Keith - I agree with many of your comments in post #70.
I was going to respond that, at the human level, a core problem is how young, impressionable, inexperienced, men (primarily) are trained by the military to behave. What they are told is expected of them by their officers and their country. How these young men are taught to "frame" the enemy.
Then I read Josh Stieber's interview and found he said it all fantastically well, with moral courage, dignity and respect for his former colleagues who have been placed in this situation by the military machine and its corrupt, insane, masters.
I've therefore posted Josh Stieber's interview in full, below:
Quote:AMY GOODMAN: The attack also killed two Reuters employees: the photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, a father of four, Saeed Chmagh.
Well, we’re joined right now from Washington, DC, by a former member of the company involved in this shooting attack, Bravo Company 2-16. Josh Stieber was not present at the time of this attack but was a member of the company at the time and served for fourteen months alongside the soldiers seen and heard in the video released by WikiLeaks. Josh left the military as a conscientious objector last year and is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.
Josh, welcome to Democracy Now! On this day, July 12th, 2007, where were you?
JOSH STIEBER: I was back on the main base and was not part of this mission, because I had chosen not to follow an order a couple days before, so some of my leaders were upset at me and didn’t trust me in a combat situation at that point.
AMY GOODMAN: Would you have been on the ground—that was the force that moved in on the van—or in the Apache helicopter?
JOSH STIEBER: I was in the company with the soldiers on the ground.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Josh, when the unit got back to the base, what did you all hear about this incident?
JOSH STIEBER: Just kind of the basic details, that, you know, this is—this is what happened, that whoever perceived it as a threat and that different insurgents were killed, so just kind of the basic details, and people weren’t talking about it a whole lot.
AMY GOODMAN: When did you hear that among the twelve people who were killed were two Reuters employees, this young photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver Saeed Chmagh?
JOSH STIEBER: As far as I can remember, I didn’t learn about that until I read the book that was written about my unit, The Good Soldiers by Washington Post reporter David Finkel.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to take a break, then we’re going to come back to this discussion. Josh Stieber, a veteran of the company involved in the July 2007 attack on the Iraqi civilians. It was—a video of this was just released by the media watchdog group WikiLeaks.org. It’s believed someone in the military released this video to get the images out.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. We’ll also find out why Josh left the military as a conscientious objector. Stay with us.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined by Josh Stieber in Washington, DC, a veteran of the company involved in the July 2007 shooting of twelve Iraqi civilians in the video released by WikiLeaks. He left the military as a conscientious objector last year and is a member of Iraqi Veterans Against the War.
Your reaction when you saw this videotape, Josh?
JOSH STIEBER: When I first saw it, I was, you know, kind of shocked that I recognized exactly what it was. And then, as I watched it a second time and then started to read about some of the reactions from it, I guess I was also surprised a little bit by kind of the nature of the conversations, because, you know, again, not to morally justify what happened—and, you know, as a conscientious objector, obviously I disagreed with our tactics—but I think the statements that have been put out by the military and by Secretary Gates yesterday have reaffirmed that what happened was by no means unusual.
So I guess the nature of the conversation, I think, is the really important thing to focus on here, in that, you know, the easy thing and maybe the natural thing to do would be to instantly judge or criticize the soldiers in this video, and again, not to justify what they did, but militarily speaking, they did exactly what they were trained to do. So I guess the point that I’m trying to make is that if we are shocked by this video—which, again, it is a very shocking video—if we’re shocked by this video, then we need to be asking questions of the larger system, because, again, this is how these soldiers were trained to act.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Josh, I’d like to play some clips from the WikiLeaks video. Here the cockpit learns from the soldiers on the ground that the victims include children. One voice says, “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids [into a] battle.”
US SOLDIER 3: I’ve got eleven Iraqi KIAs . One small child wounded. Over.
US SOLDIER 1: Roger. Ah, damn. Oh, well.
US SOLDIER 3: Roger, we need—we need a—to evac this child. She’s got a wound to the belly. I can’t do anything here. She needs to get evaced. Over.
US SOLDIER 1: Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.
US SOLDIER 2: That’s right.
JUAN GONZALEZ: The whole question of how soldiers reacted to civilian casualties, could you talk about that? Your experience in the military when, on one of these operations, civilians were killed or wounded?
JOSH STIEBER: Yeah, I mean, I would say that it’s definitely very troubling, but I guess, thinking from the military mindset—and again, this is not trying to morally justify it, but to explain something from that perspective—that you have a lot of young, impressionable people that, I think, at one point were idealistic in why they enlisted and why they participated in the military, and they find themselves in this horrible situation where, again, it is acting out the training that we’ve been so instilled with to do things like this. And part of that training is the dehumanization of the people in whatever country we happen to be in. That’s, you know, been the process throughout the history of militaries, in general. So it’s a result of the training.
And I guess what I hear when I listen to that conversation in the helicopter is two things. One of them is that, as callous as it sounds, it seems to be beginning to have a little bit of remorse like, “Wow, we just—you know, this is what we actually just did,” and then a quick response or a quick excuse to not let it trouble you. And, you know, throughout my military training, there were different times where things would trouble me, as far back as basic training. And that’s kind of, I think, a natural human reaction, that, wow, this is what I’m being asked to do, but I’m told that doing these things is in the best interest of my own country. And I think, you know, this video should provide grounds for a much-needed conversation of whether or not that’s true. But again, speaking from the military perspective, that’s what people have going through their minds, so that callousness that the helicopter pilots have, one, is a result of military training that’s hammered into them, and two, what I hear is an excuse, like I feel like this isn’t right, but then that quick excuse that, oh, well, they shouldn’t have been there in the first place, to try and distance themselves from the act that just happened.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you recognize the voices?
JOSH STIEBER: Not in the helicopter, but from the troops on the ground, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to two more clips. In this part of the video, we see around eight Iraqis lying on the ground dead or badly wounded. The soldiers claim the victims have weapons and laugh about the shooting.
US SOLDIER 1: We’re still firing.
US SOLDIER 2: Roger.
US SOLDIER 1: I got ‘em.
US SOLDIER 3: Two-six, this is two-six, we’re mobile.
US SOLDIER 2: Oops, I’m sorry. What was going on?
US SOLDIER 1: God damn it, Kyle.
US SOLDIER 2: Sorry, hahaha, I hit ‘em—Roger. Currently engaging approximately eight individuals, KIA, RPGs and AK-47s. Hotel two-six, Crazy Horse one-eight.
US SOLDIER 1: Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards.
US SOLDIER 2: Nice. Good shootin’.
US SOLDIER 1: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: In this part, we hear voices from the cockpit laughing as a Bradley tank drives over the dead body of one of the Iraqi victims.
US SOLDIER 1: I think they just drove over a body.
US SOLDIER 2: Did he?
US SOLDIER 1: Yeah!
AMY GOODMAN: Josh Stieber, do you recognize those voices?
JOSH STIEBER: Those voices? No.
AMY GOODMAN: The voices you do recognize are which?
JOSH STIEBER: The ones granting permission to the folks in the helicopter when they ask for permission to open fire.
AMY GOODMAN: And who is giving the permission?
JOSH STIEBER: Those were different leaders and radio operators in the company.
AMY GOODMAN: Where are they?
JOSH STIEBER: I guess that is an important thing that I think needs to be considered with that video, is that, again, by no means morally justifying what happened, but I think just the seventeen-minute WikiLeaks clip is taking things a little bit out of context in what was going on that day, was that the troops on the ground were searching house to house, and the helicopters were assigned to keep watch over them, and so part of that is to eliminate any threat that comes up. That was, you know, what we were trained with regularly in the military.
And again, I would take so much of this just back to the training that we had. And one thing that I think about is one exercise. Some of my leaders would ask the younger soldiers what they would do if somebody were to pull a weapon in a marketplace full of unarmed civilians. And not only did your response have to be that you would return fire, even if you knew it was going to hurt innocent civilians, because you’re trying aim at the person with the weapon, the answer had to be yes, but it had to be an instantaneous yes. So, again, these things are just hammered into you through military training. So that’s, you know, the background of what the people in the helicopter had in their minds, so that they saw this as a threat.
And actually, looking at the video myself, you know, based on my training, what I saw in the video of what the people on the ground were holding in their hands, whether or not it was a camera, but again, from my military training, I would have, you know, been told that that was a military—militarily justifiable thing. And, you know, top sources have confirmed this. But again, if you watch the forty-minute video, they actually recovered an RPG shell, so I think there’s evidence that there were weapons involved. And I think, you know, the conversation has to be that the people in the helicopter and the people in the military were responding exactly as they had been trained.
From there, we can have a much-needed conversation about what does this training really look like, and I think there have been people out there trying to warn people, myself included, to trying to talk to people about just the things that the military trains people with, very psychological things, on a day-to-day basis. And then also the conversation that if these things are militarily justified, we have to ask if they’re morally justified. If we want things that the Secretary of Defense—
JUAN GONZALEZ: Josh—
JOSH STIEBER: —is saying this is acceptable—
JUAN GONZALEZ: Josh—
JOSH STIEBER: Yeah.
JUAN GONZALEZ: —on this issue of whether they’re morally defensible, could you talk to us about your decision to become a conscientious objector and how that was received and why you made that decision?
JOSH STIEBER: I mean, I got to the point where, you know, I was saying things like this and realized that this is what the military wants me to do, and this is not something that I can do or that I want to do as a person, based on my religious beliefs and based on who I want to be, that this is what the military is telling me is acceptable—and again, I think this video illustrates that—and me that this is wrong. And it got down to some very simple concepts of doing unto others, and I knew I wouldn’t want other people doing similar things like this to me, and not only what’s in the video, but just day-to-day things of where we would go in people’s houses and rip through their houses. I’m pretty sure most people in my country would be pretty upset by that. So I decided to leave the military as a conscientious objector.
And actually, that process, a number of soldiers were supportive of me, and they would tell me things like, “You know, we disagree with the war, too, but we don’t think it’s worth the effort to try and do anything about it.” So I think that’s a really important point to focus on with this conversation about the video, is that there are many soldiers who are struggling with what’s going on there. You know, I talk to a lot of them, and just about everybody I was with lost their idealism for why we were there. So they’re struggling through these ideas.
But then, me speaking out about this, I’ve been getting criticism as a conscientious objector, being called a baby killer and white trash for enlisting in the military, to begin with. So, in terms of people who don’t want this kind of thing to happen again, if the goal is to get these soldiers who are committing these acts to stop doing that, if they see me, who has stepped out, getting criticized by people who are saying war is not the right answer, then that’s not going to make them any more likely to want to make that step, either. So I think the important part of this conversation is how can we work together with those soldiers who are struggling through these things and try to work towards other alternatives and try and provide them an outlet to say, “This is wrong, and I’m not going to do it anymore.”
AMY GOODMAN: Josh Stieber, who gave the orders to shoot?
JOSH STIEBER: From what I see in the video, it wasn’t as much a permission—the folks in the helicopter asked the leaders on the ground if they could shoot, but it wasn’t more like, you know, you’re allowed to; it was more, you know, do you have any guys in the area that we might hit if we open fire? So I think it was the people in the helicopter, you know, saying, “We want to shoot. We want to make sure we’re not going to hit you,” and the people on the ground said, “Yeah,” you know, “you’re clear to fire.”
AMY GOODMAN: So who are those voices that you recognize that say, “Yes, you’re clear to fire”?
JOSH STIEBER: Different leaders of various rank in my company.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you know any of their names?
JOSH STIEBER: Yes. But—I mean, I think one of the things with this is that, again, the temptation can be to pinpoint this all on a few individual soldiers, and if we make a huge deal about the individual soldiers and don’t look at the larger military system, where, again, we’re hearing these things from the very beginning of basic training, then you might take your judgment out on a few individual soldiers—
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Josh, let me ask you—
JOSH STIEBER: —but it won’t change the process at all.
AMY GOODMAN: —let me ask you this question. The soldier that was asking for permission to take these kids to the US military hospital, who was denied permission, told to take them to an Iraqi hospital, which would probably not be as equipped, do you know that soldier?
JOSH STIEBER: Um, that one I’m not sure of. I’m not sure.
AMY GOODMAN: The effect on these soldiers who saw the children?
JOSH STIEBER: The effect, I know, it definitely has taken a toll. And I know the soldier who carried that child, and, you know, he was very uncomfortable with it. And when he got back, you know, like so many soldiers, was very troubled by it and didn’t—I think a number of soldiers don’t see any outlet or don’t see any option to want to talk about these things. And again, if me, who is taking this step and talking about it, is getting met with such harsh resistance, that’s not going to encourage other soldiers to take a step.
So this particular soldier, I know, has tried to solve his problems through alcohol. And unfortunately, that’s what a lot of soldiers turn to when they get back, is alcohol or possessions or just something to try and push these to the back of their mind, rather than to try to address the system that put us in this situation and encouraged us to do these things.
AMY GOODMAN: Are these soldiers now—after the video was released by WikiLeaks, are these soldiers starting to talk and get together now to talk about what to do, as others are calling for a reinvestigation of this?
JOSH STIEBER: The attitude that I’ve gotten from the soldiers involved, you know, who are my friends who I was there with, is generally—not completely across the board, but is generally—one of defensiveness, that they’re hearing all this criticism, and very strongly worded criticism—and again, I’m not saying—I’m not morally justifying what happened in the video. What my point is is that what these soldiers were doing was exactly as they had been trained to do. So here’s all these people criticizing them, but they’re saying that “I’m doing what I was supposed to do for my country.”
And I guess as I’ve been thinking about it, not only is it in the military, but it’s even in our general culture. I mean, thinking back to high school, I was taught things like, you know, the atomic bomb wasn’t morally wrong. It might have been strategically questionable, but this idea, even in history class, that, you know, at times it might be necessary to take civilian lives in order to accomplish your overall goals. So I think, as a society, we need to look at these things that put people—or put this mindset or put these ideas in people. And, you know, I think, again, this video is shocking, and we need to ask, how can we take that shock from the video and turn it into something positive? So whether that looks like people shocked by this video talking to their school boards and demanding for peace education classes or something to fix this larger system, rather than just point it on a few individuals.
AMY GOODMAN: Josh Stieber, we want to thank you for being with us, veteran of the company involved in the July 2007 shooting of the Iraqi civilians, the video released by WikiLeaks. You can go to our website, democracynow.org, to see various parts of it. Josh left the military as a conscientious objector last year and is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta." The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
I am tempted to look at this issue as an organizational development conundrum in terms of both training and leadership, two areas in which I have done some significant work.
No, I haven’t been in combat.
I did a brief stint as a wannabe Green Beret – Boy Scouts with M-1’s and blanks in 1966 -- but then my college roommate [a Christian conscientious objector] and my old high school English teacher [“Today we shall have naming of parts”] (who shunned me when I showed up in his domain dressed in jump boot and black beret), brought me to my senses before I could put myself into an untenable personal and moral position in which others would surely place me in an irretrievable one.
Keith’s insights are valid and we must acknowledge the vet’s persona and experience even, as in another distant example, they retain anger and turn it on adolescents arrested for protesting in Senator’s offices. Even reading Jonathan Shay’s works on war and PTSD, or Keegan’s “The Face of Battle”, cannot convey the reality. One can only try to be at one with one’s own experience and reality.
But, in an attempt to glean what I could from the development of soldiers in order to develop more effectively trained emergency responders, I have delved into the subject, ranging across topics of performance psychology, cognitive studies, sports psychology et al to learn how one can draw from within -- or from within another -- the best that is there. Hitting home runs, tactically seeing how to manage a mass casualty incident, and soldiering have some things in common.
“Success depends on how effectively we can rapidly sort through, understand, assimilate and act on the most important bits (or "golden nuggets") of information within the vast quantities of data and information that are available to us in that moment.”
This has been termed “situational awareness” or “tactical decision-making under stress”, two areas of intense US military funded research. Early events causing this inquiry were the collision of two jumbo aircraft on the runway at an airport in the Azores, and the incident involving the USS Vincennes. Vast quantities of formal studies followed, were boiled down, and were folded into military training.
“If we function within a stressful technical or operational setting, such as a command or operations center of some sort, we have the added input (both information and “noise”) of phone, fax, e-mail, various alarms, radios on multiple frequencies covering multiple agencies, as well perhaps as a wide range of data that is available from an array of computers, dials, gauges and technical sensors.” Situation awareness requirements will vary, however, depending on a host of variables such as weather, temperature, lighting, surface or terrain variables, our strategic plan, and the nature of our “opponent”.
The addition of automation and “intelligent systems” frequently exacerbate the problem, rather than help it. It is the human integration and interpretation that is the key component of situation awareness (SA). The goal is to make good decisions that depend on having a good grasp of the true picture of the situation. Mica Endsley, the guru of SA, uses the PCP acronym: perception, comprehension, projection. Further research and development in the topic brings you to a sport psychologist’s examination of “the four types of attention”, and Boyd’s OODA loop, and its use in “free play” by the US Marines (and USAF Academy rugby teams). Simulation-based training (another area of some person interest and expertise) lends other methods for training. This is discussed in the attached “Psychology of Strategy” (an MS Word document).
James Loehr compared military and sport toughening models in his books:
Toughness Training for Life, James E. Loehr, Ed.D., Plume/Penguin, NewYork 1993, as well as The New Toughness Training for Sports: Mental. Emotional and Physical Conditioning from One of the World's Premier Sports Psychologists, James E. Loehr, Ed.D., Dutton Books, New York 1994.
Here I summarize that comparison:
Undisciplined, immature, unfocused and fearful teenagers are transformed, in an 8-week period, into soldiers that can undertake 20 mile hikes carrying 60-100 pounds of gear, overcome a wide variety of obstacles, and conquer their ultimate fear. The techniques involved in this remarkable conversion have been refined over thousands of years. Studying this approach might yield important insights.
The first place we might look is at the process of marching. Even today, when soldiers don't march into battle, they march because marching is for between battles. Marching develops and demonstrates an attitude that shows no weakness, no deviation, no fatigue, no negativism, no fear. What you see when you see a military unit in drill or on the march is precision, unit synchronization, decisive clean movement, total focus, confidence, and positive energy. Even the breathing is synchronized to movement. Marching is practice for being decisive, looking strong and acting confidently (regardless of feelings); it requires discipline, sustained concentration, and poise (all of which are essential elements in conquering emotions, especially the fear of death). The next time you observe an athletic competition, observe how the athletes walk into competition; watch their body language at the moments in the gaps between competitive movement.
Further inquiry into soldier-making reveals the following effective elements:
1.A strict code concerning how one acts and behaves, especially under stress (head, chin and shoulders up, with quick and decisive response to commands).
2.No visible sign of weakness or negative emotion is permitted. (No matter how you feel, this is the way you act.)
3.Regular exposure to high levels of physical training as well as mental and emotional stress (courtesy of the obnoxious drill instructor) to accelerate the toughening process. (The more elite the unit, the higher the stress.)
4.Precise control, regulation and requirement of cycles of sleeping, eating, drinking and rest, with mandatory meals.
5. A rigorous physical fitness program, including aerobic, anaerobic and
strength training.
6. An enforced schedule of trained recovery, including the items in #4, as well as regularly-scheduled R&R.
Some of the undesirable features of this military training system are:
1. The stripping of personal identity and its replacement with group identity. (Where this happens in civilian life (gangs and cults), it usually indicates low self-esteem.)
2. Military values, beliefs and skills have little application in civilian life.
3.Blind adherence to authority is rarely appropriate outside the military.
4.Mental and emotional inflexibility and rigidity are severely limiting. Even on the battlefield, and in any emergency situation, inflexible thinking leads straight to disaster.
5.An acquired dislike for physical training, and/or intense mental and emotional stress, is a common result of the pain and boredom of the process, although others adopt a pattern of fitness that they follow for life.
One approach used in military training was presented at the 19th Annual Springfield College Department of Psychology Conference in June 2002 ("Winning in Sport and Life") by Dave Czesniuk, a performance enhancement instructor at West Point. Dave's job was to prepare a team of volunteers (admittedly a group with high abilities, motivation and previous success) to compete in the annual Sandhurst event.
Named after Great Britain's equivalent to West Point (and always won by a team of soldiers from Sandhurst, who prepare year round), the event is scored by team only and requires nine teammates to traverse five miles over rugged terrainas fast as possible while undertaking a series of challenges or skill stations that include (among others): marksmanship; the setup, use and takedown of technical gear; rappelling down a cliff and over a river; and working together to get all nine team members over an 8-foot wall without using any aids.
The team gets very limited opportunities to "scrimmage" the event; team members are, of course, also involved in athletics, other military training, and an intense curriculum of study. Dave described participation in the event as similar to belonging to a club at another college; success was based entirely on what the individuals brought to the attempt.
Training consisted of physical fitness and limited work in each of the skill stations, but Dave's primary role was to meet with each individual to establish and create an audio CD training tool. The audio tool consisted of each volunteer reading a script, out loud and in his own voice. (The brain, of course, responds much more effectively to one's own voice.)
The "script" described, in detail, each key moment of the entire event as well as the role that individual would play in the complex interaction with his teammates at each skill station. The script also utilized goal statements, affirmations and cues specific to the individual and his role.
[The above was taken from the chapter on "Inner Game Coaching Techniques" in my compendium entitled "Summon The Magic".]
There are numerous other sources of similar research and instruction on the development of superlative performance, among them Tim Gallwey’s series. But to look at this issue as an exercise in organizational development is to sanctify it… to say it is worthy of research and study and improvement. For me, that was a road not taken.
I think we need to simply understand that, whether they were mindful or not, whether they embraced the “attitude” of the mission or not, they did what they were sent there to do.
A bit of dialogue from the movie “Glory”:
Col. Montgomery: [ordering the burning of Darien, Georgia] Prepare your men to light torches! Colonel Robert G. Shaw: I will not! Col. Montgomery: That is an order! Colonel Robert G. Shaw: An immoral order, and by the Articles of War, I am not bound to follow it! Col. Montgomery: Then, you can explain that at your court-martial... after your men are placed under my command!
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta." The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
13-04-2010, 10:32 PM (This post was last modified: 13-04-2010, 10:36 PM by Helen Reyes.)
Keith Millea Wrote:I think I'm the only person that posts here that has actually been in combat.I have a different perspective than everyone else.For instance,seeing the soldier pick up the wounded child and run as fast as he could to get her to the medic track showed how he tried his best to save this child(which they actually did).I thought to myself,this guy will invision,and have trouble with this horrible scene for the rest of his life.The following interview proves this out.I have not seen nor heard anyone express anything but contempt for the soldiers though(murderers all).
So,I'm not going to argue with anyone here about what is right or what is wrong.I find this interview with a former soldier from that unit to be pretty much in line with how I see these things,so I'll let him speak.And again,from my perspective,Amy Goodman was a complete asshole to keep trying to get him to name names over the public airways.This was about as unprofessional as a journalist could be.......
Getting people to name names is what journalists do
I have no opinion on Amy Goodman, haven't heard her at all. It's possible the 2 Reuters guys were setting up for a photo shoot behind "enemy" lines and the people with tripods or RPGs or whatever they were skidaddled at the first whiff of canon fire. The resolution just isn't good enough for me to say. The helicopter crew would have had a better view, but that also means they killed the wrong guys and saw the kids in the van, most likely. I didn't watch the full video with the same guys killing civilians in an apartment building later in the day, but there are some stills up of that at cryptome.org today.
The most obvious conclusion from the film is the military's engagement policy was/is to kill them all and figure it out later. That's a war crime, btw, even if it is policy. You aren't allowed to target civilians under any of international conventions mainly pushed by the United States. Ultimately it hardly matters to anyone affected what some group of soldiers thought they saw, and just as crooked cops will throw in a gun, so will soldiers, in a pinch, rumage up a grenade to toss in the crime scene.
With all the reporters killed, it looks like the US targeted reporters, and in that case, is the dialogue we're listening to in the leaked video real at all, or is it just bad acting to cover up that policy of executing reporters in the arena? Is it unpremeditated murder, or is it murder with malice aforethought? I don't know. It's not manslaughter, though. Not with that imbalance of firepower. imo.
Liberals Smear Wikileaks
Posted By Justin Raimondo On April 13, 2010 @ 11:00 pm In Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Activists intent on releasing evidence of crimes committed by a powerful government are harassed and followed by police and intelligence agents: a restaurant in which they are meeting comes under surveillance, and, subsequently, one of their number is detained by the police for 21 hours. Their leader is followed on an international flight by two agents: and, in a parking lot of foreign soil, one of their number is accosted by a "James Bond character" and threatened. Computers are seized, and on the group’s Twitter account the following message appears:
"If anything happens to us, you know why … and you know who is responsible."
Well, then, who is responsible? Surely it must be some totalitarian regime – say, the Chinese, or one of the Arab autocracies – but no. The culprits are the Americans, and their target is Wikileaks – the web site of record for leaked government and other official documents, which has so far done more real investigative reporting in the last few years to unnerve and expose the Powers That Be than the New York Times and the Washington Post, combined.
From the dicey activities of major banks, to the "Climate-gate" e-mails that revealed attempts by government scientists to falsify or "sex up" data to make the case for global warming, to the war crimes committed by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Wikileaks is fearlessly exposing the evil that stalks the world – and they, in turn, are being relentlessly stalked by the US government and its minions.
A US government document [.pdf] posted on Wikileaks, and authored by Michael D. Horvath, of something called the "Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch," apparently a division of the Army Counterintelligence Center, declared Wikileaks to be a danger to national security. The report explored several ways to track the provenance of documents posted on the Wikileaks site, and take down the site itself. Horvath cites a supposed lack of "editorial review" which means "the Wikileaks.org Web site could be used to post fabricated information; to post misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda; or to conduct perception management and influence operations designed to convey a negative message to those who view or retrieve information from the Web site." Oh no!
Furthermore, "it must be presumed that Wikileaks.org has or will receive sensitive or classified DoD documents in the future. This information will be published and analyzed over time by a variety of personnel and organizations with the goal of influencing US policy."
Shocking! Why, how dare these perfidious personnel and obviously subversive organizations presume to imagine they could possibly influence US policy! Horvath lists a number of "foreign" intelligence agencies – the Russians, the British, the Israelis – who have the technical capacity to shut Wikileaks down, and alludes to a more subtle effort by averring:
"Efforts by some domestic and foreign personnel and organizations to discredit the Wikileaks.org Web site include allegations that it wittingly allows the posting of uncorroborated information, serves as an instrument of propaganda, and is a front organization of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)."
Horvath goes on to detail all the criticism of Wikileaks that have appeared in the general media, including the blogosphere, and now that the "Collateral Murder" video has been released – with another one, showing similar atrocities in Afghanistan, on the way – the techniques described by Horvath are being implemented by the Obama administration’s media shills to discredit and marginalize Wikileaks, particularly targeting its founder, Julian Assange. First up is Mother Jones magazine, a citadel of Bay Area high liberalism and the left-wing of the Obama cult, with a long article by one David Kushner. The piece is essentially a critical profile of Assange, who is described as an egotist in the first few paragraphs, and it goes downhill from there. Most of the article is a collection of dishy quotes from various "experts" – including from the apparently quite jealous (and obviously demented) editor of Cryptome.org, a similar site, who says Wikileaks is CIA front. Steven Aftergood, author of the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy News blog, "says he wasn’t impressed with WikiLeaks’ ‘conveyor-belt approach’ to publishing anything it came across. ‘To me, transparency is a means to an end, and that end is an invigorated political life, accountable institutions, opportunities for public engagement. For them, transparency and exposure seem to be ends in themselves,’ says Aftergood. He declined to get involved."
To begin with, quite obviously Assange and the Wikileaks group have a political goal in, say, publishing the Iraq massacre video – which is to stop the war, end the atrocities, and expose the war crimes of this government to the light of day. Surely the video, and the ones to come, will continue to "invigorate" our political life – perhaps a bit more than the Aftergoods of this world would like.
Kushner contacted a few members of the Wikileaks advisory board who claim they never agreed to serve – and gets one of them, computer expert Ben Laurie, to call Assange "weird." Kushner adds his own description: "paranoid: – and yet Laurie’s own paranoia comes through loud and clear when he avers:
"WikiLeaks allegedly has an advisory board, and allegedly I’m a member of it. I don’t know who runs it. One of the things I’ve tried to avoid is knowing what’s going on there, because that’s probably safest for all concerned.”
This is really the goal of harassing and pursuing government critics: pure intimidation. With US government agents stalking Assange as he flies to a conference in Norway, and one attempted physical attack in Nairobi, Assange is hated by governments and their shills worldwide. And Mother Jones certainly is a shill for the Obama administration, a virtual house organ of the Obama cult designed specifically for Bay Area limousine liberals who’ll gladly turn a blind eye to their idol’s war crimes – and cheer on the Feds as they track Assange’s every move and plot to take him down.
Kushner asks "Can WikiLeaks be trusted with sensitive, and possibly life-threatening, documents when it is less than transparent itself?" Oh, what a good question: why shouldn’t Wikileaks make itself "transparent" to the US government, and all the other governments whose oxen have been viciously gored by documents posted on the site? Stop drinking the bong water, Kushner, and get a clue.
Kushner quotes one Kelly McBride, "the ethics group leader" at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, as saying Wikileaks suffers from "a distorted sense of transparency.” This Orwellian turn of phrase is an indicator of how the mind of a government shill works. Says McBride: “They’re giving you everything they’ve got, but when journalists go through process of granting someone confidentiality, when they do it well, they determine that source has good information and that the source is somehow deserving of confidentiality.”
I want to ask this "ethics group leader" if someone who works for the US government and has evidence of war crimes committed by that government, "is somehow deserving of confidentiality?" Yes or no? If no, then you had better reexamine the "ethics" upheld by you and the Poynter Institute. By the way, nothing about McBride’s views are at all surprising, given that the Poynter Institute is promoting the idea of government subsidies to the American media. If McBride & Co. aren’t already on the government payroll, then they should be. Same goes for the ubiquitous Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, who "thinks WikiLeaks’ approach gives fresh ammunition to those who seek to pressure journalists to cough up the names of their unnamed sources. She forbids her staff from using the site as a source."
Ms. Dalglish has her head screwed on backwards: that’s the only possible explanation for an organization ostensibly devoted to press freedom joining the government’s pushback against Wikileaks. She should resign – or be impeached – forthwith. Far from pressuring journalists, Wikileaks is an essential asset to the profession: it provides them not only with more sources, but also with a convenient fallback: "I got it from Wikileaks." This decreases pressure on journalists pressed to identify their sources: they can always blame it on Assange and his fellow Scarlet Pimpernels of the Internet.
A child could understand this, but it’s way beyond the executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and also far beyond the comprehension of the "liberal" Mother Jones magazine, which ought to change its name to Encounter. Kushner "reports" this nonsense uncritically, and even cites the loony John Young, of Cryptome.org, who rants:
"’WikiLeaks is a fraud,’ [Young] wrote to Assange’s list, hinting that the new site was a CIA data mining operation. ‘Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy.’"
Kushner has all bases covered: the white-wine-and-brie liberals who would rather look the other way while their hero Obama slaughters children on the streets of Baghdad, and the tinfoil hat crowd who can be convinced Wikileaks is a "false flag" operation.
The positive impact of Wikileaks is "debatable," avers Kushner – especially if you’re an Obamaite intent on covering up the fact of US war crimes, because of the political damage it might inflict on your "progressive" coalition. As evidence of this "debatability," Kushner tries to blame the assassination of two Kenyan dissidents on the publication of documents on Wikileaks exposing Kenyan corruption – which seems a blatant case of diverting the real blame from where it really belongs, and that is on the Kenyan government and its death squads. No, it just won’t wash – and this is certainly a curious argument for an ostensibly liberal magazine, supposedly devoted to human rights, to make. But then again, anything is possible if you’ve decided to become a government apologist and errand boy.
Speaking of government apologists and errand boys, Steven Colbert of The Colbert Report on Comedy Central had Assange on Monday night, and it was the Mother Jones piece with a snarky grin and a laugh track. Colbert dropped the comic mask, and let his true face as a loyal Obamaite shine through, reciting Pentagon lies and attacking Assange for having edited "Collateral Murder," and even for giving it that title. He then opined Assange was "emotionally manipulating" people – an echo of Horvath’s analysis, which denounced Wikileaks as "disinformation" and "propaganda." "Collateral Murder" was "an editorial," not real reporting, said Colbert, but looked a bit surprised when Assange calmly pointed out that the assertion of a nearby firefight is "a lie." "We have classified information" to the contrary, Assange said, with calm assurance. You could hear a pin drop when he said that the report of "some gunfire" preceded the killings by twenty minutes and miles away from the reported location.
What was supposed to have been a "gotcha" interview turned into a triumph for Wikileaks. Colbert, the court jester in King Obama’s court, missed his target by a country mile. This failed ambush, coupled with the Mother Jones hit piece, tell us all we need to know about what political discourse in Obama’s America is going to be like. Obama’s political police are after Wikileaks, and specifically Assange, and the liberal smear brigade is going to go after him hammer and tongs. The Obamaites know that a great chunk of their liberal base opposes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their Dear Leader could easily find himself in the same position as Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1968. No wonder there were two US State Department officials following Assange on that international flight: will Hillary Clinton, their boss, tell us what they were doing, and on what authority?
The spying on Wikileaks, and attempts by the US government to take down and/or discredit this valuable Internet resource, is taking place on Obama’s watch, and under the direction of his appointed officials. The entire apparatus of surveillance and repression developed under the Bush administration has been adopted by and expanded on by the Obamaites This is a regime that has now decided it’s okay to assassinate American citizens, but foreign-born terrorists plotting to kill Americans must be tried in a US court and given free lawyers.
And if that doesn’t prove we’ve entered Bizarro World, via the Twilight Zone, then I don’t know how else to explain it.
While Assange is being tailed by Hillary’s gendarmes, and a brazen campaign of intimidation is being carried out by government agencies against a legal organization and web site, the "liberals" over at Mother Jones are doing their bit by trying to discredit Assange, and Wikileaks, in progressive circles. Judging from the comments attached to Kushner’s piece, it isn’t working all that well.
When are conservatives going to wake up and smell the coffee? Probably when Obama’s thugs come after them and their dinky little web sites, if ever they become a threat to the regime. This is blowback, guys: the very spying and surveillance you wanted as weapons in the "war on terrorism" are now being turned on critics of a liberal Democratic administration. They’re going after the web site that published the "Climate-gate" emails — and you’re next!
And when are liberals going to wake up and smell the fact that their Dear Leader has betrayed the Revolution, and is in many ways worse than his predecessor? At least you knew Bush was an authoritarian. Obama puts a "reasonable" and even "liberal" face on what is, essentially, the same doctrine of executive and governmental supremacism. What’s interesting is to listen to liberals now sounding like the once-hated neocons, smearing anyone who stands in their way and justifying an increasingly unpopular and costly war. The real Mother Jones must be spinning in her grave. Read more by Justin Raimondo
More reason for my despair at any prospect of worthwhile, activist induced change that reduces the Machiavellian unaccountability of power. Violent revolution isn't much use either since it has always replaced one form of despotism with another. It's human nature that remains the problem.
No sooner does an apparently worthwhile undertaking start to achieve some traction than it is targeted in the myriad ways illustrated in that article. It's founders reveal their human ambition and weakness for personal aggrandisement; those who might otherwise assist it are affronted by and jealous of it's 'success'; it's natural opponents (ie the nexus of established power) go on the offensive with all the deception, surveillance and propaganda assets and capabilities at their disposal. The result is co-option, compromise or destruction - and the cycle starts again.
Some personal observations:
Julian assange's clear love of the limelight; his publicity seeking is a big turn-off for me. I can understand him using it as a form of self-protection - which is probably needed - but he gives the appearance of taunting 'Authority' and seeking confrontation. That IMHO is a trait which a project like WikiLeaks could do without.
I don't think John Young is Jealous either - much less 'demented'. He does his thing doggedly and without fanfare and the world needs more like him IMO. He nailed the potential weaknesses of WikiLeaks in observations published on DPF a while back.
As for the political activist Left generally; well, what can I say? They really are no better than their right-wing counterparts. Just Sheeple - useful tools for those who hold real power - and very little else. The Left will support war for 'humanitarian intervention' purposes, or to emancipate the women of Afghanistan - that sort of ludicrous crap. The Right will support war to 'go after the terrorists' and its derivatives - equal crap. And all the while they both remain oblivious to the real purposes of their Lords and Masters - after all America's (UK France Germany - whatever nationality you like) purpose is to do good in the world. Mass perception and understanding of the what is going on really is childlike in its gross naivete. If only, IF ONLY those stupid dark-skinned foreigners would just see things our enlightened way we wouldn't have to go on killing them any more would we? It's all their fault so there! -stamps foot - 'we've got to destroy the city in order to save it' as some messianic warrior once opined (Vietnam war era as I recall). When it comes to the exercise of power, things really do not change
Peter Presland
".....there is something far worse than Nazism, and that is the hubris of the Anglo-American fraternities, whose routine is to incite indigenous monsters to war, and steer the pandemonium to further their imperial aims" Guido Preparata. Preface to 'Conjuring Hitler'[size=12][size=12] "Never believe anything until it has been officially denied" Claud Cockburn
14-04-2010, 08:33 AM (This post was last modified: 14-04-2010, 09:08 AM by Peter Presland.)
This Guardian article on the WikiLeaks brohahah is worth a look. Some good background information plus a bit of 'on the one hand - on the other hand' analysis. Note the 'correction' regarding Julius Bare bank at the end. Powerful interests taking notice eh?
Quote:It has proclaimed itself the "intelligence service of the people", and plans to have more agents than the CIA. They will be you and me.WikiLeaks is a long way from that goal, but this week it staked its claim to be the dead drop of choice for whistleblowers after releasing video the Pentagon claimed to have lost of US helicopter crews excitedly killing Iraqis on a Baghdad street in 2007. The dead included two Reuters news agency staff. The release of the shocking footage prompted an unusual degree of hand-wringing in a country weary of the Iraq war, and garnered WikiLeaks more than $150,000 in donations to keep its cash-starved operation on the road.
It also drew fresh attention to a largely anonymous group that has outpaced the competition in just a few short years by releasing to the world more than a million confidential documents from highly classified military secrets to Sarah Palin's hacked emails. WikiLeaks has posted the controversial correspondence between researchers at East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit and text messages of those killed in the 9/11 attacks.
WikiLeaks has promised to change the world by abolishing official secrecy. In Britain it is helping to erode the use of the courts to suppress information. Its softly spoken Australian director, Julian Assange, was recently in Iceland, offering advice to legislators on new laws to protect whistleblowers.
Assange, who describes what he does as a mix of hi-tech investigative journalism and advocacy, foresees a day when any confidential document, from secret orders that allow our own governments to spy on us down to the bossy letters from your children's school, will be posted on WikiLeaks for the whole world to see. And that, Assange believes, will change everything.
But there are those who fear that WikiLeaks is more like an intelligence service than it would care to admit – a shadowy, unaccountable organisation that tramples on individual privacy and other rights. And like so many others who have claimed to be acting in the name of the people, there are those who fear it risks oppressing them.
Assange has a shock of white hair and an air of conspiracy about him. He doesn't discuss his age or background, although it is known that he was raised in Melbourne and convicted as a teenager of hacking in to official and corporate websites. He appears to be perpetually on the move but when he stops for any length of time it is in Kenya. Almost nothing is said about anyone else involved with the project.
WikiLeaks was born in late 2006. Its founders, who WikiLeaks says comprised mostly Chinese dissidents, hackers, computer programmers and journalists, laid out their ambitions in emails inviting an array of figures with experience dealing with secret documents to join WikiLeak's board of advisers. Among those approached was the inspiration for the project, Daniel Ellsberg, the US military analyst who leaked the Pentagon papers about the Vietnam war to the New York Times four decades ago.
"We believe that injustice is answered by good governance and for there to be good governance there must be open governance," the email said. "New technology and cryptographic ideas permit us to not only encourage document leaking, but to facilitate it directly on a mass scale. We intend to place a new star in the political firmament of man." The email appealed to Ellsberg to be part of the "political-legal defences" the organisers recognised they would need once they started to get under the skin of governments, militaries and corporations: "We'd like … you to form part of our political armour. The more armour we have, particularly in the form of men and women sanctified by age, history and class, the more we can act like brazen young men and get away with it."
Others were approached with a similar message. WikiLeaks organisers suggested that it "may become the most powerful intelligence agency on earth". Its primary targets would be "highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behaviour in their own governments and corporations."
But the group ran in to problems even before WikiLeaks was launched. The organisers approached John Young, who ran another website that posted leaked documents, Cryptome, and asked him to register the WikiLeaks website in his name. Young obliged and was initially an enthusiastic supporter but when the organisers announced their intention to try and raise $5m he questioned their motives, saying that kind of money could only come from the CIA or George Soros. Then he walked away.
"WikiLeaks is a fraud," he wrote in an email when he quit. "Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy." Young then leaked all of his email correspondence with WikiLeak's founders, including the messages to Ellsberg.
Despite this sticky start, WikiLeaks soon began making a name for itself with a swathe of documents and establishments started kicking back.
Two years ago, a Swiss bank persuaded a US judge to temporarily shut down the WikiLeaks site after it published documents implicating the Julius Baer bank in money laundering and tax evasion. That revealed WikiLeaks' vulnerability to legal action and it sought to put itself beyond the reach of any government and court by moving its primary server to Sweden which has strong laws to protect whistleblowers. Since then the Australian government has tried to go after WikiLeaks after it posted a secret list of websites the authorities planned to ban, and members of the US Congress demanded to know what legal action could be taken after the site revealed US airport security manuals. Both discovered there was nothing they could do. It's been the same for everyone from the Chinese government to the Scientologists.
Yet WikiLeaks worries more than just those with an instinctive desire for secrecy. Steven Aftergood, who has published thousands of leaked documents on the Secrecy News blog he runs for the Federation of American Scientists, turned down an invitation to join WikiLeaks board of advisers.
"They have acquired and published documents of extraordinary significance. I would say also that WikiLeaks is a response to a genuine problem, namely the over control of information of public policy significance," he says. Yet he also regards WikiLeaks as a threat to individual liberties. "Their response to indiscriminate secrecy has been to adopt a policy of indiscriminate disclosure. They tend to disregard considerations of personal privacy, intellectual property as well as security," he says.
"One of the things I find offensive about their operations is their willingness to disclose confidential records of religious and social organisations. If you are a Mormon or a Mason or a college girl who is a member of a sorority with a secret initiation ritual then WikiLeaks is not your friend. They will violate your privacy and your freedom of association without a second thought. That has nothing to do with whistleblowing or accountability. It's simply disclosure for disclosure's sake." Aftergood's criticism has angered WikiLeaks. The site's legal advisor, Jay Lim, wrote to Aftergood two years ago warning him to stop. "Who's side are you on here Stephen? It is time this constant harping stopped," Lim said. "We are very disappointed in your lack of support and suggest you cool it. If you don't, we will, with great reluctance, be forced to respond."
WikiLeaks has also infuriated the author, Michela Wrong, who was horrified to discover her book exposing the depths of official corruption in Kenya, It's Our Turn To Eat, was pirated and posted on WikiLeaks in its entirety on the grounds that Nairobi booksellers were reluctant to sell it for fear of being sued under Kenya's draconian libel laws.
Wrong was angry because, while she supports what WikiLeaks is about, the book is not a government document and is freely available across the rest of the world. From email distribution lists she could see that the pirated version was being emailed among Kenyans at home and abroad. "I was beside myself because I thought my entire African market is vanishing," says Wrong. "I wrote to WikiLeaks and said, please, you're going to damage your own cause because if people like me can't make any money from royalties then publishers are not going to commission people writing about corruption in Africa." She is not sure who she was communicating with because the WikiLeaks emails carried no identification but she assumes it was Assange because of the depth of knowledge about Kenya in the replies.
"He was enormously pompous, saying that in the interests of raising public awareness of the issues involved I had a duty to allow it to be pirated. He said: 'This book may have been your baby, but it is now Kenya's son.' That really stuck in my mind because it was so arrogant," she says. "On the whole I approve of WikiLeaks but these guys are infuriatingly self-righteous." WikiLeaks does apparently expect others to respect its claims to ownership. It has placed a copyright symbol at the beginning of its film about the Iraq shootings.
Assange has countered criticism over some of the material on the site by saying that WikiLeak's central philosophy is "no censorship". He argues that the organisation has to be opaque to protect it from legal attack or something more sinister. But that has also meant that awkward questions – such as a revelation in Mother Jones that some of those it claims to have recruited, including a former representative of the Dalai Lama, and Noam Chomsky, deny any relationship with WikiLeaks – are sidestepped.
Despite repeated requests for a response to the issues raised by Aftergood, Wrong and others, WikiLeaks' only response was an email suggesting to call a number that went to a recording saying it was not in service.
• This article was amended on 13 April 2010. The original referred to Julius Bare bank. This has been corrected.
Peter Presland
".....there is something far worse than Nazism, and that is the hubris of the Anglo-American fraternities, whose routine is to incite indigenous monsters to war, and steer the pandemonium to further their imperial aims" Guido Preparata. Preface to 'Conjuring Hitler'[size=12][size=12] "Never believe anything until it has been officially denied" Claud Cockburn
hahaha they keep repeating the same stuff. WHERE IS THE JOHN YOUNG QUOTE THAT WIKILEAKS IS A CIA FRONT? There isn't one, but they keep saying there is. They quote an internal list-server email when John Young distanced himself from the project, without context.
Several points spring to mind concerning the above-reposted media coverage:
Assange's ego: Before the Iceland saga, I'd never ever seen a photo of Assange. The only reason I did see one was because Norway has some great journalists who dug up an archive photo from an awards ceremony. The Kenyan hitmen story only came out AFTER Iceland, afaik, so, so much for Assange publishing potboiler accounts of his sekrit dangerous life as a wikileaker. If anything, he's been incredibly private about his private life. This goes into the alleged board of wikileaks: Assange seems to have elected a bunch of big names without their permission. This is probably meant to confuse the process servers and researchers. If wikileaks has no physical presence, it can't be attacked as easily.
Journalistic ethics: the above-quoted "specialist" is simply wrong, or doesn't have a clue about what she is saying, because the wikileaks interface to the world is an upload page that promises confidentiality. If wikileaks publishes something, it is abiding by the agreement on the upload page to keep the identity of the submitter confidential. If the sources "don't deserve" confidentiality, then wikileaks' choice is simple, that is, it can't publish that information from that source. there are even laws demanding wikileaks abide by this sort of confidentiality agreement with submitters in Sweden, I believe.
Wikileaks came under attack in more venues than listed. One memorable event was the publication of information about the operation of child-porn servers in Germany. Internal German "FBI" (VfD I believe is the acronym, or BND) dox led to searches and seizures inside Germany. Denmark and Australia jointly attacked wikileaks for publishing lists of internet addresses blocked by both countries' internet-filtering projects.
The Kenyan author Wrong's book is a canard if I recall correctly. In fact, wikileaks purposely did not distribute the book, and instead provided information for contacting the author in order to purchase a copy or request a hardship copy. It's possible wikileaks did this following an initial posting of her book, but this is all I saw, no free book.
Assange is connected with an early ebook on hacking around about the time CultoftheDeadCow began attacking China in retalliation for their execution of a Chinese hacker or 2 Chinese hackers, or slightly before CDC's "hacktivism." CDC was designing software for remote control of computers around this time, BackOrifice, an early hacker's version of Remote Desktop by NSA/Microsoft. I would place Julian Assange in that milleu rather than John Young's cryptome, which was similar but different, but of course the point is divide-and-conquer, to play Young against Assange rather than addressing the information itself.
On the copyright symbol on the Apache snuff film: so what? They did subtitles, they edited, they commented. Everyone puts a copyright symbol on things nowadays to claim it as their work. Somone types a public domain book into a digital format and they slap a copyright on for the typing effort. I did enjoy seeing Brigitta Jonsdottir's name in the credits at the end. In this case I don't think Assange was just adding famous names to things on a whim. She was and is involved with Assange in the IMMI, immi.is
Having looked at all the evidence I can find on this incident it seems clear that the men killed in the video were armed insurgents with the Mahdi Army and that the photographers were embedded with them. The subsequent firing on the van is questionable. However, that one can identify an RPG in the video indicates that Wikileaks misrepresented the video or missed the obvious. Both scenarios are worrying and make this "leak" look like a charity drive for a website who's operating budget seems incredibly high for what they deliver.
So, my question to you is this. Should Wikileaks simply publish or should they publish and editorialize? I fear they do themselves no favors through misrepresentation or omission, I believe their purpose is best served by presenting material with no additional commentary. I also fear that entering into the political fray will discredit them as an organization eventually and undermine their purpose. One of the best things about cryptome is that items are generally posted with commentary that doesn't exceed the title of the link. I've never seen you post a document with a preface you added, your warnings to not trust you are refreshing.
Anyways, keep keeping on, "loony John Young, of Cryptome.org."
Cryptome: Wikileaks should continue to do what it believes best, as should others, ignore critics who envy its ingenuity and fear its reverse criticism of lazy-minded, spoiled critics -- and comics. There is no single best means to gather and distribute information to the public -- nor to tell the truth about it. Variation and diversity and multiplicity is essential to avoid the deadly chokehold of dominant authorities, their complicit authoritatives and the grammar, rhetoric, graphics and technology they use for heirarchical control. To mimic the information strangulation of dominaters is to lie, deceive, misrepresent, bloviate, exaggerate, op- and pop-advert-editorialize, to manage the flow of information for a particular agenda always wedded to a grab for and protection of greater power and the lucrative revenue and fancy accoutrements it provides.
There is a plaque in the rotunda of a courthouse at 60 Center Street, New York City, which commemorates the 300th anniversary of the trial of John Peter Zenger for seditious libel. He won the trial and laid the foundation for freedom of the press in the US Constitution. There is always a first of a venerable tradition taken for granted. Wikileaks may not be the first but it is certainly a standard bearer for those less known who are challenging conventional wisdom of freedom of the press, now grown into self-satisfied authoritativeness and embedded with authorities. The press (forget the trivializing, gossipy "media") must be goaded into overcoming its fear of being seditiously libelous, of "going too far." Thanks to Wikileaks for demonstrating that the information royalty is cravenly bare-assed, terrified of losing protection against the treaty-mongering avaricious FINCEN (forget trivializing, gossipy toothless NSA, ignore nuclear security theater).
Excuse the bowel moving. Another lying sack of shit (LSOS).
![[Image: wikileaks.png]](http://news.antiwar.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/wikileaks.png)
Gates insisted it was 