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Bradley Manning leaked Granai Airstrike "~86-147, mostly women and children"
- jlgreco 13y agoI wonder if this is an example of one of the freedoms that they hate us for.
- Myrmornis 13y agoWhat do you mean "freedoms they hate us for"? Can you clarify?
- jlgreco 13y agoIt is a sarcastic reference to an often repeated line from a speech Bush gave shortly after 9/11/2001. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html 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.
- Myrmornis 13y agoAgreed. Sadly, many Americans continue, as you describe, to believe that the country is hated because of its freedoms, when the reason is its actions overseas. The core reason that people believe glib lies such as Bush's is that many people in the USA have no idea that people in other countries are not that dissimilar from themselves, in their interests and in their ambitions and concerns. We can't get everyone to travel, but we should be able to do better with modern internet technology and ubiquitous cell phones. For example, perhaps a website facilitating the creation of email / text message friendships between people in America and people in Afghanistan (or Gaza or Yemen etc). That would have the advantage of potentially severely reducing the signal-to-noise ratio in the government's mass surveillance of its own citizens. Initially of course it would be the more enlightened westerners that would participate, but it would be a start. Incentives for both sides could include language skills / other educational objectives.
- twoodfin 13y agoAre you sure they don't hate the "decadence" of modern Western society?
- jlgreco 13y agoNo doubt it is our freedom to be decadent. /s
- twoodfin 13y agoIt is, actually. Do you really think it's a coincidence that these guys set up shop in some of the most religiously oppressive places in the world?
- jlgreco 13y ago"Set up shop"? Where were they previously? Do you really think it is a coincidence that the more people we bomb, the more there seem to be?
- mpyne 13y agoThey were in Sudan previously, as I recall. By the way, Clinton did attack Sudanese AQ training camps (watch "Wag the Dog"); still waiting for the Sudanese terrorists...
- ucee054 13y agoAsk Michael Scheuer: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xgj08e_michael-scheuer-on-bin-laden-s-true-motives_news#.UbPIvdvMdXI http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xgj08e_michael-scheuer-on-b...
- Alex3917 13y agoDidn't Bin Laden also supposedly say that he was against the US because of the lack of action taken on global warming?
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- Symmetry 13y agoWell, way back in the day (around WWII) Arab opinion of the US was rather high. One of the key initial moments in the disenchantment came with Sayyid Qutb[1]'s journey to the US and writing about it. He had a lot to say about the moral degeneracy of the US, where men and women mixed together socially even sitting side by side in church etc. He later helped found the Muslim Brotherhood from which splintered the Islamic Jihad under Ayman al-Zawahiri which later made up half of Al Qaeda. 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. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb
- alan_cx 13y agoI think it is because they believe, with much justification, that Americans use their freedom to enrich themselves at the expense of others, and to try to make others more like themselves. Often by war, killing, coercion and manipulation. 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.
- rdtsc 13y agoQuestion: Mommy, mommy why do all the Arabs seemingly want to blow themselves up and attack us and why do we have to fear them? 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
- incompatible 13y agoOf course the Afghans are going to hate the US if you are killing their children. Imagine the uproar if an Afghani had set off a bomb in the US which caused the same casualties. Actually you don't have to imagine, you have the recent Boston bombing as a demonstration.
- jalayir 13y agoThe Tsaernevs were Chechens, not Afghans.
- jmduke 13y agoIt's important to note that there is absolutely no proof Manning leaked this, as the video was never posted online: > 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.
- pyre 13y ago| In March 2013, Julian Assange said Wikileaks had | successfully decrypted the video and described it | as documenting "a massacre, a war crime". This statement is confusing. I originally read this as stating that the video was decrypted March 2013.
- m_for_monkey 13y agoIt's not confusing. It would mean what you originally read only if there were a comma after "said".
- pyre 13y agos/confusing/easily misread and could probably be written more clearly/
- AgentME 13y ago>In a March 2013 statement, Julian Assange said that, while the file was still in their possession, Wikileaks had successfully decrypted the video ... 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. 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?
- markdown 13y agoYup. The claim should either be removed entirely, or be prefaced with 'allegedly'.
- patmcguire 13y agoThat's a terrifyingly wide range.
- brianobush 13y agoany number (> 0) of children killed is terrifying.
- skinnybastard 13y agowomen and children women and children women and children women and children women and children women and children women and children women and children women and children women and children why won't someone think of the women and children WOMEN AND CHILDREN women and children why aren't you crying yet
- ianstallings 13y agoYou know what bothers me about this? Look how this event and everyone like it is surrounded by newspeak. We were uncertain. Unfortunate casualties. Inconclusive intelligence. Imminent threat. American interests. It's all bullshit. The US government can't even tell themselves the truth let alone anyone else. They are drinking the kool-aid through a firehose.
- twoodfin 13y agoSo what is the truth? This happened on purpose?
- contingencies 13y agoThey don't just give people military hardware and let them go nuts. Employees have to attack the targets they are ordered to.
- twoodfin 13y agoSo, yes? Civilians were directly targeted?
- jlgreco 13y agoSomebody made the call to bomb the village. Either they knew it was a village, or they did not know it was a village. Therefore that person was either malicious or incompetent. Do we really care which? Mens rea isn't required for drunk drivers, why should we demand it for dropping bombs on villages?
- smsm42 13y agoThey knew it was the village. They knew there were Taliban there shooting on US and Afghan forces. They didn't know where the civilians were - because when there is shooting going around, civilians hide and it is very hard to see if there are any around, and how many of them, especially when you're being shot at at the same time. So they called an airstrike, and that turned out to be a big mistake. They could suspect that there might be civilians - since among Taliban, just like similar groups like Hamas or Hesbollah - hiding among civilians and using them as a cover is a common tactic, and since it is a village after all - but they did not know where, how many, etc. After many hours of fighting against hundreds of Taliban and after suffering casualties, the people on the ground made decision to call in air strike. Unfortunately, that resulted in tragedy, since the places where airstrikes were asked (presumably where Taliban forces were concentrated) turned out to be at or near the same places where the civilians hid. If the US soldiers on the ground knew that, they probably could do something else, but I don't see how they had to know it in the heat of the battle. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/world/asia/15farah.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/world/asia/15farah.html
- mpyne 13y agoUnless Assange is going to claim that the bomber crew knew there were that many women and children there and dropped the bombs anyway I don't see how a video of a horrific event is really supposed to add to the horror. "Massacre" could be said to follow from the Wikipedia article video or no video; "War Crime" is much more serious but requires actual evidence of that, such as occurred at My Lai during Vietnam.
- jlgreco 13y agoIt was a fucking village, why wouldn't there be women and children there? Are you saying that they did not realize a village was a village? Sometimes incompetence is as bad as malice.
- wavefunction 13y ago"oops" is not an excuse
- mpyne 13y agoTrue, but it's also not a war crime.
- chill1 13y agoSummary of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Their Additional Protocols - http://www.redcross.org/images/MEDIA_CustomProductCatalog/m3640104_IHL_SummaryGenevaConv.pdf http://www.redcross.org/images/MEDIA_CustomProductCatalog/m3... Pretty sure there's something in there about destroying entire village(s) filled with people.
- mpyne 13y agoYes, destroying civilian targets with no valid military usage is considered a war crime. Destroying a civilian building being used as a military facility, on the other hand, is not a war crime, except if there was no valid military purpose to the strike or the strike was not proportional to the military value that might be gained (e.g. it would never be acceptable post-Geneva to kill 1000 civilians just to destroy an enemy soldier). That was one of the justifications the Germans used to sink Lusitania (which despite American and British protestations, it appears the Germans had actually been right in retrospect).
- smsm42 13y agoManning supposedly leaked only the video about the airstrike, the facts about it - including high number of civilians killed - were known long before. Even the reference article was created before the Manning story. Since the video was never released, the connection between Manning and this story is rather weak.
- gridmaths 13y agoFor such an event, you really want to know there has been a proper investigation. 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 ?
- rhizome 13y agoWhere did the mistake happen along the chain of intel and of command Let's start here: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/200601011_fbi_unable_to_attract_arabic_speakers/ http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/200601011_fbi_un...
- smsm42 13y agoHow the fact how many FBI people speak Arabic has any relationship with the Granai tragedy?
- zallarak 13y agoThis begs the question - what's out there that America fears so much as to carry attacks like this out?
- wavefunction 13y agowho the fuck knows, I'm an American and I don't feel like this is necessary, acceptable, or justified
- alan_cx 13y agoNon Americans. 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.
- jafaku 13y agoThat's why nobody cared about the NSA spying on foreigners. Like your privacy (or any other human right) was more valuable depending on where you happened to be born.
- smsm42 13y agoIn this case, they probably were somewhat afraid of about 400 or so Taliban shooting at them whole day long. At least that's what I read here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/world/asia/15farah.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/world/asia/15farah.html
- SG- 13y agoIs anyone else really bothered that Daniel Domscheit-Berg deleted it as well as all the other things he did to Wikileaks when he left the project?
- joering2 13y agoGod bless Manning; a true American Hero that remembered he swear to protect his mother's soil from enemies foreign AND DOMESTIC. He will probably rot in jail for the rest of his life for what he did. And I salute him for taking the hit!
- znowi 13y ago> He will probably rot in jail This is where we, the people, must step in to make sure it doesn't happen.
- smsm42 13y agoAnd how you plan to achieve that? Short of overthrowing US government, I don't see how it is possible to not have Manning, who violated a ton of US laws and already pled guilty for some of those violations, not going to jail. The law is not American Idol, so ending a lot of SMSes to some paid number is not going to work. Neither liking some page on Facebook would. Any other ideas?
- girvo 13y agoHey everyone, try not to let emotions take over. Downvotes shouldn't be used for disagreement, that's what `reply' is for. For what it's worth, I agree with you. I think Manning did something truly worthwhile, and he DID break laws in doing so. Unfortunately, he will pay the price for that. I feel conflicted by it.
- lostlogin 13y agoThe law is not American Idol - the rich and well connected don't win that contest so easily.
- smsm42 13y agoThey win because you enable them by your votes. Each politician elected today had people voting for them. Each of this people decided to vote for this politician in his own free will. However rich you are, you still have to have people voting for you. So these "well connected" people are there because of the voters that put them there.
- kunai 13y ago"Hi. How are you? I'm an army intelligence analyst, deployed to Eastern Baghdad, pending discharge for "adjustment disorder" in lie of "gender identity disorder." I'm sure you're pretty busy. 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.
- gridmaths 13y agoI posted the link. I wanted to describe my reasons : 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 ?
- samstave 13y agoBradley Manning == Smedley Butler
- caycep 13y agoAn ancillary irony is the B1 Bomber, yet another example of a zombie military-industrial complex project that should have died decades ago. There's no good reason for it to be flitting around Afghanistan in the first place.
- Dewie 13y ago"mostly women and children" 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"?
- lostlogin 13y agoI love how killing >guerrilla< soldiers is ok. You invade a country, collapse the fragile infrastructure and then accuse the locals of being the problem - there is no chance than they're fighting for something worth believing in... It's just, well, their country. Btw, I don't mean you specifically, I mean the US military/government members who supported this.