Afghanistan: The war logs | World news. Iranian minister calls Wikileaks expose 'suspicious' - India. 5 Passages from the WikiLeaks "Afghan Diary" That Bring the Bizarre, Tragic Reality of War to Life | World. August 6, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Much has been made of the unfolding scandal surrounding the WikiLeaks Afghanistan war cache. Putting to the side the political debates swirling around the leak, the material is rich on its own terms, rich in a way that second-hand round-ups and editorializing syntheses simply cannot capture. Below are five memos that gave this reader pause, each for different reasons. . #1. Prisons and prisoners are running motifs in the memos. On the night of 28 May between 1500Z and 2400Z Mohammed Wali Jan, a detained suspected ACM (Anti-Coalition Militia) was able to use his blanket as a tool and pull in the roof of his cell.
Zawahiri's Gift of Grammar There are not many Al Qaeda cameos in the WikiLeaks cache, but among them include this arrest made in January of 2004: The Curse of UX Numerous documents detail the deaths of young LN's (Local Nationals). WikiLeaks | Afghan War. Please support our site by enabling javascript to view ads. ANTIBES, France — Now that the dust has settled, what was the impact of tens of thousands of classified Afghanistan War documents dumped on the internet by WikiLeaks.org? Was it — as most of the mainstream media immediately pronounced — the biggest intelligence leak since the Pentagon Papers? It was certainly the most voluminous. But it only added details to what serious newspaper readers already knew: that war is messy, soldiers make mistakes, weapons sometimes hit the wrong targets — in short, that “stuff happens,” as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said of the Iraq War.
In fact, you could find ammunition to make any point you want from the WikiLeaks. Obama supporters said the leaks showed what a mess the Bush administration's counter-terrorism strategy left behind in Afghanistan, and pointed out that the current administration is now pursuing a potentially more successful counter-insurgency strategy. State of the Nation. Well, it's a good bet the dying newspaper industry would reap benefits, given who's helping to write the proposed amendment to the Media Shield law awaiting Senate approval: From sponsor Sen. Chuck Schumer's website: Schumer and Feinstein are working with representatives of the newspaper industry in crafting the new language that will explicitly exclude organizations like Wikileaks—whose sole or primary purpose is to publish unauthorized disclosures of documents—from possible protection. So of all the people with skin in the game -- whistleblowers, digital media, television journalists, First Amendment experts, the citizen public who may just like to know what their government is up to -- it's one portion of a dying industry advising on this.
Paul J. And we all remember what great editorial controls and "experience in news judgment" the newspaper industry gave us in the deplorable case of Judith Miller, the New York Times and the fevered march to war. To summarize: Can the WikiLeaks Afghanistan War Documents Be Removed From Internet? Measuring Blood on Hands in the Wikileaks Controversy. Wikileaks. Could WikiLeaks story put a damper on battlefield intell?
Could WikiLeaks story put a damper on battlefield intell? Most of the reaction to the dumping of classified Afghan war documents at the WikiLeaks whistleblower Web site has so far focused on the broader damage the release might cause to the U.S. in that fight. But might the affair also impact the future ability of frontline troops to do their job? A story published in MIT’s Technology Review implies that it could. The story said the WikiLeaks data dump was made possible by recent efforts in the military to deliver the freshest possible intelligence to frontline fighters. A probable restriction on the distribution of that material in the future could throttle the flow of potentially lifesaving information to those soldiers.
The recent WikiLeaks debacle poses a big problem for DOD. The point of the network is to get good information to the warfighter as quickly as possible, while keeping the data as secure as possible. Pakistan under US and UK attacks: A look at history. Saturday, August 7, 2010 Strategic Issues Photo: Adnan Abidi, ReutersM. Serajul Islam Pakistan has suddenly become the scapegoat for what is going wrong in Afghanistan. The latest documents released on WikiLeaks (92,000 documents in total) reveal that in Afghanistan USA is losing the war and the truth is far removed from what the Obama administration has been telling the people. The documents also show Pakistan's intelligence agency (Inter Services Intelligence) ISI's close collusion with the Talibans and other terrorist groups. A current view in Washington is that the US administration may have leaked the WikiLeaks documents to shift the responsibility of losing the war in Afghanistan on Pakistan's shoulders. It was the US that had encouraged Pakistan to get involved in the Afghan war after the Soviet invasion in 1979.
History makes David Cameron's accusation more ironic than the US's accusations of Pakistan. Ensign blocks, then releases, Iceland nominee on Wikileaks - The Political Eye. Luis Arreaga is on his way to Iceland as the new ambassador from the United States. But only after he said the right things in a meeting yesterday with Sen.
John Ensign. Ensign, R-Nev., clamped a hold on Arreaga's Senate confirmation on Thursday, and removed it only after a face-to-face in the senator's office. The reason? The Nevadan wants the Obama administration to pressure Iceland to crack down on the Wikileaks.org network that posts troves of classified or otherwise unobtainable material gathered by whistleblowers or through leakers. Time Magazine has said Wikileaks "could become as important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act. " In April, Wikileaks released video showing civilians being killed in a U.S. helicopter attack in Iraq. Ensign argued the Afghanistan leaks, which Wikileaks shared first with the New York Times, the Guardian newspaper in London and Der Spiegel in Germany, has damaged U.S. and NATO prosecution of the war.
Mumia Abu-Jamal 'Wikileaks and the Imperial Press' Wikileaks and the Imperial Press[col. writ. 8/1/10] (c) '10 Mumia Abu-Jamal The release of some 70,000 + files from the Afghanistan War has been treated by most corporate media as, at best, a minor irritant, and worst, an act of treason. The instincts expressed by these outlets betrays the same mind set that whipped the nation to war in the aftermath of 9/11. Media as servant of presidential power. Media as servant of the defense industries - and Empire. Julian Assange, editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, has been lashed for not caring sufficiently for U.S. soldiers or secret Afghanistan informants. His other offense? This is what the Imperial media sounds like. As it stands, American corporate media is fast becoming a vanishing breed, for less and less people watch TV news, or read newspapers. While technology undoubtedly plays some role in this process, the lack of trust must also be a factor.
Their flag-waving, martial music and lies led the nation into disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pentagon to Troops: Taliban Can Read WikiLeaks, You Can’t | Danger Room. Any citizen, any foreign spy, any member of the Taliban, and any terrorist can go to the WikiLeaks website, and download detailed information about how the U.S. military waged war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2009. Members of that same military, however, are now banned from looking at those internal military documents. “Doing so would introduce potentially classified information on unclassified networks,” according to one directive issued by the armed forces. That cry you hear? It’s common sense, writhing in pain. There was a time, just a few months ago, when the Pentagon appeared to be growing comfortable with the emerging digital media landscape.
Troops were free to blog and tweet, as long as they used their heads and didn’t disclose secrets. Thumb drives and DVDs could be employed, as long as they didn’t carry viruses or classified information. Now, the Marine Corps is telling troops and civilian employees in a memo: But it’s an imperfect analogy, at best. Photo: USAF See Also: The Pentagon bans all military access to Wikileaks – Tech Products & Geek News. Following on from the controversy surrounding Wikileaks sharing sensitive military documents, and the mysterious insurance file, the Pentagon is taking steps to protect military assets. Access to Wikileaks has been banned across the entire U.S. Military in what seems to be a bid to stop any further information being leaked. It doesn’t look like much attention is being paid to the ban as the e-mail announcing the action has been leaked to the Air Warriors forum. It included the following: Yesterday, the media released information regarding a large number of documents containing U.S. national security information posted on a publicly available website called WikiLeaks.
Further requests and reminders have been issued such as this one sent to personnel in the Navy: There has been rumor that the information is no longer classified since it resides in the public domain. And this one by the Marine Corps: Read more at the Huffington Post and CrunchGear Matthew’s Opinion. Iran suspicious over WikiLeaks disclosures. Iran is suspicious about the revelations made by web portal WikiLeaks, exposing the dubious designs of Pakistani spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence in targeting Indian interests in Kabul and role of Tehran in fuelling insurgency in Afghanistan.
WikiLeaks, the whistle-blower organization has posted over 90,000 classified reports about the Afghan war, which exposes ISI's profound links with Taliban, and its complicity in terrorist attacks on Indian interests in Afghanistan, including attack on the Indian Embassy in 2008. The disclosure of a six-year archive of classified US military documents by the WikiLeaks.org website underscores deep suspicions about the role of ISI in War against Terror.
"We are suspicious of revealing of these documents because issues raised in these documents are not new ones," Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Fathollahi told reporters in New Delhi. Iran and India share almost identical positions and "close viewpoint" on development of Afghanistan. Bildt: No US-Sweden talks over WikiLeaks. Published: 06 Aug 2010 15:26 GMT+02:00Updated: 06 Aug 2010 15:26 GMT+02:00 Sweden's foreign minister Carl Bildt has denied that the US government has approached Sweden in connection with the website WikiLeaks and reports that many of the Afghan War Diary documents pass through a Swedish web-host. "No. We have ongoing discussions with the USA and all those involved in the Afghanistan operation, but not about WikiLeaks as far as I know," the foreign minister told Sveriges Television (SVT) news programme Rapport.
Chris Dunnet, public affairs spokesperson at the US embassy in Stockholm, confirmed to The Local on Friday that the embassy has "received no instructions to engage with Swedish officials over the WikiLeaks story". "I can't speculate as to what the other organs of the US government are doing," Dunnet told The Local. Mikael Viborg, a PRQ board member, has said that no contact has been made with the firm over WikiLeaks. Related links: Digg, WikiLeaks, and Censorship, American Style. Anti-free-speech/user-privacy articles are all over the news this week. And though the fuss over U.S. net neutrality may have been wrong, censorship is alive and well in America--it just takes a slightly different form. Military censors(ish) WikiLeaks visits by staff Concerned by the recent Wikileaks fiasco, which saw tens of thousands of potentially embarrassing (and also, for some forces still in the field, potentially life threatening) facts exposed to the world's eyeballs, the U.S. military machine is closing ranks.
Never mind that much of the so-called controversial material is pretty run-of-the-mill for any expeditionary military force that's actually in action, there's a huge fuss about the event as the documents were all classified. Now it's emerged that all branches of the U.S. military are issuing edicts that ban their staff from visiting WikiLeaks. Is this move surprising? Conservatives constrict liberal voices on Digg This is, if true, controversial stuff.
Iran suspicious over WikiLeaks disclosures. New Delhi, Aug 6 (ANI): Iran is suspicious about the revelations made by web portal WikiLeaks, exposing the dubious designs of Pakistani spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence in targeting Indian interests in Kabul and role of Tehran in fuelling insurgency in Afghanistan.
WikiLeaks, the whistle-blower organization has posted over 90,000 classified reports about the Afghan war, which exposes ISI’s profound links with Taliban, and its complicity in terrorist attacks on Indian interests in Afghanistan, including attack on the Indian Embassy in 2008. The disclosure of a six-year archive of classified US military documents by the WikiLeaks.org website underscores deep suspicions about the role of ISI in War against Terror. “We are suspicious of revealing of these documents because issues raised in these documents are not new ones,” Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Fathollahi told reporters in New Delhi.
This Week in Review: Newsweek’s new owner, WikiLeaks and context, and Tumblr’s media trendiness. [Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh] A newbie owner for Newsweek: This week was a big one for Newsweek: After being on the block since May, it was sold to Sidney Harman, a 92-year-old audio equipment mogul who’s married to a Democratic congresswoman and owns no other media properties. The price: $1, plus the responsibility for Newsweek’s liabilities, estimated at about $70 million. The magazine’s editor, Jon Meacham, is leaving with the sale, though he told Yahoo’s Michael Calderone that he had decided in June to leave when Newsweek was sold, no matter who the new owners were. Harman’s age and background and the low sale price made for quite a few biting jokes about the sale on Twitter, dutifully chronicled for us by Slate’s Jack Shafer.
Harman didn’t help himself out much by telling The New York Times he doesn’t have a plan for Newsweek. Mashable also examined (in nifty infographic form!) Pentagon Demands WikiLeaks ‘Return’ All Classified Documents | Threat Level. A Pentagon spokesman on Thursday demanded that the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks return and delete all the classified Defense Department documents in its possession, and stop soliciting new ones. “The Defense Department demands that WikiLeaks return immediately to the U.S. government all versions of documents obtained directly or indirectly from the Department of Defense databases or records,” said spokesman Geoff Morrell, opening the Pentagon’s daily press briefing.
“WikiLeaks’s public disclosure last week of a large number of our documents has already threatened the safety of our troops, our allies and Afghan citizens who are working with us to help bring about peace and stability in that part of the world,” said Morrell. “Public disclosure of additional Defense Department classified information can only make the damage worse. Wikileaks responded on Twitter by calling Morrell “obnoxious,” followed by a second tweet urging WikiLeaks supporters to donate to the organization. See also. Pentagon threatens to 'compel' WikiLeaks to hand over Afghan war data. Bradley Manning: An American Hero.