11 ms·

The War Logs: An archive of classified military documents

100 points by tysone 16y ago

Rod 16y ago
Also on the Guardian and the Spiegel: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/afghanistan-the-war-logs http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/afghanistan-the-war-l... http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,708314,00.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,708314,00.h... The leaked files on WikiLeaks: http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010 http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010
- mturmon 16y ago
  The Guardian's reporting package is considerably more comprehensive than the NYT.
ilamont 16y ago
The "explosive" Wikileaks collection will not have the same impact as the Pentagon Papers. The documents seem to amplify or confirm what many have suspected for years in terms of Pakistani intelligence collaboration with militants.
- Rod 16y ago
  Exposing the truth is not a popularity contest. The goal is not to take Ellsberg's place, the goal is to inform the people of what their government is doing with the taxpayers' dollars. Yes, we already knew about Pakistan's intelligence collaborating with the enemy. But did you know for sure that the Taliban were shooting down U.S. choppers with stinger missiles? I did not. I do now.
  - curtis 16y ago
    Do you mean specifically "Stinger" missiles, or simply "man portable surface to air missiles"? The difference is fairly important.
    - Rod 16y ago
      Good point. I assumed that by "man portable surface to air missiles", they meant "stingers". My mistake. While I am at it, here's some info on Stinger Missiles: http://science.howstuffworks.com/stinger.htm http://science.howstuffworks.com/stinger.htm http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/m-92.html http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/m-92.html And on general MANPADS: http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/asmp/MANPADS.html http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/asmp/MANPADS.html
      - curtis 16y ago
        To clarify for other readers, the Stinger is a U.S. made MANPAD (Man-portable air-defense systems). If the Taliban have any, they are 20 year old missiles left over from the war with the Soviets, and they are most likely non-functional, since they have a limited life time. It would be embarrassing to the U.S. to loose aircraft to Stingers, but if there are any left that still work, there probably aren't very many, and the risk is limited. It's more likely that the Taliban has managed to acquire newer MANPADS (probably a Soviet design). This would be especially scary if these missiles were being supplied by the ISI or the Iranians, since it's then possible that the Taliban could acquire quite a lot of them.
        varjag 16y ago
        Many of the original Stinger missiles can certainly be kept operational to the day. It's not your iPod, those things are well built.
    - rdl 16y ago
      The scary thing is that Pakistan apparently now produces "Stingers" as well (ANZA-II); probably superior to the other foreign MANPADS out there. We let them distribute thousands to the Muj in Afghanistan vs. the Soviets, and they apparently reverse engineered some.
      - Maktab 16y ago
        The Anza range of MANPADs is based on Chinese MANPAD designs, themselves clones of Soviet/Russian MANPADs, and not on the Stinger. If you view photos of the Anza system the resemblance to Eastern Bloc weapons like the SA-7 Strela are quite clear, whereas it seems to share very little if anything with the Stinger. Neither the Anza nor the Stinger (with the exception of the unordered Block II variant) could be regarded as superior to all other foreign MANPADs as both are handily outranged and otherwise bettered by newer fourth-generation MANPAD systems. People need to get over the idea that any mention of a surface-to-air missile in Afghanistan must mean it's a Stinger. It's unlikely any of those ancient Stingers still work and the Soviet/Russian MANPAD variants were distributed so widely around the world that pretty much every two-bit terrorist has one these days.
  - jsz0 16y ago
    Seth Jones has talked about the heat seeking missiles going back to early 2008. The only reason I happen to know this is because he was on NPR a few months ago talking about it along with the Pakistan connection. Certainly didn't see much coverage of this in the mainstream media until now. Wikileaks does a good job getting people's attention at least. Too bad they weren't around in late 2002 / early 2003.
    - rdl 16y ago
      A lot of that is because no one cared about Afghanistan from late 2002 until maybe 2008; Iraq was the focus of all attention, even by the military.
      - jacquesm 16y ago
        I think the parent means to imply that a lot of bad stuff in Iraq would have surfaced sooner than it did at the time if wikileaks had been around.
        rdl 16y ago
        I don't think the problem was so much a lack of raw data (most of this information actually WAS reported in open source publications; just ignored), as much as a lack of any ability to analyze and draw conclusions from that data. This was true within the US Department of State, the CPA, the PCO, etc. Reporters and academia didn't have anyone better. Wikileaks would have been good if there were secret information not being published, but basically everything important was published openly with a 1-3 month lag time. The only part of US society with any experience at all going into this in 2003 was the military, due to KFOR/Kosovo, and even that was exceedingly limited. Arguably, if the US had more experience in 2003, it might have been less willing to go into Iraq at all. There were people who were just 100% anti-war in general, or anti Bush, or whatever, but because they were always screaming the same thing, they could be easily ignored -- kind of like calling every single death in a war murder, it degrades the term murder and makes actual murder much cheaper as a result. Michael Yon (www.michaelyon-online.com) was probably the first to say things were actually going badly from 2003-2005, and then to document the surge and "awakening" which won Iraq.
- rdtsc 16y ago
  Indiscrimnate killing of civilians followed by a cover-up is "explosive" enough for me. If I may ask, what were you expecting? US Marines sacrificing Iraqi babies and drinking their blood?
  - ilamont 16y ago
    That's not a surprise either, sadly. Incidents of indiscriminate or careless killing of civilians have surfaced throughout the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, from the very first days of both conflicts. The military has played down most of them, or issued denials, unless confronted by overwhelming evidence that can't be easily denied such as video and photographs. EDIT: Added new phrase after the last comma
    - rdl 16y ago
      Which specific actions in this set of documents do you think were incidents of indiscriminate or careless killing? There were definitely a bunch of cases of needless (in retrospect) killing, but those were generally mistakes, vs. conscious policy. Given that it is a war zone, and information is imperfect, but that inaction would have its own costs, I haven't seen a lot of cases of seriously bad activity. There is also a gray zone between illegal and unjustified; the few genuinely illegal actions have generally been prosecuted and punished by the military. There were other cases where "bad" things happened which were not illegal, but where the policy was changed as a result to prevent those things. For instance, due to the incidents such as the madrasa night attack in J-Bad, special operations night raids were sharply limited in 2009 (per GEN McChrystal), and the rules for the use of airstrikes and artillery fires were substantially tightened. Internal to the military, people don't really cover up this information -- it feels into the process of changing policies. Compared to most companies, lower ranking military people are fairly willing to report bad news up the chain of command (still not perfect, but more so). Almost all of this is "hidden" behind security classification, maybe too much so -- which makes people outside the military assume mistakes are intentional and not being corrected. There is a compelling argument for aggressively declassifying information as quickly as possible, positive or negative.
    - loewenskind 16y ago
matt1 16y ago
Is it a crime to download or analyze the data in these documents? Edit: Clearly it's not if the NYTimes is doing it, but out of curiosity, why isn't it?
- blhack 16y ago
  Clearly it's not if the NYTimes is doing it Don't be so sure about that. NYTimes has a LOT of lawyers.
- rdtsc 16y ago
  Classified info, even if it has been leaked, is still classified info. US govt. has been known to visit companies that had un-expectedly come into contact with classified data (usually accidentally as a result of working on some military project for ex.). They take over for a while, issue "gag" orders, take people statements, find out who saw the data, then they take all the storage media and shred it. But of course, practically, I am not sure what they will now when everyone on the Internet can access this data. I guess they can still selectively enforce the law if they wanted to ... ? Or at least threaten to inforce the law.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    I think there's much less power over people who don't have security clearances. In the cases you describe, the companies are government contractors whose employees probably have clearances, and have agreed to all sorts of checks (and are required to follow certain procedures as a result of getting their clearances). The companies most likely agree to those clean-up visits anyway, if they want to keep getting government contracts, so it's not necessarily even using the government's law-enforcement power. If leaked information gets to a normal civilian who's never gotten a security clearance, though, I don't think that's illegal, if they didn't have a hand in leaking it themselves. That was basically the outcome of the Pentagon Papers case: that the people who leaked the papers to the NYT could be prosecuted, but the NYT couldn't be stopped from republishing them. Not that that'll necessarily save someone from getting hassled.
- rdl 16y ago
  Not a crime. The US doesn't have an equivalent of the UK's official secrets act. I don't think it's actually a crime, although there could be court injunction against publishing, which you could then be in contempt of if you went ahead. If you have a security clearance, it's possibly unwise to download/have this information on your own, especially if you have had secret access to it, mainly because there is going to be a bunch of counterintelligence to figure out how things were leaked (presumably PFC Manning, but who knows?). It would complicate things during an investigation if you had information on your hard drive, even if you could document that it had come from an outside commercial source. With some information, even if it is "known" by the public, having access to it through classified channels is a way to vet the information, so if someone posted "super secret a" to a website, and you commented "oh, yes, I've heard of that", you would actually be corroborating information and leaking classified information. FWIW, nothing in these seems to be particularly damning of the US. It is basically "war is hell", "mistakes are made", "we like to put a spin on things". It's pretty much par for the course for special operations forces to do things and then have the positive outcomes attributed to indigenous forces, and the negative outcomes hushed up. There probably would be some net benefit to prompt declassification and publishing of much of this information. I don't condone illegal leaks, but there is definitely a public interest in having the public informed about what is going on. Aside from the reporting on TF 373, nothing in the NY Times or Guardian analysis of the documents (I haven't looked at the raw documents) is a big deal. As far as I can tell, nothing particularly sensitive about 373 was published, either.
elblanco 16y ago
Important to all this, "The editors in chief of SPIEGEL, the New York Times and the Guardian have agreed that they would not publish especially sensitive information in the classified material -- like the names of the US military's Afghan informants or information that could create additional security risks for soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. "
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- tomjen3 16y ago
  It is properly good that they don't publish the names, but "information that could create additional security risks for soldiers stationed in Afghanistan" is outside what a newspaper should care about - it should be focused on getting news, not help or hinder a war.
  - pistoriusp 16y ago
    If you're a citizen of a country at war wouldn't hindering the war be considered treason? Besides that. Why would you want to potentially harm someone when a tiny bit of effort would prevent potential harm? There's something good to be said about been good. We are not robots.
    - buro9 16y ago
      "Besides that. Why would you want to potentially harm someone when a tiny bit of effort would prevent potential harm?" To prevent greater harm to others.
  - eli 16y ago
    Uh, I disagree. One of the tenets of journalism is to minimize harm. There is probably information in those documents that could legitimately be used to kill people.
grandalf 16y ago
Has anyone on HN donated to Wikileaks? I have to admit I'm afraid to do so.
- rdl 16y ago
  I do think they did a more respectable job of releasing this information than they did with the Iraq Apache guncam footage. It's unedited, relatively unbiased, and they did go out of their way to redact specific irrelevant but potentially damaging information (names of Afghans). I think the involvement of "real journalists" probably helped a lot.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - grandalf 16y ago
    I agree. They showed a bit of discretion and also managed to provide a resource to established media outlets. With this sort of collaboration, vetting, etc, I really think it's hard to make the case that Wikileaks is a bad thing. In this case it empowered/emboldened the NY Times to write a series of stories that never would have been written.
- DenisM 16y ago
  I did a few months ago, before the controversial Apache video. Still here. :)
- arethuza 16y ago
  Why would you be afraid?
  - grandalf 16y ago
    The US appears to be close to declaring Assange a terrorist. Do I want to be documented as having donated to a terrorist organization? Not sure.
    - 16y ago
Ras_ 16y ago
"Eight Americans were killed and 23 were wounded when 175 to 200 insurgents outnumbered and attacked this isolated command outpost in Nuristan Province. This report shows how insurgents were successfully able to cut off small, isolated outposts like Keating and exposes the weakness of an early American strategy to set up these centers near the border of Pakistan." http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/26warlogs.html#report/1892FD4E-1517-911C-C5601B60F44B345B http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/26warlogs.html#repo... Immersive, in a horrible, but educating way. Confusion, helplessness...
- rdl 16y ago
  It would be kind of interesting to reformat this as it originally appeared -- line by line as IRC messages in mIRC on someone's plywood shack or tent operations center.
  - pistoriusp 16y ago
    They actually use IRC? That's very interesting to me... Do you know where I could read a bit more about that? I find it fascinating that these people are typing to each other? Is it to make sure the commands and information is 100% clear? Is IRC the most efficient manner to do it? Do they use mIRC?
    - rdl 16y ago
      Yes, mIRC on windows xp or vista, backbone of military command and control. It is kind of sad. People in the operations center ("TOC") sit there monitoring HF radios and watching 2-8 mIRC windows for various networks (higher headquarters, medevac, artillery fires, etc.). http://trout.snt.utwente.nl/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=218281&page=1&PHPSESSID=4b3c5fb288b070b9dbe27df28932c74e http://trout.snt.utwente.nl/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=sh... http://ircreport.com/blog/20100405170/armed-forces-using-mirc/ http://ircreport.com/blog/20100405170/armed-forces-using-mir... They also do a lot of crappy conferences using the Adobe desktop VTC product (I think branded as Acrobat), and of course HUGE volumes of Microsoft PowerPoint. Email is sent out as attached powerpoints containing 2-3 lines of text, often, rather than a simple text email. It is quite possibly the worst IT environment I can imagine. The irony here is that the information in the wikileaks release (especially on the Guardian site) is now vastly better organized and more accessible than it ever was internally to the military! http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/02/17/34550-a-tactical-commanders-vision-of-ideal-communications/ http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/02/17/34550-a-tactical-comman... http://books.google.com/books?id=VQQqDxmpG9IC&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=mIRC+Afghanistan+iraq+siprnet&source=bl&ots=yaZmS7yXo_&sig=e1mJegWY1fP_vPbygqyQktFgtQ0&hl=en&ei=cXxNTI7mKZzrnQekzoXYCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=VQQqDxmpG9IC&pg=PA34&#3... http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Decentralized+fires+in+Afghanistan%3A+a+glimpse+of+the+future%3F-a0113194346 http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Decentralized+fires+in+Afghani... http://www.scribd.com/doc/1440756/US-Air-Force-AFD070205069 http://www.scribd.com/doc/1440756/US-Air-Force-AFD070205069
numeromancer 16y ago
What kind of soul-rot afflicts a man who can't say "What the documents circulated by WikiLeaks say isn't true anymore", but must say instead "The documents circulated by WikiLeaks do not reflect the current on-ground realities"?
- bjelkeman-again 16y ago
  It is just an attempt at disparaging the content. The more highfalutin language used the better. Of course things change, they change everyday. These kind of comments are often used to confuse the issue without saying anything meaningful.
- roel_v 16y ago
  Why does a more eloquent word choice say something about a man's morals? Why is the 'isn't true anymore' variety morally superior to the other one?
  - cabalamat 16y ago
    I assume the point the original poster was making is that when people use complex and obfuscatory language, they typically do so in order to deceive.
    - roel_v 16y ago
      I guess it's a value judgment and a function of one's command of the language to decide when something is 'complex' and 'obfuscatory'. I'm not even a native English speaker and I had no problem at all understanding what's being said. It's just the language that is used in a certain environment, I don't see any sign of deliberately trying to obfuscate the issue. If a doctor tells me tomorrow that I have a "malignant neoplasm on the trachea', is he an evil man that tries to hide the truth from me? No it's just what the terms he's used to using when he talks about throat cancer. (disclaimer: I don't know anything about cancer and I just wikipedia'd this example)
      - numeromancer 16y ago
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Much of the information — raw intelligence As a libertarian I am deeply concerned with the huge intelligence complex the United States has set up. I am concerned with the loss of person freedoms in the country, and I am concerned that our political leaders -- of every party -- lie to us rather than deal with some of these serious issues. But I refuse to take an all-or-nothing view. Our intelligence services also exist for a very good reason, and they do necessary and critical work. That's why I remain convinced that this leaker should receive the death penalty. It's not up to each person in an intelligence organization to make huge moral judgments about the disposition of millions of documents. If you have moral problems, resign. And to suggest, as some have, that the newspapers have any idea what to publish or not is ludicrous. Intelligence is a process of putting puzzle pieces together. Unless the newspapers were to know what every other foreign intelligence service knew, they couldn't know which pieces fill out the puzzle for which agencies -- or what impact each little piece could have. Hell, I'm even for publishing secret documents if they show how the political class is bullshitting us, as in the Pentagon Papers. But this goes way far and beyond that. We will never know who got killed because of this jerk. And now for the political/systems note. It seems that as society is getting more and more full of rules that we get these sudden breakouts of flash-back. It's almost like the more the system tries to control itself, the bigger the oscillations and the more unstable it becomes. Just guessing.
- w00pla 16y ago
  > That's why I remain convinced that this leaker should receive the death penalty. That is the standard penalty for high treason. The USA should also maybe consider taking Julian Assange prisoner as an enemy combatant. > And to suggest, as some have, that the newspapers have any idea what to publish or not is ludicrous. The aim of newspapers is to create controversy to increase circulation. They will often do things such as this. On slow news days they will stoke controversy with ridiculous opinions/editorials.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- grandalf 16y ago
Jach 16y ago
I know this isn't exactly on topic, but a query for summary like '%killed%' returns 666 records...

100 points by tysone 16y ago

Rod 16y ago

Also on the Guardian and the Spiegel: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/afghanistan-the-war-logs http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/afghanistan-the-war-l... http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,708314,00.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,708314,00.h... The leaked files on WikiLeaks: http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010 http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010

mturmon 16y ago
The Guardian's reporting package is considerably more comprehensive than the NYT.

ilamont 16y ago

The "explosive" Wikileaks collection will not have the same impact as the Pentagon Papers. The documents seem to amplify or confirm what many have suspected for years in terms of Pakistani intelligence collaboration with militants.

Rod 16y ago
Exposing the truth is not a popularity contest. The goal is not to take Ellsberg's place, the goal is to inform the people of what their government is doing with the taxpayers' dollars. Yes, we already knew about Pakistan's intelligence collaborating with the enemy. But did you know for sure that the Taliban were shooting down U.S. choppers with stinger missiles? I did not. I do now.
- curtis 16y ago
  Do you mean specifically "Stinger" missiles, or simply "man portable surface to air missiles"? The difference is fairly important.
  - Rod 16y ago
    Good point. I assumed that by "man portable surface to air missiles", they meant "stingers". My mistake. While I am at it, here's some info on Stinger Missiles: http://science.howstuffworks.com/stinger.htm http://science.howstuffworks.com/stinger.htm http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/m-92.html http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/m-92.html And on general MANPADS: http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/asmp/MANPADS.html http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/asmp/MANPADS.html
    - curtis 16y ago
      To clarify for other readers, the Stinger is a U.S. made MANPAD (Man-portable air-defense systems). If the Taliban have any, they are 20 year old missiles left over from the war with the Soviets, and they are most likely non-functional, since they have a limited life time. It would be embarrassing to the U.S. to loose aircraft to Stingers, but if there are any left that still work, there probably aren't very many, and the risk is limited. It's more likely that the Taliban has managed to acquire newer MANPADS (probably a Soviet design). This would be especially scary if these missiles were being supplied by the ISI or the Iranians, since it's then possible that the Taliban could acquire quite a lot of them.
      - varjag 16y ago
        Many of the original Stinger missiles can certainly be kept operational to the day. It's not your iPod, those things are well built.
  - rdl 16y ago
    The scary thing is that Pakistan apparently now produces "Stingers" as well (ANZA-II); probably superior to the other foreign MANPADS out there. We let them distribute thousands to the Muj in Afghanistan vs. the Soviets, and they apparently reverse engineered some.
    - Maktab 16y ago
      The Anza range of MANPADs is based on Chinese MANPAD designs, themselves clones of Soviet/Russian MANPADs, and not on the Stinger. If you view photos of the Anza system the resemblance to Eastern Bloc weapons like the SA-7 Strela are quite clear, whereas it seems to share very little if anything with the Stinger. Neither the Anza nor the Stinger (with the exception of the unordered Block II variant) could be regarded as superior to all other foreign MANPADs as both are handily outranged and otherwise bettered by newer fourth-generation MANPAD systems. People need to get over the idea that any mention of a surface-to-air missile in Afghanistan must mean it's a Stinger. It's unlikely any of those ancient Stingers still work and the Soviet/Russian MANPAD variants were distributed so widely around the world that pretty much every two-bit terrorist has one these days.
- jsz0 16y ago
  Seth Jones has talked about the heat seeking missiles going back to early 2008. The only reason I happen to know this is because he was on NPR a few months ago talking about it along with the Pakistan connection. Certainly didn't see much coverage of this in the mainstream media until now. Wikileaks does a good job getting people's attention at least. Too bad they weren't around in late 2002 / early 2003.
  - rdl 16y ago
    A lot of that is because no one cared about Afghanistan from late 2002 until maybe 2008; Iraq was the focus of all attention, even by the military.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      I think the parent means to imply that a lot of bad stuff in Iraq would have surfaced sooner than it did at the time if wikileaks had been around.
      - rdl 16y ago
        I don't think the problem was so much a lack of raw data (most of this information actually WAS reported in open source publications; just ignored), as much as a lack of any ability to analyze and draw conclusions from that data. This was true within the US Department of State, the CPA, the PCO, etc. Reporters and academia didn't have anyone better. Wikileaks would have been good if there were secret information not being published, but basically everything important was published openly with a 1-3 month lag time. The only part of US society with any experience at all going into this in 2003 was the military, due to KFOR/Kosovo, and even that was exceedingly limited. Arguably, if the US had more experience in 2003, it might have been less willing to go into Iraq at all. There were people who were just 100% anti-war in general, or anti Bush, or whatever, but because they were always screaming the same thing, they could be easily ignored -- kind of like calling every single death in a war murder, it degrades the term murder and makes actual murder much cheaper as a result. Michael Yon (www.michaelyon-online.com) was probably the first to say things were actually going badly from 2003-2005, and then to document the surge and "awakening" which won Iraq.
rdtsc 16y ago
Indiscrimnate killing of civilians followed by a cover-up is "explosive" enough for me. If I may ask, what were you expecting? US Marines sacrificing Iraqi babies and drinking their blood?
- ilamont 16y ago
  That's not a surprise either, sadly. Incidents of indiscriminate or careless killing of civilians have surfaced throughout the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, from the very first days of both conflicts. The military has played down most of them, or issued denials, unless confronted by overwhelming evidence that can't be easily denied such as video and photographs. EDIT: Added new phrase after the last comma
  - rdl 16y ago
    Which specific actions in this set of documents do you think were incidents of indiscriminate or careless killing? There were definitely a bunch of cases of needless (in retrospect) killing, but those were generally mistakes, vs. conscious policy. Given that it is a war zone, and information is imperfect, but that inaction would have its own costs, I haven't seen a lot of cases of seriously bad activity. There is also a gray zone between illegal and unjustified; the few genuinely illegal actions have generally been prosecuted and punished by the military. There were other cases where "bad" things happened which were not illegal, but where the policy was changed as a result to prevent those things. For instance, due to the incidents such as the madrasa night attack in J-Bad, special operations night raids were sharply limited in 2009 (per GEN McChrystal), and the rules for the use of airstrikes and artillery fires were substantially tightened. Internal to the military, people don't really cover up this information -- it feels into the process of changing policies. Compared to most companies, lower ranking military people are fairly willing to report bad news up the chain of command (still not perfect, but more so). Almost all of this is "hidden" behind security classification, maybe too much so -- which makes people outside the military assume mistakes are intentional and not being corrected. There is a compelling argument for aggressively declassifying information as quickly as possible, positive or negative.
  - loewenskind 16y ago

matt1 16y ago

Is it a crime to download or analyze the data in these documents? Edit: Clearly it's not if the NYTimes is doing it, but out of curiosity, why isn't it?

blhack 16y ago
Clearly it's not if the NYTimes is doing it Don't be so sure about that. NYTimes has a LOT of lawyers.
rdtsc 16y ago
Classified info, even if it has been leaked, is still classified info. US govt. has been known to visit companies that had un-expectedly come into contact with classified data (usually accidentally as a result of working on some military project for ex.). They take over for a while, issue "gag" orders, take people statements, find out who saw the data, then they take all the storage media and shred it. But of course, practically, I am not sure what they will now when everyone on the Internet can access this data. I guess they can still selectively enforce the law if they wanted to ... ? Or at least threaten to inforce the law.
- _delirium 16y ago
  I think there's much less power over people who don't have security clearances. In the cases you describe, the companies are government contractors whose employees probably have clearances, and have agreed to all sorts of checks (and are required to follow certain procedures as a result of getting their clearances). The companies most likely agree to those clean-up visits anyway, if they want to keep getting government contracts, so it's not necessarily even using the government's law-enforcement power. If leaked information gets to a normal civilian who's never gotten a security clearance, though, I don't think that's illegal, if they didn't have a hand in leaking it themselves. That was basically the outcome of the Pentagon Papers case: that the people who leaked the papers to the NYT could be prosecuted, but the NYT couldn't be stopped from republishing them. Not that that'll necessarily save someone from getting hassled.
rdl 16y ago
Not a crime. The US doesn't have an equivalent of the UK's official secrets act. I don't think it's actually a crime, although there could be court injunction against publishing, which you could then be in contempt of if you went ahead. If you have a security clearance, it's possibly unwise to download/have this information on your own, especially if you have had secret access to it, mainly because there is going to be a bunch of counterintelligence to figure out how things were leaked (presumably PFC Manning, but who knows?). It would complicate things during an investigation if you had information on your hard drive, even if you could document that it had come from an outside commercial source. With some information, even if it is "known" by the public, having access to it through classified channels is a way to vet the information, so if someone posted "super secret a" to a website, and you commented "oh, yes, I've heard of that", you would actually be corroborating information and leaking classified information. FWIW, nothing in these seems to be particularly damning of the US. It is basically "war is hell", "mistakes are made", "we like to put a spin on things". It's pretty much par for the course for special operations forces to do things and then have the positive outcomes attributed to indigenous forces, and the negative outcomes hushed up. There probably would be some net benefit to prompt declassification and publishing of much of this information. I don't condone illegal leaks, but there is definitely a public interest in having the public informed about what is going on. Aside from the reporting on TF 373, nothing in the NY Times or Guardian analysis of the documents (I haven't looked at the raw documents) is a big deal. As far as I can tell, nothing particularly sensitive about 373 was published, either.

elblanco 16y ago

Important to all this, "The editors in chief of SPIEGEL, the New York Times and the Guardian have agreed that they would not publish especially sensitive information in the classified material -- like the names of the US military's Afghan informants or information that could create additional security risks for soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. "

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tomjen3 16y ago
It is properly good that they don't publish the names, but "information that could create additional security risks for soldiers stationed in Afghanistan" is outside what a newspaper should care about - it should be focused on getting news, not help or hinder a war.
- pistoriusp 16y ago
  If you're a citizen of a country at war wouldn't hindering the war be considered treason? Besides that. Why would you want to potentially harm someone when a tiny bit of effort would prevent potential harm? There's something good to be said about been good. We are not robots.
  - buro9 16y ago
    "Besides that. Why would you want to potentially harm someone when a tiny bit of effort would prevent potential harm?" To prevent greater harm to others.
- eli 16y ago
  Uh, I disagree. One of the tenets of journalism is to minimize harm. There is probably information in those documents that could legitimately be used to kill people.

grandalf 16y ago

Has anyone on HN donated to Wikileaks? I have to admit I'm afraid to do so.

rdl 16y ago
I do think they did a more respectable job of releasing this information than they did with the Iraq Apache guncam footage. It's unedited, relatively unbiased, and they did go out of their way to redact specific irrelevant but potentially damaging information (names of Afghans). I think the involvement of "real journalists" probably helped a lot.
- deleted 16y ago
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- grandalf 16y ago
  I agree. They showed a bit of discretion and also managed to provide a resource to established media outlets. With this sort of collaboration, vetting, etc, I really think it's hard to make the case that Wikileaks is a bad thing. In this case it empowered/emboldened the NY Times to write a series of stories that never would have been written.
DenisM 16y ago
I did a few months ago, before the controversial Apache video. Still here. :)
arethuza 16y ago
Why would you be afraid?
- grandalf 16y ago
  The US appears to be close to declaring Assange a terrorist. Do I want to be documented as having donated to a terrorist organization? Not sure.
  - 16y ago

Ras_ 16y ago

"Eight Americans were killed and 23 were wounded when 175 to 200 insurgents outnumbered and attacked this isolated command outpost in Nuristan Province. This report shows how insurgents were successfully able to cut off small, isolated outposts like Keating and exposes the weakness of an early American strategy to set up these centers near the border of Pakistan." http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/26warlogs.html#report/1892FD4E-1517-911C-C5601B60F44B345B http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/26warlogs.html#repo... Immersive, in a horrible, but educating way. Confusion, helplessness...

rdl 16y ago
It would be kind of interesting to reformat this as it originally appeared -- line by line as IRC messages in mIRC on someone's plywood shack or tent operations center.
- pistoriusp 16y ago
  They actually use IRC? That's very interesting to me... Do you know where I could read a bit more about that? I find it fascinating that these people are typing to each other? Is it to make sure the commands and information is 100% clear? Is IRC the most efficient manner to do it? Do they use mIRC?
  - rdl 16y ago
    Yes, mIRC on windows xp or vista, backbone of military command and control. It is kind of sad. People in the operations center ("TOC") sit there monitoring HF radios and watching 2-8 mIRC windows for various networks (higher headquarters, medevac, artillery fires, etc.). http://trout.snt.utwente.nl/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=218281&page=1&PHPSESSID=4b3c5fb288b070b9dbe27df28932c74e http://trout.snt.utwente.nl/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=sh... http://ircreport.com/blog/20100405170/armed-forces-using-mirc/ http://ircreport.com/blog/20100405170/armed-forces-using-mir... They also do a lot of crappy conferences using the Adobe desktop VTC product (I think branded as Acrobat), and of course HUGE volumes of Microsoft PowerPoint. Email is sent out as attached powerpoints containing 2-3 lines of text, often, rather than a simple text email. It is quite possibly the worst IT environment I can imagine. The irony here is that the information in the wikileaks release (especially on the Guardian site) is now vastly better organized and more accessible than it ever was internally to the military! http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/02/17/34550-a-tactical-commanders-vision-of-ideal-communications/ http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/02/17/34550-a-tactical-comman... http://books.google.com/books?id=VQQqDxmpG9IC&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=mIRC+Afghanistan+iraq+siprnet&source=bl&ots=yaZmS7yXo_&sig=e1mJegWY1fP_vPbygqyQktFgtQ0&hl=en&ei=cXxNTI7mKZzrnQekzoXYCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=VQQqDxmpG9IC&pg=PA34&#3... http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Decentralized+fires+in+Afghanistan%3A+a+glimpse+of+the+future%3F-a0113194346 http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Decentralized+fires+in+Afghani... http://www.scribd.com/doc/1440756/US-Air-Force-AFD070205069 http://www.scribd.com/doc/1440756/US-Air-Force-AFD070205069

numeromancer 16y ago

What kind of soul-rot afflicts a man who can't say "What the documents circulated by WikiLeaks say isn't true anymore", but must say instead "The documents circulated by WikiLeaks do not reflect the current on-ground realities"?

bjelkeman-again 16y ago
It is just an attempt at disparaging the content. The more highfalutin language used the better. Of course things change, they change everyday. These kind of comments are often used to confuse the issue without saying anything meaningful.
roel_v 16y ago
Why does a more eloquent word choice say something about a man's morals? Why is the 'isn't true anymore' variety morally superior to the other one?
- cabalamat 16y ago
  I assume the point the original poster was making is that when people use complex and obfuscatory language, they typically do so in order to deceive.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    I guess it's a value judgment and a function of one's command of the language to decide when something is 'complex' and 'obfuscatory'. I'm not even a native English speaker and I had no problem at all understanding what's being said. It's just the language that is used in a certain environment, I don't see any sign of deliberately trying to obfuscate the issue. If a doctor tells me tomorrow that I have a "malignant neoplasm on the trachea', is he an evil man that tries to hide the truth from me? No it's just what the terms he's used to using when he talks about throat cancer. (disclaimer: I don't know anything about cancer and I just wikipedia'd this example)
    - numeromancer 16y ago

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

Much of the information — raw intelligence As a libertarian I am deeply concerned with the huge intelligence complex the United States has set up. I am concerned with the loss of person freedoms in the country, and I am concerned that our political leaders -- of every party -- lie to us rather than deal with some of these serious issues. But I refuse to take an all-or-nothing view. Our intelligence services also exist for a very good reason, and they do necessary and critical work. That's why I remain convinced that this leaker should receive the death penalty. It's not up to each person in an intelligence organization to make huge moral judgments about the disposition of millions of documents. If you have moral problems, resign. And to suggest, as some have, that the newspapers have any idea what to publish or not is ludicrous. Intelligence is a process of putting puzzle pieces together. Unless the newspapers were to know what every other foreign intelligence service knew, they couldn't know which pieces fill out the puzzle for which agencies -- or what impact each little piece could have. Hell, I'm even for publishing secret documents if they show how the political class is bullshitting us, as in the Pentagon Papers. But this goes way far and beyond that. We will never know who got killed because of this jerk. And now for the political/systems note. It seems that as society is getting more and more full of rules that we get these sudden breakouts of flash-back. It's almost like the more the system tries to control itself, the bigger the oscillations and the more unstable it becomes. Just guessing.

w00pla 16y ago
> That's why I remain convinced that this leaker should receive the death penalty. That is the standard penalty for high treason. The USA should also maybe consider taking Julian Assange prisoner as an enemy combatant. > And to suggest, as some have, that the newspapers have any idea what to publish or not is ludicrous. The aim of newspapers is to create controversy to increase circulation. They will often do things such as this. On slow news days they will stoke controversy with ridiculous opinions/editorials.
- deleted 16y ago
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grandalf 16y ago

Jach 16y ago

I know this isn't exactly on topic, but a query for summary like '%killed%' returns 666 records...