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Comment by noelchurchill | Hacker News Reader

There is no justification for doing wrong.

The motive for keeping incriminating evidence hidden is to continue engaging in nefarious behavior without being caught.

The fact that people's lives will be in danger after releasing the information is even more reason to not engage in that behavior in the first place. It is NOT justification for continuing to hide the horrendous things that have been done.

The only thing that will bring this behavior to an end, is for the world to see what is really happening.

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Can you tell me what the incriminating evidence is and what the nefarious behavior you're referring to is?

and that includes disclosing names of civilians who are helping US Forces?

Name a civilian whose name was disclosed by Wikileaks who has since been killed by enemy combatants. Surely to god some journalist somewhere has looked this information up and written an article about it.

How would you find out? Information coming out of Afghanistan is sketchy, there are very few journalists on the ground, we don't have lists of every civilian who gets killed.

Well, you'd expect the US Secretary of Defense to have an idea about it, and he says he doesn't know of any civilian killed for appearing in the previous documents ( http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/10/16/wikileaks.assessment/ ).

Really? You think the US Secretary of Defense has a list of every civilian killed by Al Qaeda/Taliban forces in Afghanistan?

Well, that's it - assuming the likely scenario that nobody Wikileaks has named has come to harm, you don't really have a story.

Even if you had a story, it still doesn't stop the FUD if it suits the news outlet's agenda. That much is obvious from casual analysis of most stories among different news sources.

Defenders never win in the media.

Wouldn't that be ironic if it takes a wikileaks release to find out if there were casualties caused by earlier wikileaks releases.

Wikileaks gave the military a virtual veto right over the afghanistan documents; the US chose not to allocate resources to looking over them.

With the 15,000 or so Afghanistan documents that Wikileaks continues to hold back, they again offered to let the US review and make redactions. The US again declined to do so (publicly this time). The US claimed that doing so might legitimize Wikileaks.

That shows where the US' interests really are; it isn't in protecting the civilian informants to any appreciable degree.

The U.S. also does not negotiate with, or pays ransom to terrorists. Does it also show where their interests are? That it, say, is focused on money saving rather than saving their citizens in immediate danger?

Why I'm saying this: the DoD perhaps has an idea (true or not) that legitimizing the leaks channel would make things worse in long run than any short-term security gain for the people on the ground.

i ask you this: does it also outrage you when the us forces also kill innocent people?

are innocent people really your concern?

the irony is that wikileaks also previously released a video showing us forces killing innocent people. and my guess you were probably more outraged over the video being released than the innocent civilians killed by us forces.

The fact that people's lives will be in danger after releasing the information is even more reason to not engage in that behavior in the first place

WTF is wrong with you? Would you feel differently if YOUR name was on the list?

I don't want to speak for GP, but if their thinking is anything like mine, it would be:

My name isn't and never would be on that list.

Are you sure? In a war, disinformation is common. And mistakes are made. And names aren't unique. Even a noncombatant thousands of miles away, with no allegiances to either side, could get confused with a conflict principal.

Of course, this tangential risk doesn't suggest all info should remain confidential, any more than the existence of some crimes means all operational info from a war zone must be totally public.

It just means tread carefully if revealing info that's prone to misinterpretation, or info that might be used by combatants to direct indiscriminate retaliatory violence.

If Wikileaks came across a list of confidential informants in domestic murder cases under investigation, would it be a good idea to publish that list?

"WTF is wrong with you?" Try refraining from personal attacks on HN.

And to respond to your statement, you seem to be missing the bigger picture: How many soldiers have been put in harms way and died BECAUSE the truth was hidden from the public? How many more soldiers will die because of that?

There is absolutely no justification for the armed forces to engage in unethical behavior.

"And to respond to your statement, you seem to be missing the bigger picture: How many soldiers have been put in harms way and died BECAUSE the truth was hidden from the public? How many more soldiers will die because of that?

There is absolutely no justification for the armed forces to engage in unethical behavior."

If the guys from wikileaks actually cared about human life, they would go through all of the data and change the names (no matter how difficult or long a process).

Since they aren't, I just feel that they are using this as political ammo against the US military.

People here seem to get all pissed off when you point this out, but it's the truth. People may die as a result of this info and the guys from wikileaks don't care.

I am all for being more transparent, but not at the expense of anyone's life.

You may not want to believe it because your mind is made up, but: WikiLeaks did offer the US DOD the option to censor names in the documents. The fact that the DOD chose not to tells me that it is the DOD who doesn't care, and not WikiLeaks.

I know quite a few people in the special forces on the ground all over the middle east and you'd surprised how many adamently believe that if Americans did indeed know "the truth", we would already be at war with half of the middle east and possibly Russia.

I think assuming that the American public has an aversion to war is a dangerous one. Remember that full transparency is a double edged sword. One the one hand people learn about the innocent loss of life, on the other, people may learn just how dangerous and determined the forces against "us" are. That could very well result in a cause to action.

We invaded two nations that presumably had nothing to do with 9/11 over 9/11. Take a moment to think about the potential ramifications of a population that is fully aware of the extent powerful movements within Iran, China, Russia, Vemezuela, Pakistan and a host of other countries go to undermine our national security and economic stability. In case you didnt know, the US is already fighting covert wars on all of those fronts (you can google around for articles on this stuff, they come out all the time)

Ok. But if that's what's actually happening, we need to have that conversation. Keeping these things secret will lead to nothing but waste, corruption, and misunderstanding.

I'm not sure how that solves the op's problem. The point is democracies and crowds often make bad decisions based on popularity, status, pride, anger, ignorance, whats good for the majority (at the expense of a minority), etc.

Heh, not that I have a solution. I'm just saying the OP has a valid point and crowd rule isn't necessarily going to lead to the best solution.

Indeed, and these "hikers" and "tourists" keep on getting caught.

> if Americans did indeed know "the truth", we would already be at war with half of the middle east and possibly Russia

That's a pretty big claim. Elaborate? What's this big truth? Not that America could possibly win such a war..

> assuming that the American public has an aversion to war is a dangerous one

I'd wager that the American public would have quite a healthy aversion to total war against a serious opponent, should they ever experience it. Adventures to these pathetic third world countries don't count. The day America invades a country with ICBMs is the day an awful lot of US citizens become a lot less hawkish.

What's unethical? Depends quite a bit on your definition of ethics, even if ground rules like 'killing or hurting people is a bad thing' is agreed upon. The problem is one of balancing the risk and reward. The acceptable ratio varies from person to person, as well as the estimates for each. Collateral damage, for instance, is inevitable in war, and while such damage is clearly wrong, it isn't necessarily unethical. So saying that there is absolutely no justification to engage in unethical behavior is either trivially true, or false.

I happen to agree with your (I presume) belief that the suppressing the secrets in this case will have a higher cost than revealing them, but there is a reasonable argument to the contrary.

Lets flip this around.

We can all agree that if we knew in 2003 - 2009 that the gory details of the occupation would come out, many of the abuses would not have happened?

So now that we know that sites like WikiLeaks will leak such information, maybe (just maybe) current and future abuses will be reduced? Isn't that a positive thing from these leaks?

I think this is a good point. However, its not clear to me that this would have deterred anyone. Consider Darfur.

Not now, perhaps. But with more sites like Wikileaks and more leakers, if we can be sure no war crime (and Wikileaks is not about just war crimes) can remain hidden forever, we may hope people will think twice before taking the easy route.

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