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> http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/taliban-study-wi.. http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/taliban-study-wi.... Although you didn't say that

> http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/taliban-study-wi.. http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/taliban-study-wi.... Although you didn't say that this link contradicts my point (being, there are no reports anyone was hurt), I assume that is why you pasted it. I will point out that it also contains no such reports, and doesn't contradict my point. > 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. This is not a discussion about whether the US Army or the Taliban is worse. I'm not really interested in taking a position on that. You're kind of creating a straw man there. > 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. I feel like although this makes sense, you didn't actually think about what you are suggesting. Yes, I do believe that in order to claim that someone is responsible for people getting hurt, you need some indication that it actually happened. Speculating about what horrible things could have happened is essentially an unbounded thought experiment that has no relevance. We have enough actual problems to worry about, let's not waste resources over hypothetical problems. Note that I didn't even set a bar - I'm just pointing out that there hasn't even been a whisper of an actual papercut from a friend of a friend. Nothing. Given the propensity of people on both sides to exaggerate in order to further their agendas, the fact that there was nothing reported speaks volumes to me anyway. Sure, it's common sense that they're going to look for traitors in the documents, but it's within the bounds of reason that one could take the position that they had a high probability of getting out of harms way, relative to the greater good that said person feels would come of releasing the documents. Of course, this is taking a chance, and reasonable people can disagree about whether or not that was acceptable risk. In this case, however, the "for releasing" position would have been correct as far as anybody seems to know. > 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? What does a statement made by Julian Assange have to do with this? I'm saying it's invalid reasoning to continue making serious attacks based on what "might happen", especially when the time during which said incidents would likely occur has now passed, and it never did happen as far as anyone seems to know. The particular claim that I am addressing charges that his decision potentially caused unacceptable collateral damage. I am not taking a position on whether or not releasing the documents was justified or whether or not Assange is an egomaniac who doesn't shower. If one's position is that he should not have released these, it's bullshit to justify that position with this particular claim.

tptacek 14y ago
These points are fair game, but you entered the thread by asking why 'tzs would continue to use the "rhetoric" of harm from the document dump, and so the goal line here is "reasons a reasonable person would believe the document dump would be harmful". And so those reasons include: * The Taliban is likely to kill Afghans with minimal provocation, having done so on innumerable occasions in the past. * Even if the Taliban had done so hundreds of times directly in response to the Wikileaks dump, it's likely we would never have heard about it. * The poor harm minimization concern was one expressed by many journalists, including those ideologically close to Wikileaks. * The leader of Wikileaks has been reported as ambivalent to the concern, which calls into question the diligence with which anything they published was redacted. These are reasons a reasonable person might evoke harm from the document dump. They are not dispositive of harm having occurred. It would be difficult in any circumstances to dispose of that question one way or the other. The comparison between the Taliban and the US Army was itchy trigger finger debate tactic stuff from me. Sorry. Apropos nothing: I really do not like Julian Assange. But I can't think of a way anything he did was criminal (extremely unethical: yes) and I would be offended and upset if he was the target of reprisals from the US Government. Weirdly enough, given how sympathetic Bradley Manning seems to be to people, I have no trouble at all understanding how he could be a criminal. He dropped a gigantic collection of documents he could not possibly have read or likely even understood to an anonymous third party on the Internet. Most of what we know today about Wikileaks (and the basis for most people's opinions about the Manning leak) are based on the result of the leak, and weren't known in January 2010.

tptacek 14y ago

These points are fair game, but you entered the thread by asking why 'tzs would continue to use the "rhetoric" of harm from the document dump, and so the goal line here is "reasons a reasonable person would believe the document dump would be harmful". And so those reasons include: * The Taliban is likely to kill Afghans with minimal provocation, having done so on innumerable occasions in the past. * Even if the Taliban had done so hundreds of times directly in response to the Wikileaks dump, it's likely we would never have heard about it. * The poor harm minimization concern was one expressed by many journalists, including those ideologically close to Wikileaks. * The leader of Wikileaks has been reported as ambivalent to the concern, which calls into question the diligence with which anything they published was redacted. These are reasons a reasonable person might evoke harm from the document dump. They are not dispositive of harm having occurred. It would be difficult in any circumstances to dispose of that question one way or the other. The comparison between the Taliban and the US Army was itchy trigger finger debate tactic stuff from me. Sorry. Apropos nothing: I really do not like Julian Assange. But I can't think of a way anything he did was criminal (extremely unethical: yes) and I would be offended and upset if he was the target of reprisals from the US Government. Weirdly enough, given how sympathetic Bradley Manning seems to be to people, I have no trouble at all understanding how he could be a criminal. He dropped a gigantic collection of documents he could not possibly have read or likely even understood to an anonymous third party on the Internet. Most of what we know today about Wikileaks (and the basis for most people's opinions about the Manning leak) are based on the result of the leak, and weren't known in January 2010.