new wikileaks cache of defense department documents about iraq - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 10-17-2010, 05:16 PM

this is pretty self explanatory---just note that the section in bold below is a side-bar if you chase the link. it's probably easier to read the piece that way...

Quote:

Superbombs and Secret Jails: What to Look for in WikiLeaks’ Iraq Docs

The Afghanistan war logs were just the beginning. Coming as early as next week, WikiLeaks plans to disclose a new trove of military documents, this time covering some of the toughest years of the Iraq war. Up to 400,000 reports from 2004 to 2009 could be revealed this time — five times the size of the Afghan document dump.

It’s a perilous time in Iraq. Politicians are stitching together a new government. U.S. troops are supposed to leave by next December.

Pentagon leaders were furious over the Afghanistan documents, but the American public largely greeted them with yawns. Iraqis might not be so sanguine.

It’s hard to imagine Iraq will fall back into widespread chaos over the disclosures. But they can’t be good for the United States, as it tries to create a new postwar relationship with Iraq, or for the 50,000 U.S. troops and diplomats still over there.

Will 400,000 Secret Iraq War Documents Restore WikiLeaks’ Sheen?

After a brief quiescence, the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks is about to explode again onto the global stage with the impending release of almost 400,000 secret U.S. Army reports from the Iraq War, marking the largest military leak in U.S. history.

Measured by size, the database will dwarf the 92,000-entry Afghan war log WikiLeaks partially published last July. “It will be huge,” says a source familiar with WikiLeaks’ operations, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Former WikiLeaks staffers say the document dump was at one time scheduled for Monday, October 18, though the publication date may well have been moved since then. Some large media outlets were provided an embargoed copy of the database in August.

In Washington, the Pentagon is bracing for the impact. The Defense Department believes the leak is a compilation of the “Significant Activities,” or SIGACTS, reports from the Iraq War, and officials have assembled a 120-person taskforce that’s been scouring the database to prepare for the leak, according to spokesman Col. Dave Lapan.

“They’ve been doing that analysis for some time and have been providing information to Central Command and to our allies, so that they could prepare for a possible impact of the release [and] could take appropriate steps,” says Lapan. “There are … things that could be contained in the documents that could be harmful to operations, to sources and methods.”

Continue reading on Threat Level …

We don’t know what’s in the documents. But here’s what we’ll be looking to find in the trove — and some unanswered questions that the documents might address.

The Rise of Roadside Bombs

Iraq is more a war. It was a proving ground for today’s signature weapon: the improvised explosive device. Insurgents raided Iraq’s military weapons silos to jury-rig devices set off by a simple cellphone.

Later, they bent bomb casings into cones to form the deadlier Explosively Formed Projectile, essentially a bomb that shoots a jet of molten metal into and through an armored vehicle.

Conflicting reports credited the “superbombs” to Iran, or not. Look to the WikiLeaked documents for supporting evidence either way.

Early on, the military found that its jammers — devices emitting frequencies to block those believed to detonate bombs — didn’t work. Worse, rumor was the jammers actually set the bombs off themselves.

We could be about to learn a lot more about how U.S. forces endured the first new bomb threat of the 21st century.

Abu Ghraib and Missing Jails

The Abu Ghraib detainee-abuse scandal was one of the worst strategic debacles in recent U.S. history. Aides to Gen. David Petraeus candidly said it inspired foreign fighters to join the Iraq insurgency.

Only one prison scandal came to light after Abu Ghraib: torture at the Special Ops facility known as “Camp Nama.” But journalists lost visibility into how the United States ran its detention complex in Iraq. Only in 2007, when Petraeus put Maj. Gen. Doug Stone in charge of rehabbing captured insurgents, did any sunlight return.

What happened for three years in the U.S. jails where tens of thousands of Iraqis were held?

Lost U.S. Guns

The Government Accountability Office reported in 2007 that the military had simply lost nearly 200,000 AK-47s and pistols it intended for Iraqi soldiers and police. Its documentation was a mess in 2004 and ‘05, when Petraeus ran the training mission. Many of those guns are believed to have made their way to the black market and to insurgents.

The leaks may shed some light on how thousands of guns fell off the back of a truck.

Ethnic Cleansing of Baghdad

Shiite death squads and Sunni insurgents each preyed on the other side’s civilians in 2005 and 2006. More than a million Baghdadis were displaced from their homes in a massive demographic shift between March 2006 and July 2007.

It’s never been clear how much the U.S. military knew about the cleansing. Low-level units watched it happen. And American psychological-operations troops certainly played on the religious splits to win local support.

But Gen. George Casey, then the top general in Iraq and now the Army’s chief of staff, has never answered questions about it. If the logs document the cleansing, he may have to speak up.
Drones

As much as the air war in Iraq became defined by the “Shock and Awe” bombing raids of its opening salvo, from the start there were at least ten types of unmanned planes the United States used for surveillance — from the Marines’ Dragon Eye to the Air Force’s iconic Predator.

But how did they prove their value to soldiers and Marines in Iraq? Gen. Petraeus says drones were crucial to the spring 2008 battle in Sadr City, finding targets for the troops below. And a secret task force used drone-fired missiles to kill bomb-planting insurgents.

What other spy gear was employed? Bob Woodward claims a “secret weapon” helped turned the war’s tide.

Could we see hints of it in the new WikiLeaks?
The Air War And More ‘Collateral Murders’

WikiLeaks makes no apologies for its antiwar agenda. Its Iraq and Afghanistan disclosures are designed to weaken support for both wars.

That’s why we should expect to see a lot more material like its gruesome April video showing an Apache helicopter killing people — including a Reuters photographer — who didn’t threaten its crew. The video suggests that other combat aircraft in the confusing urban environments of Iraq might have also engaged in similar mistargeting.

If there are accounts of civilian casualties from what used to be an intense,
violent air war — including, perhaps, hidden military documentation about the so-called “Collateral Murder” incident — WikiLeaks is going to publish them.

Superbombs and Secret Jails: What to Look for in WikiLeaks’ Iraq Docs | Danger Room | Wired.com

i wasn't aware that this was on the horizon, but guess that we'll all likely know something relatively soon about this cache of documents about the war in iraq.

at this point, the thread is largely a heads up that might acquire different focus once the materials are released.

for myself, i'm looking forward to reading this material. there's been information available for some time that reveal aspects of the realities behind the wall of mirrors created by press pools and a 24/7 infotainment combine that has lots of time to fill and prefers to do it on the cheap. whence the preference for pre-packaged infotainment, you see. and the lack of meaningful investigative work about what's on the other side of the mirror.

i don't really buy any of the "you're endangering the troops" arguments that came up around the afghanistan release as meaningful criticisms of the release itself. i think most of the damage that did was political, and i expect this to be worse. and given the illegitimacy of the war to begin with, i look forward to it.

also, the united states has had nothing remotely compatible to the chilcot inquiry in the uk, which, depsite it's limitations, was at least a serious sustained reckoning with the problems of launching a war on the basis of bogus claims, illegitimate evidence, etc. the united states seems incapable of facing up to what the bush administration did because the only way that could have happened presupposed the collusion of most factions within the oligarchy.

but i retain a slight glimmer of optimism that something like chilcot could happen here--or something different, with teeth. maybe this release will trigger moves toward that end.

what do you anticipate coming of this?
will you read around in the documents when they are released?
do you see a need for some sort of reckoning within the united states on the question of the war in iraq?
shouldn't it be illegal to launch a war on fraudulent grounds? what does illegal mean if nothing happens? shouldn't launching a war on fraudulent be met with something beyond stern disapproval and election for a second term?

Slims · 10-17-2010, 05:40 PM

I think these documents should not have been released. However, I don't think they will endanger US troops or Local Nationals to the same degree of the Afghanistan leaks.

For better or worse we are winding down our involvement in Iraq and the country has a (mostly) functioning government and a less active insurgency.

I argued different for Afghanistan because we are still very much at war in a country largely controlled by the Taliban. Any information leaked is information given to our enemy who will use it to their advantage.

The Iraq leaks will still cause damage, but are less likely to get sources executed or American Soldiers killed.

That said, the Military is an institution that was given a very complex problem. If you bust out the pitchforks every time you find documented evidence we have made mistakes the Military will be unable to prosecute future conflicts due to fear of witch hunts following their conclusions. These leaks were the reports available theatre-wide (just like the Afghanistan Leaks) and represent incidents the Military documented. If they were trying to hide or look the other way following mistakes they would not have been so thoroughly databased.

War is Chaos, you cannot expect everything to be rainbows and butterflies.

These reports will almost definitely consist of tactical decisions and ground-level reporting. I don't think the reporting will prove to have any relevance on your final question regarding whether the war was fraudulent and/or illegal.

As far as I am concerned we had a cease fire agreement following the first Gulf War that Saddam Hussein broke in every way possible. Doing so invalidated that agreement and gave us the right to resume hostilities.

Just because some people in this country latched onto bad information does not invalidate that fact.

roachboy · 10-17-2010, 06:18 PM

well, two different things.

on your last point, i should have maybe been clearer. i dont expect anything in the wikileaks material to bear on questions of the manufactured case for war. those problems are evident---just how evident was clarified by chilcot. but there's more to the manufactured case problem. i take it as a political matter and a quite high order political matter. one of those instances that folk may well look back on later and point to as a moment where something basic slipped away from the american empire.

a moral thing i'd say, if i thought that word signified anything in politics.

on the other matter, the "war is chaos" thing is a straw man.
war is legally sanctioned barbarism.
i'm not a pacifist, but i think that the decision to go to war should be a weighty one and not something taken in the cavalier way that comes from blinkered imperial arrogance, the kind of arrogance that comes from seeing war as some manly activity involving Heroes in Uniform--the reverse abstraction from the straw man of rainbows and unicorns, every bit as uninformed and ridiculous, but the sort of uninformed that is expedient for the military as an institution because it's that kind of illusion that keeps the bloated levels of funding coming.
but really, it's barbarism. i think it's better that people know more than less.

and i think that iraq was a tremendous, costly, brutal fuck-up. and this without for a minute falling into the binary thinking that conservatives like to impute to others, the binarism that would result in a claim that to oppose bushwar was to think saddan hussein a swell guy.

but it's also possible to call to mind despots around the southern hemisphere that the united states has found useful in the past, useful enough to overlook brutalization of people on a far more vast scale than saddam hussein.

and i think the military should be impeded in the unfolding of its organized barbarism as a political matter. this is simply the reverse way of stating the above--because the reality of war has no relation to any of the nice, empty flag waving words that it's political champions impute to it, because it pulverizes the ideals that it's waged in the name of, because it's psychotic and brutal and stupid it shouldn't be unleashed on the basis of something as shabby and ridiculous as the imperialist pipe dreams of the assholes in the project for a new american century.

Slims · 10-17-2010, 06:28 PM

Ok,

The first part of your post: What? I'm sorry, I've got a college degree and am not illiterate or 'uninformed' but the only thing which comes to mind when I try to read your post is "Non Sequiter"

I don't claim that the Iraq War wasn't a fuck-up...It was. I would even say that we probably should not have gone to war in Iraq in the first place. However, that does not change the fact that there was nothing illegal about waging a war against the man who tried to kill a sitting president and who was paying 10,000 dollars to the family of every suicide bomber who killed an American.

Likewise for your argument about sitting despots: Just because we decline to give them the boot and offer the people in those countries a chance for self-rule doesn't mean we would be wrong to do so.

I absolutely agree the Military should be 'impeeded' in a political manner. It is, was and continues to be. The Military does not enter into a conflict without being ordered to do so by the (civilian) President with backing and funding by the congress.

Beyond that and some basic oversight you are simply a living room quarterback who seems eager to pick apart every hint of poor action without EVER offering anything in support of all the things that have gone well.

roachboy · 10-18-2010, 06:15 AM

slims---there's a choice about how to proceed. we could find any number of "arguments" to exclude the other from speaking. you could continue the tack you adopt at the end of the last post. i could go after your academic credentials. but we are on a message board, so what's the point?

i am not inclined to see anything "good" coming from the war in iraq because it never should have happened. all that is possible are less-awful outcomes. the operation was incoherent from the beginning--any space in which the wolfowitz "plan" was confused with a Plan is not a space populated with competent people. and that space was, in the end, a civilian space populated by a republican administration that rationalized what they were doing in abstract pro-military language.

in terms of "good" things that followed:

i see the whole of the conflict as an absurd imperialist fever-dream. the *only* good outcome is that it ends.

within that context, the "good" that comes is basically people who try to survive the psychosis of war survive it and manage, somehow, to get by that psychosis and build something in which civilized human beings can live. so make something that is the antithesis of war, particular war that had, from the outset, no coherent point.

you could say the same kind of things about afghanistan. they'd only require more qualifications.

basically there the united states finds itself party in a civil war and is looking for a face-saving way to declare the "mission" accomplished and get out. so the only "good" outcome there is the construction of a way to save face long enough to get out. because the war made no sense from the beginning. but we've had this discussion and don't agree. which is fine.

i'll be interested to see what discussion follows once the documents are released.

roachboy · 10-18-2010, 09:27 AM

from today's washington post:

Quote:

Pentagon asks media not to publish war leaks

By ANNE FLAHERTY
The Associated Press
Monday, October 18, 2010; 12:00 PM

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon is asking media organizations not to publish or post on websites classified war files released by the WikiLeaks Web site.

The Defense Department has been bracing for a possible leak of as many as many as 400,000 documents from a military database on the Iraq war. In July, the self-described whistleblower organization obtained and released nearly 77,000 records on Afgahnistan.

The documents are mostly field reports, summarizing actions taken by troops and intelligence gathered.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has told Congress that the July leak did not expose the nation's most sensitive intelligence secrets. But, he also maintained that the release still put put U.S. interests at risk because it exposed the names of some Afghans who had cooperated with U.S. forces.

washingtonpost.com

also:

washingtonpost.com

so the ground is being plowed. downplay what's to be released before anyone knows exactly what's there and then ask that whatever it is not be reprinted even though it's not likely to be a problem.

roachboy · 10-22-2010, 10:46 AM

wiki leaks has still not released the new cache of documents.

here, however, is an interesting piece from nieman journalism lab at harvard:

Quote:

WikiLeaks vs. the world: The international leaking organization WikiLeaks has kept a relatively low profile since it dropped 92,000 pages of documents on the war in Afghanistan in July, but Spencer Ackerman wrote at Wired that WikiLeaks is getting ready to release as many as 400,000 pages of documents on the Iraq War as soon as next week, as two other Wired reporters looked at WikiLeaks’ internal conflict and the ongoing “scheduled maintenance” of its site. WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange responded by blasting Wired via Twitter, and Wired issued a defense.

One of the primary criticisms of WikiLeaks after their Afghanistan release was that they were putting the lives of American informants and intelligence agents at risk by revealing some of their identities. But late last week, we found out about an August memo by Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledging that no U.S. intelligence sources were compromised by the July leak. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald documented the numerous times government officials and others in the media asserted exactly the opposite.

Greenwald asserted that part of the reason for the government’s rhetoric is its fear of damage that could be caused by WikiLeaks future leaks, and sure enough, it’s already urging news organizations not to publish information from WikiLeaks’ Iraq documents. At The Link, Nadim Kobeissi wrote an interesting account of the battle over WikiLeaks so far, characterizing it as a struggle between the free, open ethos of the web and the highly structured, hierarchical nature of the U.S. government. “No nation has ever fought, or even imagined, a war with a nation that has no homeland and a people with no identity,” Kobeissi said.

This Week in Review: Hard news’ online value, a small but successful paywall, and the war on WikiLeaks » Nieman Journalism Lab

here's an ap story about the gates memo that undermines the (bogus) claim that american intel or military assets were put in danger by the last wikileaks action. it displaces the terrain of conflict from what was claimed to proactive political damage control....

Quote:

Gates: Limited damage from leak of Afghan war logs

(AP) – 6 days ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — No U.S. intelligence sources or practices were compromised by the posting of secret Afghan war logs by the WikiLeaks website, the Pentagon has concluded, but the military thinks the leaks could still cause significant damage to U.S. security interests.

The assessment, outlined in a letter obtained Friday by The Associated Press, suggests that some of the Obama administration's worst fears about the July disclosure of almost 77,000 secret U.S. war reports have so far failed to materialize.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates reported these conclusions in an Aug. 16 letter to Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who had requested a Pentagon assessment.

Questions persist about whether the disclosure undermined U.S. officials' ability to maintain the allegiance of allies and people from other countries who take risks to cooperate with the U.S.

"The mere fact of the disclosure erodes confidence in the ability of the military to keep secrets," said Steven Aftergood, whose Secrecy News blog tracks trends in government openness.

"And that can have subtle but real effects on recruitment of sources and on maintenance of relationships with individuals and with other security services," he added. "So it's something they have to take seriously."

WikiLeaks, a self-described whistle-blower website, is believed to be preparing to release an even larger set of classified Pentagon documents on the Iraq war as early as Sunday.

U.S. officials warned of dire consequences in the days following the July leak. In his letter to Levin, Gates struck a more measured tone in describing the impact.

"Our initial review indicates most of the information contained in these documents relates to tactical military operations," Gates wrote, suggesting the materials did not include the most sensitive kinds of information.

"The initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security; however, the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by this disclosure," he added.

A Pentagon spokesman, Marine Col. David Lapan, said Friday that the assessment of the July documents is still valid, even after a more thorough review. A special task force led by the Defense Intelligence Agency combed the posted reports for weeks to determine what might have been compromised.

Lapan said the since the Aug. 16 letter, Gates has kept members of Congress and their staffs apprised of the Pentagon's document review through phone calls, personal contacts and briefings.

Names of intelligence sources generally are classified at a higher level than the secret-level documents published by WikiLeaks. The documents provided a ground-level view of the war, from 2004 through 2009, based largely on narrow intelligence reports and other battlefield materials.

Gates noted that the documents contained the names of "cooperative Afghan nationals." These were not secret intelligence sources but Afghans who had decided to cut their ties to the Taliban.

The Taliban later vowed to punish these individuals, if the reports proved true.

"We assess this risk as likely to cause significant harm or damage to the national security interests of the United States and are examining mitigation options," Gates wrote. "We are working closely with our allies to determine what risks our mission partners may face as a result of the disclosure."

So far, the Pentagon has not reported any incidents of reprisals against Afghans named in the leaked documents.

Gates told a news conference on July 29, just a few days after the documents were posted by WikiLeaks, that he had enlisted the help of the FBI to investigate a leak with "potentially dramatic and grievously harmful consequences."

"The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships and reputation in that key part of the world," he said. "Intelligence sources and methods, as well as military tactics, techniques and procedures, will become known to our adversaries."

At the same news conference, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the WikiLeaks operators could face blame for any deadly consequences.

"The truth is, they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family," Mullen said.

More recently, U.S. intelligence officials have said the July disclosures sharpened a debate over how far to go in sharing sensitive information within the government, a practice that expanded after Sept. 11, 2001, in order to help prevent future terrorist attacks.

In a speech Oct. 6 to the Bipartisan Policy Center, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, called the July leaks "a big yellow flag" for those concerned about protecting classified information.

"I think it's going to have a very chilling effect on the need to share," Clapper said.

Military investigators say Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who served as an intelligence specialist in Baghdad, is a person of interest in the investigation into who provided the Afghan war logs to WikiLeaks.

The Associated Press: Gates: Limited damage from leak of Afghan war logs

this link takes you to the story cited above in the link about the american war on wikileaks:

The Internet War | Features | The Link

from the article:

Quote:

Weeks after the WikiLeaks conference, the site released a cache of over 92,000 classified Afghanistan war documents, free for the world to browse through, conveniently coupling the release with a leaked Central Intelligence Agency document that examines the possibility of the U.S. being perceived as an exporter of terrorism.

The Pentagon, already on a full-swing manhunt for Assange, intensified its war against WikiLeaks. Pentagon spokesmen called for the “return” of the leaked documents—a move that is necessary by law for the Pentagon to be capable of later accusing WikiLeaks of espionage.

The FBI and the U.S. government joined forces, declaring its $9-million “Going Dark” program combined with an Obama-backed bill that would outlaw all encryption that the government can’t obtain backdoor access to, thus outlawing all encryption WikiLeaks depends on to provide security for its sources. The U.S. Government aimed to garner an “Eye of Sauron” of the Internet.

In late September, the U.S. government furthered its war against WikiLeaks with a new bill—the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act—which seems like an anti-piracy bill, if one doesn’t bother to closely examine the fine print.

“The list is for domains ‘dedicated to infringing activity’, which is defined very broadly,” said Aaron Swartz on his anti-web-censorship site DemandProgress.org. “Any site where counterfeit goods or copyrighted material are ‘central to the activity of the Internet site’ would be blocked.”

It doesn’t seem far-removed for a government that already plans to accuse WikiLeaks of espionage to accuse it of harboring “counterfeit goods.” The United States has launched a full-scale attack on the rights, privacy and freedom of its own people in a desperate, scrambling attempt to deal with WikiLeaks’s truth-speaking.
An Ideal Held at Gunpoint

In March, WikiLeaks published a classified CIA document that discussed in detail various means the U.S. government could employ to destroy WikiLeaks.

“Websites such as WikiLeaks.org have trust as their most important centre of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insider, leaker, or whistleblower,” the report stated. “Successful identification, prosecution, termination of employment, and exposure of persons leaking the information by the governments and businesses affected by information posted to WikiLeaks.org would damage and potentially destroy this centre of gravity and deter others from taking similar actions.”

Many have realized the chilling similarity between the report’s suggested strategy for dismantling WikiLeaks and Manning’s recent arrest.

“It looks like we’re about to be attacked by everything the U.S has,” said WikiLeaks via Twitter in June. Those words were prophetic.

the article pitches this conflict as one of a vertically organized authoritarian structure--the american military machine---against the horizontal world of the net for control over information.

so what's at issue here isn't really an inside/outside matter that pits the military Insiders against those pesky civilians who imagine that the Professional Actions of Warriors should be subject to political control. the issue here is about information flows and who controls them. beyond that, the issue is about accountability.

within that, it is interesting to find out about the lengths the american state is willing to go to in order to eliminate information sources that do not repeat the party line.

war is peace.

edit: this link takes you to a democracy now! interview with daniel ellsburg that outlines the war against wikileaks in more detail.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/..._intel_leak_in

ring · 10-22-2010, 11:22 AM

Thanks for the flow of info, roach. Much appreciated.

roachboy · 10-22-2010, 11:36 AM

WikiLeaks Iraq files to be released - Middle East - Al Jazeera English

it may be that the start of this process with go through al jazeera.
this link to a video stream.

this from the sydney morning herald:

Quote:

Jazeera: WikiLeaks papers show Iraq torture, US killings
October 23, 2010 - 6:09AM

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Al-Jazeera on Friday released "startling new information" from US documents obtained by WikiLeaks, alleging state-sanctioned Iraqi torture and the killing of hundreds of civilians at US military checkpoints.

It said that the major findings included a US military cover-up of Iraqi state-sanctioned torture and "hundreds" of civilians deaths at manned American checkpoints after the US-led invasion of 2003 that ousted Saddam Hussein.

The Qatar-based satellite broadcaster also said the leaked papers, dating from January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2009, show the United States kept a death count throughout the war, despite US denials.

Al-Jazeera's English channel was to broadcast a series of programmes from 2100 GMT on Friday, it said in a statement sent to AFP, "that reveal startling new information about the operations of US forces during the Iraq War."

It said the programmes are based on files from WikiLeaks "who gained access to over 400,000 documents regarding the War in Iraq making it the largest document leak in US history.

"The secret materials are more than four times larger then Wikileak?s Afghanistan files," the broadcaster said in a statement issued in English.

WikiLeaks infuriated the Pentagon in July by publishing 77,000 classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan.

"Although one of the stated aims of the Iraq War was to close down Saddam Hussein?s torture chambers, the Wikileaks documents show many cases of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Iraqi police and soldiers," Al-Jazeera said.

"In addition, the documents reveal the US knew about the state sanctioned torture but ordered its troops not to intervene."

Al-Jazeera said the leaked documents also provide new information on the killing of civilians by US private security firm Blackwater.

"The secret US files reveal new cases of Blackwater (a company now known as XE) opening fire on civilians. No charges were ever brought," the statement said.

The broadcaster's Arabic service reported that the civilian death toll in Iraq was "much higher than officially announced."

Also included in the papers obtained by WikiLeaks was information on what the station's statement in English called the "secret involvement" of Iran in financing Shiite militias in Iraq.

"The files detail Iran?s secret war in Iraq and discuss Iran?s Revolutionary Guard acting as an alleged supplier of arms to Shia insurgents," Al-Jazeera said.

It said the papers also included US Army reports about Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki "and allegations of his association with death squads" in Iraq.

The Pentagon warned on Friday that releasing secret military documents could endanger US troops and Iraqi civilians.

"By disclosing such sensitive information, WikiLeaks continues to put at risk the lives of our troops, their coalition partners and those Iraqis and Afghans working with us," Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said.

He said the documents were "essentially snapshots of events, both tragic and mundane, and do not tell the whole story.

"That said, the period covered by these reports has been well-chronicled in news stories, books and films and the release of these field reports does not bring new understanding to Iraq's past," Morrell added.

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen also said on Friday that the lives of soldiers and civilians could be placed in peril if WikiLeaks released confidential documents

Jazeera: WikiLeaks papers show Iraq torture, US killings

ASU2003 · 10-23-2010, 02:42 PM

I'm not really sure what they are trying to do with these documents. The people who are against the war already knows most of the stuff, the people for the war won't care. Is there any 'real' news here? Did wikileaks pick some of the 'best' documents? Do any of these documents point any fingers of people high-up giving orders to violate the law or knowingly mislead Americans?

Just because the military withheld some information in order to win a conflict is not wrong.

LordEden · 10-23-2010, 03:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ASU2003

I'm not really sure what they are trying to do with these documents. The people who are against the war already knows most of the stuff, the people for the war won't care. Is there any 'real' news here? Did wikileaks pick some of the 'best' documents? Do any of these documents point any fingers of people high-up giving orders to violate the law or knowingly mislead Americans?

Just because the military withheld some information in order to win a conflict is not wrong.

I am pretty sure that these documents are just there to give the armchair commandos/militant anti-war protesters something to throw around and say, "We were right, na-na, we were right!"

I'm going to state this again, anyone who thinks we can wage a war in this modern age without collateral damage (i.e. civilians killed, structures destroyed, local economy damage) is an idiot. Wars have been fought since day one of human history and not one of them have been free of this kind of damage/killing. People all over history who had said, "I just want to raise my family and tend to my farm/house/business, not get caught up in this needless war" have been killed for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time/side/location/ect.

The people who actually believe the news media spin about how these last two wars were "justified" and free of collateral damage to the local populace are not going to read these documents (or change their minds about it either). The people that are against the war are going to wave these documents around and yell about murder, genocide, big govement, and the rest of the bad things they yell about in rallies across the world. They are already set in the mindframe of "war is bad no matter the reason or who is fighting it".

Basically, nothing is going to change.

The people smart enough to understand what these documents entail, already know that we shouldn't be fighting these wars. The people dumb enough to believe the news media's take on this, won't read it because the news told them not to.

I'm not sure why people are happy these documents are going to be released, it isn't like the government is going to step up and say, "Aw hell, guess you found us out. Alright boys, pack it up, let's get on out of here."

When that happens, I'll be the first to say, "Well shit, I guess I was wrong."

*****

I'm against the war and don't think we should be fighting it. Just throwing that out there.

ASU2003 · 10-23-2010, 04:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LordEden

I'm not sure why people are happy these documents are going to be released, it isn't like the government is going to step up and say, "Aw hell, guess you found us out. Alright boys, pack it up, let's get on out of here."

When that happens, I'll be the first to say, "Well shit, I guess I was wrong."
.

I guess the only way that would happen is if the Iraq people are so pissed off that they demand the US get out. I'm not sure how likely that would be, and what the average Iraqi thinks of the US however.

Tully Mars · 10-23-2010, 04:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LordEden

I am pretty sure that these documents are just there to give the armchair commandos/militant anti-war protesters something to throw around and say, "We were right, na-na, we were right!"

I'm going to state this again, anyone who thinks we can wage a war in this modern age without collateral damage (i.e. civilians killed, structures destroyed, local economy damage) is an idiot. Wars have been fought since day one of human history and not one of them have been free of this kind of damage/killing. People all over history who had said, "I just want to raise my family and tend to my farm/house/business, not get caught up in this needless war" have been killed for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time/side/location/ect.

The people who actually believe the news media spin about how these last two wars were "justified" and free of collateral damage to the local populace are not going to read these documents (or change their minds about it either). The people that are against the war are going to wave these documents around and yell about murder, genocide, big govement, and the rest of the bad things they yell about in rallies across the world. They are already set in the mindframe of "war is bad no matter the reason or who is fighting it".

Basically, nothing is going to change.

The people smart enough to understand what these documents entail, already know that we shouldn't be fighting these wars. The people dumb enough to believe the news media's take on this, won't read it because the news told them not to.

I'm not sure why people are happy these documents are going to be released, it isn't like the government is going to step up and say, "Aw hell, guess you found us out. Alright boys, pack it up, let's get on out of here."

When that happens, I'll be the first to say, "Well shit, I guess I was wrong."

*****

I'm against the war and don't think we should be fighting it. Just throwing that out there.

That's pretty much how I feel about it.

roachboy · 10-24-2010, 07:47 AM

1.it's a bit curious that the content of these documents have already been evaluated before they've been read isn't it?

2. if you're serious about this "shit happens" approach, why bother with rules of war at all?
torture? shit happens.
massacres of civilians? shit happens.
problems with accountability of mercenaries/contractors? shit happens.
it's all good.
shit just happens.

3. don't you find disturbing the idea that information flows are fragmented into myriad narrowcasts that enable consumers to customize infotainment to include only what they want to hear? so if you don't want to address a reality, you simply tune it out?

so the war in iraq is a tv show that not everyone wants to watch. or think about. it's no different from glee, really.

roachboy · 10-24-2010, 10:53 AM

typically, not surprisingly, the best initial writing is not being published in american outlets.

this on the leak in general:

Quote:

The WikiLeaks exposé:
Robert Fisk: The shaming of America

Our writer delivers a searing dispatch after the WikiLeaks revelations that expose in detail the brutality of the war in Iraq - and the astonishing, disgraceful deceit of the US

Sunday, 24 October 2010

As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims.

Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could counter every claim, every allegation against the Americans or British with some worthy general – the ghastly US military spokesman Mark Kimmitt and the awful chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace, come to mind – to ring-fence us with lies. Find a man who'd been tortured and you'd be told it was terrorist propaganda; discover a house full of children killed by an American air strike and that, too, would be terrorist propaganda, or "collateral damage", or a simple phrase: "We have nothing on that."

Of course, we all knew they always did have something. And yesterday's ocean of military memos proves it yet again. Al-Jazeera has gone to extraordinary lengths to track down the actual Iraqi families whose men and women are recorded as being wasted at US checkpoints – I've identified one because I reported it in 2004, the bullet-smashed car, the two dead journalists, even the name of the local US captain – and it was The Independent on Sunday that first alerted the world to the hordes of indisciplined gunmen being flown to Baghdad to protect diplomats and generals. These mercenaries, who murdered their way around the cities of Iraq, abused me when I told them I was writing about them way back in 2003.

It's always tempting to avoid a story by saying "nothing new". The "old story" idea is used by governments to dampen journalistic interest as it can be used by us to cover journalistic idleness. And it's true that reporters have seen some of this stuff before. The "evidence" of Iranian involvement in bomb-making in southern Iraq was farmed out to The New York Times's Michael Gordon by the Pentagon in February 2007. The raw material, which we can now read, is far more doubtful than the Pentagon-peddled version. Iranian military material was still lying around all over Iraq from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and most of the attacks on Americans were at that stage carried out by Sunni insurgents. The reports suggesting that Syria allowed insurgents to pass through their territory, by the way, are correct. I have spoken to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers whose sons made their way to Iraq from Lebanon via the Lebanese village of Majdal Aanjar and then via the northern Syrian city of Aleppo to attack the Americans.

But, written in bleak militarese as it may be, here is the evidence of America's shame. This is material that can be used by lawyers in courts. If 66,081 – I loved the "81" bit – is the highest American figure available for dead civilians, then the real civilian mortality score is infinitely higher since this records only those civilians the Americans knew of. Some of them were brought to the Baghdad mortuary in my presence, and it was the senior official there who told me that the Iraqi ministry of health had banned doctors from performing any post-mortems on dead civilians brought in by American troops. Now why should that be? Because some had been tortured to death by Iraqis working for the Americans? Did this hook up with the 1,300 independent US reports of torture in Iraqi police stations?

The Americans scored no better last time round. In Kuwait, US troops could hear Palestinians being tortured by Kuwaitis in police stations after the liberation of the city from Saddam Hussein's legions in 1991. A member of the Kuwaiti royal family was involved in the torture. US forces did not intervene. They just complained to the royal family. Soldiers are always being told not to intervene. After all, what was Lieutenant Avi Grabovsky of the Israeli army told when he reported to his officer in September 1982 that Israel's Phalangist allies had just murdered some women and children? "We know, it's not to our liking, and don't interfere," Grabovsky was told by his battalion commander. This was during the Sabra and Chatila refugee camp massacre.

The quotation comes from Israel's 1983 Kahan commission report – heaven knows what we could read if WikiLeaks got its hands on the barrels of military files in the Israeli defence ministry (or the Syrian version, for that matter). But, of course, back in those days, we didn't know how to use a computer, let alone how to write on it. And that, of course, is one of the important lessons of the whole WikiLeaks phenomenon.

Back in the First World War or the Second World War or Vietnam, you wrote your military reports on paper. They may have been typed in triplicate but you could number your copies, trace any spy and prevent the leaks. The Pentagon Papers was actually written on paper. You needed to find a mole to get them. But paper could always be destroyed, weeded, trashed, all copies destroyed. At the end of the 1914-18 war, for example, a British second lieutenant shot a Chinese man after Chinese workers had looted a French military train. The Chinese man had pulled a knife on the soldier. But during the 1930s, the British soldier's file was "weeded" three times and so no trace of the incident survives. A faint ghost of it remains only in a regimental war diary which records Chinese involvement in the looting of "French provision trains". The only reason I know of the killing is that my father was the British lieutenant and told me the story before he died. No WikiLeaks then.

But I do suspect this massive hoard of material from the Iraq war has serious implications for journalists as well as armies. What is the future of the Seymour Hershes and the old-style investigative journalism that The Sunday Times used to practise? What is the point of sending teams of reporters to examine war crimes and meet military "deep throats", if almost half a million secret military documents are going to float up in front of you on a screen?

We still haven't got to the bottom of the WikiLeaks story, and I rather suspect that there are more than just a few US soldiers involved in this latest revelation. Who knows if it doesn't go close to the top? In its investigations, for example, al-Jazeera found an extract from a run-of-the-mill Pentagon press conference in November 2005. Peter Pace, the uninspiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is briefing journalists on how soldiers should react to the cruel treatment of prisoners, pointing out proudly that an American soldier's duty is to intervene if he sees evidence of torture. Then the camera moves to the far more sinister figure of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who suddenly interrupts – almost in a mutter, and to Pace's consternation – "I don't think you mean they (American soldiers) have an obligation to physically stop it. It's to report it."

The significance of this remark – cryptically sadistic in its way – was lost on the journos, of course. But the secret Frago 242 memo now makes much more sense of the press conference. Presumably sent by General Ricardo Sanchez, this is the instruction that tells soldiers: "Provided the initial report confirms US forces were not involved in the detainee abuse, no further investigation will be conducted unless directed by HHQ [Higher Headquarters]." Abu Ghraib happened under Sanchez's watch in Iraq. It was also Sanchez, by the way, who couldn't explain to me at a press conference why his troops had killed Saddam's sons in a gun battle in Mosul rather than capture them.

So Sanchez's message, it seems, must have had Rumsfeld's imprimatur. And so General David Petraeus – widely loved by the US press corps – was presumably responsible for the dramatic increase in US air strikes over two years; 229 bombing attacks in Iraq in 2006, but 1,447 in 2007. Interestingly enough, US air strikes in Afghanistan have risen by 172 per cent since Petraeus took over there. Which makes it all the more astonishing that the Pentagon is now bleating that WikiLeaks may have blood on its hands. The Pentagon has been covered in blood since the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, and for an institution that ordered the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 – wasn't that civilian death toll more than 66,000 by their own count, out of a total of 109,000 recorded? – to claim that WikiLeaks is culpable of homicide is preposterous.

The truth, of course, is that if this vast treasury of secret reports had proved that the body count was much lower than trumpeted by the press, that US soldiers never tolerated Iraqi police torture, rarely shot civilians at checkpoints and always brought killer mercenaries to account, US generals would be handing these files out to journalists free of charge on the steps of the Pentagon. They are furious not because secrecy has been breached, or because blood may be spilt, but because they have been caught out telling the lies we always knew they told.

US official documents detail extraordinary scale of wrongdoing

WikiLeaks yesterday released on its website some 391,832 US military messages documenting actions and reports in Iraq over the period 2004-2009. Here are the main points:

Prisoners abused, raped and murdered

Hundreds of incidents of abuse and torture of prisoners by Iraqi security services, up to and including rape and murder. Since these are itemised in US reports, American authorities now face accusations of failing to investigate them. UN leaders and campaigners are calling for an official investigation.

Civilian death toll cover-up

Coalition leaders have always said "we don't do death tolls", but the documents reveal many deaths were logged. Respected British group Iraq Body Count says that, after preliminary examination of a sample of the documents, there are an estimated 15,000 extra civilian deaths, raising their total to 122,000.

The shooting of men trying to surrender

In February 2007, an Apache helicopter killed two Iraqis, suspected of firing mortars, as they tried to surrender. A military lawyer is quoted as saying: "They cannot surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets."

Private security firm abuses

Britain's Bureau of Investigative Journalism says it found documents detailing new cases of alleged wrongful killings of civilians involving Blackwater, since renamed Xe Services. Despite this, Xe retains extensive US contracts in Afghanistan.

Al-Qa'ida's use of children and "mentally handicapped" for bombing

A teenage boy with Down's syndrome who killed six and injured 34 in a suicide attack in Diyala was said to be an example of an ongoing al-Qa'ida strategy to recruit those with learning difficulties. A doctor is alleged to have sold a list of female patients with learning difficulties to insurgents.

Hundreds of civilians killed at checkpoints

Out of the 832 deaths recorded at checkpoints in Iraq between 2004 and 2009, analysis by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism suggests 681 were civilians. Fifty families were shot at and 30 children killed. Only 120 insurgents were killed in checkpoint incidents.

Iranian influence

Reports detail US concerns that Iranian agents had trained, armed and directed militants in Iraq. In one document, the US military warns a militia commander believed to be behind the deaths of US troops and kidnapping of Iraqi officials was trained by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard.

Robert Fisk: The shaming of America - Robert Fisk, Commentators - The Independent

and this a startling, sickening litany of us collusion with torture in iraq:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010...torture-saddam

Willravel · 10-24-2010, 11:32 AM

To those who support the wars: fucking listen to us next time because we know what we're talking about when we say, "Don't go to war." Every time we're ignored, shit like this is inevitable. Rampant torture and subsequent cover-ups, slaughtering innocent people, friendly fire, corruption, ignorance, extremism, hatred, cruelty and for absolutely nothing. Iraq in 2010 is worse than it was under Saddam and it will remain that way for the foreseeable future. Fucking listen to us next time.

Tully Mars · 10-24-2010, 03:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

2. if you're serious about this "shit happens" approach, why bother with rules of war at all?
torture? shit happens.
massacres of civilians? shit happens.
problems with accountability of mercenaries/contractors? shit happens.
it's all good.
shit just happens.

Yea, pretty much that's the way shit has gone down in every war ever. Which was part of the reason I opposed this POS war to begin with.

I would leave out the "it's all good" statement.

roachboy · 10-24-2010, 04:03 PM

well, there's shit that happens and then there's stuff that goes way beyond shit that simply happens. read about the use of torture, how that "system" worked and what the role of rumsfeld et al...

Iraq war logs: US turned over captives to Iraqi torture squads | World news | The Guardian

in the uk there's immediate calls for an investigation.
in the states, there's football games to be watched.

clearly the us politico-military order has suffered a very significant erosion of its legitimacy thanks to those fine fellows in the bush administration such that it's clear that there's concern about anything like an accounting or investigation or even honest statements concerning obvious problems to do with the iraq war---which are if anything worse than we knew---and that is one of the main revelations in these documents.

the pervasive complacency/indifference----coupled with the lack of substantial media exposure (when compared with the independent, the guardian and al jazeera) seems almost an opinion management result.

LordEden · 10-24-2010, 04:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Willravel

To those who support the wars: fucking listen to us next time because we know what we're talking about when we say, "Don't go to war." Every time we're ignored, shit like this is inevitable. Rampant torture and subsequent cover-ups, slaughtering innocent people, friendly fire, corruption, ignorance, extremism, hatred, cruelty and for absolutely nothing. Iraq in 2010 is worse than it was under Saddam and it will remain that way for the foreseeable future. Fucking listen to us next time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by LordEden

... militant anti-war protesters something to throw around and say, "We were right, na-na, we were right!"

I'm sure next time the governments of the world will go, "Let's play nice, we don't want to have our face covered in egg AGAIN."

War will be nothing but puppies and sunshine because of these documents.

If nothing else this will make governments of the world BETTER at covering their tracks.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tully Mars

Yea, pretty much that's the way shit has gone down in every war ever. Which was part of the reason I opposed this POS war to begin with.

I would leave out the "it's all good" statement.

Tully is right, this war was bad news to begin with and nothing good was going to come from it.

War is not rational and the only rules set in it, are the rules set by the leaders of the war. If those in charge don't follow their own rules, then there are no rules. How many times in human history have we seen genocide and other atrocities like "salting the earth" that ruined land for generations.

War /= Sunshine and Puppies.

Willravel · 10-24-2010, 04:25 PM

The governments can only act against the will of so many people.

Tully Mars · 10-25-2010, 07:52 AM

Yea, I'm always kind of amazed that after all the documentation, all the written history and all the so called evolution of man we're still resolving conflicts at a caveman level.

Old rich men start wars and profit from them while young men (and now women) go fight them. And innocent people suffer and die in the process. Been that way since the first man figured out how to throw a rock at another. Seems pretty ludicrous, doesn't it?

Baraka_Guru · 10-25-2010, 08:56 AM

Tully, what are you talking about? Cavemen didn't have the horrific, nightmarish tools of war that we do today.

It's not that nothing changes; it's that things get worse.

For fuck's sake, just look at the 20th century.

Now, more than ever, we need to know what the hell is going on.

Plan9 · 10-25-2010, 09:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Willravel

To those who support the wars: fucking listen to us next time because we know what we're talking about when we say, "Don't go to war." Every time we're ignored, shit like this is inevitable. Rampant torture and subsequent cover-ups, slaughtering innocent people, friendly fire, corruption, ignorance, extremism, hatred, cruelty and for absolutely nothing. Iraq in 2010 is worse than it was under Saddam and it will remain that way for the foreseeable future. Fucking listen to us next time.

I see you've been promoted.

roachboy · 10-25-2010, 09:54 AM

i still think that the iraq war will be remembered as a moment at which the united states gave away something fundamental about itself and then didn't have the integrity or courage to look it down, to take account of it, and still less to hold the oligarchy responsible.

i'm not arguing with tully and eden's assessments of what's likely to happen as a result of the leak. i mean, just look at the continuing gap in coverage between the heroic us media and that of the guardian and independent and al-jazeera. apparently when dod "asks" that a story not be covered, they nearly get their wish domestically anyway.

i wish it were otherwise.
obviously posting this way in a messageboard is an index of little more than frustration, or a desire to distance myself somehow from the overwhelming blase response, like systematic torture and the killing of in the area of 100,000 civilians falls under the rubric of "shit that happens" because "war is hell"---and still more from the non-reaction of alot of other folk who really don't seem to be interested at all. maybe that's because they're not being told that they are already interested. and americans are passive, don't you think? they like doing what they're told so long as they can pretend they aren't being told what they like doing. and they don't like bad news. and they don't like war crimes when the americans are complicit in them. they want to feel good while they sit on their couches.

i am btw sitting on a couch.

dlish · 10-25-2010, 09:56 AM

are you saying Will should be President?

Plan9 · 10-25-2010, 10:08 AM

Hmm. "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs," is a good 'n snarky one for this situation.

...

Rumor has it a good number of Iraqis are actually glad the US stumbled into the country and wrecked everything.

They're under the mistaken impression that things are going to be better, that progress has been made.

Stupid Iraqis.

...

War is bad!*

*until you run out of food, fuel, land, and the ability to sit on your couch and complain

Xazy · 10-25-2010, 10:15 AM

What are the odds of the UN coming out and condemning US or investigating USA over these documents. My bet is nil.

roachboy · 10-25-2010, 10:21 AM

right, plan 9. i'm sure there are, just as i'm also sure that there are alot of people dead for nothing.

and just as i'm also sure that from the point of view of the use of torture as an instrument to attempt social control that the new boss was pretty much the same as the old boss. but hey, what's a few war crimes? war is heck. and to point out those----ooopsie daisy!-----war crimes...why that's just complaining.

but i'm sure you're right that there are people who think it's just swell that the united states fabricated a case for war and then launched it. for example, i'm sure those fine folk at xe/blackwater are still kinda psyched about the whole thing. and you're right: those important perspectives are being ignored when people read the wikileaks cache.

that's because civilians are like parents in that old dj jazzy jeff/fresh prince track.
they just don't understand.

and so you're no doubt correct that it really is the exclusive purview of people who were in iraq to talk about the politics of the war, to talk about the political realities that shape it and the information that we've been given.

because we really ought to be focusing on the good stuff.
like the case for war in the first place could have been an even more shabby piece of shit than it was.
and like that there were only 100,000 civilians killed and not, say, 200,000.
that is a good thing.
glass half full, dontcha know.
accentuate the positive.
war is peace.

except not all wars are equal. and this war was less equal than most. that's because it was unnecessary. launched for no reason, really, apart from the imperialist fever dreams of those fellows at the project for a new american century. i'd think you'd be more than a little pissed off about that, getting stuck in harms way for no real reason. i would think you'd want to understand how the fuck that was possible. but i'm just sitting on my couch. what do i know?

Willravel · 10-25-2010, 10:32 AM

Things are still not as good as they are under Saddam, but even if they were, we still invaded a sovereign nation which was no threat to us and killed between 100,000 and 270,000 Iraqis in less than 10 years, based on conservative estimates. We displaced millions. Despite the fact we've poured billions into the country, there are still many areas without power, water and waste management. There's still a civil war, though it's smaller than it was before.

I suppose I'm glad some Iraqi folks wanted us to invade and destroy their country, but their happiness isn't worth 100,000-270,000 lives, close to $1t in money we'll never see again, and what will certainly be significant blowback in the coming decades. The next 9/11 will be because of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the cycle of ignorance, hatred, and violence will continue until the United States finally collapses.

Most of the information in the wikileaks release probably won't surprise those who have posted about the war here, but they should serve as a reminder of what has happened, a way to keep the numbness and apathy away.

Tully Mars · 10-25-2010, 10:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru

Tully, what are you talking about? Cavemen didn't have the horrific, nightmarish tools of war that we do today.

It's not that nothing changes; it's that things get worse.

For fuck's sake, just look at the 20th century.

Now, more than ever, we need to know what the hell is going on.

Oh the weapons change the degree of carnage has changed but we're still trying to solve our problems by killing each other.

I agree we should know what's going on. I really don't see anything in these leaks that I didn't already believe to be true. Raise your hand if you honestly believed we weren't torturing people. Raise your hand if you thought there weren't a whole lot more civilian causalities then the DOD was reporting. So I guess they verify to some degree. But I also believe some, maybe a lot, are inaccurate when taken at face value. A lot of these are field reports given in the fog of war. Plus they concern me in that they may be putting more troops at risk. I know we're done with Iraq and it's over over there but I keep getting e-mails from friends who seem to still be there. I like not to put them in any more danger then they already are.

Plan9 · 10-25-2010, 10:41 AM

Roachboy,

Well, it's your couch. Your self-righteous furniture isn't any different than my self-righteous furniture outside of a ten digit grid.

Forgive my lack of skill at hanging sarcasm tags. I did enjoy your 1984 diatribe and, shocking as it may be, generally concur.

At no point did I refer to Iraq as a war. The GWoT and actual wars are different creatures. Senior military officials don't even see it as a "War War."

I think the distinction matters here for the purposes of the discussion and is something that has been generally ignored in this thread.

Continue the "the man is evil" circle jerk. I failed to heed the appropriate The Academy's submenu again. My bad.

roachboy · 10-25-2010, 10:54 AM

plan 9---there's no real subtext to this. and i'm not terribly interested in "the man is evil" as a line of thinking. i haven't been since i was 19. that was a long time ago.

one problem with the definition of the gwot fiction is that it enabled rumsfeld et al to decide that the rules did not apply. so it was ok to, say, turn people over the the secular arm (inquisition-speak) and then "not investigate" the torture that in which they were entirely complicit. with plausible deniability dontcha know. because, well, they're just "reporting not investigating".... so it's not a surprise. and there's a sense in which i think people got kind of inured to reports of such business enabled by the bush administration somehow. acted like it was a bad tv show instead of what it was..war crimes, you know. the kind of shit that would've had the lot of them on trial had the united states committed to only real crime, which is to loose a war.

but i digress.

personally, like i said at the outset, i would hope these documents function to build some level of pressure for even something like the chilcot commission. a public accounting for what happened--even as i am pretty sure that the main reason chilcot happened was that everyone knew that beyond whatever actions blair took there was the united states to blame. it's much harder for a single party state with two right wings to undertake an investigation of a bogus war that was consented to by much of the political class in a context where there's no-one anywhere to blame but ourselves.

i'm also interested in this as an fight over information control. just to you know.

but it's quite nice that you are so quick to assume that this is a one-dimensional thread and that, in another way, you are the only person really qualified to make adequately complex judgments about iraq. it's a strange viewpoint, one that you seem to share with slims. i confess that i don't get it. fact is that in all of this, my personal interest is in the political and/or command conditions of possibility for things like torture, for overlooking the trigger-happy folk at checkpoints, for overlooking the mercenary psychopaths from blackwater....

that's different from going after the daily routines of the people who signed up and ended up there. and even from questioning their motives. i'm not entirely sure what made you think the situation was otherwise.

Plan9 · 10-25-2010, 11:01 AM

Ha! I'm not qualified to clean toilets. I can't make complex judgments about my toenail clippings. Stop putting text in my profile. You flatter me.

...

My interest in this thread has to do with WillRavel's bloodthirsty TEOTWAWKI / Edwin Starr commentary. I figure it had to be balanced out with something or it'd create a wormhole. Please know that I wouldn't dare step in the intellectual ring with you on anything above the debate of chocolate vs. vanilla.

Willravel · 10-25-2010, 11:08 AM

I'm venting because I feel helpless about a situation which angers and frustrates me.

A.K.A. I'm posting on a forum.

Plan9 · 10-25-2010, 11:10 AM

I'm here, brother.

*double rimshot*

...

Edit: Just had a spark of reasoning as I was pissing into the corner of a fly-infested plastic closet under a full moon. How romantic.

I think my problem with this whole topic is scale. You lofty academics are talking about these big numbers that, quite frankly, my cromag brain can't handle. Me dumdum. All I can think about is the faces of the people I've worked with. I guess that's where I get my stupid self-righteous from. It leaves me wondering where you guys get yours from. You talk about the 200,000 you've never seen. I talk about the dozen or so I've shook hands with.

And I get it: You can't make a shit sandwich into anything but a shit sandwich.

Other than voting for the next suitman that'll send us overseas, you guys help anybody?

roachboy · 10-25-2010, 11:24 AM

i think that's something to keep in mind, what will said.
this is a frustrating situation.

personally, i think it's ethically and politically pretty significant, that the united states launches a war on shabby false pretenses---why that hadn't happened since most of the actions involving treaties and native americans then the spanish-american war (remember the maine) then world war 1 (dubious because we were selling weapons to both sides until we stopped) then the various coups d-etat in latin america and africa then vietnam.

ok so maybe that's just how the us o a rolls.

ugh.

Plan9 · 10-25-2010, 11:28 AM

Please don't call it a war. And don't call it frustrating.

With employment what it is... I'm sure the deployed baby-killers in US camo are glad to be getting a paycheck so they can feed their bratlings.

ring · 10-25-2010, 11:37 AM

Ugh, indeed.
I'm not as informed as some, but I do recall reading the Bay Guardian as a young
twenty something. 1982-3 ish. Back then they did a fair job of covering US
shenanigans.
The current stranglehold on our media is infuriatingly puzzling.

Willravel · 10-25-2010, 11:54 AM

Liberal, as it's used now, is another way of saying, "I honestly care about the well-being of people I've never met or otherwise interacted with". The smugness comes much later, at least 15 minutes, and is really only a byproduct.

I voted against the guy that wanted to invade Iran and stay in Iraq. I don't have any other power in this situation, and I have a sneaking suspicion even the voting thing is a bit of a joke.

roachboy · 10-25-2010, 01:52 PM

selections:

Showcase: Read selected reports

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Wikileaks Iraq War Diaries

---------- Post added at 09:52 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:51 PM ----------

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Edit: Just had a spark of reasoning as I was pissing into the corner of a fly-infested plastic closet under a full moon. How romantic.

I think my problem with this whole topic is scale. You lofty academics are talking about these big numbers that, quite frankly, my cromag brain can't handle. Me dumdum. All I can think about is the faces of the people I've worked with. I guess that's where I get my stupid self-righteous from. It leaves me wondering where you guys get yours from. You talk about the 200,000 you've never seen. I talk about the dozen or so I've shook hands with.

And I get it: You can't make a shit sandwich into anything but a shit sandwich.

this is interesting. i kinda wondered about it, but wouldn't have known how to ask or say anything about it without feeling--and likely being--presumptuous.

alot of academic understanding is about collections of information---counting things, modelling things, writing stories that connect those models to other models. it's like that in any social science. the same business obtains in the physical sciences too, but there's more numbers and fewer obvious gaps (even as almost everything about the physical sciences, about what knowledge is produced, is based on models which don't seem like models because of all them numbers)....

ideally there's a continuum with the particularities of individual experience. but there isn't always. historians don't have to worry about that so much usually because the people they deal with are all dead.

i don't think this is the same problem that's here exactly. inside/outside, someplace you were the people you know and knew in a fucked up situation vs. people who see in the chain of decisions that resulted in your being there and knowing these people a disastrous political situation. i can see how there'd be problems with talking across that divide, but it doesn't seem to me that it's an academic vs. cromag (your term) or whatever problem.

what is seems like is that one perspective dissolves the other---the same thing's happened with slims. two different registers of claims to "the real" about the war in iraq or afghanistan on the one hand---release of documents that show fragments of the reality in theater that pose significant interpretive problems. code violations. people getting to read codes they don't necessarily understand, which is a screen----i think (even as it could be true) for an intrusion of norms particular to civilian world into this other hectic dangerous space.

that there are problems--ethical, political and hopefully legal---with the rumsfeld dod position on torture---that these documents demonstrate that the reality was much bigger and distributed quite differently than we might have thought by way of by ghraib---that it was widely known about and condoned by "report don't do anything" is not an intrusion into the day-to-day experience of ordinary people in ordinary situations--it's a glimpse of how collusion with war crimes looks.

and the top-down hierarchy is a kind of given.

this is all moving around the question of whether an actual discussion about this sort of thing is possible across different types of experience or if they're inevitably going to be what they seem to be so far---folk with one type of experience excluding the other from talking as if there's only one "reality" to do with a war and that being on a front line is what defines it.

but it's obvious that anything as complex as a non-war, a not war-war, involves any number of levels of reality.

so what to do?
anything?

it may be that wikileaks triggers a type of response that i don't understand at all.
is that the case?

10-17-2010, 05:40 PM	#2 (permalink)
Slims Eccentric insomniac Location: North Carolina	I think these documents should not have been released. However, I don't think they will endanger US troops or Local Nationals to the same degree of the Afghanistan leaks. For better or worse we are winding down our involvement in Iraq and the country has a (mostly) functioning government and a less active insurgency. I argued different for Afghanistan because we are still very much at war in a country largely controlled by the Taliban. Any information leaked is information given to our enemy who will use it to their advantage. The Iraq leaks will still cause damage, but are less likely to get sources executed or American Soldiers killed. That said, the Military is an institution that was given a very complex problem. If you bust out the pitchforks every time you find documented evidence we have made mistakes the Military will be unable to prosecute future conflicts due to fear of witch hunts following their conclusions. These leaks were the reports available theatre-wide (just like the Afghanistan Leaks) and represent incidents the Military documented. If they were trying to hide or look the other way following mistakes they would not have been so thoroughly databased. War is Chaos, you cannot expect everything to be rainbows and butterflies. These reports will almost definitely consist of tactical decisions and ground-level reporting. I don't think the reporting will prove to have any relevance on your final question regarding whether the war was fraudulent and/or illegal. As far as I am concerned we had a cease fire agreement following the first Gulf War that Saddam Hussein broke in every way possible. Doing so invalidated that agreement and gave us the right to resume hostilities. Just because some people in this country latched onto bad information does not invalidate that fact. __________________ "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." - Winston Churchill "All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible." Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence Last edited by Slims; 10-17-2010 at 05:47 PM..

10-17-2010, 06:18 PM	#3 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	well, two different things. on your last point, i should have maybe been clearer. i dont expect anything in the wikileaks material to bear on questions of the manufactured case for war. those problems are evident---just how evident was clarified by chilcot. but there's more to the manufactured case problem. i take it as a political matter and a quite high order political matter. one of those instances that folk may well look back on later and point to as a moment where something basic slipped away from the american empire. a moral thing i'd say, if i thought that word signified anything in politics. on the other matter, the "war is chaos" thing is a straw man. war is legally sanctioned barbarism. i'm not a pacifist, but i think that the decision to go to war should be a weighty one and not something taken in the cavalier way that comes from blinkered imperial arrogance, the kind of arrogance that comes from seeing war as some manly activity involving Heroes in Uniform--the reverse abstraction from the straw man of rainbows and unicorns, every bit as uninformed and ridiculous, but the sort of uninformed that is expedient for the military as an institution because it's that kind of illusion that keeps the bloated levels of funding coming. but really, it's barbarism. i think it's better that people know more than less. and i think that iraq was a tremendous, costly, brutal fuck-up. and this without for a minute falling into the binary thinking that conservatives like to impute to others, the binarism that would result in a claim that to oppose bushwar was to think saddan hussein a swell guy. but it's also possible to call to mind despots around the southern hemisphere that the united states has found useful in the past, useful enough to overlook brutalization of people on a far more vast scale than saddam hussein. and i think the military should be impeded in the unfolding of its organized barbarism as a political matter. this is simply the reverse way of stating the above--because the reality of war has no relation to any of the nice, empty flag waving words that it's political champions impute to it, because it pulverizes the ideals that it's waged in the name of, because it's psychotic and brutal and stupid it shouldn't be unleashed on the basis of something as shabby and ridiculous as the imperialist pipe dreams of the assholes in the project for a new american century. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

10-17-2010, 06:28 PM	#4 (permalink)
Slims Eccentric insomniac Location: North Carolina	Ok, The first part of your post: What? I'm sorry, I've got a college degree and am not illiterate or 'uninformed' but the only thing which comes to mind when I try to read your post is "Non Sequiter" I don't claim that the Iraq War wasn't a fuck-up...It was. I would even say that we probably should not have gone to war in Iraq in the first place. However, that does not change the fact that there was nothing illegal about waging a war against the man who tried to kill a sitting president and who was paying 10,000 dollars to the family of every suicide bomber who killed an American. Likewise for your argument about sitting despots: Just because we decline to give them the boot and offer the people in those countries a chance for self-rule doesn't mean we would be wrong to do so. I absolutely agree the Military should be 'impeeded' in a political manner. It is, was and continues to be. The Military does not enter into a conflict without being ordered to do so by the (civilian) President with backing and funding by the congress. Beyond that and some basic oversight you are simply a living room quarterback who seems eager to pick apart every hint of poor action without EVER offering anything in support of all the things that have gone well. __________________ "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." - Winston Churchill "All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible." Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence

10-18-2010, 06:15 AM	#5 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	slims---there's a choice about how to proceed. we could find any number of "arguments" to exclude the other from speaking. you could continue the tack you adopt at the end of the last post. i could go after your academic credentials. but we are on a message board, so what's the point? i am not inclined to see anything "good" coming from the war in iraq because it never should have happened. all that is possible are less-awful outcomes. the operation was incoherent from the beginning--any space in which the wolfowitz "plan" was confused with a Plan is not a space populated with competent people. and that space was, in the end, a civilian space populated by a republican administration that rationalized what they were doing in abstract pro-military language. in terms of "good" things that followed: i see the whole of the conflict as an absurd imperialist fever-dream. the only good outcome is that it ends. within that context, the "good" that comes is basically people who try to survive the psychosis of war survive it and manage, somehow, to get by that psychosis and build something in which civilized human beings can live. so make something that is the antithesis of war, particular war that had, from the outset, no coherent point. you could say the same kind of things about afghanistan. they'd only require more qualifications. basically there the united states finds itself party in a civil war and is looking for a face-saving way to declare the "mission" accomplished and get out. so the only "good" outcome there is the construction of a way to save face long enough to get out. because the war made no sense from the beginning. but we've had this discussion and don't agree. which is fine. i'll be interested to see what discussion follows once the documents are released. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

10-24-2010, 07:47 AM	#14 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	1.it's a bit curious that the content of these documents have already been evaluated before they've been read isn't it? 2. if you're serious about this "shit happens" approach, why bother with rules of war at all? torture? shit happens. massacres of civilians? shit happens. problems with accountability of mercenaries/contractors? shit happens. it's all good. shit just happens. 3. don't you find disturbing the idea that information flows are fragmented into myriad narrowcasts that enable consumers to customize infotainment to include only what they want to hear? so if you don't want to address a reality, you simply tune it out? so the war in iraq is a tv show that not everyone wants to watch. or think about. it's no different from glee, really. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

10-22-2010, 11:22 AM	#8 (permalink)
ring ░ Location: ❤	Thanks for the flow of info, roach. Much appreciated.

10-23-2010, 02:42 PM	#10 (permalink)
ASU2003 immoral minority Location: Back in Ohio	I'm not really sure what they are trying to do with these documents. The people who are against the war already knows most of the stuff, the people for the war won't care. Is there any 'real' news here? Did wikileaks pick some of the 'best' documents? Do any of these documents point any fingers of people high-up giving orders to violate the law or knowingly mislead Americans? Just because the military withheld some information in order to win a conflict is not wrong.

10-24-2010, 11:32 AM	#16 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	To those who support the wars: fucking listen to us next time because we know what we're talking about when we say, "Don't go to war." Every time we're ignored, shit like this is inevitable. Rampant torture and subsequent cover-ups, slaughtering innocent people, friendly fire, corruption, ignorance, extremism, hatred, cruelty and for absolutely nothing. Iraq in 2010 is worse than it was under Saddam and it will remain that way for the foreseeable future. Fucking listen to us next time.

10-24-2010, 04:03 PM	#18 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	well, there's shit that happens and then there's stuff that goes way beyond shit that simply happens. read about the use of torture, how that "system" worked and what the role of rumsfeld et al... Iraq war logs: US turned over captives to Iraqi torture squads \| World news \| The Guardian in the uk there's immediate calls for an investigation. in the states, there's football games to be watched. clearly the us politico-military order has suffered a very significant erosion of its legitimacy thanks to those fine fellows in the bush administration such that it's clear that there's concern about anything like an accounting or investigation or even honest statements concerning obvious problems to do with the iraq war---which are if anything worse than we knew---and that is one of the main revelations in these documents. the pervasive complacency/indifference----coupled with the lack of substantial media exposure (when compared with the independent, the guardian and al jazeera) seems almost an opinion management result. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

10-24-2010, 04:25 PM	#20 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	The governments can only act against the will of so many people.

10-25-2010, 07:52 AM	#21 (permalink)
Tully Mars Living in a Warmer Insanity Super Moderator Location: Yucatan, Mexico	Yea, I'm always kind of amazed that after all the documentation, all the written history and all the so called evolution of man we're still resolving conflicts at a caveman level. Old rich men start wars and profit from them while young men (and now women) go fight them. And innocent people suffer and die in the process. Been that way since the first man figured out how to throw a rock at another. Seems pretty ludicrous, doesn't it? __________________ I used to drink to drown my sorrows, but the damned things have learned how to swim- Frida Kahlo Vice President Starkizzer Fan Club

10-25-2010, 08:56 AM	#22 (permalink)
Baraka_Guru warrior bodhisattva Super Moderator Location: East-central Canada	Tully, what are you talking about? Cavemen didn't have the horrific, nightmarish tools of war that we do today. It's not that nothing changes; it's that things get worse. For fuck's sake, just look at the 20th century. Now, more than ever, we need to know what the hell is going on. __________________ Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing? —Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

10-25-2010, 09:54 AM	#24 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i still think that the iraq war will be remembered as a moment at which the united states gave away something fundamental about itself and then didn't have the integrity or courage to look it down, to take account of it, and still less to hold the oligarchy responsible. i'm not arguing with tully and eden's assessments of what's likely to happen as a result of the leak. i mean, just look at the continuing gap in coverage between the heroic us media and that of the guardian and independent and al-jazeera. apparently when dod "asks" that a story not be covered, they nearly get their wish domestically anyway. i wish it were otherwise. obviously posting this way in a messageboard is an index of little more than frustration, or a desire to distance myself somehow from the overwhelming blase response, like systematic torture and the killing of in the area of 100,000 civilians falls under the rubric of "shit that happens" because "war is hell"---and still more from the non-reaction of alot of other folk who really don't seem to be interested at all. maybe that's because they're not being told that they are already interested. and americans are passive, don't you think? they like doing what they're told so long as they can pretend they aren't being told what they like doing. and they don't like bad news. and they don't like war crimes when the americans are complicit in them. they want to feel good while they sit on their couches. i am btw sitting on a couch. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

10-25-2010, 09:56 AM	#25 (permalink)
dlish Currently sour but formerly Dlishs Super Moderator Location: Australia/UAE	are you saying Will should be President? __________________ An injustice anywhere, is an injustice everywhere I always sign my facebook comments with ()()===========(}. Does that make me gay? - Filthy

10-25-2010, 10:08 AM	#26 (permalink)
Plan9 I Confess a Shiver	Hmm. "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs," is a good 'n snarky one for this situation. ... Rumor has it a good number of Iraqis are actually glad the US stumbled into the country and wrecked everything. They're under the mistaken impression that things are going to be better, that progress has been made. Stupid Iraqis. ... War is bad!* until you run out of food, fuel, land, and the ability to sit on your couch and complain __________________ Whatever you can carry.* "You should not drink... and bake." Last edited by Plan9; 10-25-2010 at 10:11 AM..

10-25-2010, 10:15 AM	#27 (permalink)
Xazy People in masks cannot be trusted Location: NYC	What are the odds of the UN coming out and condemning US or investigating USA over these documents. My bet is nil. __________________ Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.

10-25-2010, 10:21 AM	#28 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	right, plan 9. i'm sure there are, just as i'm also sure that there are alot of people dead for nothing. and just as i'm also sure that from the point of view of the use of torture as an instrument to attempt social control that the new boss was pretty much the same as the old boss. but hey, what's a few war crimes? war is heck. and to point out those----ooopsie daisy!-----war crimes...why that's just complaining. but i'm sure you're right that there are people who think it's just swell that the united states fabricated a case for war and then launched it. for example, i'm sure those fine folk at xe/blackwater are still kinda psyched about the whole thing. and you're right: those important perspectives are being ignored when people read the wikileaks cache. that's because civilians are like parents in that old dj jazzy jeff/fresh prince track. they just don't understand. and so you're no doubt correct that it really is the exclusive purview of people who were in iraq to talk about the politics of the war, to talk about the political realities that shape it and the information that we've been given. because we really ought to be focusing on the good stuff. like the case for war in the first place could have been an even more shabby piece of shit than it was. and like that there were only 100,000 civilians killed and not, say, 200,000. that is a good thing. glass half full, dontcha know. accentuate the positive. war is peace. except not all wars are equal. and this war was less equal than most. that's because it was unnecessary. launched for no reason, really, apart from the imperialist fever dreams of those fellows at the project for a new american century. i'd think you'd be more than a little pissed off about that, getting stuck in harms way for no real reason. i would think you'd want to understand how the fuck that was possible. but i'm just sitting on my couch. what do i know? __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 10-25-2010 at 10:24 AM..

10-25-2010, 10:32 AM	#29 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	Things are still not as good as they are under Saddam, but even if they were, we still invaded a sovereign nation which was no threat to us and killed between 100,000 and 270,000 Iraqis in less than 10 years, based on conservative estimates. We displaced millions. Despite the fact we've poured billions into the country, there are still many areas without power, water and waste management. There's still a civil war, though it's smaller than it was before. I suppose I'm glad some Iraqi folks wanted us to invade and destroy their country, but their happiness isn't worth 100,000-270,000 lives, close to $1t in money we'll never see again, and what will certainly be significant blowback in the coming decades. The next 9/11 will be because of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the cycle of ignorance, hatred, and violence will continue until the United States finally collapses. Most of the information in the wikileaks release probably won't surprise those who have posted about the war here, but they should serve as a reminder of what has happened, a way to keep the numbness and apathy away.

10-25-2010, 10:41 AM	#31 (permalink)
Plan9 I Confess a Shiver	Roachboy, Well, it's your couch. Your self-righteous furniture isn't any different than my self-righteous furniture outside of a ten digit grid. Forgive my lack of skill at hanging sarcasm tags. I did enjoy your 1984 diatribe and, shocking as it may be, generally concur. At no point did I refer to Iraq as a war. The GWoT and actual wars are different creatures. Senior military officials don't even see it as a "War War." I think the distinction matters here for the purposes of the discussion and is something that has been generally ignored in this thread. Continue the "the man is evil" circle jerk. I failed to heed the appropriate The Academy's submenu again. My bad. __________________ *Whatever you can carry.* "You should not drink... and bake." Last edited by Plan9; 10-25-2010 at 10:45 AM..

10-25-2010, 10:54 AM	#32 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	plan 9---there's no real subtext to this. and i'm not terribly interested in "the man is evil" as a line of thinking. i haven't been since i was 19. that was a long time ago. one problem with the definition of the gwot fiction is that it enabled rumsfeld et al to decide that the rules did not apply. so it was ok to, say, turn people over the the secular arm (inquisition-speak) and then "not investigate" the torture that in which they were entirely complicit. with plausible deniability dontcha know. because, well, they're just "reporting not investigating".... so it's not a surprise. and there's a sense in which i think people got kind of inured to reports of such business enabled by the bush administration somehow. acted like it was a bad tv show instead of what it was..war crimes, you know. the kind of shit that would've had the lot of them on trial had the united states committed to only real crime, which is to loose a war. but i digress. personally, like i said at the outset, i would hope these documents function to build some level of pressure for even something like the chilcot commission. a public accounting for what happened--even as i am pretty sure that the main reason chilcot happened was that everyone knew that beyond whatever actions blair took there was the united states to blame. it's much harder for a single party state with two right wings to undertake an investigation of a bogus war that was consented to by much of the political class in a context where there's no-one anywhere to blame but ourselves. i'm also interested in this as an fight over information control. just to you know. but it's quite nice that you are so quick to assume that this is a one-dimensional thread and that, in another way, you are the only person really qualified to make adequately complex judgments about iraq. it's a strange viewpoint, one that you seem to share with slims. i confess that i don't get it. fact is that in all of this, my personal interest is in the political and/or command conditions of possibility for things like torture, for overlooking the trigger-happy folk at checkpoints, for overlooking the mercenary psychopaths from blackwater.... that's different from going after the daily routines of the people who signed up and ended up there. and even from questioning their motives. i'm not entirely sure what made you think the situation was otherwise. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

10-25-2010, 11:01 AM	#33 (permalink)
Plan9 I Confess a Shiver	Ha! I'm not qualified to clean toilets. I can't make complex judgments about my toenail clippings. Stop putting text in my profile. You flatter me. ... My interest in this thread has to do with WillRavel's bloodthirsty TEOTWAWKI / Edwin Starr commentary. I figure it had to be balanced out with something or it'd create a wormhole. Please know that I wouldn't dare step in the intellectual ring with you on anything above the debate of chocolate vs. vanilla. __________________ *Whatever you can carry.* "You should not drink... and bake." Last edited by Plan9; 10-25-2010 at 11:08 AM..

10-25-2010, 11:08 AM	#34 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	I'm venting because I feel helpless about a situation which angers and frustrates me. A.K.A. I'm posting on a forum.

10-25-2010, 11:10 AM	#35 (permalink)
Plan9 I Confess a Shiver	I'm here, brother. double rimshot ... Edit: Just had a spark of reasoning as I was pissing into the corner of a fly-infested plastic closet under a full moon. How romantic. I think my problem with this whole topic is scale. You lofty academics are talking about these big numbers that, quite frankly, my cromag brain can't handle. Me dumdum. All I can think about is the faces of the people I've worked with. I guess that's where I get my stupid self-righteous from. It leaves me wondering where you guys get yours from. You talk about the 200,000 you've never seen. I talk about the dozen or so I've shook hands with. And I get it: You can't make a shit sandwich into anything but a shit sandwich. Other than voting for the next suitman that'll send us overseas, you guys help anybody? __________________ *Whatever you can carry.* "You should not drink... and bake." Last edited by Plan9; 10-25-2010 at 11:29 AM..

10-25-2010, 11:24 AM	#36 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i think that's something to keep in mind, what will said. this is a frustrating situation. personally, i think it's ethically and politically pretty significant, that the united states launches a war on shabby false pretenses---why that hadn't happened since most of the actions involving treaties and native americans then the spanish-american war (remember the maine) then world war 1 (dubious because we were selling weapons to both sides until we stopped) then the various coups d-etat in latin america and africa then vietnam. ok so maybe that's just how the us o a rolls. ugh. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

10-25-2010, 11:28 AM	#37 (permalink)
Plan9 I Confess a Shiver	Please don't call it a war. And don't call it frustrating. With employment what it is... I'm sure the deployed baby-killers in US camo are glad to be getting a paycheck so they can feed their bratlings. __________________ *Whatever you can carry.* "You should not drink... and bake." Last edited by Plan9; 10-25-2010 at 11:31 AM..

10-25-2010, 11:37 AM	#38 (permalink)
ring ░ Location: ❤	Ugh, indeed. I'm not as informed as some, but I do recall reading the Bay Guardian as a young twenty something. 1982-3 ish. Back then they did a fair job of covering US shenanigans. The current stranglehold on our media is infuriatingly puzzling.

10-25-2010, 11:54 AM	#39 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	Liberal, as it's used now, is another way of saying, "I honestly care about the well-being of people I've never met or otherwise interacted with". The smugness comes much later, at least 15 minutes, and is really only a byproduct. I voted against the guy that wanted to invade Iran and stay in Iraq. I don't have any other power in this situation, and I have a sneaking suspicion even the voting thing is a bit of a joke.