"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it', a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong."
It's terrible, of course, but I don't think anybody in the military intends things like this to happen (aside from a few legitimate psychopaths who use the chaos for their own ends). It's 'just' a horrifying side effect of using war and military power as a blunt instrument for statecraft.
Fuck that, the U.S. has a huge dominant army with superior technology and well trained personnel. They bombard a village because it's easy and effective.
Someone made a decision that the lives of American soldiers were worth more than an entire Afghan village. That's a war crime, and someone should pay for that. And that person should not be Bradley Manning..
I don't think that would happen without someone leaking.
Seriously, how can justify these kind of mistakes when you have military satellites, surveillance drones, intelligence and all the stuff that goes with it. I don't buy in it being just "collateral damage".
"We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means." -- Carl von Clausewitz
Now, the past decade of war has been against enemies which do not have the authority, power, or will to be dealt with politically. The obvious question, then, is how we can be fighting a war--we are going after the criminals that hit us, no?
Even a defense wherein we say "Aha! But the Taliban and Saddam regime were opposed to us, politically!" is flawed, for we had successfully conducted combat operations against their regular forces and won by any reasonable definition of the phrase. We now find ourselves in a long and bloody occupation---for that is what this is, and an occupation is not a war.
To be even more blunt about this, we cannot simply ascribe the bombing of an Afghan village as an unfortunate side-effect of total war.
We are not engaged in total war, we are not engaging an enemy which has hills and manufacturing capacity worth our bombs and weapons--this is no Dresden or Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Hiding behind "War is hell" at the very least requires us to be engaged in an honest war, and this we are not.
How would I say the truth?
The world is a beautiful and amazing place full of divinely creative and wonderful humans. We all need to work together toward a singular goal: evolving our civilization and exploring the truths of existence and the universe. We should see that we are a singular species on this planet that has evolved to a level of intelligence that allows us to explore the wider universe around us and gaining understanding and ultimately wisdom of this universe, existence and ourselves should be our cohesive, singular goal.
If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?
"I'm in the desert, with a bunch of hyper-masculine trigger-happy ignorant rednecks as neighbors... and the only safe place I seem to have is this satellite internet connection. I already got myself into minor trouble, revealing my uncertainty over my gender identity. Which is causing me to lose this job. And putting me in an awkward limbo...
At the very least, I managed to keep my security clearance (so far), and little does anyone know. But, among this "visible" mess, there's the mess I created that no one knows about yet.
Hypothetical question: if you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of time, say, 8-9 months ... and you saw incredible things, awful things ... things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, D.C. ... what would you do?
Say ... a database of half a million events during the Iraq war. From 2004 to 2009, with reports, date time groups, lat-lon locations, casualty figures...? Or 260,000 state department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world, explaining how the first world exploits the third, in detail, from an internal perspective?
Let's just say someone I know intimately well, has been penetrating U.S. classified networks, mining data like the ones described, and [has] been transferring that data from the classified networks over the "air gap" onto a commercial network computer ... sorting the data, compressing it, encrypting it, and uploading it to a crazy white-haired Aussie who can't seem to stay in one country very long.
Crazy white Aussie = Julian Assange..
In other words, I've made a huge mess.
"And, it's important that it gets out, I feel, for some bizarre reason. It might actually change something. I just ... don't wish to be a part of it. At least not now. I'm not ready ... I wouldn't mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn't for the possibility of having pictures of me plastered all over the world press, as a [poster] boy.
I've totally lost my mind. I make no sense. The CPU is not made for this motherboard. I cannot believe what I'm confessing to you.
"So, it was a massive data spillage, facilitated by numerous factors. Both physically, technically, and culturally. [It's a] perfect example of how not to do INFOSEC. [I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.
Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis ... a perfect storm.
I mean, what if I were someone more malicious? I could've sold to Russia or China, and made bank."
Adrian shot back, "Why didn't you?"
"Because it's public data. It belongs in the public domain.
Information should be free." - Bradley Manning
======================================
This is true bravery. This is courage. This is heroism. Capitol Hill does not have the intelligence quotient to understand this.
Either that, or they're just corrupt. It's probably the latter.
I am praying to a God I know doesn't exist, if only because I feel helpless in this matter. Bradley Manning, please be free. Just like the information you set out to liberate, be yourself liberated from tyranny.
Bradley Manning struck me as likely suffering from a level of mental disorder which renders him unable to discern whether or not something belonged in the 'public domain.'
"I'm in the desert, with a bunch of hyper-masculine trigger-happy ignorant rednecks as neighbors."
These are not the words of a hero. More importantly, these are not the words of someone acting rationally. These are the words of someone who leaked massive amounts of information without knowing what the information was. In some cases -- like the Baghdad airstrike video -- the information was important to bring to light; in other cases, like Cablegate, the information caused hundreds of diplomats and journalists to fear for their lives.
Bradley Manning, in my opinion, is a terrible example of a whistleblower, and if anything undermined the effort for transparency.
You have to remember that this is an IM transcript after all. The "trigger-happy hyper-masculine" comment was likely just a joke or either angst at his predicament.
Funny how averse most HNers are when it comes to perpetuating stereotypes and making negative generalizations based on race or gender, but when it comes to the military or people from "flyover states", it suddenly becomes acceptable.
c wat I did there? ;)
and for the record, I'm from a fly-over state and a bit of a redneck, and a bit not...
"Hypothetical question...and you saw incredible things, awful things ... things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, D.C. ... what would you do?"
The question isn't interesting...in fact, it isn't a question, it's an opinion veiled as a discussion. If you drop your own opinion from it, then it becomes interesting. Then people can talk about it.
This is like saying:
"Hypothetical question...Let's say you're Truman, and you know that dropping the bomb will definitely kill more civilians and soldiers on both side while extending the war and turning all your allies against you, what would you do?"
That line have never made much sense to me, can anyone elaborate on what he might have been seeing?
it could be interpreted as a feeling that there is an incompatibility/conflict between the physical gender of the "motherboard" body and the gender identity of the mind.
The trouble is, Americans believe they have the best system, society, country in the world, and that it is up to them to make every one have that same sort of system, regardless of whether or not they asked for it.
If you see America as a religion, its constitution as a holy book, its foreign policy as a crusade, its politicians as religious leaders, its people as believers, then you begin to understand the problem.
The problem is, America has a fundamentally different history than most other countries, and is that way it is because of its history. Essentially diverse people came from abroad for many different reasons to create it. The rest of the planet is not like that. Nothing wrong in that at all for America, it makes total reasonable sense, and works fairly well inits context. But for most other countries it does not. All America needs to do is accept that its unique and that other systems have equal validity to their own people. It is not up to America to judge other and seek to tell them they are wrong. If other countries and culture are wrong for their people, its is up to them to change it, not have it forced on them. If such people want American "democracy", which lets face it, Americans seem to have plenty of issues with, then such people will fight for it, loose blood for it, and really value it. Just like Americans did for themselves. No one forced democracy on Americans.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacke...
My point here being that "our freedoms" plainly is not why they hate us. The real reason is because of our involvement and interaction with them. When such involvement and interaction is kept classified for decades, then the American public has no hope of correctly evaluating statements such as Bush's.
But while it is true that part of their beef with the US was things that we would consider freedom a much bigger issue would be America's support of Israel or the stationing troops in Saudi Arabia. And then 9/11 happened and the West invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and this became very much beside the point. So Bush's famous mention of Al Qaeda hating us for our freedoms, while true in some sense, was very much a red herring.
Answer: Because they hate our freedoms honey...
/They reason it is presented in that way is because the explanation is infantile and geared for an infantile mind but it is funny how well it has worked for so long
> Assange blamed former spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg for taking the video, who said he had deleted it along with 35,000 other files when he left Wikileaks in September 2010. To date, the video has never been publicly released.
| In March 2013, Julian Assange said Wikileaks had
| successfully decrypted the video and described it
| as documenting "a massacre, a war crime".
If it was deleted in September 2010, how was it decrypted and still in their possession in March 2013? Why are the possibly outdated and conflicting events listed after future events?
In this case, its a newspaper article that are citing Assange, which is why the sentence beginning with "Julian Assange said". Changing it to "Julian Assange allegedly claim" would make the article worse, as the implied disbelief of using the word "allegedly" is not supported by the source.
Having to base edits around sources is hard, but I think a crucial aspect of any encyclopedia. The alternative is just so much worse, don't you agree?
He will probably rot in jail for the rest of his life for what he did. And I salute him for taking the hit!
This is where we, the people, must step in to make sure it doesn't happen.
I wish we had a hero to champion our fight for privacy, but I don't think Manning is that person. An anti-war hero, maybe.
A lot of the information he dumped violated the privacy of individuals who worked for the government, interacted with the government, or were in government in other countries. We can't know for sure some poor Afghans did not suffer reprisals.
We need someone in government who is willing spill everything about these domestic programs, then fight against the charges leveled against him/her in court (knowing that most likely the court will come down upon them like a pile of bricks).
It doesn't go unnoticed across the world how Americans refer to Americans as "Americans" instead of just "people". It is always said as though there is difference and that Americans have more intrinsic value.
Sometimes incompetence is as bad as malice.
I dont know if there was a video, what it showed, how many people died, how many were combatants, what their ages were.
If I was a soldier.. Id want to know that these things are investigated well.. because I really don't want to kill innocent people by mistake. Where did the mistake happen along the chain of intel and of command, who didn't double check, was someone gung-ho or negligent ?
Let's start here:
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/200601011_fbi_un...
Of course it would have been much less horrific if it was mostly civillian men instead of mostly civillian women?
Or would it be more okay because civillian men are more likely to be guerilla soldiers? So then it wouldn't be so terrible to kill them "just in case"?
I know that even the most justified war is ugly : there are accidents and mistakes and innocent people die at times, despite the best precautions.
Im aware that the freedoms I have every day, are a result of a coalition of democratic countries winning WWII and other conflicts. Many of my freedoms were won by American strength : military, economic and technological. I'm not an American, but I hold up the Constitution, the rule of Law and Democracy as high ideals - the best way humans have come up with so far of coexisting on this planet.
But a Democracy cannot exist where there is no free speech nor the right to question the government and the law. Citizens need information on whats happening : we need freedom to speak and anonymity to discuss in private, if we are to have a functioning Democracy.
I think Bradley Manning had a moral obligation as a soldier and as a citizen, to release the information he did. From what I read it seems that he was careful not to share information that would get other soldiers and spies killed, nor give the enemy any material advantage in the war.
What I think should happen is that this should be a civil trial by jury to decide whether he acted legally and morally. He leaked news of military 'mistakes', so he should not be tried by that same organization. A civil jury should decide whether the obligation to uphold the Constitution, by leaking, outweighed his obligation as a soldier to keep the information secret.
Even more worrying here is that the Obama administration is pushing for this to be tried as 'giving information directly to the enemy' ie. treason, when clearly the motivation was not that.
If there were no Wikileaks, no Press, no privacy.. how would we keep our secret organisations in check, and have any confidence they are following their mandate ?