The 92,000 military documents from Afghanistan published by WikiLeaks start in 2004 and run through December 2009 -- a time frame mostly under the Bush administration, not the Obama one. It's a slender line for the Democratic leadership to grab, though they're doing their best.
State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley:
"The State Department joins the White House and DOD in condemning the disclosure of classified information by Wikileaks. The fact that these are in many cases documents that are several years old does not change our concern that this action risks our national security."
In other words, you shouldn't be looking at these documents. They're old and not especially relevant but they still threaten our national security.
And here's House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, off camera as she walked to the House floor:
"I haven't really seen any confirmation of the authenticity of the documents, but a lot of it predates the President's new policy."
It would be easier to believe that the toxic brew of atrocities and ineffectiveness portrayed in the Wikileaks war diaries belongs solely to an earlier era if not for two points. First, regardless of how we got into this mess, President Obama still has to deal with it. And second, Mr. Obama's policies are a lot like his predecessor's.
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The house is about to vote on another supplemental war funding bill. In the middle of a recession.
How can anybody support this anymore?
I called my congressman's office. You should too.
madlionism,
It’s not just ‘The house is about to vote on another supplemental war funding bill’, it’s, the House is about to vote on another emergency supplemental appropriations bill.
Since 2003 this method has been used to fund both wars – almost anyone with a pulse, average intelligence and mediocre conscious (like say, your average elected official) agrees this has been the single most destructive act in undermining fiscal responsibility for the federal government (what transparency?, what accountability?, what effective discipline in federal budget making and budget deficit & debt projections?). Funding both wars using the emergency supplemental appropriations as the vehicle should be stopped immediately (or as fast a 8 years of doing the wrong thing takes to fix..)…and both wars too, while they are at it.
WikiLeaks provides handy links to download the information. Everyone should.
Now, why am I thinking about Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist?
Rachel,
Can you please talk to Matthews about the little white and black icons he shows at the bottom of his segments concerning race?
It clearly shows a white man with a fully developed cranium but the black man has the sloping forehead and jutting jaw.
Please talk to him Rachel. I'm a full blood black man and I know for a fact I'm smarter than Matthews.
Please consort with your colleague about his racist icons at the bottom of his racism segments.
Wikilinks is redacting names from the Afghanistan Papers documents. Would they have done that to protect war criminals in Bosnia? I think not. This was not principled; it was practical accomodation to the power of the USA currently involved in two illegal "aggressive" (first strike) wars.
Rachel, Rachel, Love your new haircut and glasses on Monday!!
Please, george, please....
Failure to segregate and rehabilitate prisoners turns jails and prisons into Taliban schools, and we built most of those jails and prisons. The enemy is using our resources against us to create more enemy combatants that are increasingly more violent.
How crackhead stupid is that?
The U.S. is not even using our own foreign jails and prisons to re-educate enemy combatants.
More information.
The problem is that executive orders that establish wartime foreign policy procedures are defective. Military policy is written in blood so that is unacceptable.
More information.
There is no better place for training than jails and prisons during a war. After enemy combatants have been captured, their hearts and minds are available until they are released. We can give those hearts and minds to the enemy or we can capture them for ourselves.
Do we want to release friends or enemies? People talk with other people after we let them out of jails and prisons.
There must be a separate non-combatant military force for the specific purpose of rehabilitating enemy prisoners because combatants trained to deal with conflict cannot function in a rehabilitation role. This must be done by qualified professionals. Rehabilitation at gun point produces martyrs, and religious coversion always escalates muslim conflict. Both unacceptable.
Rehabilitation is the ONLY policy that will work after we are gone, and we have to leave eventually. Enemy conversion is more important than bullets because the enemy will always outnumber us in their own country.
Failure to segregate and rehabilitate prisoners turns jails and prisons into Taliban schools, and we built most of those jails and prisons. The U.S. jails common criminals with enemy combatants. The enemy is using our resources against us to create more enemy combatants by converting those criminals that are increasingly more violent.
How crackhead stupid is that?
The U.S. is not even using our own foreign jails and prisons to re-educate enemy combatants.
More information. seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/8642
The problem is that executive orders that establish wartime foreign policy procedures are defective. Military policy is written in blood so that is unacceptable.
More information. www.archives.gov/federal-register/executive-orders/index.html
There is no better place for training than jails and prisons during a war. After enemy combatants have been captured, their hearts and minds are available until they are released. We can give those hearts and minds to the enemy or we can capture them for ourselves.
Do we want to release friends or enemies? People talk with other people after we let them out of jails and prisons. Word gets around. Rehabilitation at gun point produces martyrs, and religious coversion always escalates muslim conflict (christian converts are often killed). Both unacceptable.
There must be a separate non-combatant military force for the specific purpose of rehabilitating enemy prisoners because combatants trained to deal with conflict cannot function in a rehabilitation role. This must be done by qualified professionals.
Rehabilitation is the ONLY policy that will work after we are gone, and we have to leave eventually. Even more effective when we train foreign police/military to do the same. Enemy conversion is more important than bullets because the enemy will always outnumber us in their own country.
Where honest journalism hardly exists anymore in the newspapers or television, Wikileaks is real journalism at its best. Like Vietnam, Afghanistan is an imperial war of aggression disguised for the benefit of the American people as self-defense against "terrorism". But the real truth about Vietnam, which is that the Kennedy assassination was a coup by the military-industrial complex, which has been running the country ever since, never came out, and the country has continued in a steady downhill course toward a full police state and military dictatorship ever since. It's not as though Vietnam was nothing but a "mistake" on the part of our policymakers. No, it was a deliberate war of aggression by engineered by war profiteers, for war profiteers. Now I am praying that Wikileaks will not only expose that Afghanistan is nothing but senseless butchery that benefits only war profiteers, arms and drug dealers, just like Vietnam, but they will actually get into 9/11 itself and expose that 9/11 was in fact an inside job engineered by our own covert agencies, our own national security apparatus which is completely out of any kind of civilian control and riddled with gangsters and psychopaths. Only that will finally break the fifty-year grip of the military-industrial complex on our country. Of course, anybody who would like to look into this does not have to wait for Wikileaks; the facts are already available at the website of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, ae911truth.org.
Let's follow the SCIENCE and leave the bloodshed of the politics of what we've done come once we know the full extant of the American Government Conspiracy of JFK's “Magic Bullet” and the “Miracle Moon Feather - Hammer Drop” of WTC Bldg 7...NEVER fully explained by the US Government.
rewind: Hammer Feather Moon Gravity Experiment http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6926891572259784994#
WTC7 in Freefall--No Longer Controversial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP9Qp5QWRMQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEuJimaumW4/
WTC Building 7 was 610 feet tall, 47 stories. It would have been the tallest building in 33 states. Although it was not hit by an airplane, it completely collapsed into a pile of rubble in less than 7 seconds at 5:20 p.m. on 9/11, seven hours after the collapses of the Twin Towers. However, no mention of its collapse appears in the 9/11 Commission's "full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks." Watch the collapse video above. To date, many years after 9/11, the Federal government has yet to publish its promised final report that explains the cause of its collapse.
Until EVERY single Press Conference asks what happened to WTC Bldg 7? Where are the Washington DC Metro Tapes of the Highway overlooking the Pentagon SEIZED within minutes of a missile hitting the office wall holding ALL the paper documents for Pentagon funding...for more than 50 years?
We have NO "Press Corps"...we have "Press Whores"
Until these questions are asked by even YOU folks...we, and you, will remain economic slaves of royalty rather than free thinking humans working toward OUR own common good.
Military Manipulated Media Industrialized Imperial Intelligence Corporational Control Complex.
M3I3C3 aka “Mickey...They'll Eat Everything before you knew there was something. Then tell you there was nothing...move along.”
Bob
http://mycommonsensepolitics.net/
.
So the face of the war has been made less obscure...and yet it's hard to recognize the upper deck of a Starship from the Helm of Kleon Inner ring pirate ship, from the Dark Galaxy...trying to run faster from some perceived "allien" craft coming on behind them... I've been reading a lot of what gets said across my fav sites, and it's hard not to get the idea that we're not really hearing each other.... The problem isn't any real "evil" set upon the world from any political interest other than all the ones who stand to profit from international warfare....any old war will do...Big ones small ones, they all can do the same... The're using up the warriors, our tribes of brave young men ..it's genuine un-awareness of who we all really are! The west knows so little of the advantages of a truly Peaceful nation of the peoples we could be....But we too are running so fast, in our own personal fleeing from something coming up upon us from the rear....could it all be fear?....of death of what we thought we were?...deep in our sleep...somewhere... So to celebrate the Chiron-Neptune conjunction, the karma of the world has demanded the release of the "War Diaries" to force the closure of this last excursion of this old 18th century industrial base... Go look in the water... We'd waste that much in Afghanastan next year...who want's to vote against the vote that now calls for peace? The conversation needs to move into the realm of what do we do after the end of war! How do you keep an economy in gear, that sort of depended on making guns and bullits? And the psychological head cases we'll, no doubt, have to deal with. Is that what we're all running from?....because we can't slow down, or it will run us all over...?! Not to get too preachy, but we need to cool it dudes... Fox needs to know that their "marching orders" are really hurting the psychological mindset of the middle of the country. and we're not foolin' Rush...we'll call stupid as we see it till you can't look in the mirror anymore... All of the late night right-wing radio guys....who have a gig, because they bent over....don't you guys know scaring a certain segment of the population is dangerous? Everone say a little prayer for the safety of Wikileaks,
because we now know...for sure!
If we could get a 75% reduction in the military budget, I'm sure a halfway decent, rational government would find constructive ways to spend the money.