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  • Thanks for taking time to respond.

    two points, just because many times insurgents use vehicles to pick up injured comrades, doesnt mean it is right to blow up a vehicle pulling in.

    That means al Qaeda can say, their recon has shown that many times they have seen important military targets in the WTC and so it is okay to take it down.

    I am not justifying, but see what type of slipperly slope situation is that.

    ====

    End of the day I support what the guys did. I would have pretty much done the same in the situation, shot up every and every one around if they came close. It just feels wrong down the line thgh.

    Comment


    • Originally posted by bigross86 View Post
      To me, the authors A: exude either immense stupidity or naivety, and B: are accepting responsibility for their actions by blaming their superiors and their leadership, even though the Nuremberg trials have shown us that's not much of a valid excuse.
      Everyone is different, Ben. This man is trying to live with himself and doing the best he can. I know a few who swallowed bullets instead.

      Comment


      • Not to say that I'm any better or any worse than anyone else here, but I sleep soundly at night knowing that I did everything I did in my years of service out of a just cause, and to people who were trying to harm me, my friends and the country I swore to defend. A lot of my service was done in the heart of a civilian population that did not like us and would harbor enemy activists, be they stone throwers or actual armed terrorists.

        Yes, sometimes mistakes were made and we arrested the wrong person, and yes, sometimes a rubber bullet would hit someone who wasn't the intended target, but overall, we did our best to be damn sure mistakes didn't happen, so when they did, we accepted them as mistakes, drew the lessons from it and moved on
        Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

        Abusing Yellow is meant to be a labor of love, not something you sell to the highest bidder.

        Comment


        • Bump

          U.S. Military Plotted Revenge on Wikileaks - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership


          U.S. Military Plotted Revenge on Wikileaks
          The U.S. military was so fearful of classified information ending up on Wikileaks it considered ways to undermine the organisation, a newly published secret report on the site appears to show.
          By John E. Dunn on Tue, March 16, 2010

          Techworld — The US military was so fearful of classified information ending up on Wikileaks it considered ways to undermine the organisation, a newly published secret report on the site appears to show.

          In an ironic twist, Wikileaks has now published what appears to be an assessment of the site and the danger is poses to US military confidentiality, apparently from the US Army and Counterintelligence center and dated 18 March 2008.

          Most of the report is a measured analysis of the site's activities, modus operandi, funding and history, which then details numerous documents allegedly leaked to Wikileaks relating to US military activities in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond that it sees as having handed intelligence to agencies hostile to the US.

          Eventually, however, the document turns to possible counter-measures, including placing fabricated information as a means of discrediting its reliability, spreading propaganda, and of prosecuting anyone within the US military, intelligence or government departments found leaking to it.

          "The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions," it notes.

          A justification for following this course of action is considered to be that other countries have attempted to do the same.

          "The governments of China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Thailand, Zimbabwe, and several other countries have blocked access to Wikileaks.org-type Web sites, claimed they have the right to investigate and prosecute Wikileaks.org and associated whistleblowers, or insisted they remove false, sensitive, or classified government information, propaganda, or malicious content from the Internet," says the report.

          That the US military was concerned over the danger posed by Wikileaks is probably not a surprise, but that this document itself has leaked will prove a huge embarrassment, assuming it is genuine. That wouldn't have been in the mind of the author when compiling the report.

          Wikileaks itself believes the plan to attack it did not come to fruition.

          "As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective." It says in its official introduction.

          The date of March 2008 puts the report's creation within the dying days of the US administration of President Bush. It is possible that the Obama administration would be less likely to act on such an analysis.

          Wikileaks sprang to prominence in the US a few months after the report's date, publishing email messages allegedly hacked from the mailbox of vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin.
          Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

          Abusing Yellow is meant to be a labor of love, not something you sell to the highest bidder.

          Comment


          • Originally posted by bigross86 View Post
            "As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective." It says in its official introduction.
            Not anymore.

            U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe
            By Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter
            June 6, 2010

            Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.

            SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.

            Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.

            He said he also leaked three other items to Wikileaks: a separate video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession; a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which the site posted in March; and a previously unreported breach consisting of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing “almost criminal political back dealings.”

            “Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning wrote.

            Wired.com could not confirm whether Wikileaks received the supposed 260,000 classified embassy dispatches. To date, a single classified diplomatic cable has appeared on the site: Released last February, it describes a U.S. embassy meeting with the government of Iceland. E-mail and a voicemail message left for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Sunday were not answered by the time this article was published.

            The State Department said it was not aware of the arrest or the allegedly leaked cables. The FBI was not prepared to comment when asked about Manning.

            Army spokesman Gary Tallman was unaware of the investigation but said, “If you have a security clearance and wittingly or unwittingly provide classified info to anyone who doesn’t have security clearance or a need to know, you have violated security regulations and potentially the law.”

            Manning’s arrest comes as Wikileaks has ratcheted up pressure against various governments over the years with embarrassing documents acquired through a global whistleblower network that is seemingly impervious to threats from adversaries. Its operations are hosted on servers in several countries, and it uses high-level encryption for its document-submission process, providing secure anonymity for its sources and a safe haven from legal repercussions for itself. Since its launch in 2006, it has never outed a source through its own actions, either voluntarily or involuntarily.

            Manning came to the attention of the FBI and Army investigators after he contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail. Lamo had just been the subject of a Wired.com article. Very quickly in his exchange with the ex-hacker, Manning claimed to be the Wikileaks video leaker.

            “If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?” Manning asked.

            From the chat logs provided by Lamo, and examined by Wired.com, it appears Manning sensed a kindred spirit in the ex-hacker. He discussed personal issues that got him into trouble with his superiors and left him socially isolated, and said he had been demoted and was headed for an early discharge from the Army.

            When Manning told Lamo that he leaked a quarter-million classified embassy cables, Lamo contacted the Army, and then met with Army CID investigators and the FBI at a Starbucks near his house in Carmichael, California, where he passed the agents a copy of the chat logs. At their second meeting with Lamo on May 27, FBI agents from the Oakland Field Office told the hacker that Manning had been arrested the day before in Iraq by Army CID investigators.

            Lamo has contributed funds to Wikileaks in the past, and says he agonized over the decision to expose Manning — he says he’s frequently contacted by hackers who want to talk about their adventures, and he has never considered reporting anyone before. The supposed diplomatic cable leak, however, made him believe Manning’s actions were genuinely dangerous to U.S. national security.

            “I wouldn’t have done this if lives weren’t in danger,” says Lamo, who discussed the details with Wired.com following Manning’s arrest. “He was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as he could, and just throwing it up into the air.”

            Manning told Lamo that he enlisted in the Army in 2007 and held a Top Secret/SCI clearance, details confirmed by his friends and family members. He claimed to have been rummaging through classified military and government networks for more than a year and said that the networks contained “incredible things, awful things … that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC.”

            He first contacted Wikileaks’ Julian Assange sometime around late November last year, he claimed, after Wikileaks posted 500,000 pager messages covering a 24-hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. ”I immediately recognized that they were from an NSA database, and I felt comfortable enough to come forward,” he wrote to Lamo. He said his role with Wikileaks was “a source, not quite a volunteer.”

            Manning had already been sifting through the classified networks for months when he discovered the Iraq video in late 2009, he said. The video, later released by Wikileaks under the title “Collateral Murder,” shows a 2007 Army helicopter attack on a group of men, some of whom were armed, that the soldiers believed were insurgents. The attack killed two Reuters employees and an unarmed Baghdad man who stumbled on the scene afterward and tried to rescue one of the wounded by pulling him into his van. The man’s two children were in the van and suffered serious injuries in the hail of gunfire.

            “At first glance it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter,” Manning wrote of the video. “No big deal … about two dozen more where that came from, right? But something struck me as odd with the van thing, and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer’s directory. So I looked into it.”

            In January, while on leave in the United States, Manning visited a close friend in Boston and confessed he’d gotten his hands on unspecified sensitive information, and was weighing leaking it, according to the friend. “He wanted to do the right thing,” says 20-year-old Tyler Watkins. “That was something I think he was struggling with.”

            Manning passed the video to Wikileaks in February, he told Lamo. After April 5 when the video was released and made headlines Manning contacted Watkins from Iraq asking him about the reaction in the United States.

            “He would message me, Are people talking about it?… Are the media saying anything?” Watkins said. “That was one of his major concerns, that once he had done this, was it really going to make a difference?… He didn’t want to do this just to cause a stir…. He wanted people held accountable and wanted to see this didn’t happen again.”

            Watkins doesn’t know what else Manning might have sent to Wikileaks. But in his chats with Lamo, Manning took credit for a number of other disclosures.

            The second video he claimed to have leaked shows a May 2009 air strike near Garani village in Afghanistan that the local government says killed nearly 100 civilians, most of them children. The Pentagon released a report about the incident last year, but backed down from a plan to show video of the attack to reporters.

            As described by Manning in his chats with Lamo, his purported leaking was made possible by lax security online and off.

            Manning had access to two classified networks from two separate secured laptops: SIPRNET, the Secret-level network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level.

            The networks, he said, were both “air gapped” from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out.

            “I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga,’ erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.”

            “[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm.”

            Manning told Lamo that the Garani video was left accessible in a directory on a U.S. Central Command server, centcom.smil.mil, by officers who investigated the incident. The video, he said, was an encrypted AES-256 ZIP file.

            Manning’s aunt, with whom he lived in the United States, had heard nothing about his arrest when first contacted by Wired.com last week; Debra Van Alstyne said she last saw Manning during his leave in January and they had discussed his plans to enroll in college when his four-year stint in the Army was set to end in October 2011. She described him as smart and seemingly untroubled, with a natural talent for computers and a keen interest in global politics.

            She said she became worried about her nephew recently after he disappeared from contact. Then Manning finally called Van Alstyne collect on Saturday. He told her that he was okay, but that he couldn’t discuss what was going on, Van Alstyne said. He then gave her his Facebook password and asked her to post a message on his behalf.

            The message reads: “Some of you may have heard that I have been arrested for disclosure of classified information to unauthorized persons. See CollateralMurder.com.”

            An Army defense attorney then phoned Van Alstyne on Sunday and said Manning is being held in protective custody in Kuwait. “He hasn’t seen the case file, but he does understand that it does have to do with that Collateral Murder video,” Van Alstyne said.

            Manning’s father said Sunday that he’s shocked by his son’s arrest.

            “I was in the military for five years,” said Brian Manning, of Oklahoma. “I had a Secret clearance, and I never divulged any information in 30 years since I got out about what I did. And Brad has always been very, very tight at adhering to the rules. Even talking to him after boot camp and stuff, he kept everything so close that he didn’t open up to anything.”

            His son, he added, is “a good kid. Never been in trouble. Never been on
            drugs, alcohol, nothing.”

            Lamo says he felt he had no choice but to turn in Manning, but that he’s now concerned about the soldier’s status and well-being. The FBI hasn’t told Lamo what charges Manning may face, if any.

            The agents did tell Lamo that he may be asked to testify against Manning. The Bureau was particularly interested in information that Manning gave Lamo about an apparently-sensitive military cybersecurity matter, Lamo said.

            That seemed to be the least interesting information to Manning, however. What seemed to excite him most in his chats was his supposed leaking of the embassy cables. He anticipated returning to the states after his early discharge, and watching from the sidelines as his action bared the secret history of U.S. diplomacy around the world.

            “Everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed,” Manning wrote. “It’s open diplomacy. World-wide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”

            Update: The Defense Department issued a statement Monday morning confirming Manning’s arrest and his detention in Kuwait for allegedly leaking classified information.

            “United States Division-Center is currently conducting a joint investigation” says the statement, which notes that Manning is deployed with 2nd Brigade 10th Mountain Division in Baghdad. “The results of the investigation will be released upon completion of the investigation.”
            "Nature abhors a moron." - H.L. Mencken

            Comment


            • Pentagon Manhunt
              Philip Shenon Philip Shenon Thu Jun 10, 11:03 pm ET

              NEW YORK – Anxious that Wikileaks may be on the verge of publishing a batch of secret State Department cables, investigators are desperately searching for founder Julian Assange. Philip Shenon reports.

              Pentagon investigators are trying to determine the whereabouts of the Australian-born founder of the secretive website Wikileaks for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified State Department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security, government officials tell The Daily Beast.

              The officials acknowledge that even if they found the website founder, Julian Assange, it is not clear what they could do to block publication of the cables on Wikileaks, which is nominally based on a server in Sweden and bills itself as a champion of whistleblowers.

              “We’d like to know where he is; we’d like his cooperation in this,” one U.S. official said of Assange.

              American officials said Pentagon investigators are convinced that Assange is in possession of at least some classified State Department cables leaked by a 22-year-old Army intelligence specialist, Bradley Manning of Potomac, Maryland, who is now in custody in Kuwait.

              And given the contents of the cables, the feds have good reason to be concerned.

              As The Daily Beast reported June 8, Manning, while posted in Iraq, apparently had special access to cables prepared by diplomats and State Department officials throughout the Middle East, regarding the workings of Arab governments and their leaders, according to an American diplomat.

              The cables, which date back over several years, went out over interagency computer networks available to the Army and contained information related to American diplomatic and intelligence efforts in the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, the diplomat said.

              American officials would not discuss the methods being used to find Assange, nor would they say if they had information to suggest where he is now. "We'd like to know where he is; we'd like his cooperation in this," one U.S. official said of Assange.

              Assange, who first gained notoriety as a computer hacker, is as secretive as his website and has no permanent home.

              He was in the United States as recently as several weeks ago, when he gave press interviews to promote the website’s release of an explosive 2007 video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the news agency Reuters.

              Wikileaks has not replied directly to email messages from The Daily Beast.

              However, in cryptic messages he sent this week via Twitter, Wikileaks referred to an earlier Daily Beast article on the investigation of Manning and said that it “looks like we’re about to be attacked by everything the U.S. has.”

              In an earlier post, the site said that allegations that “we have been sent 260,000 classified U.S. embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.â€

              This morning, a new Wikileaks tweet went out: "Any signs of unacceptable behavior by the Pentagon or its agents towards this press will be viewed dimly."

              In one post, the site said that allegations that “we have been sent 260,000 classified U.S. embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.â€

              Pentagon investigators say that particular post may have been an effort by Wikileaks to throw them—and news organizations—off the track as the site prepared the library of State Department cables for release, officials said.

              “It looks like they’re playing some sort of semantic games,” one American official said of Wikileaks. “They may not have 260,000 cables, but they’ve probably got enough cables to make trouble.”

              • Philip Shenon: The State Dept.’s Worst NightmareIn another cryptic Twitter message, the site said that while the State Department might be alarmed about the prospect of the release of classified cables, “we have not been contacted.”

              American officials were unwilling to say what would happen if Assange is tracked down, although they suggested they would have many more legal options available to them if he is still somewhere in the United States.

              Manning has reportedly admitted that he downloaded 260,000 diplomatic cables and provided them to Wikileaks. In Internet chat logs first revealed by Wired Wired.

              In the chat log revealed by Wired, Manning bragged to Lamo about having downloaded a huge library of State Department cables, as well as the 2007 video of the helicopter attack, and having provided the material to Wikileaks.

              Manning took credit for having leaked a classified diplomatic cable that has already appeared on the site—a memo prepared by the United States embassy in Reykjavik, Iceland, that described a meeting there between American and Icelandic officials over that country’s banking meltdown.

              The January 2010 memo may have been of special interest to Wikileaks given the site’s close ties to Iceland, where Assange has based himself at times and where he worked with local lawmakers to draft free-speech laws that give broad freedom to journalists to protect their sources.

              A profile this week in The New Yorker The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation.

              Get a head start with the Morning Scoop email. It's your Cheat Sheet with must reads from across the Web. Get it.

              For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at [email protected].
              Copyright © 2010 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserve
              To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

              Comment


              • American officials said Pentagon investigators are convinced that Assange is in possession of at least some classified State Department cables leaked by a 22-year-old Army intelligence specialist, Bradley Manning of Potomac, Maryland, who is now in custody in Kuwait.

                And given the contents of the cables, the feds have good reason to be concerned.

                As The Daily Beast reported June 8, Manning, while posted in Iraq, apparently had special access to cables prepared by diplomats and State Department officials throughout the Middle East, regarding the workings of Arab governments and their leaders, according to an American diplomat.

                The cables, which date back over several years, went out over interagency computer networks available to the Army and contained information related to American diplomatic and intelligence efforts in the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, the diplomat said.
                Does this Assange guy and his staff for this website realize that there's probably not a single country in the world that wants their private diplomatic conversations made public, and some of these countries may take action against said individuals if things get out they don't want out? If they think the U.S. acts evil in diplomacy and doing "collateral murder", just wait until they release stuff that pisses off some less morally scrupulous actors on the world stage.

                Comment


                • I'm tired of foreign douchebags with stupid accents criticizing us.

                  Julian Assange,readying video of a deadly U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan.

                  WikiLeaks Founder Has Massacre Video
                  by Philip Shenon
                  June 15, 2010 | 3:35pm

                  Julian Assange, who the Feds fear may release State Dept. secrets, denies having them—but he’s readying video of a deadly U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan.
                  After several days underground, the founder of the secretive website WikiLeaks has gone public to disclose that he is preparing to release a classified Pentagon video of a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan last year that left as many as 140 civilians dead, most of them children and teenagers.
                  In an email obtained by The Daily Beast that was sent to WikiLeaks supporters in the United States Tuesday, Julian Assange, the website’s Australian-born founder, also defends a 22-year-old Army intelligence specialist who is now under arrest in Kuwait on charges that he leaked classified Pentagon combat videos, as well as 260,000 State Department cables, to WikiLeaks.
                  “Mr. Manning allegedly also sent us 260,000 classified US Department cables, reporting on the actions of US Embassy’s [sic] engaging in abusive actions all over the world,” Assange said in an email. “We have denied the allegation, but the US government is acting as if the allegation is true.”
                  American officials have said they are eager to determine the whereabouts of Assange, who canceled an appearance last Friday in Las Vegas, to discourage him from releasing any more classified information on his website, which is nominally based in Sweden and promotes itself as a global resource for whistleblowers. As recently as two weeks ago, Assange, who first gained global notoriety as a computer hacker, was in his native Australia.
                  In April, his website posted a copy of a classified Pentagon video of a 2007 American helicopter attack in Baghdad in which a dozen people were killed; that video is also believed to have been leaked by the Army intelligence analyst, Specialist Bradley Manning of Potomac, Maryland.
                  While denying again that WikiLeaks has the State Department cables, Assange acknowledges in the email today that he is in custody of the May 2009 video that shows the airstrike on the Afghan village of Garani, believed to be the most lethal combat strike in Afghanistan—in terms of civilian deaths—since the United States invaded the country in 2001. Assange writes that “we are still working on” preparations for release of the video of “the Garani massacre.” The State Department and Pentagon did not immediately comment on Assange’s email message.
                  American officials have acknowledged in the past that they are concerned about the release of the Garani video, fearing that it could undermine public support for the American military campaign in Afghanistan both in that country and in the United States. Pentagon officials were outraged by WikiLeaks’ release of the Baghdad video this spring.
                  State Department officials are especially alarmed by the potential that Assange might post the huge library of classified department memos that Manning is reported to have bragged of providing to WikiLeaks earlier this year. The department has confirmed that it is conducting a forensic examination of Manning’s computer equipment for evidence of what he may have downloaded.
                  In the email, Assange does not confirm any relationship between the website and Manning, describing him as “one of our alleged sources.”
                  But he suggests that Manning is being treated unfairly—“detained and shipped to a US military prison in Kuwait, where he is being held” without trial.
                  “Manning is alleged to have acted according to his conscience and leaked to us the Collateral Murder video and the video of a massacre that took place in Afghanistan last year at Garani,” Assange continues.
                  “Mr. Manning allegedly also sent us 260,000 classified US Department cables, reporting on the actions of US Embassy’s [sic] engaging in abusive actions all over the world. We have denied the allegation, but the US government is acting as if the allegation is true and we do have a lot of other material that exposes human rights abuses by the United States government.” Assange does not reveal exactly what that other material might be.
                  American officials are treating Assange’s claim that he does not have the State Department emails with skepticism, suggesting that he is playing word games—that while he may not have exactly 260,000 cables, he has a large number of them.
                  Assange seems to enjoying taunting the United States government and news organizations with information that is not always accurate. Last Friday, WikiLeaks—which tends to communicate with the outside world through Twitter messages–created a flurry when it disclosed via tweet that Assange was scheduled to appear that afternoon at a journalists’ conference in Las Vegas. The Twitter notice failed to mention that Assange had canceled his appearance several days earlier because of unspecified security concerns.
                  The arrest of Manning became public last week after Wired magazine disclosed that Manning had been turned in to authorities by another former computer hacker, Adrian Lamo, who had been contacted by Manning for counsel. Much of the evidence against Manning is contained in an Internet chat log that Lamo has already turned over to authorities.
                  In an interview with The Daily Beast on Monday, Lamo said that he had been interviewed for nearly 12 hours this weekend by investigators from the Defense Department, the State Department, and the FBI, as formal criminal charges are being prepared for Manning. Lamo said he was motivated to turn in Manning out of fear that the classified information he had provided to WikiLeaks could put lives in danger—within the United States government and elsewhere.
                  Lamo said he is convinced that Manning did have access to highly classified State Department cables, and that Manning’s boast of having stolen 260,000 cables sounds truthful.
                  In his email, Assange asks supporters for money, citing “an enforced lack of resources” for the website. “Please donate and tell the world you have done so,” he writes. “Encourage all your friends to follow the example you set, after all, courage is contagious.”
                  Philip Shenon, a former investigative reporter at The New York Times, is the author of The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation.
                  Get a head start with the Morning Scoop email. It's your Cheat Sheet with must reads from across the Web. Get it.
                  For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at [email protected].

                  http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-a...o-new-email/p/
                  To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

                  Comment


                  • Originally posted by bigross86 View Post

                    Oh, and by the way: Engin Ceber was beaten to death on 10 October 2008 in Metris Prison, İstanbul. Are Turkish Police allowed to act in a disgraceful manner, as long as the soldiers don't?
                    First of all ,that is only half of the story,rest is here:

                    http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-u...ath-2010-06-02

                    "Amnesty International has welcomed the conviction of 19 Turkish officials found guilty of causing the death of a political activist in a landmark torture case."



                    This Ad Hominem type of "arguments" are so disgusting,and i see them used here, on almost every heated debate.It's simply childish and immature way of discussing things.You derail the topic by doing so.

                    Lets assume TR is a dictatorship,like Saddam , for example. So what ?According to your and other ad hominemist members' logic here,they do not have right to protest or disagree on such issues with you because his/her goverment is committing crimes against humanity ? Thus he can not have an opinion even if he hated his own goverment,because he was born in the wrong place ??

                    Also people who try to justify the van shooting with lots of legal military stuff and details,you miss 2 critical points imo:

                    1 is that after those killings did happen,they were reported(all) as insurgents to the media by army.

                    Second:

                    Haditha killings - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

                    If you know the "incident" then just skip to charges dropped part,see for yourself,soldiers who participated the "incident" got no sentences at all.

                    Comment


                    • As a general rule I refrain from entertaining necroposters such as yourself, but being as you quoted me, I'll humor you:

                      First of all ,that is only half of the story,rest is here:

                      http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-u...ath-2010-06-02

                      "Amnesty International has welcomed the conviction of 19 Turkish officials found guilty of causing the death of a political activist in a landmark torture case."
                      Relevance? No one said that anything about Turkish jailers being punished or allowed to go free. I merely mentioned that Turkish jailers had beaten a man to death, and then asked if there was a certain double standard I was unaware of, if Turks were allowed to behave one way while Americans had to act in another.

                      This Ad Hominem type of "arguments" are so disgusting,and i see them used here, on almost every heated debate.It's simply childish and immature way of discussing things.You derail the topic by doing so.
                      I usually do my very best to avoid ad hominem attacks. Sometimes it slips out, sometimes I do it because someone is literally too stupid for their own good, and need to be told that their continued existence on earth spewing such stupidity is merely a waste of oxygen.

                      I'm fairly certain (without having read the whole thread all over again) that I committed no ad hominem attacks, so I'm not quite sure what your point is.-

                      Lets assume TR is a dictatorship,like Saddam , for example. So what ?According to your and other ad hominemist members' logic here,they do not have right to protest or disagree on such issues with you because his/her goverment is committing crimes against humanity ? Thus he can not have an opinion even if he hated his own goverment,because he was born in the wrong place ??
                      Did I say anything about where a person was born, or what they thought of their government? I raised the point that there was a very similar case to the point being discussed in the member's home country. If he was Belgian I wound have tried to find an example in Belgium. If French, then in France. If Bulgarian, then in Bulgaria, etc... The reason I raised the example was because change starts at home. Before you decide that someone else is doing something wrong, first fix your mistakes. Before you declare some other country is doing wrong, fix your country's mistakes.

                      Also people who try to justify the van shooting with lots of legal military stuff and details,you miss 2 critical points imo:

                      1 is that after those killings did happen,they were reported(all) as insurgents to the media by army.
                      Because they were insurgents. The fact that the reporters were stupid enough to join the insurgents and not give them up means they were aiding them and were therefore just as guilty. The fact that the people in the van were stupid enough to bring kids with them, doesn't change the fact that they were also trying to aid insurgents, or at the very least trying to aid people that were though to be insurgents at the time.

                      This may come as a bit of a surprise, I'm fairly certain the pilots in the Apache didn't land to check the ID's of their victims. They didn't know that the reporters were there, to them it was all one large group of insurgents, and you can even see in the video how the video camera is mistaken for an RPG, especially as one RPG was already clearly seen in the video.

                      The Army reported them as insurgents because that's what they were, nothing more and nothing less.

                      Second:

                      Haditha killings - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

                      If you know the "incident" then just skip to charges dropped part,see for yourself,soldiers who participated the "incident" got no sentences at all.
                      Again, relevance? We are dealing specifically with this case. We're not drawing conclusion as to the nature of all combat ops in Iraq, nor are we drawing conclusions regarding all combat ops in Iraq where there are civilian casualties.

                      To tell you the truth, I hadn't even heard about the Haditha killings until this very minute, when they happened I was in Basic training and fairly incommunicado from world news. But again, this is neither here nor there. The Haditha killings have absolutely no bearing on the matter at hand.

                      ====================
                      Mate, let me make a friendly suggestion: Read the Survival Guide, and then head on to the Member Introductions forum and introduce yourself. In the future, you may find that many of the members here are not as indulgent as I am...
                      Last edited by bigross86; 17 Jul 10,, 22:14.
                      Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

                      Abusing Yellow is meant to be a labor of love, not something you sell to the highest bidder.

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                      • I tried to tell that using ad hominem in discussions is immature ,not you,so i do not know why i should appreciate your indulgence(doubt there was any),but thx anyway.

                        I dont want to go quote by quote,you said is it OK for TR police to act in that manner ?,i said even for the TR goverment answer was clearly NO.

                        Now you talk about relevance,despite the fact that you were the guy who brought that Engin murder, which had absolutely no relevance to this subject. The only relevance is, the guy who disagreed with you happened to be Turkish,like you've said, if i were Belgian,you'd follow the same logic,which is clearly ad hominem.

                        Then,certainly not all of those guys were insurgents,as it was reflected back then by US. army,and point about haditha is,even if those operators had clearly violated RoE or whatever,it is possible that charges against them could have been dropped or they could have ended trial with minor punishments etc.

                        I've been reading through this site for 2-3 years,i became a member a year ago,but posted so few because because,well i don't know,either didnt have anything to post on those subjects something new,or the topics were locked.

                        About necroposting,logic being, because someone just like myself,might decide to go through older topics or happen to find those on google.I guess i'll continue doing that if i'm not banned.

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                        • Great. Have fun with that.
                          Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

                          Abusing Yellow is meant to be a labor of love, not something you sell to the highest bidder.

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                          • BBC interview with Ethan Mccord

                            US soldier on aftermath of WikiLeaks Apache attack

                            Some background: He was one of the soldiers involved in the rescue of the children and has been discussed extensively in this thread.

                            Warning: The video contains some disturbing footage.

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