Anyone read through some of the Wiki leaks documents?

@mammal

This is the link unless its wrong?

http://213.251.145.96/cablegate.html

@The_Idler So they have been changed to look a certain way?

I read maybe 100 of the Afghan leaks, and a couple of the Iraq ones. I assume you are talking about the actual documents and not the summaries in the New York Times or Guardian.

I think it’s instructive to read a sampling of them. I was struck by how mundane and professional the Afghan ones were. They were like police reports. I think a lot of people assume that the documents are somehow these nefarious cover-ups hidden from the eyes of the world, which is really not true.

That said, I don’t think you’ll ever get a comprehensive picture of the leaks without relying on a newspaper’s interpretation of them (the NYT and Guardian and some others were given access to the leaks before they were published), unless you want to spend a month just wading through all the tens of thousands of documents.

There’s very little of “complete surprise” in them, and lots and lots of minutiae. That idiot who stole all of them should have at least tried to find something interesting.

Nope, but one of my best friends has, and she said that there wasn’t anything really interesting in them, except for some documents about weird marriage rituals in a midwestern American city where the groomsmen have to set out and search for the bride as she hides in the woods.

I’m not sure why that was anything that would need to be “leaked” but whatever.

@CaptainHarley

The expanded “war on terror” moving into Yemen and Pakistan is something many did not know before the leaks. Hell, I still think people have no freakin clue.
I think the fact that the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh told Gen David Petraeus, then commander of US forces in the Middle East, that: “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.” The conversation was reported in a diplomatic cable sent back to Washington by a US diplomat in Yemen, is a huge deal. How many other governments are bombing their own citizens under our watch and covering it up? Are we complicit in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Who knows?

I think people are afraid of Wikileaks because they are afraid of the truth. Maybe people are afraid the conspiracy theorists are right after all?

@chris6137, the military actions in Yemen and Pakistan and our uneasy (and deception-laden) alliances with leaders in these countries were widely reported in the New York Times well before the leaks, and probably in many other papers as well. The documents about these things in Wikileaks shouldn’t have surprised any well-informed person.

What he said.

i thought the Apache helicopter video was interesting, if only to highlight the American military reluctance to engage up front and personal with suspicious looking groups of men. Apparently the helicopter was one mile away. The level of callous detachment displayed by the pilots were in stark contrast to the troops who arrived at the scene and could smell the stench and some who vomited at the horrific wounds inflicted on the children.

You could argue that this kind of incident is an unfortunate mistake, inevitable in the fog of war. But to some people the sight of unarmed humans being mown down in cold blood, smacks more like a policy of preemptive assassination, and reminds those who wholeheartedly support war of the true nature of that war.

i’m not personally a fan of statistics but wiki-leaks discovered that 15,000 combat related deaths in Iraq were unreported, deliberately. Also one statistic claims that 90% of deaths are non combatants (not from wiki-leaks). That seems difficult to accept but there you have it. Maybe smart bombs aren’t so smart. Certainly the battle for Fallujah was won at an horrific cost to the civilian inhabitants.

But of course the scope of the leaks is vast, much of it mundane and or merely realpolitik. however what is interesting to some of us, is the candid and damning assessment of corruption and human rights abuses occurring in regimes all over the world. The insight offered by diplomats are free of spin and propaganda, the same applies to CIA operatives in the field. What is fascinating is the gulf between Government PR commentary and the cables. This in itself is vital to a healthy democracy whereby public opinion counts for something.

Being continuously and willfully lied to is thoroughly condescending, it is tiresome.

@mammal

Yes it is. Both major parties have engaged in bald-faced lying, and it’s a wonder the people haven’t lynched them all!

@mammal, I agree that the large number of unreported civilian deaths is troubling, but again, this is something that shouldn’t be surprising as we’ve known for some time the Bush administration was prone to underreporting.

Also, the manner of most of those civilian deaths (both the ones caused by us and by insurgents) was not surprising—a lot were killed by our soldiers in roadblocks because the drivers wouldn’t slow down and our idiotic ROE lacks any less lethal way to make them stop except “shooting them.”

Got it all figured out, don’tcha!

I am sure that thanks to the media-whore Assange, these sorts of things will never happen again. Those military leaders who tell their troops to go out and kill the innocent instead of the enemy will cease.

What I have read of the leaks will accomplish nothing in the overall picture. Most simply make difficult world relations even more so. Bad things happen in war, even in the hand to hand combat that ensued when the settlers fought the natives there were innocents killed. It doesn’t make it right but it sure isn’t news and will unfortunately continue as long as there is conflict. He should devote himself to bettering relations between all humanity instead of looking for his 15 minutes of fame (and one would think such a smart guy should always participate in safe sex).