn't contact you?)

 

• Wikileaks is against the war in Afghanistan; they're not an objective news source. (So does that mean the documents they published are fake?)

 

• "The period of time covered in these documents … is before the president announced his new strategy. Some of the disconcerting things reported are exactly why the president ordered a three month policy review and a change in strategy." (Okay, so now that we too know the basis for the President's decision, that's a bad thing?)

 

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/...aks_afghan.html

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Here’s what I said on Twitter Sunday: “We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.

 

Last week, it was the Washington Post’s big series, Top Secret America, two years in the making. It reported on the massive security shadowland that has arisen since 09/11. The Post basically showed that there is no accountability, no knowledge at the center of what the system as a whole is doing, and too much “product” to make intelligent use of. We’re wasting billions upon billions of dollars on an intelligence system that does not work. It’s an explosive finding but the explosive reactions haven’t followed, not because the series didn’t do its job, but rather: the job of fixing what is broken would break the system responsible for such fixes.

 

The mental model on which most investigative journalism is based states that explosive revelations lead to public outcry; elites get the message and reform the system. But what if elites believe that reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible? What if cognitive dissonance has been insufficiently accounted for in our theories of how great journalism works… and often fails to work?

 

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/...aks_afghan.html

 

:unsure:

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A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.

 

The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history. The files, which were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, give a blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years, which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and more than 1,000 US troops.

 

Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama's "surge" strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US naval personnel captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.

 

The war logs also detail:

 

• How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.

 

• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

 

• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

 

• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/2...-military-leaks

 

Huge coverage of this at the guardian. Running a live update blog for reaction around the world...

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/...-logs-wikileaks

 

 

A few gasps of the expected outrage by the liberal types in there. Wankers should get themselves in the front line in the real world. Shoot or be shot. They will never understand. Whats wrong with hunting down Taliban leaders or any other terrorists and killing them and kicking them up to fuck first ?

 

And it isn't the publics "right" to know anything about operational matters either.

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Wankers should get themselves in the front line in the real world. Shoot or be shot.

 

Been there yourself lately? It must be hard to find the time when you're trying to work out how long your mp3s are.

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A few gasps of the expected outrage by the liberal types in there. Wankers should get themselves in the front line in the real world. Shoot or be shot. They will never understand. Whats wrong with hunting down Taliban leaders or any other terrorists and killing them and kicking them up to fuck first ?

 

And it isn't the publics "right" to know anything about operational matters either.

 

French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight. A US patrol similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers, and in 2007 Polish troops mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack.

 

Operational matters.

 

Doesn't concern us.

 

Those kids would definitley have grown up to be terrorists....even the feotus.

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Don't really have a problem with taking out Taliban leaders as you have to fight them on their terms and so on but to justify cover-ups and say the public have no right to know what is being done in our name with our money is a joke imo. Obviously they don't want us to know what they're up to but you could apply that to all sorts of shit the government get up to. Doesn't make it right though.

LM is defo ex-armed forces btw imo. Has to be.

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The MoD is blocking Wikileaks to its staff so officials can't actually view the material they are criticising.

 

:unsure:

 

Alexis Madrigal describes the publication of the documents as "a milestone in the new news ecosystem", and writes of "new conduits ... opened into the most highly regarded newsrooms in the country":

 

In the new asymmetrical journalism, it's not clear who is on what side or what the rules of engagement actually are. But the reason WikiLeaks may have just changed the media is that we found out that it doesn't really matter. Their data is good, and that's what counts.

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Wankers should get themselves in the front line in the real world. Shoot or be shot.

 

Been there yourself lately? It must be hard to find the time when you're trying to work out how long your mp3s are.

 

 

haha. Nice one. :unsure:

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Coalition cover ups. well fuck my old boots.

 

Old news. I'm just surprised the us haven't killed more of our people out there. let alone the iraqi's and afghan's.

 

 

the very nature of the beast automatically leads people to think of "cover up", even when it's a genuine security reason. That's the way it is and you won't change it.

 

You can't make such things "accountable".

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Coalition cover ups. well fuck my old boots.

 

Old news. I'm just surprised the us haven't killed more of our people out there. let alone the iraqi's and afghan's.

 

 

the very nature of the beast automatically leads people to think of "cover up", even when it's a genuine security reason. That's the way it is and you won't change it.

 

You can't make such things "accountable".

Partly true but also (and probably more so) just an excuse to keep stuff quiet that the government would rather than public didn't know about. To suggest everything that is 'covered up' is purely for security reasons just doesn't wash I'm afraid. As is evidenced by stuff that comes out after something like this. There's no way in the world it's purely for security reasons. An example is Abu Ghraib.

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Coalition cover ups. well fuck my old boots.

 

Old news. I'm just surprised the us haven't killed more of our people out there. let alone the iraqi's and afghan's.

 

 

the very nature of the beast automatically leads people to think of "cover up", even when it's a genuine security reason. That's the way it is and you won't change it.

 

You can't make such things "accountable".

Partly true but also (and probably more so) just an excuse to keep stuff quiet that the government would rather than public didn't know about. To suggest everything that is 'covered up' is purely for security reasons just doesn't wash I'm afraid. As is evidenced by stuff that comes out after something like this. There's no way in the world it's purely for security reasons. An example is Abu Ghraib.

Another is Watergate?

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Or an example from the 91,000 reports that came out today.....

 

report dated November 22, 2009, submitted by a unit called Task Force Pegasus. It describes how a convoy was stopped on a road in southern Afghanistan at an illegal checkpoint manned by what appeared to be a hundred insurgents, “middle-age males with approx 75 x AK-47’s and 15 x PKM’s.” What could be scarier than that?

 

Maybe what the soldiers found out next: these weren’t “insurgents” at all, at least not in the die-hard jihadi sense that the American public might understand the term. The gunmen were quite willing to let the convoy through, if the soldiers just forked over a two- or three-thousand-dollar bribe; and they were in the pay of a local warlord, Matiullah Khan, who was himself in the pay, ultimately, of the American public. According to a Times report this June (six months after the incident with Task Force Pegasus), Matiullah earns millions of dollars from NATO, supposedly to keep that road clear for convoys and help with American special-forces missions. Matiullah is also suspected of (and has denied) earning money “facilitating the movement of drugs along the highway.”

 

That is good to know. The Obama Administration has already expressed dismay that WikiLeaks publicized the documents, but a leak informing us that our tax dollars may be being used as seed money for a protection racket associated with a narcotics-trafficking enterprise is a good leak to have. And the checkpoint incident is, again, only one report, from one day. It will take some time to go through everything WikiLeaks has to offer—the documents cover the period from January, 2004, to December, 2009—but it is well worth it, especially since the war in Afghanistan is not winding down, but ramping up.

 

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/clos...l#ixzz0unu5ghOY

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Coalition cover ups. well fuck my old boots.

 

Old news. I'm just surprised the us haven't killed more of our people out there. let alone the iraqi's and afghan's.

 

 

the very nature of the beast automatically leads people to think of "cover up", even when it's a genuine security reason. That's the way it is and you won't change it.

 

You can't make such things "accountable".

Partly true but also (and probably more so) just an excuse to keep stuff quiet that the government would rather than public didn't know about. To suggest everything that is 'covered up' is purely for security reasons just doesn't wash I'm afraid. As is evidenced by stuff that comes out after something like this. There's no way in the world it's purely for security reasons. An example is Abu Ghraib.

 

Maybe. But the people who decide what is and what isn't made "accountable" are the same people who may or may not have something to "cover up". You won't change it, because it essentially is for security reasons. Sometimes something may go tits up but it is still covered, in essence, by the need for security when lives are involved.

 

Personally, I don't have a problem with beating up some terrorist shitbag and I also accept mistakes are made when lives are at risk, these things don't come under the "accountability" banner and never can be.

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