Friday, July 30, 2010

Blood on their hands

CNN : WikiLeaks founder may have 'blood' on his hands
Reuters : WikiLeaks may have blood on its hands, U.S. says

Both sources quote Admiral Mike Mullen :

"Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing," Mullen said. "But the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family."
Guardian : The War Logs :

"...the marines opening fire with automatic weapons as they tore down a six-mile stretch of highway, hitting almost anyone in their way – teenage girls in fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road. Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed and 50 wounded."
Two hours later they returned to confiscate camera evidence.
A news photographer said they told him : "Delete them, or we will delete you."
A US army colonel paid $2,000 to the families of each victim and Major General Francis Kearney ordered the marines to pull the entire 120-man company out of the country.

Washington Post reader question to Assange :

"Did you take steps to delete the names and other identifying information of informants before you released the 90,000+ documents? If not, how do you answer the charge that your actions may get these informants killed?
Assange :

"We released 36,000 out of the 92,000 or so documents in the Afghan War Diaries. 15,000 have been held for further review because they may contain information about innocents or informants. We also asked the White House to provide resources to help us vet the materials; the White House did not respond."
.

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Yesterday Obama signed the new Afganistan troop surge bill, passed by both Democrats and Republicans.
Last month, after accusing Stephen Harper of making a decision to “cut and run” from Afghanistan, Michael Ignatieff called for Canadians to stay in Afghanistan after 2011 as police and army trainers.

Harper and Iggy both supported the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and both voted to extend the Afghanistan occupation from 2009 to 2011.
Former human rights advocate Ignatieff is providing Harper and Obama with the cover necessary to support and extend that occupation.

It's down to all of us now to blow that cover : Rethink Afghanistan
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Update : Voice of America Aug. 3
"Documents containing the names of sources were marked "Secret," a mid-level security classification. They then were widely distributed across a classified Pentagon computer network called "SIPRnet," a kind of classified Internet, as one analyst put it, which was set up to foster greater information-sharing within the defense and intelligence communities.
Officials believe this is how the leaker got his hands on them.

Former CIA director Michael Hayden tells VOA that means the real identities of sources were available to thousands of people."
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5 comments:

Kev said...

This from those who bathe in blood daily.

West End Bob said...

Excellent post, Alison, excellent post!

Thanks . . . .

Anonymous said...

"Many news agencies, including the CBC have refused to publicize the WikiLeaks information..." CBC 5 pm 'news'.

peace, babies

waterbaby

Anonymous said...

I think one of the most interesting facets of the Wikileaks release is that Wikileaks retained ultimate control of how the data was used even after sharing it with NYT, Spiegel, and the Guardian. Sharing it with all three forced them to compete for completeness instead of just dribbling it out through the filter du jour, and had any of them used a really dishonest data filtering system, WikiLeaks was still in a position to counter by publishing the info itself.
This is the opposite of what usually happens - that you give up your data to the media and they have complete control over emphasis and how much or little of it is revealed.
It will take the media some time to adjust to this loss of control. Expect them to be pretty bitchy about it till then.

Ian

Anonymous said...

Julian Assange:
"This material was available to everyone, as far as I can see, on SIPRNet, which is the secret network, which is not a high classification. It’s just a low- to medium-level classification, so available to hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals, and included Afghan informants’ and collaborators’ names. That is not how, for example, we do things. We always use code names. We never keep those names. And the US has simply shown contempt for these Afghans. They never really cared about them at all—and that’s why it didn’t help us to try and go through this enormous quantity of material to find these names-–and never engaged in correct security procedures to protect its sources in the first place, because they didn’t give a damn about them."

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