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A whistle-blower website has published what it says are more than 90,000 United States military and diplomatic reports about Afghanistan filed between 2004 and January of this year.
The first-hand accounts are the military’s own raw data on the war, including numbers killed, casualties, threat reports and the like, according to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.org, which published the material Sunday.
Here’s the link. When I prepared this post, last night, their servers were pretty much swamped.
“It is the total history of the Afghan war from 2004 to 2010, with some important exceptions — U.S. Special Forces, CIA activity and most of the activity of other non-U.S. groups,” Assange said…
The significance lies in “all of these people being killed in the small events that we haven’t heard about that numerically eclipse the big casualty events. It’s the boy killed by a shell that missed a target,” he told CNN.
“What we haven’t seen previously is all those individual deaths,” he said. “We’ve seen just the number and like Stalin said, ‘One man’s death is a tragedy, a million dead is a statistic.’ So, we’ve seen the statistic.”
The website held back about 15,000 documents from Afghanistan to protect individuals who informed on the Taliban, he said.
The easier it becomes to collect data, the easier it is to lose control of it.
98, Bobbo,
I’ll live. But don’t get used to this. Consider it a very rare occurrence.
My “issue” revolved around correcting what seemed to me a clear misunderstanding of military black ops vs. military covert ops. There are nuances. The way you have talked you seem to want to maintain that there is no difference between a military black or a covert op.
That is not how you previously said it. The way it previously read to me is you felt the use of “black” defined that the ops was covert. It was an underscoring of the word and what you concluded to be its meaning in military black ops.
And as I have already stated, so long as you’re not referencing the U.S. military with your definition of “black ops” I don’t care either.
And I was actually making a correction to a misunderstanding that I didn’t think would have met with such resistance (if you were discussing military black ops).
Ditto.
You’re certainly entitled to that opinion, but I will humbly disagree. You’re now trying to rationalize things. The phrase War against drugs is political theater.
Usually the differences revolves around size or the nuance of legal declaration. You have heard the expression losing the battle, but winning the war? And the Vietnam Conflict?
100, Bobbo,
Believe it or not, an interesting example is Area-51 and how former employees tried to sue the Federal Government due to radiation / chemical illnesses they got (and ultimately died from). They couldn’t go see a doctor because they’d violate the secrecy of Area 51. They were literally left to die suffering because they couldn’t say who or where they worked. The government said the place doesn’t exist and even pointed out the place doesn’t exist on any map. The prosecutor (now a law professor somewhere I believe) offered to drive the judge to Area 51. As a result, Bill Clinton signed an executive order that stated Area 51 exists, but due to national security no one could go there. I don’t know if the former employees got anything out of the suit.
Do you have any honest sense we weren’t connecting?
You know, thinking about my 2-3 situations, I think it might well have been a Black Ops–just not “formally” my part of it. It was covert. It was denied by the Presnedent. I had written orders that were “standard” to do what I and 1000 other guys did all the time but I knew enough about what I was doing to know that what I was doing wasn’t “standard.” Or, actually what I was doing was totally standard but it involved something that was not accurately documented. Didn’t make any difference to me. As I said, and even said at the time: “I don’t care.” And thats why I now have to work for a living.
Good times.
I’ve enjoyed listening to Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins on Book TV. He talks about being sent in to manipulate governments into having to take World Bank Loan commitments/terms and if the refuse, then a Black Ops will come in and take out the leaders. But then he says that his book was reviewed and ok’d by the powers that be. Something doesn’t match up. Hard to believe we could be so competent at controlling other economies when we can’t control our own?
Julian assange is awesome.
If I had a small piece of his talent
I am for sure going to see the Wikileaks movie when it premieres