It's worse. (Julian Assange remains a clown - Part IV)

Again, what did I say?

The latest WikiLeaks flap raises, once again, the problem of revealing classified information. Some of the WikiLeaks Afghanistan material—the names of individual Afghans who are working against the Taliban, some of whom are now sure to die as a result—represents exactly the sort of stuff that any government would reasonably try to keep secret. The other classic examples are "order-of-battle" information, negotiating instructions, intelligence sources and methods, and technical details about the capacities and vulnerabilities of specific weapons and about how to create them.

I'm just glad its getting noticed. My fellow Liberals on the blogosphere have been too quick to paper this over.

Once again, if you're going to release classified material, fine...but do your due diligence and redact all the names of those involved. If you can't do that, don't release the stuff. Period.

It's worse. (Julian Assange is a clown - Part III)

I called him a clown, and I wish I could stand by that. It's now confirmed by Newsweek:

After WikiLeaks published a trove of U.S. intelligence documents—some of which listed the names and villages of Afghans who had been secretly cooperating with the American military—it didn’t take long for the Taliban to react. A spokesman for the group quickly threatened to “punish” any Afghan listed as having “collaborated” with the U.S. and the Kabul authorities against the growing Taliban insurgency. In recent days, the Taliban has demonstrated how seriously those threats should be considered. Late last week, just four days after the documents were published, death threats began arriving at the homes of key tribal elders in southern Afghanistan. And over the weekend one tribal elder, Khalifa Abdullah, who the Taliban believed had been in close contact with the Americans, was taken from his home in Monar village, in Kandahar province’s embattled Arghandab district, and executed by insurgent gunmen.

One dead, but that's one dead too many...to gauge this by Mr. Assange's standards.

I mean, that's why you did it, right? You were outraged by all the death and destruction in Afghanistan, and you wanted to do something about it.

Congratulations, your overinflated sense of self-importance just got someone killed. I really hope that all the Interviews and publicity were worth it.

Again, I will repeat. I have no truck with Whistleblowers. I'm not comfortable with them leaking stuff on National Security, but it's sometimes necessary (see: Ellsberg, Daniel). But for Wikileaks to black out everyone's names except for the Afghanis is now bearing tragic consequences, and all it is directly attributable to Mr. Assange's decision to put this nearly worthless crap out there.

I hope Mr. Assange enjoys the limelight, and burns in hell afterwards.

"Julian Assange is a clown" Part II

...or worse.

It does seem as if measures have been taken by Wikileaks to protect U.S. and allied personnel whose lives might be endangered by the leaks. The same cannot be said for the Afghans. A cursory search of the Wikileaks documents by the consistently excellent Afghanistan-based journalist Tom Coughlan revealed hundreds of Afghan lives to have been put at risk by these leaked documents. The mentions of Afghans -- either because they have confounding, non-Western names or because they simply are not considered of importance -- do not seem to have been considered by Mr. Assange and Wikileaks when they decided to dump these documents into the public sphere. I don't know whether Mr. Assange simply did not understand enough about Afghanistan to realize what he was doing when he leaked these documents or just doesn't care, so myopic is his focus on the governments of the United States and Europe.

So Julian made sure he blacked out the America names, and left the Afghan names alone. Peachy. Is this what Secretary Gates meant by there being blood on Wikileaks hands? (From what I read, partially).

Got this from the Daily Dish, so hat's off to Andrew Sullivan.

"Julian Assange is a clown"?

It's not my quote, but there's much about this that smacks of a pub-grab.

My feelings about Wikileaks is mixed. I sympathize with whistleblowers...always, but leaking National Security Information makes me nervous.

Still, I find it interesting that in light of the Wikileaks 91,000 page Afghanistan thing, the I-hate-the-Afghanistan-War-Crowd (populated by people who somehow listened to President Obama talk about ratcheting up the Afghan War in virtually every Foreign Policy speech, yet still did not hear him) cheered the release. (A cross-board summary can be found here.)

More telling, the professional Military Reporters (at least the ones I read) haven't so much as reacted, as they have...yawned.

Andrew Sullivan, no Afghan War lover, also said that not much was learned, while spending the day trumpeting the Wikileak stuff.

Thomas Ricks:

A huge leak of U.S. reports and this is all they get? I know of more stuff leaked at one good dinner on background. I mean, when Mother Jones yawns, that's an indication that you might not have the Pentagon Papers on your hands. If anything, the thousands of documents remind me of what it is like to be a reporter: Lots of different people telling you different things. It takes awhile to learn how to distinguish the junk from the gold.

You know how Robert DeNiro used to shout once in every film, "You got nothin' on me, nothin'"? (I think it was in his contract.) This data dump reminded me of that.

Fred Kaplan:

Some of the conclusions to be drawn from these files: Afghan civilians are sometimes killed. Many Afghan officials and police chiefs are corrupt and incompetent. Certain portions of Pakistan's military and intelligence service have nefarious ties to the Taliban.

If any of this startles you, then welcome to the world of reading newspapers. Today's must be the first one you've read.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has likened these documents to the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret history of the Vietnam War that Daniel Ellsberg leaked in 1972. The comparison is preposterous.

Adam Weinstein (Mother Jones):

Here's a cliche for you: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And here's a fact: A little knowledge is precisely what Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks cohorts have given us in the "Afghan War Diary." The intimation by Assange (and the media outlets he cherry-picked to preview the data) is that these are the Pentagon Papers of the Afghan war. Certainly there are a few eyebrow-raising details in the bunch, as Mark Mazzetti, Chris Chivers & Co. at the New York Times point out. But in truth, there's not much there. I know, because I've seen many of these reports before—at least, thousands of similar ones from Iraq, when I was a contractor there last year.

And finally, the whole Abu Muqawama post from the Center for a New American Security:

Here are the things I have learned thus far from the documents released via Wikileaks:

1. Elements within Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) support the Taliban.

2. The United States integrates direct action special operations into its counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan, targeting insurgent leaders through capture/kill missions.

3. Civilians have died in Afghanistan, often as the result of coalition combat operations.

I'm going to bed, but if I were to stay up late reading more, here is what I suspect I would discover:

1. "Afghanistan" has four syllables.

2. LeBron is going to the Heat.

3. D'Angelo Barksdale didn't actually commit suicide in prison. Stringer Bell had him killed.

4. Although a document dated 17 October 2004 claims the Red Sox were down 3-0 in a seven-game series with the Yankees, they actually went on to win 4-3.

5. Liberace was gay.

6. The Pathan remains wily.

7. Julian Assange is a clown.