WikiLeaks? A Whole Lot of Nothing Going On
When I received word last night that WikiLeaks was about to set free a treasure trove of more than 91,000 secret military documents from the war in Afghanistan, a thrill ran down my spine.
Was it going to be another spectacular train wreck like their hyped “Collateral Murder” release? For those of you who missed that one, Julian Assange and his band of merry leaks had convinced themselves that the gun camera footage from an Apache helicopter was proof that U.S. servicemen were trigger-happy madmen that liked nothing better than blowing away innocent journalists, family men, and children. Unfortunately, the video actually proved quite the opposite.
Worse, the video was released to coincide with a fundraising appeal (the organization had only collected $370,000 of their estimated $600,000 operating budget), strongly suggesting the group was creating controversy merely to profit from it.
The newest release, the so-called “Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010,” is a document dump of over 91,000 classified military documents from our war in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The UK’s Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and the New York Times have had teams of reporters pouring over embargoed copies of the files for weeks. Sadly, what they found offers very little in the way of news, revelations, or even entertainment.
Imagine walking down to your local police department’s archives and printing out 91,000 pages of reports. The vast majority would be mundane. Traffic stops, property crime reports, accidents, and yes, on much more infrequent occasions, even violent crimes. You’d also find really exciting stuff, like how much the department spends on printer ink, toilet paper, handcuff keys, and uniform allowances. What WikiLeaks has reported, for the most part, seems to be of this nature.
This is not to completely discount the document dump. As reporters and investigators continue to search their way through the tens of thousands of files, they have hit upon interesting nuggets here and there. Readers may be nodding along, saying to themselves: “I thought so.” But if you are someone that has followed the war through the blogs and reporters that cover this isolated beat, you won’t find anything exciting.
Pakistan’s intelligence service is playing both sides?
The U.S. has special operations task forces dedicated to bringing down high-value enemy targets, dead or alive?
Gesundheit.
Michael Isikoff of NBC (himself with an impressive body count) states that the Pentagon hasn’t yet found anything worrisome in the leaked documents they’ve reviewed, and that the documents they’ve seen are marked “secret,” the lowest level of classified document sensitivity.
It isn’t hard to understand WikiLeaks’ position. This is a huge release of documents. It deserves a bit of press for the sheer novelty of its size. But despite Julian Assange’s best attempts to whip up a media frenzy, there simply isn’t much that has been released in this document dump that amounts to excitement in the media, or from the public that consumes the news.
Assange can claim possible evidence of “war crimes” all he wants, but he’s already cried that particular wolf before, with laughable results. The simple fact of the matter is that everyone knows that the most regrettable part of war is that the killing and maiming of civilians is a certainty. Just as assuredly, most recognize that the accidental deaths of civilians are horrible mistakes, but not war crimes.
None of this is to say that the release won’t provide some interesting archival information. Minor surprises may indeed lurk far under the surface.
And yet, it seems that the most intriguing part of this story are the storytellers themselves.
Julian Assange, the face of WikiLeaks, is an odd duck. A convicted computer hacker, activist, and sometime journalist, Assange had a bizarre, arguably unstable early life of non-conformist parents and life on the run from his step-father’s alleged cult, and his running has never ended. Few have doubted his intelligence or his talent. His ethics, opinions, and politics, however, are ripe for speculation. While WikiLeaks gained fame for it’s attacks on Scientology, reports of corruption in Kenya, and posting the hacked emails of Sarah Palin, that fame has been damaged by Assange’s apparent shift towards trying to profit from WikiLeaks’ fame.
The Apache gun camera footage Assange dubbed “Collateral Murder” was released at a time WikiLeaks was in dire financial straits. It seemed purposefully calibrated to ignore the mundane reality of a helicopter gunship identifying and then eliminating armed insurgents, in favor of touting the deaths of the two journalists collaborating with the militiamen as an assassination. Because of this exceedingly dubious claim, his new charge that the Afghan War documents reveal evidence of war crimes rings decidedly hollow.
And then there are the questions about where the documents originated.
Initial speculation has immediately focused on U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning, a Lady Gaga fan who claimed he stole hundreds of thousands of classified documents and turned them over to WikiLeaks. Manning already faces a court martial, and an Army investigation will determine whether or not the military will bring further charges against him for the Afghanistan documents. Until the hundreds of thousands of documents he leaked have been thoroughly investigated and catalogued, the upper limit on the number of charges he could face is sky-high.
At the moment, the investigation into the leak promises to be the most exciting part of this entire drama. As Herschel Smith noted after personally sorting through hundreds of the documents: “To anyone with a computer, some time, and a little interest, none of this is news.”
Indeed, it isn’t.
But it is a chance for Julian Assange to stand in front of the cameras once again.
This is hilarious coming from the same angry gang of idiots that last week declared that the Black Panther DOJ “SCANDAL” would mean the end of voting rights as they exist today. You don’t have one tenth of Assange’s courage, discipline or relevance. You’re just a man with clown shoes on.
The only people bashing the idiots are those who stand to loose something if the idiots are seen as less than idiotic.
Assange breaks open secrets with zero consideration of the negative impact. That’s not courage or discipline. That’s idiocy.
Incidentally I wonder how “courageous” it is to go after another country’s secrets and not your own?
I find it interesting when a Soros minion is the first to comment. Not what they say but that they’re in first. Media Matters is the first door to the left, spectral one.
“Courage, discipline, relevance”?
You mock him with every syllable. Assange is a bitter little beta male who hates all aspects of the Judeo Christian culture from which he feels rejected. Radical leftism has its superficial appeal to the childishly peeved. Assange would find out, if he had lived in the ‘leftist paradise’ of Mao or Stalin, that beta males such as himself fare even WORSE than in the enlightened western culture in which he can only find endless fault.
What he works so hard to accomplish, if done, would result in the ascendancy of a culture which would push a brick wall on top of him in short order. He MUST know this. As do you. His is a pitiful little squeal for attention and approval, but worth only pity. And I seriously doubt it’s entirely noble, given his need for $$$ and his over-selling of this boring new material.
“is a bitter little beta male who” wants to be a somebody by slinging mud and hiding behind a computer–gee whiz like Bob Owens.
Write anything to get attention, notice me, notice me writes Bob Owens, an educated economic failure that thrives on the agony of others lives.
Dave in Dallas
“That would be Julian Assange’s take. He doesn’t mind innocents suffering. As long as it serves his twisted idea of justice.” Just like Bob Owens!!!
‘Courage’ can also be recklessness.
‘Discipline’ – how so?
‘Relevance’ – Okay, he is in the news. Mal Gibson, Lindsay Lohan and Bo Obama are also relevant.
Assange is just playing a game called ‘Tweak the Elephant’s Ear’ – the elephant being the most powerful nation on the globe. Assange figures he’s safe because he knows it’s not nearly as malevolent as he claims.
Maybe Assange would like to publish the Journolist archives?
Gould’s Ghost your hilarious,
Assange did ten times the smear with even more underhanded tactics then Breitbart ever came close to, and this is your idea of a hero?
I think the most obvious solution is to make a hardware looking rack strip sort of like Combinator. But with room for just 1 VST instrument/effect inside the container.
Left and right outputs on the back.
On the front the strip should have just the basic controls: Patch change, bypass button, mix level, volume etc.
A reveal button should open up a screen area with the graphical interface for the effect/instrument.
The challenge is to make it look like a piece of hardware in the Reason rack when the graphical interface is visible.
I need VST because the Synths in Reason is not up to speed with the latest sounds in the music industry. So I have to have a few VST’s. When I use Record as a slave it becomes a major issue to do side chaining when the drums are coming from Reason. Which means I can’t use Redrum, REX or the coming Kong device. Then what’s left then. Not much.
I usually end up making the drums in my DAW, most of the synths also in the DAW. And the end result is that Reason and Record becomes less and less usable.
Many of my latest projects have bin made entirely without Reason or Record simply because of the side chaining issue.
Daniel Ellsberg did our country a service by leaking The Pentagon Papers. That release in 1971 help convince Americans of the futility of the Vietnam War. By early 1973, we were out of Vietnam for the most part.
The argument that these documents endanger our troops falls flat. No top secret material has been presented as far as I can tell. From my own experience, I know how labeling something embarrassing to the government and the military leads to classifying those documents.
The danger to the troops? Is staying in Afghanistan any longer.
The unnamed person who leaked these document to Julian Assange may have had The Pentagon Papers in mind. But it doesn’t seem to have the desired effect, for congress voted on more money for this useless war. We have been in Afghanistan going on 9 years now. It is clear from these documents that we’ve screwed up totally in allowing the Taliban and al-Qaeda to regroup in Pakistan, while we were wasting effort chasing ghosts in Iraq. This is a lost cause, we need to get out now!
I believe the leaker did it because he thought it was cool.
I believe he did it for attention and to “be somebody” in life.
Just like this clown shoe Bob Owens and his barely scratch the surface researched yellow rag spews.
They do it for attention and personal glory with no concern for truth, fact or other people.
Some of those nuggets are disquieting. For instance, Canada being asked to rein
in Saudi Arabia and South Africa, regarding fund raising for the Taliban.
As long as uncomfortable matters raise their gruesome heads, forcing a re-evaluation of the big picture, it is easier to say, “Nothing going on here folks, move along”, than actually re-evaluate.
“(…) the New York Times have had teams of reporters pouring over (…)” — Don’t you mean “poring”?
You’ve obviously never seen cockroaches boiling out of their hiding place when disturbed.
Takes one to recognize one there Bob. You are just pissed that ole boy Julian got the scoop before you did…………
“Until the hundreds of thousands of documents he leaked have been thoroughly investigated and catalogued, the upper limit on the number of charges he could face is sky-high.”
Someone with a clearance, the right accesses, a bit of savvy and a lot of spare time can get their hands on some pretty interesting reading. Instead, he grabbed as big a sack as he could, and just shoveled in as much mundane, day to day crap as he could get his hands on.
That’s the more interesting aspect of this. It’s like systematically stealing junk mail from mailboxes, rather than sifting for the stuff that might be profitable. It’s almost funny, until you realize how many years those felonies add up to. What sane or competent person would risk hundreds of years in prison or the death penalty over stealing the equivalent of ten thousand Mastercard offer letters?
Is Wikileaks leading with their strongest stuff? If so, then this kid ruined his life by looting the dumbest parts of America’s secret filing cabinet, and fell on his sword to prove how bureaucratic, dull and pointless most classified material is.
No doubt this leak will discomfit a lot of conservatives. After all, it was under the reign of George W “Islam is a religion of peace” Bush that the jihadist rogue state was designated a “major non-NATO ally” or whatever hell they call it these days. And billions were pumped into its flailing economy which produces and exports nothing but terrorism. That said, none of these ‘revelations’ relating to the rogue state’s Taliban links is new, everybody knew them all along, except perhaps the US regime.
Walters: So you are a military expert who can predict the future, eh? You know for certain that our soldiers will not be in increased danger from the release of the documents?
Can you tell me which stocks I should be buying as well.
“From my own experience, I know how labeling something embarrassing to the government and the military leads to classifying those documents.”
That’s a nice dissembling and distortion of the truth. I, too, know about the classification of materials and your suggestion is immature, false and shows your true colors.
What is needed is a deadly consequence for you and that hermaphordite Assange, the NYT and others who leak classified material that causes the death of an America soldier. Then we’ll see how brave and patriotic you dingbats really are.
By the way, your cause and effect comparison of Ellsberg and the end of the Vietnam war is similarly false.
“Walters: So you are a military expert who can predict the future, eh? You know for certain that our soldiers will not be in increased danger from the release of the documents?”
-Nothing is for certain, and i can’t help you on stocks either. My point was from personal experience from my Army days long past. Embarrassing information was held incommunicado by giving it a classification. The Army was then totally wrapped up in secrecy about things that were technically illegal under rule of law. Some things never seem to change.
“What is needed is a deadly consequence for you and that hermaphordite Assange,…..”
-Must have hit a raw nerve, to bad. So do you want to deal this “deadly consequence” yourself? I’m so scared. Bring it on.
I take it you have had a sexual encounter with Mr. Assange to know his particular sexual organ arrangement?
Mr Owens,
“Secret” is not the lowest level of classification. That would be “confidential”, and other levels like FOUO and PIV are techinally unclassified but subject to some controls.
As for who leaked the documents, I doubt it was Pvt Manning. The fact that the documents were specific to Afghanistan implies that the leaker was there. Manning was in Iraq, and if he leaked the most recent docs, why weren’t there any for Iraq?
The sad reality is that there are lots of people out there who will steal classified information for lots of reasons: money, fame, girls, etc. Manning is not the only Soldier, Sailor, Airman, or Marine who lacks the moral and ethical grounding to know or care that what they are doing hurts real people.
“A Whole Lotta Nothin’,” eh? He ousted hundreds of identities of Afghan informants – should anything happen to them or their families, the blood will be solely on Mr. Assange’s hands. Of course, I suppose he would consider it a worthy price to pay to stomp on the toes of America – after all, these kinds of people do not actually give a damn about death and suffering…it is all politics to them.
#12 Tyler520
Absolutely correct. I would like nothing more than to hand him over to the families of the people he outed. And I would like nothing more than a videotape of him being cut to pieces by those families very slowly and painfully. I’m sure he’ll be speaking “truth to power” the whole time. Actually, he’ll be begging for his own miserable life and crying like a three year old being sodomized by an elephant.
Agree 100%
Tyler,
I think Mr. Assange’s corrupt moral worldview would consider the dead to have deserved their deaths, given the evil soldiers they were helping, and the noble Islamic compatriots they were betraying.
He would say the families are suffering because of the corruption of their dead male relatives, not because of any ‘evil’ in the radical Islamic terrorists who showed up to kill them. They DESERVED their deaths. Traitors, America-lovers, westernized b@st@rds.
That would be Julian Assange’s take. He doesn’t mind innocents suffering. As long as it serves his twisted idea of justice.
I predict that if anyone ever pins him down and asks him about these informants, he will say proudly some version of what I’ve written here.