While WikiLeaks’ leak of the secret documents about Afghanistan created a news frenzy, the media has moved on to other things. However, the situation still raise some important issues.
Not surprisingly, the folks in government have invoked the well worn phrase “national security” and other folks have said that those behind the leak are guilty of murder.
The gist of the argument for this is that the secrets leaked will put people in danger and lead to deaths (if it has not done so already). For example, it has been claimed that the documents reveal how American forces operate and this will give America’s enemies there an advantage.
This sort of argumentation has considerable appeal. After all, there is obviously information that would give enemies an advantage and this could result in more Americans dying. Even more obvious, if the documents could be used to determine the identity of those who have cooperated with the United States, then those who leaked the information would bear some responsibility if anything was done to those people.
However, there is the obvious question of whether the leaked information actually contains information that 1) would put people in danger and 2) cannot be readily found elsewhere. The folks at Wikileaks claim that the material was carefully reviewed so as to avoid leaking anything that would result in deaths. Also, it seems likely that much of the secret information is already well known. For example, the people who have been fighting Americans for years probably have a very good idea about how American forces operate. I often suspect that most government secrets are intended to be kept from the citizens rather than the enemy.
Also, if one wants to play the murder blame game, than one should be prepared to play it to the end. If those who leak the truth about what is happening in a war are guilty of murder, it would seem that those who used untruths to start and justify a war would be at least as guilty of murder.
Are you saying wilileaks did us a favor?
Where are all of the reports of US attrocities in these 1000s of documents?
The leaked reports put Afghan informants who helped ISAF in danger. It is Taliban doctrine to kill those who cooperate with us.
“If those who leak the truth about what is happening in a war are guilty of murder, it would seem that those who used untruths to start and justify a war would be at least as guilty of murder.”
What’s this have to do with the leaked material and if the leaked material is damaging or not?
Obama could just remove us from both engagements, could he not?
Are you saying that the reasons for war were made up, like in Matt Damon’s propaganda flic, The Green Zone? If so, what is your proof that people simply made up intelliegence to start wars?
Are you sad that Saddam Hussein is gone. I wonder if the Iraqi people would go back to before the war? See, what you want is painless war, but mostly no war ever.
Eat more meat, Mike. Your vegan experimentations are causing you to think like a vegan. To you, evil must have horns and a tail, or have an (R) behind its surename.
Since Julian Assange is actively helping the enemies of the U.S. it seems he has crossed over to the other side.
Welcome back magus. You in Afghanistan now? You were sorely missed. Or were you a sore that we failed to notice was missing? 🙂 Whatever.
Just want to jump in with one or two little things:
“Are you sad that Saddam Hussein is gone. I wonder if the Iraqi people would go back to before the war?” The location of this Q in your post would lead us to believe it’s got something to do with your Q “If so, what is your proof that people simply made up intelliegence to start wars?” To paraphrase you: “What does that have to do with whether intelligence was made up or not?”
Whether “the Iraqi people would go back to before the war”. . .Didn’t we go to war as a primarily as a matter of self-defense? Wasn’t the war primarily preemptive? The Iraqi resolution included the Iraqi people as an afterthought, clumped in with 10 or so other reasons. I’m pretty certain that if improving the future of the Iraqis had been the main goal, we wouldn’t have attacked Hussein.
And, where in the article did LaBossiere claim intelligence was “simply made up”? BTW, I think there is at least some evidence that principal intelligence evidence was incorrect at best (yellow cake uranium, and Powell’s mobile chem labs, and the infamous WMD’s that miraculously disappeared like Copperfield’s Statue of Liberty). It doesn’t matter who got the “intelligence” wrong or who cooked it to fit their own purposes, or who “misinterpreted” it. In the end, we got into a war based on inaccurate and/or misused “intelligence”.
Freddie,
I’m replying to Mike’s article, which goes on all kinds of tangets like so many of his articles. I’m addressing each tangent.
“In the end, we got into a war based on inaccurate and/or misused “intelligence”.”
No shit, freddie. Your mastery of the obvious has grown to epic proportions. What’s the point now? Pointing out the errors of history seems to be the great past time of scholars. Did you shed a tear when Saddam swung? I bet you did…
Did nothing good come from the war, Freddie? If you go out deer hunting and have to settle for a rabbit, at least you can still make a stew….
Colin Powell you say? He’s certainly no Bush crony.
This fits both you and Mike perfectly, my beloved Orwell, from his 1941 essay, The Lion and the Unicorn:
“If one looks back over the last quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world; and yet in not one single case were these atrocities . . . believed in and disapproved by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.”
“Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist . . . If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other . . . pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.”
“In the last twenty years western civilisation has given the intellectual security without responsibility, and in England, in particular, it has educated him in skepticism while anchoring him almost immovably in the privileged class. He has been in the position of a young man living on an allowance from a father he hates. The result is a deep feeling of guilt and resentment, not combined with any genuine desire to escape.”
“England (Read: America) is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution . . . the negative, fainéant outlook which has been fashionable among English left-wingers, the sniggering of the intellectuals at patriotism and physical courage, the persistent effort to chip away English morale and spread a hedonistic, what-do-I-get-out-of-it attitude to life, has done nothing but harm .”
“to express pro-British sentiments needs considerable moral courage.”
“. . . the Nazi radio got more material from the British left-wing press than from that of the Right. And it could hardly be otherwise, for it is chiefly in the left-wing press that serious criticism of British institutions is to be found. Every revelation about slums or social inequality, every attack on the leaders of the Tory party, every denunciation of British imperialism, was a gift for Goebbels. And not necessarily a worthless gift, for German propaganda about “British plutocracy†had considerable effect in neutral countries, especially in the earlier part of the war.”
“Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist . . . If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other . . . pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.”
“If one looks back over the last quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world; and yet in not one single case were these atrocities . . . believed in and disapproved by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.”
And so I say, Freddie, welcome. Welcome to the smarmy world of the abstract thinker. A man with under-calloused hands and an over-read mind. Welcome to a world where chimeras of great lands populated by dark-skinned people victimized by war pigs drift through the minds of people who have never really been there. Greetings from the world of too many books and too little toilings, where the very word work means that someone must be abusing someone else. We’re so glad we could find you here, amongst the over-paid and under-appreciative. Yes, you, like all of the people here, really believe that America is making places like Afghanistan worse. If only you could see, freddie. If only you would walk down a road somewhere here, without someone with a gun to make sure you didn’t get kidnapped or killed for having white skin and no beard–then Freddie, you’d wish there were a gun-toting, bible-thumping, blue-collar, Republican voting white boy from Maine standing beside you.
But then you’d have to see how the cities here grow more proseperous and safer the closer one gets to an American base. How the Afghan soldiers actually seem to absorb some of the american soldiers’ professionalism, how the streets get cleaner, the violence less intense, the people more polite and less suspicious.
And even if we can’t win here, even if we leave and the Taliban–those modern facists that the left supports by ommission (find an article on the taliban written by Mike) takes to slashing women’s and children’s faces off for flying kites, or or beheading men for drinking a beer, or hanging 7 year olds for playing soccer, at least we tried, Freddie. You come here and you tell these people, “You’re on your own now.” Tell them. Tell a kid what the next 80 years hold for his country. Utter darkness. Liberty is dead. Sorry–there are all kinds of bad places in the world, kid. You just happen to live one of them.
And then pat yourself on the back because you didnt have to drop a bomb on someone. Then go back to enjoying your easy life. “cause it aint easy over here for anyone. But the people doing the fighting against the Islamo-fascists aren’t complaining–it’s some of the people who drink whine with raised pinkys that are doing all that.
Out.
Let me get this straight. In reply to Mike’s words “used untruths” you write “If so, what is your proof that people simply made up intelliegence to start wars?”. The two concepts are not the same. An incompetent CIA could “use untruths” unknowingly because. . . they’re incompetent. Anyway, I provide three examples including the questionable WMD claims. Now 7 years have passed, no WMD’s have been found. My choices are, apparently a/ these claims are simply based on piss-poor intelligence gathered or not vetted by a piss-poor intelligence community b/ they are “untruthful” creations of an intelligence community that, by its nature deals in deception c/ Bush et al lied d/ Bush et al were fools. Feel free to add any choices I omitted.
Your defense of the errors/lies/deceptions ?: “No, shit” but let’s not dwell in the past. “Pointing out the errors of history seems to be the great past time of scholars. “”Then you proceed to quote at length from GOl who, quite ironically, is looking “back over the past quarter century”! Burke wrote “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” My take: Ignoring the past seems to be the first and last refuge of those trying to escape from the consequences of their errors or hide them.
“Colin Powell you say? He’s certainly no Bush crony.” To quote a famous scholar: ” No shit” But, again, irrelevant . He was another bearer of still-to-be-proven information.
“. . .to express pro-British (read ‘anti-American government policy’) sentiments needs considerable moral courage.” Here’s where the rubber hits the road. It is possible, you know, to love America— the country the people and the government —without agreeing with every action it takes either within its borders or internationally. But many people think that patriotism means blindly following wherever the government goes as long as it’s going in their direction (“America, love it or leave it” banners being flown at anti-war protests). That view, in my opinion, is dangerous. It’s not un-American—it’s dangerous. If you and I are both Americans, you will permit me to promote my view of what America should be and I will encourage you to do likewise.
Saddam dead. Iraqi people helped. As I pointed. out “The Iraqi Resolution included the Iraqi people as an afterthought, clumped in with 10 or so other reasons.” Great job not ‘yet’ completed. But, the question for history (assuming we haven’t erased it yet 🙁 ) should be “What level of success is necessary to justify a preemptive war based on shaky “evidence”? Why don’t we just put this all behind us and next time we can make the same mistakes?
You wax quite eloquent in your last 4 paragraphs. But, you know, I don’t like someone else thinking for me or making wild judgments based on misinformation. You’re free to do it, but it says more about you than about me. It’s the path of the name caller, who flings “spaghetti-armed metrosexual”crap-balls. “Gun-toting” is legal I believe, and regulation of gun ownership is not disallowed by the BoR–at least some 200 years of judicial precedent would seem to indicate so. As an American I am not required to carry a weapon. I am religious. I believe in a God Who is somewhat more liberal than yours I’m guessing. 🙂 In some simplistic minds, that would mean I’m going to hell and you’re not. Excuse me if I don’t “thump” my Bible or wear my religion on my sleeve. And I make an assumption, which you sometimes test, that the men, young and old who have fought for and still fight and die for our country are fighting for ALL Americans–even the people who run the corporations that build our armaments some of whom —how would YOU put it?—have ” under-calloused hands”. AND the honest people who run our banks and educate our children whose hands are similarly less calloused than they should be–having not met national requirements on “callousedness” I assume. 🙂 And our ministers and priests, most of whose hands are doughy soft. And people who have opposing opinions about certain wars. . . .