The War Logs: An archive of classified military documents | Hacker News Reader

The War Logs: An archive of classified military documents

nytimes.com

100 pointstysone98 comments

Open articleView on HN

Also on the Guardian and the Spiegel:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/afghanistan-the-war-l...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,708314,00.h...

The leaked files on WikiLeaks:

http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010

The Guardian's reporting package is considerably more comprehensive than the NYT.

Important to all this, "The editors in chief of SPIEGEL, the New York Times and the Guardian have agreed that they would not publish especially sensitive information in the classified material -- like the names of the US military's Afghan informants or information that could create additional security risks for soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. "

It is properly good that they don't publish the names, but "information that could create additional security risks for soldiers stationed in Afghanistan" is outside what a newspaper should care about - it should be focused on getting news, not help or hinder a war.

If you're a citizen of a country at war wouldn't hindering the war be considered treason?

Besides that. Why would you want to potentially harm someone when a tiny bit of effort would prevent potential harm?

There's something good to be said about been good. We are not robots.

"Besides that. Why would you want to potentially harm someone when a tiny bit of effort would prevent potential harm?"

To prevent greater harm to others.

Uh, I disagree. One of the tenets of journalism is to minimize harm. There is probably information in those documents that could legitimately be used to kill people.

"Eight Americans were killed and 23 were wounded when 175 to 200 insurgents outnumbered and attacked this isolated command outpost in Nuristan Province.

This report shows how insurgents were successfully able to cut off small, isolated outposts like Keating and exposes the weakness of an early American strategy to set up these centers near the border of Pakistan."

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/26warlogs.html#repo...

Immersive, in a horrible, but educating way. Confusion, helplessness...

It would be kind of interesting to reformat this as it originally appeared -- line by line as IRC messages in mIRC on someone's plywood shack or tent operations center.

They actually use IRC? That's very interesting to me... Do you know where I could read a bit more about that?

I find it fascinating that these people are typing to each other? Is it to make sure the commands and information is 100% clear? Is IRC the most efficient manner to do it?

Do they use mIRC?

Yes, mIRC on windows xp or vista, backbone of military command and control. It is kind of sad. People in the operations center ("TOC") sit there monitoring HF radios and watching 2-8 mIRC windows for various networks (higher headquarters, medevac, artillery fires, etc.).

http://trout.snt.utwente.nl/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=sh...

http://ircreport.com/blog/20100405170/armed-forces-using-mir...

They also do a lot of crappy conferences using the Adobe desktop VTC product (I think branded as Acrobat), and of course HUGE volumes of Microsoft PowerPoint. Email is sent out as attached powerpoints containing 2-3 lines of text, often, rather than a simple text email.

It is quite possibly the worst IT environment I can imagine.

The irony here is that the information in the wikileaks release (especially on the Guardian site) is now vastly better organized and more accessible than it ever was internally to the military!

http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/02/17/34550-a-tactical-comman...

http://books.google.com/books?id=VQQqDxmpG9IC&pg=PA34...

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Decentralized+fires+in+Afghani...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/1440756/US-Air-Force-AFD070205069

Email is sent out as attached powerpoints

That's a thing I've noticed in the commercial world too. With most non-technical managers, if you send them a long email, they'll ignore it. Well not quite; they'll see it in Outlook, then their eyes will sort of slide off it and go onto the next one (I have observed this). Sometimes they will even phone the sender and say, you sent me an email, what's it say?

Put exactly the same content in a Word doc or a PDF and in the email just say "please see attached" and they'll perfectly happily read it, or even 10x as much text. Very, very weird.

As an IRC junkie, this is an incredible tidbit of info to find out. So all those wasted years of scripting irc bots could have real-world application at the highest levels of global warfare!

> LET'S PLAY GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR? Y/N

I think it's kind of sad that they don't have bots, usually (they rely on humans to transcribe from voice radio to IRC and back again), and use mIRC vs. something like irssi or even BitchX.

Also I doubt people do channel takeovers, banning, amusing hostmasks, etc. Warrior using IRC != IRC Warrior.

Founding IRC: http://www.mirc.com/help/jarkko.html

Very similar to the birthing of Linux.

Uncensored @ http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/afg/event/2009/10/AFG20091003n...

Some thoughts on reading that log: - have a look at the stats on that: 8x US Killed IA (in action) 23x US Wounded IA 3x Afghan National Army KIA 10 x ANA WIA 2 x ASG

2 Enemies KIA

11 x GBU 31 (2000 lb bombs) 26 x GBU 38 (500 lb bombs) 1 x Hellfire 3 x 20mm strafing runs. 19x 105 (AC-130) attack airplane

- illiteracy (in the moment, it's excusable) aside, the level of organisation and effort that went into that brief moment in history is truly admirable. But one can only imagine how it could be better spent... these aren't just dollars being spent, it's serious, high quality, highly organised man hours; intense effort, training and organisation. I realise these are personal politics, but really: it makes it hard to enter arguments about welfare state resource wastage when you think about warfare stage waste.

Money, and lives ("blood and treasure").

Also note the 23 US WIA and the ANA/etc. WIA, of which 5-10 are going to be permanently disabled, and all of which together probably cost more in medical treatment than the munitions expended. Plus of course all of the time spent training those people to do an inherently negative-sum task.

This is why the decision to go to war should not be taken lightly, and why it is important that if you do go to war, you fight it to win as quickly as possible.

Especially if you consider that the base was abandoned a week later [1]. Looking forward to seeing "Restrepo"[2] when it becomes available. I can't say I like the "action theme" in the trailer, but at least it seems honest.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/International/exclusive-apache-pilots-... [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DjqR6OucBc

Is it a crime to download or analyze the data in these documents?

Edit: Clearly it's not if the NYTimes is doing it, but out of curiosity, why isn't it?

Clearly it's not if the NYTimes is doing it

Don't be so sure about that. NYTimes has a LOT of lawyers.

Classified info, even if it has been leaked, is still classified info.

US govt. has been known to visit companies that had un-expectedly come into contact with classified data (usually accidentally as a result of working on some military project for ex.). They take over for a while, issue "gag" orders, take people statements, find out who saw the data, then they take all the storage media and shred it.

But of course, practically, I am not sure what they will now when everyone on the Internet can access this data. I guess they can still selectively enforce the law if they wanted to ... ? Or at least threaten to inforce the law.

I think there's much less power over people who don't have security clearances. In the cases you describe, the companies are government contractors whose employees probably have clearances, and have agreed to all sorts of checks (and are required to follow certain procedures as a result of getting their clearances). The companies most likely agree to those clean-up visits anyway, if they want to keep getting government contracts, so it's not necessarily even using the government's law-enforcement power.

If leaked information gets to a normal civilian who's never gotten a security clearance, though, I don't think that's illegal, if they didn't have a hand in leaking it themselves. That was basically the outcome of the Pentagon Papers case: that the people who leaked the papers to the NYT could be prosecuted, but the NYT couldn't be stopped from republishing them. Not that that'll necessarily save someone from getting hassled.

Not a crime. The US doesn't have an equivalent of the UK's official secrets act. I don't think it's actually a crime, although there could be court injunction against publishing, which you could then be in contempt of if you went ahead.

If you have a security clearance, it's possibly unwise to download/have this information on your own, especially if you have had secret access to it, mainly because there is going to be a bunch of counterintelligence to figure out how things were leaked (presumably PFC Manning, but who knows?). It would complicate things during an investigation if you had information on your hard drive, even if you could document that it had come from an outside commercial source. With some information, even if it is "known" by the public, having access to it through classified channels is a way to vet the information, so if someone posted "super secret a" to a website, and you commented "oh, yes, I've heard of that", you would actually be corroborating information and leaking classified information.

FWIW, nothing in these seems to be particularly damning of the US. It is basically "war is hell", "mistakes are made", "we like to put a spin on things". It's pretty much par for the course for special operations forces to do things and then have the positive outcomes attributed to indigenous forces, and the negative outcomes hushed up.

There probably would be some net benefit to prompt declassification and publishing of much of this information. I don't condone illegal leaks, but there is definitely a public interest in having the public informed about what is going on. Aside from the reporting on TF 373, nothing in the NY Times or Guardian analysis of the documents (I haven't looked at the raw documents) is a big deal. As far as I can tell, nothing particularly sensitive about 373 was published, either.

I thought the finding that the insurgents are using US provided stinger missiles against US aircraft was fairly damning... it shows that past US intervention has unforeseen consequences.

Also, it's pretty significant (to a lot of people) to observe that all this continued under Obama... that there has been no improvement in the way the war effort is being waged.

I don't see anything saying the enemy is using US provided stinger missiles against US aircraft. There was a report of "smoke trail", which may or may not be accurate. If accurate, I would assume it's a soviet weapon (SA-7 or successor), or maybe a Pakistani stinger clone, but very unlikely a US stinger given in the early 1980s.

Yes, a lot of this is interesting, but isn't far beyond that is available in the news, at least if you have a basic understanding of military operations in Afghanistan. If you read 2-3 of the popular military blogs (Michael Yon, especially), you would know 95+% of this.

Unlikelier considering the Stinger is filled with oddball proprietary batteries, and a canister of argon (for cooling the seeker head right before launch) that I've been told leaks over time.

That's true, but depot-level maintenance could certainly deal with that. Taliban in caves in Afghanistan probably not, but ISI/AQ Khan organizations in Pakistan are fairly sophisticated (they built nuclear weapons, after all).

More unlikely because the stingers given to the ISI/Afghans were early models with less effective seekers (more easily jammed) than the missiles available today from other sources. Current generation Stingers are the best, but current missiles from China, Russia, etc. are probably superior to first generation Stingers, especially ones that have been carted around Afghanistan.

US military helicopters and other aircraft have a variety of countermeasures -- electronic systems, well chosen flight paths, low altitude operations, and multi-ship operations (where one helicopter supports another), plus support from other aircraft for ECM. Compared to a commercial airliner, they're non-trivial to shoot down. There are plenty of contractor/NGO/etc. operated Mi-8s and other crappy ex-Soviet helicopters flying, but those crash on their own quite frequently -- no one needs to shoot them down.

There was a period where people were really scared that stingers would wind up in the hands of international terrorists who would shoot down a commercial airliner in the civilized world. There was a huge CIA buyback program for these weapons; during the Afghan civil war, they were actually too expensive to expend, and were mainly just kept by various leaders as totems of power.

I really doubt US stingers are being used to shoot down US military aircraft in Afghanistan. I admit I'm fairly biased on this, being a frequent passenger, but I'm pretty sure small arms fire and RPGs (unguided rockets) are still the primary threats.

The countermeasures don't reduce the chance of hit manyfold, certainly less than twice. Jamming is useless against heat-seeking heads, and flares help only so much.

It's pretty certain stingers can be, and probably were used to attack NATO aircraft, successfully or not. Stinger specimen were found as late as in early 2000s in Chechnya, showing there's still quite a few in circulation.

AN/ALQ-144A and AN/ALQ-157M is an IR jammer, and effective against IR MANPADS. The newest Stingers are IR + UV to defeat this. This is the "disco ball".

I don't know how effective these are (I suspect the primary defense is route planning and flying low/fast), and no one who actually knows the effectiveness would be able to comment.

See NY Times vs. USA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_St...

It would be funny if it were a crime to download this data and yet not a crime to cause the deaths of innocent Afghan civilians.

Members of the military absolutely can be prosecuted under the UCMJ if they commit crimes, including murder of innocent Afghan civilians. There have been numerous prosecutions -- in fact, the "guncam" footage from Iraq was actually recovered, allegedly, from JAG, the legal arm of the military, which was reviewing it to see if crimes had occurred which would need to be prosecuted.

The standards for use of force in a war zone are different from other places, but fundamentally, members of the military must obey the rules of engagement set by the military (at the direction of the civilian leadership, i.e. the President).

There is a much stronger argument about contractors, especially in Iraq from 2003-2006, using unlawful force and not being prosecuted, than military.

>The standards for use of force in a war zone are different from other places, but fundamentally, members of the military must obey the rules of engagement set by the military

This doesn't preclude the death of innocent civilians. And from the point of view of the people who's country you've invaded that would be murder.

That's a useful skill, to be able to speak for all the people of Afghanistan like that.

I guess you have the objectivity of distance working in your favour.

FFS man, who on earth would be happy for some military power to invade their country and setup shop wherever they like? No one wants to be occupied. Talk about "objectivity of distance", you apparently have no concept of what being occupied means.

If some military super power invaded your country but a base in your neighborhood and a member of your family was killed during one of their operations would you say "well, my brother was innocent but the army was within their own self defined rules for legitimate engagement. Bad luck for us" or would you say he was murdered?

It depends entirely on the context.

Obviously, I would be unhappy if someone I liked got killed.

However, if my house were on fire with 10 of my family trapped inside, and the firefighters racing to the scene accidentally ran over one family member in putting out the fire, I would not consider this to be "murder".

There are definitely people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have had family members killed, but who overall are still happy the US invaded. There was one report about a guy who had a US bomb hit his house, killing several family members, who then went to the US commander, told him what had happened, and asked that we be more careful and continue to get rid of the Taliban.

It's not like we invaded Canada. Afghanistan and Iraq were fairly horrible places to begin with (especially Afghanistan), and in a lot of ways, even at the peak of badness in each place, outside of localized areas, quality of life is better for most civilians.

The US has killed maybe 200 Afghan civilians in about a decade of operations. The Taliban would kill more than 200 Afghan civilians in a single month.

US medical assistance provided to Afghans (not injured by NATO/US), e.g. kids in car accidents, has probably saved more Afghans than have been killed by the US.

There are definitely grounds for not wanting the US to be there, but they're more "moral" or "honor" than practical quality of life, for most people.

> There are definitely people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have had family members killed, but who overall are still happy the US invaded. There was one report ...

Very dangerous statement to make. Unless you're citing something, please don't... I'm not saying such report is a lie, but it's a risky thing to say if it wasn't true. There are many stories which need a lot of context to understand properly. There isn't much more that person could do, is there?

There are a lot of examples. Afghan society is generally willing to sacrifice individuals for their tribe, so it's not that hard to understand.

Example: Kandahar, Marines under MajGen Mattis, late Dec 2001/Early Jan 2002. ODA 574 enroute from Tarin Kowt, Dec 2001.

For a more recent example: http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Afghanistan/special-forces-apologiz...

>However, if my house were on fire with 10 of my family trapped inside, and the firefighters racing to the scene accidentally ran over one family member in putting out the fire, I would not consider this to be "murder".

What does this example have to do with occupation? Likening an invading military force (especially when there was no reason for the invasion as is the case in Iraq) is pretty insulting to everyone involved except, of course, the invading force.

>There are definitely people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have had family members killed, but who overall are still happy the US invaded.

This might be the case in Afghanistan (I can buy that you might find someone somewhere, but I doubt the average Joe is very happy about it) but you're going to have a hard time finding someone "better off" in Iraq after the invasion. The country is less stable, less safe. There are extremist roaming around kidnapping and killing that were not doing so before. I've met several families that had decent lives in Iraq that had to leave after the invasion.

> There was one report about a guy who had a US bomb hit his house, killing several family members, who then went to the US commander, told him what had happened, and asked that we be more careful and continue to get rid of the Taliban.

Were they two such reports? What was the source of this story? Was due diligence done on the story? Sounds too patriotic/"feel good" for me to take it at face value.

>and in a lot of ways, even at the peak of badness in each place, outside of localized areas, quality of life is better for most civilians.

In the case of Iraq this is demonstrably not true. In fact the situation is almost exactly the opposite. What do you think Sadam was doing exactly? He was for sure a bad person and not someone who's radar you want to be on but for the average citizen there were definitely worse people to have as a ruler (e.g. Kim Jong-il).

>The US has killed maybe 200 Afghan civilians in about a decade of operations.

Based on what definition? The one you gave elsewhere about following US military protocol? My definition of civilian death is if a non-American who isn't a terrorist gets killed, regardless if the people who killed him where within their protocols or not. If they hadn't been there the person would likely still be alive. Given that definition your "200 in 10 years" sounds impossibly low.

>There are definitely grounds for not wanting the US to be there, but they're more "moral" or "honor" than practical quality of life, for most people.

This statement could only possibly hold for Afghanistan. Clearly it doesn't apply to Iraq.

I was trying to use an example/scenario which might be more relevant to 99.999% of HN which does not live in a war zone.

More precisely, "If I lived in a town where a criminal gang would kill members of my family, confiscate my property, and oppress everyone, and someone came in to kill the gang and stray gunfire killed my family". In the case of a legal invasion (pretty clear in the case of Afghanistan), that someone would be the police; in the case of Iraq, that someone might be a random concerned citizen.. I would definitely be upset, but it would not be murder -- it would be anywhere from purely accidental to some form of manslaughter. During a legal war, it is clearly legal, provided the belligerent obeys the law of war. Depending on the exact situation, I would be more or less upset; there are definitely situations where I would remain very upset (i.e. if the shooting was highly negligent).

Under pashtunwali, accidental death during a conflict, if you take responsibility for it and apologize, is not the same level of offense that it is in western culture.

The quality of life in Afghanistan is probably better today for 90% of Afghans than it was in 2000, although definitely worse than it was in 1954.

In Iraq, the quality of life is absolutely better for the Kurds, and quite possibly better for most Shia, than it was under Saddam. Around 2009 and 2010, it's probably reached the turning point of being better on a daily basis than it was in the past, at least for those who didn't leave Iraq; there are definitely displaced persons who are worse off. I don't think the decrease in quality of life from 2003-2007 was inherent to the invasion, but to incompetence during the occupation -- if the military vs. state department were doing the same thing today, it would have been a lot less bad. Perhaps still not worthwhile, but definitely less bad.

>a legal invasion

From who's point of view? I don't care if the invading force claims it is legal or necessary.

> I would definitely be upset, but it would not be murder

Well what if it was the mafia who "saved" you?

>During a legal war, it is clearly legal, provided the belligerent obeys the law of war.

The problem with this line of thinking is it's completely one sided. If an entity declares war on another entity the second entity can't simply say "we don't accept". They are at war at this point and now all sorts of nasty and immoral things become technically "legal".

This is compounded even more with the US' current "war", the ludicrous "war on terror".

>The quality of life in Afghanistan is probably better today for 90% of Afghans than it was in 2000,

I need some citations on that. And non-US military (or pro-US military) ones.

>In Iraq, the quality of life is absolutely better for the Kurds, and quite possibly better for most Shia, than it was under Saddam. Around 2009 and 2010, it's probably reached the turning point of being better on a daily basis than it was in the past, at least for those who didn't leave Iraq; there are definitely displaced persons who are worse off.

I disagree. And my "displaced" friends would also disagree. The people I know who do mission work there would also disagree. I wish I could somehow inspire you to get your news from sources that aren't so... sympathetic to the US' imperialistic causes because the picture your sources are painting seem to be particularly rosy.

>I don't think the decrease in quality of life from 2003-2007 was inherent to the invasion, but to incompetence during the occupation

It was a direct result of the invasion. Sadam was gone, extremists who were afraid to do certain crimes became free to do them. It's very clear.

Three other points:

1) The other reason why Iraq was moral was that the sanctions in Iraq from 1991-2003 were actually more genocidal than the US invasion of 2003. If the invasion was a precondition to end the sanctions, it was less bad than allowing them to continue. (Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died due to sanctions! Plus, huge quality of life impairment)

2) The number of civilians killed in Afghanistan is tricky. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_the_War_... is a decent compilation

In the wikileaks information, there were about 200 civilian deaths reported from US ground actions. On top of that, there were many due to air strikes. The estimates various sources publish are about 5-10k direct deaths, and up to 30k indirect deaths. That is 10x less than during the Afghan civil war of the 1990s, and far less (2+ orders of magnitude) than the Soviet invasion.

3) If I lived in South Sudan, Somalia, or Eastern Congo, I would welcome a US/international invasion and occupation, even if it meant a 5-10% chance of death for me of my family.

>The other reason why Iraq was moral was that the sanctions in Iraq from 1991-2003 were actually more genocidal than the US invasion of 2003.

The US played a big role in these sanctions so your statement amounts to: "This one evil thing the US did was ok because it wasn't as bad as this other evil thing they were involved in before".

>nd up to 30k indirect deaths. That is 10x less than during the Afghan civil war of the 1990s, and far less (2+ orders of magnitude) than the Soviet invasion.

Are these comparative numbers meant to excuse the unnecessary 30k deaths caused by US interference? Because I assume you must know that it doesn't work like that. If it did hostage situations would be a great deal easier. Just kill everyone involved because the hostage taker would have likely caused more damage then we did anyway, right?

> If I lived in South Sudan, Somalia, or Eastern Congo, I would welcome a US/international invasion and occupation, even if it meant a 5-10% chance of death for me of my family.

Those are some bad places to be sure, but I don't think you comprehend what an occupation is exactly. Do you remember the L.A. riots? Everything was out of control, innocent people were dying, the police were powerless. A news anchor asked a member of the military who was on the show "at what point should the military get involved" to which the military person replied "Please don't bring in the military". He knew that as bad as things were, bringing in the military would make it much worse because they are not a police force.

Ignoring your distorted characterisation of the situation in Afghanistan, one can think of many situations where people would tolerate and support the presence of foreign forces in their country, even if inevitably civilians are killed as a result (not a war-crime or 'murder' by the laws of war).

All one needs to do is avoid naively modelling the thought processes of brown people in a couple of lines of chomskyscript. Really, give it a try some time.

Don't you find your view a little bit too convenient? "We can still be the good guys even though we're engaging in multiple occupations, because they.. um.. want us there!"

EDIT: P.S. It's pretty low for you to pull the race card on me. Thinking like "brown people"? Wtf is that garbage supposed to mean? My view comes from how I would react in their situation (i.e. they are just as smart/capable/etc. as I am). You are the one who seems to suggest that they can't cope without the help of the US.

Bullshit. It doesn't matter one inch. These people are still dead and the war is still going on.

Who the hell cares about procedures and rules when your loved ones are getting murdered?

What? What are you arguing against? Are you saying that all deaths in war are unlawful? Because if you are you're obviously wrong. I guess you're trying to make a pacifist point trying to say that all deaths in war are immoral, but it's hard to tell.

Much of the information — raw intelligence

As a libertarian I am deeply concerned with the huge intelligence complex the United States has set up. I am concerned with the loss of person freedoms in the country, and I am concerned that our political leaders -- of every party -- lie to us rather than deal with some of these serious issues.

But I refuse to take an all-or-nothing view. Our intelligence services also exist for a very good reason, and they do necessary and critical work.

That's why I remain convinced that this leaker should receive the death penalty. It's not up to each person in an intelligence organization to make huge moral judgments about the disposition of millions of documents. If you have moral problems, resign.

And to suggest, as some have, that the newspapers have any idea what to publish or not is ludicrous. Intelligence is a process of putting puzzle pieces together. Unless the newspapers were to know what every other foreign intelligence service knew, they couldn't know which pieces fill out the puzzle for which agencies -- or what impact each little piece could have.

Hell, I'm even for publishing secret documents if they show how the political class is bullshitting us, as in the Pentagon Papers. But this goes way far and beyond that. We will never know who got killed because of this jerk.

And now for the political/systems note. It seems that as society is getting more and more full of rules that we get these sudden breakouts of flash-back. It's almost like the more the system tries to control itself, the bigger the oscillations and the more unstable it becomes. Just guessing.

> That's why I remain convinced that this leaker should receive the death penalty.

That is the standard penalty for high treason. The USA should also maybe consider taking Julian Assange prisoner as an enemy combatant.

> And to suggest, as some have, that the newspapers have any idea what to publish or not is ludicrous.

The aim of newspapers is to create controversy to increase circulation. They will often do things such as this.

On slow news days they will stoke controversy with ridiculous opinions/editorials.

I don't think it's contradictory to both support Wikileaks in principle and also condone stiff penalties for leakers in principle: Such penalties are legitimate insofar as the state is legitimate, and even most libertarians grant it some legitimacy.

Surely if a leak is worth leaking then it's worth suffering the penalty for leaking it if caught. Thousands of people are dying in Afghanistan and so the people who risked their careers, lives, etc. to get this information out are heroes.

The value of Wikileaks comes from the sensitivity of the information... If there were no penalty for disclosing it, then it wouldn't really be secret. The existence of Wikileaks diminishes the ability of any organization to conduct secret operations, and so we can expect secrecy to be used less often and more judiciously by everyone.

I agree. I think there is a difference between passionate advocate of a cause that requires some public leaks -- and being able to accept the consequences, and being an armchair, couch-potato anarchist.

Last night my youngest son and I watched "Tora Tora Tora!", the story of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Back then, the United States had cracked the Japanese embassy codes. We were literally reading all their messages before they were.

This information -- that we had cracked the codes and what the traffic contained -- was limited to only 12 people in the entire government. After the president left one of the reports in a waste-basket, he was taken off the list.

Revealing even one of these messages would have been cause for long-term imprisonment. For a member of the military, sworn to protect the constitution, to release hundreds of thousands? I can't imagine any worse intelligence catastrophe. And that includes losing the A-bomb secrets.

The activist (or foreign intelligence service) has a cause and is will to suffer the consequences for using the information. The anarchist has only chaos as a cause. The activist selects what to leak, selects how to leak it, and sometimes dies for the revelation -- a fair penalty since leaking information can easily cause the deaths of others. The anarchist simply wants openness and lack of secrecy -- their enemy is reality itself, the fact that secrecy is necessary in some cases. A much more dangerous situation.

Well put.

I think there is an inherent tension between the state and the governed, which is amplified when there is secret information involved.

A military officer sworn to obey the chain of command is not a perfect vessel for secrets, which is why there are all sorts of levels of trust/clearance, etc. Why? Because most humans can be counted upon to exercise their individual moral judgment on matters of grave importance.

The grouping of minor leakers into the category of armchair anarchists diminishes the role of independent moral discretion that may have motivated their actions. Even if it's poorly formed/articulated, I think the leakers have a sense of the moral consequences of their compliance with secrecy rules, which explains why they risk punishment to bring forth the leak.

Though derived from a chaotic and political mess, state actions (war plans, etc.) must be treated by the state as essentially sacred (and to go against it must be considered a "high crime"). Once in a while a person has the opportunity to see state actions through his/her individual moral lens and also feels empowered to act upon that feeling.

As misguided as that feeling often is, I think that its presence is a major force in the prevention of tyranny.

To be honest, based on my knowledge of Afghanistan, and of military operations to date, there hasn't been substantial harm due to the release of this information. (I haven't read through it all, but just looking at some of the high points). To some extent, it actually helps US policy interests, and a really paranoid individual could think this was an intentional leak. (it makes it more deniable and polite to ratchet up the hate on the ISI if it is in the form of a "leak")

Given that it all appears to have been SECRET and not TS or TS with a codeword/SAP, it's only potentially "serious harm to national security", not "grave", and almost all of it was highly time sensitive. Flight schedules for helicopter missions I fly on are actually SECRET until they fly; afterward, they are basically public record. By waiting 6-12 months at least to release this information, the original leaker seems to have done a reasonable job of balancing OPSEC considerations.

The most serious allegations of leaked information so far are the diplomatic cables off JWICS, which would be potentially TS, and could cause lasting harm. As well, individual source names could be sensitive, although in my experience there is enough turnover among Afghans, as well as bad intelligence on the US part, that after a year or so, the names of any sources would be outdated anyway.

The newspapers can make a pretty reasonable first approximation of what in a body of information is particularly sensitive. This is all routine operational material, so the sensitive details are operational capabilities, individual sources, and other procedural details, items which actually have the least value to the public in being disclosed. The information which is most compellingly in the public interest is "what happened", which is already well known to any interested party. Given that this information was all relatively low levels of classification, there isn't anything super secret squirrel revealed here; anything super-secret squirrel would have been hidden from this classification as well.

I would like to see prompt declassification of as much as possible, and virtually every item in this release is something which should be declassified 1-2 years after the operation. Classification should never be used to cover up incompetence or mistakes or wrongdoing, only to protect national security.

There absolutely should be an investigation, and probably a court martial (assuming it was a military member who leaked the info). The trial would need to include motivations and other factors, but I can see situations where 5-10 years would be adequate, and maybe 25-50 (i.e. effectively life), but I would be very uncomfortable with life or capital punishment over this particular release. There are people from the cold war (Ames, Hanssen) who are vastly worse than this release, and they did it for money, not for any kind of "the truth must be released" motivation. They got Life, even though their information clearly resulted in the deaths of US affiliated agents, so I think that should be an absolute upper bound.

The "explosive" Wikileaks collection will not have the same impact as the Pentagon Papers. The documents seem to amplify or confirm what many have suspected for years in terms of Pakistani intelligence collaboration with militants.

Exposing the truth is not a popularity contest. The goal is not to take Ellsberg's place, the goal is to inform the people of what their government is doing with the taxpayers' dollars.

Yes, we already knew about Pakistan's intelligence collaborating with the enemy. But did you know for sure that the Taliban were shooting down U.S. choppers with stinger missiles? I did not. I do now.

Do you mean specifically "Stinger" missiles, or simply "man portable surface to air missiles"? The difference is fairly important.

Good point. I assumed that by "man portable surface to air missiles", they meant "stingers". My mistake. While I am at it, here's some info on Stinger Missiles:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/stinger.htm

http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/m-92.html

And on general MANPADS:

http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/asmp/MANPADS.html

To clarify for other readers, the Stinger is a U.S. made MANPAD (Man-portable air-defense systems). If the Taliban have any, they are 20 year old missiles left over from the war with the Soviets, and they are most likely non-functional, since they have a limited life time. It would be embarrassing to the U.S. to loose aircraft to Stingers, but if there are any left that still work, there probably aren't very many, and the risk is limited. It's more likely that the Taliban has managed to acquire newer MANPADS (probably a Soviet design). This would be especially scary if these missiles were being supplied by the ISI or the Iranians, since it's then possible that the Taliban could acquire quite a lot of them.

Many of the original Stinger missiles can certainly be kept operational to the day. It's not your iPod, those things are well built.

The scary thing is that Pakistan apparently now produces "Stingers" as well (ANZA-II); probably superior to the other foreign MANPADS out there. We let them distribute thousands to the Muj in Afghanistan vs. the Soviets, and they apparently reverse engineered some.

The Anza range of MANPADs is based on Chinese MANPAD designs, themselves clones of Soviet/Russian MANPADs, and not on the Stinger. If you view photos of the Anza system the resemblance to Eastern Bloc weapons like the SA-7 Strela are quite clear, whereas it seems to share very little if anything with the Stinger.

Neither the Anza nor the Stinger (with the exception of the unordered Block II variant) could be regarded as superior to all other foreign MANPADs as both are handily outranged and otherwise bettered by newer fourth-generation MANPAD systems.

People need to get over the idea that any mention of a surface-to-air missile in Afghanistan must mean it's a Stinger. It's unlikely any of those ancient Stingers still work and the Soviet/Russian MANPAD variants were distributed so widely around the world that pretty much every two-bit terrorist has one these days.

Sort of off-topic (it's highly doubtful the Taliban have the latest generation...), but which MANPADS would you consider top for the anti-blackhawk mission? The Starstreak?

Hard to say really, as it's been a while since I dove into this subject. But yes, considering the missile approach warning systems, directed infrared countermeasures and countermeasure dispensers available for use on helicopters today, it's probably fair to say that a beam-riding SACLOS missile like the Starstreak is likely to be amongst the most effective against helicopters.

Seth Jones has talked about the heat seeking missiles going back to early 2008. The only reason I happen to know this is because he was on NPR a few months ago talking about it along with the Pakistan connection. Certainly didn't see much coverage of this in the mainstream media until now. Wikileaks does a good job getting people's attention at least. Too bad they weren't around in late 2002 / early 2003.

A lot of that is because no one cared about Afghanistan from late 2002 until maybe 2008; Iraq was the focus of all attention, even by the military.

I think the parent means to imply that a lot of bad stuff in Iraq would have surfaced sooner than it did at the time if wikileaks had been around.

I don't think the problem was so much a lack of raw data (most of this information actually WAS reported in open source publications; just ignored), as much as a lack of any ability to analyze and draw conclusions from that data. This was true within the US Department of State, the CPA, the PCO, etc. Reporters and academia didn't have anyone better. Wikileaks would have been good if there were secret information not being published, but basically everything important was published openly with a 1-3 month lag time.

The only part of US society with any experience at all going into this in 2003 was the military, due to KFOR/Kosovo, and even that was exceedingly limited. Arguably, if the US had more experience in 2003, it might have been less willing to go into Iraq at all.

There were people who were just 100% anti-war in general, or anti Bush, or whatever, but because they were always screaming the same thing, they could be easily ignored -- kind of like calling every single death in a war murder, it degrades the term murder and makes actual murder much cheaper as a result.

Michael Yon (www.michaelyon-online.com) was probably the first to say things were actually going badly from 2003-2005, and then to document the surge and "awakening" which won Iraq.

Iraq was 'won' ? That's news to me.

It absolutely went from utter failure to just sort of failure with the surge and awakening.

No one really won (well, the Kurds, and maybe Iran), but sometimes making something really bad suck less is a victory. Given that the people who architected the turnaround were not the people who started it, I'd say they did a pretty good job with what they were given.

Going from utter failure to mere failure is not victory, it is disaster mitigation. What would a victory in Iraq even look like? Iran emerged as a regional power. Saudi Arabia continues to finance terrorism with petrodollars. Millions of Arabs hate the U.S. even more than they did 10 years ago. How could this happen? Where was Congress in early 2003? Where were the checks and balances?

Why is that any sane person who dares to criticize the U.S. foreign policy is labeled as "traitor", when the true traitors were the congressmen who failed to check the executive branch, the intelligence agencies' employees who could but did not blow the whistle, and overall the American people who engaged in hysteria and madness and abstained from rational thought after the 9/11 attacks.

If anyone won the war in Iraq, it was Iran. The surge only "worked" because Iran allowed it to work. In case the U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear facilities, you can count on losing Iraq once again.

Yon takes good photos, and he provides some interesting stories at the tactical level. But he's kind of completely clueless about the grand plan. He's nothing more than a "useful idiot", cheering for a campaign from which he gains very little.

Indiscrimnate killing of civilians followed by a cover-up is "explosive" enough for me.

If I may ask, what were you expecting? US Marines sacrificing Iraqi babies and drinking their blood?

That's not a surprise either, sadly. Incidents of indiscriminate or careless killing of civilians have surfaced throughout the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, from the very first days of both conflicts. The military has played down most of them, or issued denials, unless confronted by overwhelming evidence that can't be easily denied such as video and photographs.

EDIT: Added new phrase after the last comma

Which specific actions in this set of documents do you think were incidents of indiscriminate or careless killing?

There were definitely a bunch of cases of needless (in retrospect) killing, but those were generally mistakes, vs. conscious policy. Given that it is a war zone, and information is imperfect, but that inaction would have its own costs, I haven't seen a lot of cases of seriously bad activity. There is also a gray zone between illegal and unjustified; the few genuinely illegal actions have generally been prosecuted and punished by the military. There were other cases where "bad" things happened which were not illegal, but where the policy was changed as a result to prevent those things.

For instance, due to the incidents such as the madrasa night attack in J-Bad, special operations night raids were sharply limited in 2009 (per GEN McChrystal), and the rules for the use of airstrikes and artillery fires were substantially tightened.

Internal to the military, people don't really cover up this information -- it feels into the process of changing policies. Compared to most companies, lower ranking military people are fairly willing to report bad news up the chain of command (still not perfect, but more so). Almost all of this is "hidden" behind security classification, maybe too much so -- which makes people outside the military assume mistakes are intentional and not being corrected. There is a compelling argument for aggressively declassifying information as quickly as possible, positive or negative.

This is the nature of an occupation. If the news would cover Iraq/Afghanistan the way they covered Vietnam we would probably already be out of both.

If the media covered Iraq/Afghanistan like they covered WWI/WW2/Korea, there could be burning cities (well, burning crappy towns in the case of Afghanistan), tens of thousands of dead civilians, etc. (I don't actually think that would happen, outside of Fallujah, Baqubah, Shahikot, Konar, etc.)

There are a lot more embedded reporters now than there were in Vietnam. The main difference with Vietnam was the draft. For almost all Americans, the wars now are something on TV which happens to other people, which they might feel intellectually one way or the other about, but which has very little direct impact.

There are more embedded but either they have more constraints on what they can/will say (I've heard this but can't find a citation so I wont stand on it) or they are siding with what's going on. You don't get the same feeling of senselessness from the reporting that you did from Vietnam.

The US killed more civilians in one afternoon on 16 MAR 1968 at My Lai (and, unlawfully) than have died in the ENTIRE AFGHAN WAR FOR TEN YEARS.

The reason there is no news reporting of numerous horrible atrocities committed by the US in Iraq or Afghanistan is that...there haven't been (m)any. There have been potentially needless but non-criminal incidents, and accidents, which are documented. There have not been many genuine crimes. (I believe there were more in Iraq than there have been in Afghanistan; in Iraq there was a military unit running a brothel, several cases of detainees potentially being abused, etc.)

The crime in Afghanistan and Iraq, if any, is that we're wasting huge amounts of "blood and treasure" for a mission which isn't in the US vital national interest. As far as how the actual war is being conducted, it's about as bloodless as an occupation can be. We're effectively trading combat effectiveness and huge amounts of money for casualties on both sides.

Very well, point retracted. But I think that the media should work harder to make people realize what hell on earth occupation is for the occupied in the same way they made people realize what a hell Vietnam was.

I don't disagree that the media has done a horrible job of reporting on Iraq/Afghanistan.

However, I think you really overestimate the downrange reporting coming from Vietnam (I don't know how old you are; the war was over before I was born, so I only read about it after the fact).

There was definitely a lot of focus on US casualties. We were losing about 300 per week, whereas now it is more like 300 per quarter or per year.

The main difference was in Vietnam, the journalists had free reign to go anywhere in the allied area they wished; in Iraq/Afghanistan, reporters are generally embedded with a specific unit. Maybe psychologically embedding with the unit makes reports identify with the soldiers more.

The only really stunning difference between Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan was down to Walter Cronkite giving his opinion that the war would end in stalemate. I don't think very many other Vietnam war reporters (from Vietnam; not US based) gave personal commentary like that. I think that is down to Walter Cronkite as a person, and that he had experience with a previous war (he flew on bombers and covered landings during WW2) before reporting on Vietnam. None of the embedded reporters in Afghanistan or Iraq covered a major war other than Gulf War I before (Anderson Cooper, Geraldo, Christiane Amanpour, etc.)

Has anyone on HN donated to Wikileaks? I have to admit I'm afraid to do so.

I do think they did a more respectable job of releasing this information than they did with the Iraq Apache guncam footage. It's unedited, relatively unbiased, and they did go out of their way to redact specific irrelevant but potentially damaging information (names of Afghans). I think the involvement of "real journalists" probably helped a lot.

I agree. They showed a bit of discretion and also managed to provide a resource to established media outlets.

With this sort of collaboration, vetting, etc, I really think it's hard to make the case that Wikileaks is a bad thing. In this case it empowered/emboldened the NY Times to write a series of stories that never would have been written.

I did a few months ago, before the controversial Apache video. Still here. :)

Why would you be afraid?

The US appears to be close to declaring Assange a terrorist. Do I want to be documented as having donated to a terrorist organization? Not sure.

If pure journalism is declared a terrorist activity in your country, you've got bigger problems than appearing on a list of Wikileaks donors.

I know this isn't exactly on topic, but a query for summary like '%killed%' returns 666 records...

What kind of soul-rot afflicts a man who can't say "What the documents circulated by WikiLeaks say isn't true anymore", but must say instead "The documents circulated by WikiLeaks do not reflect the current on-ground realities"?

It is just an attempt at disparaging the content. The more highfalutin language used the better. Of course things change, they change everyday. These kind of comments are often used to confuse the issue without saying anything meaningful.

Why does a more eloquent word choice say something about a man's morals? Why is the 'isn't true anymore' variety morally superior to the other one?

I assume the point the original poster was making is that when people use complex and obfuscatory language, they typically do so in order to deceive.

I guess it's a value judgment and a function of one's command of the language to decide when something is 'complex' and 'obfuscatory'. I'm not even a native English speaker and I had no problem at all understanding what's being said. It's just the language that is used in a certain environment, I don't see any sign of deliberately trying to obfuscate the issue.

If a doctor tells me tomorrow that I have a "malignant neoplasm on the trachea', is he an evil man that tries to hide the truth from me? No it's just what the terms he's used to using when he talks about throat cancer. (disclaimer: I don't know anything about cancer and I just wikipedia'd this example)

When a doctor says you have a "malignant neoplasm on the trachea", he is being precise, not obfuscatory. When technical language confounds us, our problem is ignorance; we have come to a place where we do not yet know the names, and time and study and attention will make things clear to us. When obfuscatory language deceives us, we have come to place where the doors have been closed in our faces. That is the difference. And that the doors have been closed out of habit or fear, and not out of malice, does not help us at all.

Yes, exactly. So now the question can be brought back to whether "do not reflect the current on-ground realities" is jargon or technical language, or not. I can easily imagine it is, for higher-level military commanders. Just like 'synergy' is a word that means something to professional managers in bigger organizations and consultancy. I know it's a word that is often derided by technical people for being meaningless management mumbo jumbo, but that's just a brash generalization coming from ignorance of the field of management.

Anyway my objection against the original comment was precisely this; the OP made a statement on the intent of who said those words based on (from what I read between the lines of the post) prejudices and his/her own ignorance.

He's Pakistani; Pakistani (and Indian) English tends to have different phrasings -- probably tending toward stilted and archaic to western taste.

I think he was just trying to say "it's not like that NOW" without saying it was necessarily true in the past. Passive voice, indirection, implication, etc. all have a long tradition in bureaucracy.

Also, he's an ISI commander, so there is no chance he has soul-rot, as he has no soul.

I don't know Pakistani, but I don't think that's the cause of the awkward phrasing. It's more likely that he has picked up bureaucratic English too well.

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