WikiLeaks says it won't be threatened by Pentagon

[kpete]

Source: Associated Press


WikiLeaks says it won't be threatened by Pentagon
AP

By KEITH MOORE, Associated Press Writer Keith Moore, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 3 mins ago

STOCKHOLM – WikiLeaks will publish its remaining 15,000 Afghan war documents within a month, despite warnings from the U.S. government, the organization's founder said Saturday.

The Pentagon has said that secret information will be even more damaging to security and risk more lives than WikiLeaks' initial release of some 76,000 war documents.

"This organization will not be threatened by the Pentagon or any other group," Julian Assange told reporters in Stockholm. "We proceed cautiously and safely with this material."

In an interview with The Associated Press, he said that if U.S. defense officials want to be seen as promoting democracy then they "must protect what the United States' founders considered to be their central value, which is freedom of the press."

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100814/ap_on_hi_te/afghanistan_wikileaks;_ylt=Ao0LFfun9_ULWO26Bk5mY22s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNwOGVlYWNtBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwODE0L2FmZ2hhbmlzdGFuX3dpa2lsZWFrcwRjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wdWxhcgRjcG9zAzcEcG9zAzQEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl9oZ

[Jefferson23]

1. Fascinating you are to me Assange, and stay well. n/t

[Xipe Totec]

2. Threatened, yes. Intimidated, maybe not nt

[Joanne98]

3. LOL

[The Backlash Cometh]

4. Has anything important been learned by these documents?

[kpete]

5. yes!

the hippies were right!

[The Backlash Cometh]

7. About what?

Certainly not hygiene. Though they looked pretty in their tie-dyes.

[bigmonkey]

11. During the Nixon era, that "hygine" stuff became a common right-wing term of dismissal.

Gratuitous, exaggerative, and irrelevant.

[The Backlash Cometh]

12. Okay, I'll take that on the chin.

Now, what were they right about?

[bigmonkey]

14. Mark Morford has one of the most fun lists of what the hippies were right about,

And here it is:

http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-05-02/bay-area/17242484_1_ex-hippie-alternative-energy-ancient-cultures

(Short answer - They were right about a huge amount of stuff.)

[The Backlash Cometh]

15. hee

When you're right, you're right.

[bigmonkey]

16. So, thank a hippie today!

(At this point, it's almost like honoring the ancestors.)

[boppers]

18. From the article:

"It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the goddamn grid and it's about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology."

But hey, I'm not surprised to see that group being gratuitously self-congratulatory. Not a bit at all.

[bigmonkey]

19. Somebody contemporary carries culture.

The hippies looked at what had been abandoned, and said "Wait a minute, let's try that stuff again." That ancient culture stuff didn't get much respect back then. Credit was secondary. Consciousness is not personal property, it's not even property.

[Chef Eric]

8. Yes, we've learned many things from WikiLeaks.

We learned that Sarah Palin was evading public record laws.
In September 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaigns, the contents of a Yahoo account belonging to Sarah Palin were posted on Wikileaks. The contents of the mailbox seemed to suggest that she used the private account to send work-related messages in order to evade public record laws.

We learned about right-wing extremists in Britain.
The membership list of the far-right British National Party was posted to Wikileaks on 18 November 2008. The name, address, age and occupation of many of the 13,500 members were given, including several police officers, two solicitors, four ministers of religion, at least one doctor, and a number of primary and secondary school teachers. In Britain, police officers are banned from joining or promoting the BNP, and at least one officer was dismissed for being a member.

We learned about toxic dumping in Africa.
In September 2006, commodities giant Trafigura commissioned an internal report about a toxic dumping incident in the Ivory Coast,vwhich (according to the United Nations) affected 108,000 people. The document, called the Minton Report, names various harmful chemicals "likely to be present" in the waste — sodium hydroxide, cobalt phthalocyanine sulfonate, coker naphtha, thiols, sodium alkanethiolate, sodium hydrosulfide, sodium sulfide, dialkyl disulfides, hydrogen sulfide.

We learned details about civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
In July 2010, Wikileaks released 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009. The documents detail individual incidents including friendly fire and civilian casualties.

[The Backlash Cometh]

9. Thanks for the summary!

[JonLP24]

17. Civilians were being under-counted

in death totals.

War logs show how marines gave cleaned up accounts of incident in which they killed 19 civilians

t started with a suicide bomb. On 4 March 2007 a convoy of US marines, who arrived in Afghanistan three weeks earlier, were hit by an explosives-rigged minivan outside the city of Jalalabad.

The marines made a frenzied escape, opening fire with automatic weapons as they tore down a six-mile stretch of highway, hitting almost anyone in their way – teenage girls in fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road. Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed and 50 wounded.

None of this, however, was captured in the initial military account, written by the marines themselves. It simply says that, simultaneous to the suicide explosion, "the patrol received small arms fire from three directions".

And the subsequent rampage as they drove away – which would later be the subject of a 17-day military inquiry and a 12,000-page report – is captured in five words: "The patrol returned to JAF ."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/26/afghanistan-war-logs-us-marines

and

Afghanistan war logs: Secret CIA paramilitaries' role in civilian deaths

Shum Khan, a man both deaf and unable to speak, lived in the remote border hamlet of Malekshay, 7,000ft up in the mountains. When a heavily armed squad from the CIA barrelled into his village in March 2007, the war logs record that he "ran at the sight of the approaching coalition forces … out of fear and confusion".

The secret CIA paramilitaries, (the euphemism here is OGA, for "other government agency") shouted at him to stop. Khan could not hear them. He carried on running. So they shot him, saying they were entitled to do so under the carefully graded "escalation of force" provisions of the US rules of engagement.

Khan was wounded but survived. The Americans' error was explained to them by village elders, so they fetched out what they term "solatia", or compensation. The classified intelligence report ends briskly: "Solatia was made in the form of supplies and the Element mission progressed".

Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs recording some of these so-called "blue on white" events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/afghanistan-civilian-deaths-rules-engagement

You may not find this stuff important but I do. Also due to the 4 paragraph limit--I left out in the first article they made no mention of punishment the soldiers may or may not of received.

[daleo]

21. Yeah, that the war is a hopeless waste of blood and treasure

Though, technically we did know that already.

[pipoman]

6. I hope he likes Stockholm...

[Turborama]

10. I think he's living in Reykjavik developing a taste for Hákarl n/t

[ProgressiveProfessor]

13. or whale

as seen in: http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB122031777512289251.html

[Pavulon]

20. Maybe the 5 human rights groups that said he is a moron for publishing

names are a threat. Other than a snitch list for the taliban to kill he published nothing of value.