Yesterday, the organization called Wikileaks released what they are calling the War diaries. It is leaked American military reports the were filed on the ground in Afghanistan.
The collection is massive. It contains 90,000 short reports of incidents that have occurred in the war between 2004-2009. The reports can be a bit cryptic to read since they are written in “military speak”. If you decide to take a look at them, you may want to peek at this tutorial first.
Inconsistencies Exposed:
When looking at these reports, we obviously have to be skeptical. These reports have been leaked, but there is no way to verify them, and the various governments involved are already refuting their legitimacy. This is a situation that skeptics are used to, whether it be conspiracy theories, UFO reports, testimony of divine intervention,etc.
These records are extremely thorough however, and many of the records match up perfectly with well known events. This makes them a little harder than usual to dismiss outright. Some of these records are even shedding light on inconsistencies that are causing people to ask hard questions.
Consider the following news report in which 4 Canadian troops were killed and 6 were injured in an insurgent attack near kandahar on Sept 3 2006 at 4:30 AM (12:30PM our time):
This event is listed in the records, and unfortunately, it sheds completely different light on the incident:
http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/afg/event/2006/09/AFG20060903n347.html
It is listed as a “Friendly Fire” event. The Ottawa Citizen pointed out this inconsistency in this article last night. This is a big problem, if there is truth to be found in these reports. It would show that we are not getting the full story over here on our end.
PZ Myers posted a reflection on the problem that most media outlets are focused on the question of whether or not it was a good idea to release the reports, rather than asking questions about what is inside of them. I am interested to see which way the momentum swings on this story. Will it be an all out attack on Wikileaks’s legitimacy, or will questions like the above mentioned Canadian soldiers killed continue to pop out?
So who runs this Wikileaks site? How legitimately should we take them?
Well, here’s an interview with Julian Assange who is the person that heads this project. He sits down with Chris Anderson at TED to talk about what he is doing with the project.
2010/07/27 at 10:24 am
Thanks for posting this Tony. I have become aware of all the elements you have included in this posting last night and I think you did a great job of putting them all together. I, for one, hope people concentrate on the message rather than the messenger but we all know how fallacious arguments go “if you can’t attack the message then attack the messenger”. I hope Julian Assange has the right stuff to stand up to his detractors.
2010/07/27 at 10:52 am
I think part of the issue with the reporting at this point is that with 90,000 + documents, there hasn’t really been enough time to sort through and investigate individual incidents yet, or put some of this info into proper context. I hope that in the coming weeks this banal debate about the leak itself will be replaced by actual reporting or investigation based on the new information.
2010/07/27 at 10:56 am
It is more than obvious that the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is a hopeless, extremely expensive, cruel, and unjust war and we should never have entered. The loss of all the lives lost speaks – cries out -that it was not worth anything.
2010/07/27 at 12:16 pm
One of the tragedies when people go in to “save” oppressed people from oppression is that the people start doing the things they weren’t allowed to do before under protection of their “saviours” but when those “saviours” leave then the people who took advantage of their new found freedom are faced with the full force of local backlash. A recent example is the pull out in Iraq in which Iraqi gays have been hunted down, dragged away from their homes or the street and brutally tortured throughout the night only to be murdered with their bodies left in garbage dumpsters or on the sidewalks for the morning pedestrians to find.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8005420.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/13/iraq-gays-murdered-militias
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/17/iraqi-gays-targeted-bruta_n_261155.html
2010/07/27 at 1:29 pm
I made a mistake as things were not too bad for gay people under Sadam Hussein – not good but not too bad – it was when Sadam Hussein’s regime was brought down making way for other forces to fill the vaccuum that things got bad for gay people. Some powerful Clerics like Muqtada al Sadr and his militia army started hunting down, torturing and murdering gay people.
2010/07/27 at 4:46 pm
Your linked CBC News article is for August 3rd, not September 3rd.
2010/07/27 at 4:49 pm
You are right, I posted the wrong article. I just updated it.