PUBLIC JOURNALISM

WikiLeaks releases 92 000 confidential documents about Afghanistan war

26. 7. 2010

American forces could be investigated for thousands of possible war crimes committed when the Bush administration was running that war, according to analysts.

WikiLeaks in the past has made available a Somali assassination order, Guantanamo Bay procedures, U.S. Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's email account contents, Internet censorship lists and 9/11 pager messages.

In a nutshell, the documents reveal that Pakistan allows its spy service (the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence) to strategize with the Taliban and collaborate with the Afghan insurgency. Pakistani intelligence is working alongside al Qaeda to plot attacks. Britain's Guardian newspaper said the files, many of which detail growing numbers of civilians dying at the hands of international forces as well as the Taliban, painted "a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan".

Before the leaks were posted online, its condemnation was issued by The White House by saying the information could endanger US lives but also pointing to the administration's long-held doubts about links between Pakistan intelligence agents and Afghan insurgents.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said while defending the documents' release, "Militaries keep information secret to prosecute the war but also to hide abuse." Assange said, "There is a military argument for keeping some information secret that is very timely --- as an example, where troops are about to deploy --- but that information expires quickly." And he warns that "We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually, in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits."

At first glance, the reports included in these files will not be a surprise to readers here since we have been recounting the persistence of unjustified attacks on civilians and the callous response of U.S. and ISAF command for years --- but these new accounts are so very disturbing and the breadth of detailed information this release provides is astonishing.

Based on the leaks, Der Spiegel wrote that a report on June 17, 2007, for example, "includes a warning in the second sentence that the operation of the TF 373 must be "kept protected." Details about the mission could not be provided to other countries contributing to the ISAF forces".

The German paper added that "the aim was to kill prominent al-Qaida functionary Abu Layth Al Libi. The special forces suspected that the top terrorist and several of his followers were present at a Koran school the soldiers had been staking out for a number of days. But after the impact of five American rockets, instead of finding Al Libi, the ground forces discovered six dead children in the rubble of the school. A further seriously injured child was also found but could not be saved".

Who is Julian Assange? He was born in 1971 in Townsville, Australia and had a nomadic, unconventional childhood. His mother left his theater director father for a singer, from whom mother and son later fled. (Assange believes the singer was a member of a powerful cult.) The "family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible". He got married at 18 and had a son, but his family soon fell apart. Assange then spent years fighting for custody of his child, and in 1999 worked out an agreement with his wife.

He discovered computers at an early age and became a skilled hacker. When he was a teenager, police raided his home with allegations that he had stolen money from Citibank. Though they took his computers, he was never charged. As Assange continued to hack, the Australian government spent three years mounting a case against him and his confederates. Though he plead guilty to 25 charges, he was only penalized with a fine.

He says he wasn't interested in harming computers systems, only snooping around. His ethos, described in the book "Underground," which he co-wrote, was: "Don't damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don't change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information."

He came up with the idea for WikiLeaks after spending the next several years traveling, studying physics and working at various computer-related jobs.

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution.

As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto called "Conspiracy as Governance", which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial - the product of functionaries in "collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population." He argued that, when a regime's lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare."

In 2006. Wikileaks' first post was a document allegedly signed by a Somali rebel leader calling for the assassination of Somali government officials.

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