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Brad/Chelsea Manning: Charged w/AFG file leak, Cdn angles, disposition (merged)

  • Thread starter Thread starter jollyjacktar
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George Wallace said:
That is the real kicker, and an assumption that someone made without 'all' the facts, no doubt due to the brevity of the report they were looking at.

Exactly, George.

I've looked at several reports of activity I am personally familiar with, and they're almost all just as succinct. They're equally ambiguous if you don't have special knowledge of the event. Many of the reports are "first comment" and these are the ones the media seem to be focusing on, not the more detailed and complete reports.
 
I wonder how long Julian Assange is going to be allowed to remain a free man?  What he has gone and done now, is cross a very fine line.  I am sure his Wikileaks will soon be closed down, and his finding himself jailed.
 
I do not see that happening. Different organizations have tried since he started up. The screaming of "censorship" would go arounf the planet pretty quick.

Besides, there will always be some ass-clown with an ISP that will host another ass-clown.

Wook
 
I'm thinking "the National Security Act" or whatever the US and UK have to protect State Secrets.  He has crossed the line in releasing secret documents that can "embarrass" or "do harm" to the governments of the US and UK.  These maters are not usually taken lightly.  I don’t think they would go so far as to try him for treason, but they may try to charge him with something close to it.
 
George Wallace said:
I'm thinking "the National Security Act" or whatever the US and UK have to protect State Secrets.  He has crossed the line in releasing secret documents that can "embarrass" or "do harm" to the governments of the US and UK.  These maters are not usually taken lightly.  I don’t think they would go so far as to try him for treason, but they may try to charge him with something close to it.
Legal-beagle question:  if the servers where the info is contained aren't in the US or UK, can this fly? 

Then again, maybe he can visit the areas where anyone who's listed on these reports talking to ISAF has been killed to share his philosophy  >:D
 
I have hard time believing that, actually.  I doubt he'll wind up in any sort of detention.  As for the site, it'll likely not go anywhere, either.  And even if it did, it has mirrors everywhere, and any of the info put out on it has been copied and stored all over the place - if it disappeared, a replacement would likely appear very quickly.

George Wallace said:
I wonder how long Julian Assange is going to be allowed to remain a free man?  What he has gone and done now, is cross a very fine line.  I am sure his Wikileaks will soon be closed down, and his finding himself jailed.
 
milnews.ca said:
Legal-beagle question:  if the servers where the info is contained aren't in the US or UK, can this fly? 

He did make a public appearance to announce these 'facts':
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaks during a press conference in London, 26 Jul 2010. Assange said he believes there is evidence of war crimes in the thousands of pages of leaked U.S. military documents.

LINK
WikiLeaks is a website that posts formerly secret documents online in what its members say is the pursuit of transparency and accountability.  Its release of more than 75,000 U.S. Army and Marine Corps documents chronicling six years of events in Afghanistan has angered officials in Washington, Britain and Pakistan

The WikiLeaks website says the organization began as a dialogue between activists who wanted to alleviate suffering.  It says the organization champions "principled leaking." 

Since 2007 WikiLeaks has posted thousands of documents on the internet.  Founder Julian Assange sees himself as an information activist whose main goal is to get information into the public domain.  He says he has a small, overworked staff, about 800 part time workers and thousands of supporters. 

"I suppose our greatest fear is we will be too successful too fast, and we will not be able to do justice to the material we are getting in fast enough," said Assange.  "That is our greatest problem at the moment."

WikiLeaks is non-profit and Assange says during the past few months there has been tremendous financial support.

"We have raised a million dollars from the general public.  As a result we are enabled to have a sort of fierce independence that larger organizations find more difficult.  That said, of course, we are also immediately accountable to the public because that is where our money comes from, directly from the public, not from advertisers or foundations," said Assange.

Simon Schneider, who runs a competition to find new internet technology to improve global security, says WikiLeaks main strength is protecting its sources.

"The fact that it is so controversial and the fact that so many people talk about it tells me that WikiLeaks touches on a very, very important point," said Schneider.  "And I think that this discussion between what should be private and what should be public touches a lot of peoples nerves, and I think it is important that we talk about it."

But former intelligence analyst Bob Ayers is not convinced WikiLeaks is a force for good.

"The fact that we have a bunch of liberal amateurs trying to do intelligence assessments of material does not give me a strong feeling of confidence," said Ayers.

Ayers cites WikiLeaks most recent revelations, the release of more than 75,000 U.S. military documents relating to Afghanistan.

"The information that was released is not a threat to the United States per se," said Ayers.  "It has the potential to be a threat to combatants that are fighting in the area, it has the potential to destabilize the trilateral relationships between Afghanistan, Pakistan and the U.S.  And it has the potential to place the intelligence community at some level of risk if their sources are being compromised publicly."

WikiLeaks founder Assange says his organization has a harm-minimization process to identify, redact or withhold anything that might hurt a source or anyone involved in the documents.  Assange says for that reason, they did not release more than 15,000 Afghanistan-related documents, and he says because what they did make public was seven months old, he believed it contained no information that could harm NATO troops. 

Ayers disagrees.  "The fact it is seven months old is immaterial.  It is irrelevant.  They are not going to change their patrolling patterns in seven months, they are still going to patrol the same way.  So now what you have done is you have informed the enemy of information that can assist them in planning how to attack NATO forces in Afghanistan when they are on patrol," said Ayers.

Ayers believes the American government will have to do something about WikiLeaks.  Under U.S. law it is illegal to disclose classified information. 

"There is a real dilemma here as to how to deal with a site like WikiLeaks," said Ayers.  "Are they acting in the public good?  Are they acting sensationally? Are they endangering the public good?  Are they endangering lives by their actions?  And those are things that I think we will still see addressed and sorted out over the next six months or so."

To thwart censorship, WikiLeaks released the leaked documents in three jurisdictions, the United States, Germany and Great Britain.
========================================================================

Who is really providing the "financial support"?
 
This, via Canadian Press, from former CDS Rick Hillier:
.... Hillier says there were more than 1,000 Canadian soldiers involved in Operation Medusa, and hundreds of witnesses who saw precisely what happened, and the American account is simply incorrect.

He says it's a cardinal rule among soldiers in the field to take every piece of information with a grain of salt, because it's only in the fullness of time that the true picture emerges.

A source in Washington says the report could be confusing their deaths with a genuine friendly-fire death the following day: Pte. Mark Graham died when Canadian troops in the area were strafed by NATO planes.

"Somebody wrote a document, obviously, and was wrong in what they wrote," said Hillier, who was conducting interviews Tuesday for The Motorcycle Ride for Dad, a cross-Canada effort to raise money for prostate cancer awareness.

"We always tried to take with a grain of salt everything we heard, because nothing was ever as good or as bad as you would first hear. We never trusted those first reports, and don't trust them now."

"We had hundreds of witnesses to all the events that occurred over the days and several weeks there, and sadly, we know from those hundreds of folks who were involved directly, that the lives of those four soldiers were lost because of enemy action, not because of friendly fire."

Hillier said the documents, which were posted Sunday on the fledgling whistle-blower site Wikileaks, pose a serious problem because they're already forcing the families of Canadian soldiers killed in battle to relive the tragedy ....
 
There's quite a bunfight going on on cbc.ca under the article 'Military Rejects Wiki leaks' and to a lesser extent, 'Hillier Slams Wiki report'.

I am curious, and I know everyone likes their PerSec, but is anyone on this forum also one of the sane fellows saying their was no cover-up?
 
I'm no doctor, but I'm fairly certain if I read much more of CBC in the next few days I'm going to burst a blood vessel and stroke out.

 
Brutus said:
There's quite a bunfight going on on cbc.ca under the article 'Military Rejects Wiki leaks' and to a lesser extent, 'Hillier Slams Wiki report'.

I am curious, and I know everyone likes their PerSec, but is anyone on this forum also one of the sane fellows saying their was no cover-up?

I haven't seen the CBC site, but as the dad of a fallen, and a member, the CF was upfront with us all the way.

As for the "soldier" who leaked these documents, I can only hope he is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, along with the people who run that organization that publicized the documents.

These people are nothing more than fifth columnists who seek to make money off the misfortune of others. I can only imagine how those parents feel right now.

:rage:
 
The hardest thing to try and convince civilians that just because its on paper this stuff isn't gospel...its what some overworked staff guy transcribed listening to a radio, who may not necessairly be a native english speaker (welcome to NATO).

Ask any civvy to listen to a hockey game on the radio and write down everything that they hear. How accurate is that going to be? Now imagine that the announcer is the team captain, trying to play the game, coordinate his players, and describe what they're seeing/doing.

Oh, yeah...they're also being shot at...in complex terrain...spread out over a wide area...sometimes with other teams in the field, who are trying to do the same bloody thing.

Confusing? Damn right. Its takes a hell of a lot of effort to sift through the raw reports, and try to piece the facts together. This is as a staff weenie. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to be be the guy who was actually there, and seeing reports coming out that describe the worst day of your life to that point that don't get the facts right.
 
Jim Seggie said:
I haven't seen the CBC site, but as the dad of a fallen, and a member, the CF was upfront with us all the way.

As for the "soldier" who leaked these documents, I can only hope he is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, along with the people who run that organization that publicized the documents.

These people are nothing more than fifth columnists who seek to make money off the misfortune of others. I can only imagine how those parents feel right now.

:rage:
I appreciate the sacrifice your son (or daugher) and your family made, and there is no such thing as giving more to our country.

With that said, and I don't mean to be disrespectful, but the documents leaked were not written by those who posted it. Yes, much of it is classified, and that is illegal, and will be taken care of as required,

With that said, now that they ARE leaked, who should be at fault for what is written, in this specific case? The person who leaked it? Or the person or organization to wrote it?
 
Nauticus:

Thank you for your kind words.

The "soldier" who leaked it has to be prosecuted. He was entrusted with it and he chose to give it to Wikileaks. He violated a trust.

Second, as far as I'm concerned Wikileaks should prosecuted, knowingly publishing classified material.

 
Jim Seggie said:
Nauticus:

Thank you for your kind words.

The "soldier" who leaked it has to be prosecuted. He was entrusted with it and he chose to give it to Wikileaks. He violated a trust.

Second, as far as I'm concerned Wikileaks should prosecuted, knowingly publishing classified material.
And I agree on both points.

On that, though, I am wondering why the report that suggests our soldiers were the result of friendly fire is obviously wrong. There could be a look into the accuracy of some of these reports.
 
This is one ugly mess.  suggest to people (40 below?) not speculate or make comments unless they know for sure or were there to witness it.
 
Nauticus said:
With that said, now that they ARE leaked, who should be at fault for what is written, in this specific case? The person who leaked it? Or the person or organization to wrote it?

Nauticus said:
On that, though, I am wondering why the report that suggests our soldiers were the result of friendly fire is obviously wrong. There could be a look into the accuracy of some of these reports.

It's a question of context for each and every document.

The document suggesting it was friendly fire could have been written from a very specific viewpoint with information available to the writer at that time.  If it was subsequently proven wrong, it is still part of the evolving collection of documents on the incident which leads to the official report that gets issued after all the facts are considered.  Just because an earlier report turns out to be wrong doesn't mean you root out every copy and delete it, it's still part of the process, and how it happened to be created is also worth sturdy to minimize confusion in early reporting of future incidents.

With the dumping of thousands of documents that were never meant to be public, for many reasons including that some may have been from early stages of analysis and investigation and did turn out have wrong conclusions, leading to the uninformed accepting of isolated reports as fact simply because they exist (including dis-proven reports now seen outside of the context of their full evolution), it is the unplanned release of a document that was superseded that is the greater wrong.
 
Michael O'Leary said:
It's a question of context for each and every document.

The document suggesting it was friendly fire could have been written from a very specific viewpoint with information available to the writer at that time.  If it was subsequently proven wrong, it is still part of the evolving collection of documents on the incident which leads to the official report that gets issued after all the facts are considered.  Just because an earlier report turns out to be wrong doesn't mean you root out every copy and delete it, it's still part of the process, and how it happened to be created is also worth sturdy to minimize confusion in early reporting of future incidents.

With the dumping of thousands of documents that were never meant to be public, for many reasons including that some may have been from early stages of analysis and investigation and did turn out have wrong conclusions, leading to the uninformed accepting of isolated reports as fact simply because they exist (including dis-proven reports now seen outside of the context of their full evolution), it is the unplanned release of a document that was superseded that is the greater wrong.

That's fair.

Obviously I'm referring to this specific document, since this thread is about this one document and not the entire leak (there's another thread for that), but yes. Your explanation is fair.

I just hope there's some criminal action taken as a result of all these getting leaked. Treason wouldn't be a bad charge, especially since this isn't the first time the accused has done it, but I doubt such a charge will be laid. I'd love to be proven wrong ;)
 
On a different note but same topic, I read the comments made by people on CBC.ca. Man is there ever alot of conspiracy theorist. Even when people who were there made comments, they were being ignored or discredited.

My beleif is this, there are lots of people with "agendas of their own" that are exploiting this unfortunate incident to spread their own message. that is absolutely unacceptable in my view.

Lets not forget that it was four brothers that have fallen, and many were there when it happened.

No conspiracy, no cover up. There never was.

 
George Wallace said:
I wonder how long Julian Assange is going to be allowed to remain a free man?  What he has gone and done now, is cross a very fine line.  I am sure his Wikileaks will soon be closed down, and his finding himself jailed.

My understanding is that his server is located in Sweden which has very strong laws that protect whistleblowers from revealing their sources. Plus, the fact that the reports were published in three different newspapers, in three different countries, and nothing has been done to shutdown the three sites would suggest that nothing is going to happen. However, if I was Mr. Assange, I would be very careful when making any travel plans in the future.
 
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