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Any thoughts on continuing to use this rhetoric despite a lack of any reports that any one of these supposed people got so much as a papercut in the aftermath,

Any thoughts on continuing to use this rhetoric despite a lack of any reports that any one of these supposed people got so much as a papercut in the aftermath, despite all the fear mongering suggesting that those people might be "in serious trouble soon" shortly after the release?

tzs 14y ago
I covered this. To repeat, we probably won't ever get proof of any particular death from the leaks, but we knew the leaks included information on groups of people that we know bad guys were actively seeking out for jailing, torturing, and killing, and so the odds are high that some are or will be killed from the leaks. It's similar to the way we can conclude that smoking has killed people via lung cancer, even though it is impossible or nearly so to pin any particular lung cancer death on smoking. People get lung cancer who do not smoke and do not spend time with smokers, and so any particular death might be due to one of those instances of lung cancer. There's also common sense. The Taliban is known to target people who they discover are committing certain acts that they consider to be offenses (which is why US forces were keeping an eye on those people, and thus why those people turned up in US reports). It seems unlikely that they would consider, say, educating girls, to no longer be an offense if they first learn about it through a leaked US report.
- lawnchair_larry 14y ago
  If you don't get proof that someone died, you have to charge him with something other than contributing to someone's death. The other side can also do thought experiments bounded by "common sense." It's common sense that anyone who was an informant knew that their cover was blown and they got out of harms way ASAP. It's common sense that during the time before the release, when the US Gov was calling up foreign governments to let them know a bad leak was on the way, they also called up their informants. It's also worth noting that only an extremely small percentage of the content contained identifiable information. Most of it wasn't related to informants at all. Your claim that the odds are high that some are or will be killed from the leaks would be questionable at the time of release, and now that we have a few years of history, fails even a preponderance of evidence standard of proof. For such a serious claim, I personally feel that it warrants at least that.
tptacek 14y ago
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/taliban-study-wikileaks-to-hunt-informants/ http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/taliban-study-wi... But it's also common sense, right? It is not controversial that the Taliban operate death squads. If you want to say NATO does too, fine, but that doesn't change the implications of the document dump. It does in fact create a list of specific people subject to reprisal killings by a group that is world famous for targeted reprisal killings on a scale even the US Army (in your least charitable interpretation) would have difficulty rivaling. Still another response to your criticism is that you've set an unreasonably high bar. How many Pashtun residence of Paktia province do you know? I don't know many. How well reported to you think Ghazni province is compared to LA County? You're suggesting that we not take harm seriously until an extremely thin layer of journalists can document that harm carefully. Well, that's never going to happen. 60% of every Pashtun person identified by the document dump could already have been murdered and we wouldn't know. History suggests that this concern is more than legitimate. How good do you feel the accounting has been for death squads in South America? Julian Assange is alleged to have sat in a room full of journalists and said "Well, they're informants. So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." That seems like an easy claim for some journalist who was at the table to have knocked down. Has that happened, or is it likely that Assange actually said that? The journalist who made that allegation was David Leigh, investigations editor or The Guardian. FRONTLINE ran the claim in their documentary. Do you think FRONTLINE didn't fact-check?
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- mixmastamyk 14y ago
  The link says they are "scouring the reports," not documenting incidents. I'm wondering if the Taliban would be able to scour thousands of documents in English fast enough to catch anyone before they left town? Unlikely. I also remember we were warned they were coming before they actually came.

tzs 14y ago

I covered this. To repeat, we probably won't ever get proof of any particular death from the leaks, but we knew the leaks included information on groups of people that we know bad guys were actively seeking out for jailing, torturing, and killing, and so the odds are high that some are or will be killed from the leaks. It's similar to the way we can conclude that smoking has killed people via lung cancer, even though it is impossible or nearly so to pin any particular lung cancer death on smoking. People get lung cancer who do not smoke and do not spend time with smokers, and so any particular death might be due to one of those instances of lung cancer. There's also common sense. The Taliban is known to target people who they discover are committing certain acts that they consider to be offenses (which is why US forces were keeping an eye on those people, and thus why those people turned up in US reports). It seems unlikely that they would consider, say, educating girls, to no longer be an offense if they first learn about it through a leaked US report.

lawnchair_larry 14y ago
If you don't get proof that someone died, you have to charge him with something other than contributing to someone's death. The other side can also do thought experiments bounded by "common sense." It's common sense that anyone who was an informant knew that their cover was blown and they got out of harms way ASAP. It's common sense that during the time before the release, when the US Gov was calling up foreign governments to let them know a bad leak was on the way, they also called up their informants. It's also worth noting that only an extremely small percentage of the content contained identifiable information. Most of it wasn't related to informants at all. Your claim that the odds are high that some are or will be killed from the leaks would be questionable at the time of release, and now that we have a few years of history, fails even a preponderance of evidence standard of proof. For such a serious claim, I personally feel that it warrants at least that.

tptacek 14y ago

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/taliban-study-wikileaks-to-hunt-informants/ http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/taliban-study-wi... But it's also common sense, right? It is not controversial that the Taliban operate death squads. If you want to say NATO does too, fine, but that doesn't change the implications of the document dump. It does in fact create a list of specific people subject to reprisal killings by a group that is world famous for targeted reprisal killings on a scale even the US Army (in your least charitable interpretation) would have difficulty rivaling. Still another response to your criticism is that you've set an unreasonably high bar. How many Pashtun residence of Paktia province do you know? I don't know many. How well reported to you think Ghazni province is compared to LA County? You're suggesting that we not take harm seriously until an extremely thin layer of journalists can document that harm carefully. Well, that's never going to happen. 60% of every Pashtun person identified by the document dump could already have been murdered and we wouldn't know. History suggests that this concern is more than legitimate. How good do you feel the accounting has been for death squads in South America? Julian Assange is alleged to have sat in a room full of journalists and said "Well, they're informants. So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." That seems like an easy claim for some journalist who was at the table to have knocked down. Has that happened, or is it likely that Assange actually said that? The journalist who made that allegation was David Leigh, investigations editor or The Guardian. FRONTLINE ran the claim in their documentary. Do you think FRONTLINE didn't fact-check?

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mixmastamyk 14y ago
The link says they are "scouring the reports," not documenting incidents. I'm wondering if the Taliban would be able to scour thousands of documents in English fast enough to catch anyone before they left town? Unlikely. I also remember we were warned they were coming before they actually came.