I posted the link. I wanted to describe my reasons :
I know that even the most justified war is ugly : there are accidents and mistakes and innocent people die at times, despite the best precautions.
Im aware that the freedoms I have every day, are a result of a coalition of democratic countries winning WWII and other conflicts. Many of my freedoms were won by American strength : military, economic and technological. I'm not an American, but I hold up the Constitution, the rule of Law and Democracy as high ideals - the best way humans have come up with so far of coexisting on this planet.
But a Democracy cannot exist where there is no free speech nor the right to question the government and the law. Citizens need information on whats happening : we need freedom to speak and anonymity to discuss in private, if we are to have a functioning Democracy.
I think Bradley Manning had a moral obligation as a soldier and as a citizen, to release the information he did. From what I read it seems that he was careful not to share information that would get other soldiers and spies killed, nor give the enemy any material advantage in the war.
What I think should happen is that this should be a civil trial by jury to decide whether he acted legally and morally. He leaked news of military 'mistakes', so he should not be tried by that same organization. A civil jury should decide whether the obligation to uphold the Constitution, by leaking, outweighed his obligation as a soldier to keep the information secret.
Even more worrying here is that the Obama administration is pushing for this to be tried as 'giving information directly to the enemy' ie. treason, when clearly the motivation was not that.
If there were no Wikileaks, no Press, no privacy.. how would we keep our secret organisations in check, and have any confidence they are following their mandate ?
It's important to note that there is absolutely no proof Manning leaked this, as the video was never posted online:
> Assange blamed former spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg for taking the video, who said he had deleted it along with 35,000 other files when he left Wikileaks in September 2010. To date, the video has never been publicly released.
>In a March 2013 statement, Julian Assange said that, while the file was still in their possession, Wikileaks had successfully decrypted the video ... Assange blamed former spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg for taking the video, who said he had deleted it along with 35,000 other files when he left Wikileaks in September 2010.
If it was deleted in September 2010, how was it decrypted and still in their possession in March 2013? Why are the possibly outdated and conflicting events listed after future events?
A common misconception regarding how Wikipedia works. Wikipedia works by writing what reliable sources has to say about an issue.
In this case, its a newspaper article that are citing Assange, which is why the sentence beginning with "Julian Assange said". Changing it to "Julian Assange allegedly claim" would make the article worse, as the implied disbelief of using the word "allegedly" is not supported by the source.
Having to base edits around sources is hard, but I think a crucial aspect of any encyclopedia. The alternative is just so much worse, don't you agree?
Unless you think "said" implies truth, there is no clear improvement between "Julian said" and "Julian claimed". "Julian said" is not implying that what he was saying is beyond reproach.
To see why it's not worded that way in the Wikipedia article, imagine each sentence in the article implicitly preceded by "According to source x,..." -- source x of course being the relevant citation. If the cited source states that he "said", then using "claims" or "allegedly" does not accurately reflect the degree of certainty expressed in the cited source. Veracity of that source notwithstanding.
It's fairly common to word things that way in Wikipedia articles, though of course not for every citation. It's a judgment call whether it should be or not, since adding a qualifier in-text more strongly contextualizes the claim as being from the source, rather than in "Wikipedia's voice".
For example, I recently wrote an article about an ancient Roman politician. A number of sentences are in the form "[Scholar A] argues that the person did X [cite]" rather than "The person did X [cite]". I'll use the second form for uncontroversial facts, but the first form when it's more like a proposal from a particular scholar which isn't necessarily an accepted consensus viewpoint.
Of course the Afghans are going to hate the US if you are killing their children. Imagine the uproar if an Afghani had set off a bomb in the US which caused the same casualties. Actually you don't have to imagine, you have the recent Boston bombing as a demonstration.
I think it is because they believe, with much justification, that Americans use their freedom to enrich themselves at the expense of others, and to try to make others more like themselves. Often by war, killing, coercion and manipulation.
The trouble is, Americans believe they have the best system, society, country in the world, and that it is up to them to make every one have that same sort of system, regardless of whether or not they asked for it.
If you see America as a religion, its constitution as a holy book, its foreign policy as a crusade, its politicians as religious leaders, its people as believers, then you begin to understand the problem.
The problem is, America has a fundamentally different history than most other countries, and is that way it is because of its history. Essentially diverse people came from abroad for many different reasons to create it. The rest of the planet is not like that. Nothing wrong in that at all for America, it makes total reasonable sense, and works fairly well inits context. But for most other countries it does not. All America needs to do is accept that its unique and that other systems have equal validity to their own people. It is not up to America to judge other and seek to tell them they are wrong. If other countries and culture are wrong for their people, its is up to them to change it, not have it forced on them. If such people want American "democracy", which lets face it, Americans seem to have plenty of issues with, then such people will fight for it, loose blood for it, and really value it. Just like Americans did for themselves. No one forced democracy on Americans.
My point here being that "our freedoms" plainly is not why they hate us. The real reason is because of our involvement and interaction with them. When such involvement and interaction is kept classified for decades, then the American public has no hope of correctly evaluating statements such as Bush's.
Agreed. Sadly, many Americans continue, as you describe, to believe that the country is hated because of its freedoms, when the reason is its actions overseas. The core reason that people believe glib lies such as Bush's is that many people in the USA have no idea that people in other countries are not that dissimilar from themselves, in their interests and in their ambitions and concerns.
We can't get everyone to travel, but we should be able to do better with modern internet technology and ubiquitous cell phones. For example, perhaps a website facilitating the creation of email / text message friendships between people in America and people in Afghanistan (or Gaza or Yemen etc). That would have the advantage of potentially severely reducing the signal-to-noise ratio in the government's mass surveillance of its own citizens. Initially of course it would be the more enlightened westerners that would participate, but it would be a start. Incentives for both sides could include language skills / other educational objectives.
The reason Mohamed Atta or Osama Bin Laden hated the U.S. need not be the same reason their followers hate the U.S.
Let's just say that Al Qaida had an easy time recruiting men with a grudge against the U.S. The western worlds 'decadent' lifestyles are just a way for Al Qaida to dehumanize them.
That said, I bet Mohammed Atta and Osama Bin Laden also have their reasons besides idealistic ones to despise the western world.
Osama Ibn Laden has equally to do with 9/11 as you or me with Boston Bombing. Well, that's overstatement, but here are some facts for you to digest:
- Osama never took responsibility for 911. His multiple speeches he gave recorded in caves after 911 were incorrectly translated and heavily redacted for political purposes. E was just perfect to be framed. Anyone speaking Laden's language can hear him speaking that his family were doing business with Bush family (proven fact) for decades and he would never be competent to carry such an attack. Unfortunately, most videos of him speaking without overlapping loud audio vanished and any translation you find you can barely hear his native language. But you can find interview with people that were asked to translate his words ad they were pretty angry that everything got twisted.
- ibn Laden was on FBI top list but never for 911. As far as I remember he was most wanted for some huge oil fraud he performed while his family did work with Bushes.
His argument is that radical Islamists hate us for what we do, not who we are. But we do what we do because of who we are. That's nearly a tautology in a democracy. We support Israel because its people largely share our values. We threw Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and maintained a presence in Saudi Arabia because we support and defend the sovereignty of our allies, particularly when those allies supply vital resources. We continued to prop up Mubarak because we thought he was better than the alternative, etc.
All of these are policies reached through a free, democratic process, which has not been a hallmark of those societies which have welcomed Al Qaeda into their midst.
Also, have you heard of Sayyid Qutb? Just curious.
Also remember when all the fatwas were proclaimed for a Danish newspapers publication of a cartoon featuring the Prophet Muhammad? That's not even considering the issue of extremist religion and Sharia law, as led to the shooting and near-murder of Malala Yousafzai.
Islamist culture is not entirely compatible with Western democracy, just as far-right fundamentalist Christian extremism is not entirely compatible with Western democracy (e.g. the 1996 Olympic Park bombing).
I'm using Islamist as the term was first defined, which means exactly "Islamic terrorism". As far as I know there's never been a popularly-agreed-on meaning of "Islamist" other than that, if you're referring to the peaceful followers of Allah the term is Muslim, or perhaps Islamic, but never Islamist.
Christian on the other hand is already overloaded with many meanings and I don't feel like inventing new words when I can simply add adjectives as appropriate.
"Islamism" certainly does not mean "Islamic terrorism". It means a belief that Islam should be a force in the public sphere, not just a private religion.
Well, it's certainly a pity that Islamic terrorism is a big enough threat that they had to invent a Huffman-coded word for it. Though perhaps we can treat it as a relief that Christian terrorism is no longer so prevalent that we had to make a shorter term for it after we invented 'terrorist'.
Though I hear 'Crusader' is a close equivalent among many Muslims, for obvious reasons. I don't think Americans or most West. Europeans would understand that as a negative connotation though.
So you are telling me that the "decadence" of modern Western society simply FORCED the USA to support the Shah, Mubarak, Ben Ali, the dictators of Bahrain etc etc etc down through history?
Like the Western world couldn't possibly have beer and miniskirts without installing dictators in or invading other countries?
If you think OBL would have been thrilled with a peaceful, democratic, Islamic world with all the freedoms and associated "decadence" we see in the West, just so long as the U.S. had never interfered there, I don't think you are seeing the whole picture.
Obviously the U.S. record in the Middle East is not spotless. But it's not as if we haven't been a force for good there on more than one occasion. The Suez Crisis comes to mind immediately, as does Desert Shield/Storm. Our record there isn't better or worse than our record in, say, Central and South America, yet for some reason, Nicaraguans and Chileans aren't blowing themselves up in Times Square.
In the Monkey King Legend the heroes are warned not to overwhelm the monster by a reference to the Art of War by Sun Zi.
If I remember correctly, the translation is "even a rat will fight if cornered", though today we might mutter something about "asymmetric warfare" in response to "full spectrum dominance".
Sun Zi wrote in about 500BC. So it's not like you were warned yesterday. You've had 2500 years of warning.
Expect kamikaze attacks. They happen. Especially from people who feel they have nothing to lose, and feel under attack from very, very strong opponents.
But they don't. Not from the Vietnamese, nor the Indians nor are the Gabonese. Nor the Chileans and Nicaraguans, as was pointed out in the comment I originally responded to.
But they did from the Vietnamese, when the Vietnamese were occupied.
And try googling for "suicide attack India" or "suicide attack Kashmir" or "suicide attack Sri Lanka", you'll find plenty of hits.
Just because South Americans haven't done it (yet) (that we know of), it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Like I told you, you've had at least 2500 years warning.
Hell, there's even the American saying "Give me Liberty or give me Death!"
I have referenced academic study on this topic elsewhere, go read it.
Occupation is one reason the kamikaze may feel like a cornered rat. Indirect occupation is another.
This can be because the perpetrator (USA) is giving weapons to the actual occupier (Israel), because the perpetrator is implementing a sanctions/embargo regime amounting to a mediaeval siege that killed half a million, mostly children (Iraq) or because the perpetrator has installed a "government" in your country to do the occupation for it (Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Ethiopia etc etc etc Saudi Arabia).
If you google for the jihadis' motives, you'll find that they mention all three.
Given that the actual 911 attackers were Saudis, I would have thought that US sponsored tyranny in Saudi Arabia would have been their main motive, but it appears that they were significantly motivated by fellow-feeling for Palestinians.
It is not an excuse if the guy is ready to throw himself and an airplane into a building for it. That means the guy is pretty sincere. The word you are looking for is motive.
The fact that you do not find their motives "reasonable" intrigues me. Is it their methods you disagree with, or their grievances?
If you think their grievances are not legitimate, does it change when you substitute "gold rush" for "oil rush" and "red skin" for "rag head"?
(By the way I'm not thrilled about getting bombed. I almost lost a friend in Boston.)
> It is not an excuse if the guy is ready to throw himself and an airplane into a building for it. That means the guy is pretty sincere. The word you are looking for is motive.
The human unconscious is a mysterious place.
> The fact that you do not find their motives "reasonable" intrigues me. Is it their methods you disagree with, or their grievances?
I disagree with deliberately targeting civilians. I also think the worldview of these perpetrators is rather distant from reality.
> If you think their grievances are not legitimate, does it change when you substitute "gold rush" for "oil rush" and "red skin" for "rag head"?
(c) you can only condemn the violence if you would not do the same thing in their place.
To me, that means you should be able to sell them a peaceful method as being more effective than jihad. Well, we have a historical record.
The peaceful, liberal, pro-democratic reformers in the middle east seem to have gotten defeated and tortured by the CIA and their local satraps. Like what happened to my family.
On the other hand Jihad seems to be winning in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and so on.
TL;DR People do not run kamikaze attacks against other people for being less religiously conservative than they are, they run kamikaze attacks against occupiers.
Pray tell, which Islamic nations was the U.S. "occupying" on 9/11? We're getting way off topic, re: decadence and "hating freedom", but let me try to bring it back. Why blow up the World Trade Center? Surely that was a symbolic act, against a quintessentially civilian target.
As I've stated elsewhere, and as you can find by googling what jihadis actually say about their motives, the motive for 911 included the occupation of Palestine and US enabling of it.
And if they wanted to make a symbolic attack, they would have hit the Statue of Liberty, not financial and military targets like the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Furthermore it is you who are taking things off-topic.
The topic was jlgreco commenting about the Granai massacre, and how resistance in Afghanistan is because (sarcastically) "they hate us for our freedoms"
You tried to make it out that "Western Decadence" in fact was the reason, which is plain WRONG and contradicted by authorities which I have cited and provided references for.
You have repeatedly attempted to derail the point by going off on a tangent about Osama Ben Laden's psychology, or why Nicaraguans haven't reacted the same way, despite all of my efforts to stick to the topic. The 911 example is a similar red herring, because NO Afghans, Taleban or otherwise, were involved in that attack.
> As I've stated elsewhere, and as you can find by googling what jihadis actually say about their motives, the motive for 911 included the occupation of Palestine and US enabling of it.
It doesn't matter what they say. It matters what's true, and it matters what's right.
It's as though you defend a child's tantrum because the child explained "my mummy didn't buy me any sweeties".
You think jihadis are in truth really pleased about how Palestinians were ethnically cleansed, how they can't get their homes back and how they're treated like dirt everyday?
That's retarded, they're mad as hell about it, and as it happens many non-terrorist Middle Easterners are mad as hell about it too. If you doubt that, read the 2004 Pentagon Defense Science Board Report.
Furthermore, many non-Middle Easterners are mad as hell about it too. Many jews are mad as hell about it as well, as you can see from looking up eg mondoweiss.net
Finally, many Americans - including veterans and ex-intelligence personnel - are mad as hell about the American money and lives being expended to harm the Middle East on Israel's behalf, which you can see by looking up eg The Council for the National Interest.
Well, way back in the day (around WWII) Arab opinion of the US was rather high. One of the key initial moments in the disenchantment came with Sayyid Qutb[1]'s journey to the US and writing about it. He had a lot to say about the moral degeneracy of the US, where men and women mixed together socially even sitting side by side in church etc. He later helped found the Muslim Brotherhood from which splintered the Islamic Jihad under Ayman al-Zawahiri which later made up half of Al Qaeda.
But while it is true that part of their beef with the US was things that we would consider freedom a much bigger issue would be America's support of Israel or the stationing troops in Saudi Arabia. And then 9/11 happened and the West invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and this became very much beside the point. So Bush's famous mention of Al Qaeda hating us for our freedoms, while true in some sense, was very much a red herring.
Question: Mommy, mommy why do all the Arabs seemingly want to blow themselves up and attack us and why do we have to fear them?
Answer: Because they hate our freedoms honey...
/They reason it is presented in that way is because the explanation is infantile and geared for an infantile mind but it is funny how well it has worked for so long
Manning supposedly leaked only the video about the airstrike, the facts about it - including high number of civilians killed - were known long before. Even the reference article was created before the Manning story. Since the video was never released, the connection between Manning and this story is rather weak.
For such an event, you really want to know there has been a proper investigation.
I dont know if there was a video, what it showed, how many people died, how many were combatants, what their ages were.
If I was a soldier.. Id want to know that these things are investigated well.. because I really don't want to kill innocent people by mistake. Where did the mistake happen along the chain of intel and of command, who didn't double check, was someone gung-ho or negligent ?
I means that when you're a scrooge and decide not to attract people to fill positions that you need by offering them some monetary incentive, you have to spend even more money on bombs and spare parts that fall in the wrong places.
"Hi. How are you? I'm an army intelligence analyst, deployed to Eastern Baghdad, pending discharge for "adjustment disorder" in lie of "gender identity disorder." I'm sure you're pretty busy.
If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?
"I'm in the desert, with a bunch of hyper-masculine trigger-happy ignorant rednecks as neighbors... and the only safe place I seem to have is this satellite internet connection. I already got myself into minor trouble, revealing my uncertainty over my gender identity. Which is causing me to lose this job. And putting me in an awkward limbo...
At the very least, I managed to keep my security clearance (so far), and little does anyone know. But, among this "visible" mess, there's the mess I created that no one knows about yet.
Hypothetical question: if you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of time, say, 8-9 months ... and you saw incredible things, awful things ... things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, D.C. ... what would you do?
Say ... a database of half a million events during the Iraq war. From 2004 to 2009, with reports, date time groups, lat-lon locations, casualty figures...? Or 260,000 state department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world, explaining how the first world exploits the third, in detail, from an internal perspective?
Let's just say someone I know intimately well, has been penetrating U.S. classified networks, mining data like the ones described, and [has] been transferring that data from the classified networks over the "air gap" onto a commercial network computer ... sorting the data, compressing it, encrypting it, and uploading it to a crazy white-haired Aussie who can't seem to stay in one country very long.
Crazy white Aussie = Julian Assange..
In other words, I've made a huge mess.
"And, it's important that it gets out, I feel, for some bizarre reason. It might actually change something. I just ... don't wish to be a part of it. At least not now. I'm not ready ... I wouldn't mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn't for the possibility of having pictures of me plastered all over the world press, as a [poster] boy.
I've totally lost my mind. I make no sense. The CPU is not made for this motherboard. I cannot believe what I'm confessing to you.
"So, it was a massive data spillage, facilitated by numerous factors. Both physically, technically, and culturally. [It's a] perfect example of how not to do INFOSEC. [I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.
Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis ... a perfect storm.
I mean, what if I were someone more malicious? I could've sold to Russia or China, and made bank."
Adrian shot back, "Why didn't you?"
"Because it's public data. It belongs in the public domain.
Information should be free." - Bradley Manning
======================================
This is true bravery. This is courage. This is heroism. Capitol Hill does not have the intelligence quotient to understand this.
Either that, or they're just corrupt. It's probably the latter.
I am praying to a God I know doesn't exist, if only because I feel helpless in this matter. Bradley Manning, please be free. Just like the information you set out to liberate, be yourself liberated from tyranny.
I had the complete opposite reaction to his transcript.
Bradley Manning struck me as likely suffering from a level of mental disorder which renders him unable to discern whether or not something belonged in the 'public domain.'
"I'm in the desert, with a bunch of hyper-masculine trigger-happy ignorant rednecks as neighbors."
These are not the words of a hero. More importantly, these are not the words of someone acting rationally. These are the words of someone who leaked massive amounts of information without knowing what the information was. In some cases -- like the Baghdad airstrike video -- the information was important to bring to light; in other cases, like Cablegate, the information caused hundreds of diplomats and journalists to fear for their lives.
Bradley Manning, in my opinion, is a terrible example of a whistleblower, and if anything undermined the effort for transparency.
From the transcript, it seemed pretty clear he did know what the information was, but he just didn't know the potential consequences of it.
You have to remember that this is an IM transcript after all. The "trigger-happy hyper-masculine" comment was likely just a joke or either angst at his predicament.
"I'm in the desert, with a bunch of hyper-masculine trigger-happy ignorant rednecks as neighbors..."
Funny how averse most HNers are when it comes to perpetuating stereotypes and making negative generalizations based on race or gender, but when it comes to the military or people from "flyover states", it suddenly becomes acceptable.
Neither agree or disagree, but I couldn't help but notice that you pose a hypothetical question in a manner which is impossible to disagree with.
"Hypothetical question...and you saw incredible things, awful things ... things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, D.C. ... what would you do?"
The question isn't interesting...in fact, it isn't a question, it's an opinion veiled as a discussion. If you drop your own opinion from it, then it becomes interesting. Then people can talk about it.
This is like saying:
"Hypothetical question...Let's say you're Truman, and you know that dropping the bomb will definitely kill more civilians and soldiers on both side while extending the war and turning all your allies against you, what would you do?"
Based on pending discharge for "adjustment disorder" in lie of "gender identity disorder."
it could be interpreted as a feeling that there is an incompatibility/conflict between the physical gender of the "motherboard" body and the gender identity of the mind.
And how you plan to achieve that? Short of overthrowing US government, I don't see how it is possible to not have Manning, who violated a ton of US laws and already pled guilty for some of those violations, not going to jail. The law is not American Idol, so ending a lot of SMSes to some paid number is not going to work. Neither liking some page on Facebook would. Any other ideas?
Hey everyone, try not to let emotions take over. Downvotes shouldn't be used for disagreement, that's what `reply' is for.
For what it's worth, I agree with you. I think Manning did something truly worthwhile, and he DID break laws in doing so. Unfortunately, he will pay the price for that. I feel conflicted by it.
They win because you enable them by your votes. Each politician elected today had people voting for them. Each of this people decided to vote for this politician in his own free will. However rich you are, you still have to have people voting for you. So these "well connected" people are there because of the voters that put them there.
I am asking for downvotes, but I really don't see how Manning was fighting against domestic enemies. He leaked a dump of data about foreign operations and foreign governments. He could not have even known what most of it contained.
I wish we had a hero to champion our fight for privacy, but I don't think Manning is that person. An anti-war hero, maybe.
A lot of the information he dumped violated the privacy of individuals who worked for the government, interacted with the government, or were in government in other countries. We can't know for sure some poor Afghans did not suffer reprisals.
We need someone in government who is willing spill everything about these domestic programs, then fight against the charges leveled against him/her in court (knowing that most likely the court will come down upon them like a pile of bricks).
He showed the military killing foreign civilians with callous disregard. This is/was happening supposedly to benefit the US public, and make the US safer. If someone was doing this in my name, Id sure want to know about it and want something to prevent jail time for the whistle blower. He broke some laws to expose massive violations and that's a mitigating circumstance. God knows (or a lawyer may) if mitigating circumstances are allowed to apply though.
You know what bothers me about this? Look how this event and everyone like it is surrounded by newspeak. We were uncertain. Unfortunate casualties. Inconclusive intelligence. Imminent threat. American interests. It's all bullshit. The US government can't even tell themselves the truth let alone anyone else. They are drinking the kool-aid through a firehose.
"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it', a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong."
Somebody made the call to bomb the village. Either they knew it was a village, or they did not know it was a village. Therefore that person was either malicious or incompetent.
Do we really care which? Mens rea isn't required for drunk drivers, why should we demand it for dropping bombs on villages?
They knew it was the village. They knew there were Taliban there shooting on US and Afghan forces. They didn't know where the civilians were - because when there is shooting going around, civilians hide and it is very hard to see if there are any around, and how many of them, especially when you're being shot at at the same time. So they called an airstrike, and that turned out to be a big mistake. They could suspect that there might be civilians - since among Taliban, just like similar groups like Hamas or Hesbollah - hiding among civilians and using them as a cover is a common tactic, and since it is a village after all - but they did not know where, how many, etc. After many hours of fighting against hundreds of Taliban and after suffering casualties, the people on the ground made decision to call in air strike. Unfortunately, that resulted in tragedy, since the places where airstrikes were asked (presumably where Taliban forces were concentrated) turned out to be at or near the same places where the civilians hid. If the US soldiers on the ground knew that, they probably could do something else, but I don't see how they had to know it in the heat of the battle.
> By the way, it's a really crappy air force that can't do an air strike with sleeping-gas bombs.
I daresay that would be a lot less effective than you might expect. See the Moscow theater hostage situation[1][2] for what happens when trying to use it on a fixed target with ground level access. Imagine how much harder that would be from an air-drop, and the concentration gradient you'd end up with. Individual dispensers, cluster-bomb style might help a bit, but I still think you'd end up killing anyone close-by if you wanted it strong enough to permeate buildings.
Calling in a heavy smoke/CS drop and then retreating might be a sensible option, although I don't think there's nearly enough (public) information for anyone to judge definitively on the correct course of action in this instance.
The Moscow situation is not comparable to Afghan countryside.
If "effective" includes "not killing innocent civilians" then sleeping gas would work much better than what they are dropping now.
If smoke or CS would work better, well it's the military's responsibility, not mine, to the the R&D to pick the right tool to protect civilians as required by law.
> The Moscow situation is not comparable to Afghan countryside.
Precisely. If anything, it's a much more easily controlled environment for gas diffusion, and allowed almost immediate entry by the special forces to clear the area. Even then, there were significant hostage fatalities (although in a large part due to medical staff not being timely informed of the nature of the gas, or provided with the antidote)
Achieving that level of consistency of dose (enough to work, not enough to kill) in a rural village environment, via air-dropped containers, is, IMO, utterly impossible.
I'm arguing against your suggestion of 'sleeping gas bombs' only, not that the indiscriminate bombing is/was the correct choice.
In addition, R&D only determines what you will have available maybe some time in the future. If you're in combat right now, you don't have the luxury of waiting 3-5 years for promising test-bench stuff to make it to your rucksack/support units.
If all you have is high-explosives, eventually everything looks like rubble.
If "effective" includes only "not killing civilians", opening a hot dog stand nearby would work as well. However, if it also includes "stop 400 Taliban fighters from shooting at us", the situation become a bit more complex. Smoke would just remove visibility. But Taliban don't need much visibility - they already know where the forces are, they were fighting for the whole day in the same setting, and they probably know the village inside out anyway. And they also don't care if they hit a civilian by mistake, so they can just keep shooting in general direction. And if you use some real active chemistry, the civilians - especially children - would be the ones hit the worst.
They don't have phasers that can be set on stun either.
There are chemicals, of course, that can cause loss of consciousness, but any that causes loss long enough to be effective against the force of 400 people hiding in urban setting, would kill most of the civilians. It's not random that when the human is anesthetized it is done in controlled setting by an experienced doctor with very precise mixture of chemicals - it is very dangerous to do it and exceeding dosage could be lethal or cause permanent harm. Military weapon can not adhere to such dose requirements so it will be either ineffective or extremely dangerous.
This was the easiest setting - everybody in one enclosed building and civilians can be treated within minutes after the attack is done. Imagine doing this in a complex urban setting, with multiple buildings, with 10 times as much enemies, where both enemy and civilians can be anywhere. It's just impossible to do without killing everybody and leaving the place a chemical wasteland.
And, of course, on top of that, if US military does it once, Talibans get gas masks. But civilians would not, so the only effect would be killing civilians.
It's terrible, of course, but I don't think anybody in the military intends things like this to happen (aside from a few legitimate psychopaths who use the chaos for their own ends). It's 'just' a horrifying side effect of using war and military power as a blunt instrument for statecraft.
Fuck that, the U.S. has a huge dominant army with superior technology and well trained personnel. They bombard a village because it's easy and effective.
Someone made a decision that the lives of American soldiers were worth more than an entire Afghan village. That's a war crime, and someone should pay for that. And that person should not be Bradley Manning..
>>> Someone made a decision that the lives of American soldiers were worth more than an entire Afghan village
Nobody made this decision. American soldiers were already engaged in the fight with large Taliban force and suffering casualties when the strike was called in. They most probably had no idea where civilians are, since it wasn't exactly home terrain for them (they were called in from Farah when Afghans came under attack) and finding out where civilians are in the conditions of active urban warfare is next to impossible. They only target that makes sense to call air strike on is where the shooting at you originates. Turned out, it was also where the civilians were hiding (read: Taliban was probably firing either from the same or from the nearby places). Common tactics, Hamas is Gaza places rocket launchers near mosques, on the roofs of hospitals and in the school yards for exactly the same reason. If the army new that, they could probably do something else - retreat, regroup and try to resolve it in some other way, but I don't see where could they know it from.
What do you think used to happen with artillery strikes? It doesn't make it ok, but in war when under fire, they would call in air-strikes or artillery and clear a whole ridge. The difference is "the heat of battle" versus intelligence that 3 terrorist operatives where staying in a village of 300 people.
Military operations are not law enforcement. They aren't required to prevent all deaths other than combatants. I don't know where you draw the line on collateral damage, but to say that you can't kill any "innocents" is not practical.
Why don't we keep pretending that there is a way to wage war without innocents dying? Why don't we mention the morality of terrorists using villagers as body shields? There is some complicity for both the villagers and the terrorists in all of this as well.
Because they signed up for it and are paid to risk their lives. They then get another choice - they can refuse to go there. The civilians don't get that choice. There isn't much fair in the situation, but I sure dont think many people would argue that the civilians are in the position of strength.
First, because they are soldiers and that is what they signed up for to do.
Second, it was not 5 soldier lives versus 1 civilian, more likely it was 5 soldier lives versus 140 civilian lives.
Third, yes I myself would probably also make the same decision, favouring the lives of my friends over a bunch of foreigners who are probably on the enemies side.
That doesn't make it less wrong, if I was in that position, and I made that decision, I would still have to be tried for committing a war crime, because that's what it is.
It would seem that the civilians would be the ones bearing the brunt of those decisions.
More importantly, the issue at hand is that we don't know whether that decision was as clean-cut as you suggest, precisely because of the lack of transparency of our .gov and .mil.
Now, there are very sound opsec reasons for not making that information public, but when we are the foreign aggressor I believe that it is not an unreasonable burden to place on ourselves; indeed, it may help encourage caution when considering military adventures abroad.
Someone made a decision that the lives of American soldiers were worth more than an entire Afghan village. That's a war crime, and someone should pay for that.
Is that true? I mean, it could be, but I'm wondering if anyone determined this to be the case, or is this just speculation based on descriptions of the video of the attack.
"shit happens in war" ... and when it does, it needs to be investigated properly, the results published [ subject to sane censorship ] so we can learn from those mistakes and prevent them in future.
I don't think that would happen without someone leaking.
How you would learn from mistakes made by somebody deep inside Army operations and help prevent them in the future? I can see where investigation is needed to aid the Army to do better, but publishing this has nothing to do with preventing such mistakes in the future, since the public has no control and no input on Army operations in any case.
> "but publishing this has nothing to do with preventing such mistakes in the future"
It does, if enabling the public to realize the reality of war (and more importantly, the fallibility of their beloved military) results a society that is less bloodthirsty and eager to start wars.
This has nothing to do with investigating anything. First, the public would never actually realize the reality of war without actually experiencing it, what it can only realize is what the press would choose to tell them and in a way that the press chooses to report it, and there's a real lot of wiggle room in reporting and choosing how to present events. But more importantly, this would be the same with and without investigation - the tragedy already happened, and if you plan to exploit it in anti-war propaganda, you can exploit it regardless of why it happened, who is to blame and any other investigation results. In fact, investigating may only make it less useful for for anti-war purposes - what if after investigation it turns out Taliban deliberately placed their fighters in the midst of the civilians so that the response fire would hit most of them and thus achieve the best propaganda effect? It might only make the society more determined to get those bastards. The most tragic and most shocking part already happened - people died. If you want to say war is evil because people die - no further investigation necessary. Further investigation is needed only if you intend to wage war in the future but want to do it differently - but then it is useful mostly for people that actually wage war.
Publishing surgeon performances wouldn't really lead to better surgeries by any particular surgeon - most of them are doing their best already. It would enable you to choose a better one (provided you can afford it and he/she can take you). Since you can not choose military commanders, how useful is that for you?
I may not be able to sit in and vote for a commander but every appointment has the backing of an elected official that can be replaced.
As a civilian everything the military does is of interest to me and should be made open - your argument of "you may not understand it" is irrelevant. I want to know everything from how much they spend on toothpaste to how many civilians have died.
I know why civilians control the military. But I think you have wrong idea about it. Politicians control top generals, but they do not control details of every military operation, and neither do you - so knowing the details of the specific operational planning of the army would not be very useful to you, unless you want you politician to intervene in specific operation planning - which would not be very good, as neither you nor your politician have the relevant knowledge. There can be situations where common knowledge is enough - e.g. if certain commander plans to kill all civilians in the city, you don't have to be in the military to know it's wrong and such commander should be removed - but such cases are very rare. Usually mass-casualty tragedies result from a set of very complex circumstances and varied set of coincidences and mistakes, and I'm not sure your politician will be qualified to figure it out.
CHeck the links at the bottom of the wikipedia page. Similar bombings happened for TWO weddings, where mainly women and children were attending.
Seriously, how can justify these kind of mistakes when you have military satellites, surveillance drones, intelligence and all the stuff that goes with it. I don't buy in it being just "collateral damage".
> Seriously, how can justify these kind of mistakes when you have military satellites, surveillance drones, intelligence and all the stuff that goes with it. I don't buy in it being just "collateral damage".
Satellites and even drones don't have that kind of resolution.
And what kind of intelligence do you think they have? Even the NSA, even with PRISM, requires a warrant on specific foreign persons to be signed by judge to milk data on them, unless they're dumb enough to communicate over a net NSA is able to monitor. (They're not that dumb).
Do you think it's like FourSquare where KSM says he's checking into a wedding? It's not, and it's also not like they can send the white/black/Hispanic guy in on the ground to check it out.
I think the resolution and real-time power of government satellites and the commercial satellites they have access to is debatable unless you've actually seen it. I recently had to look into this and was pretty surprised at the level of sophistication that's commercially available.
"And what kind of intelligence do you think they have?" With the massive amount of data gathering combined with information from satellites (that we know about) like these, who knows...
This is rubbish. Let us consult a dead Prussian who had a great deal to say on the topic:
"We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means." -- Carl von Clausewitz
Now, the past decade of war has been against enemies which do not have the authority, power, or will to be dealt with politically. The obvious question, then, is how we can be fighting a war--we are going after the criminals that hit us, no?
Even a defense wherein we say "Aha! But the Taliban and Saddam regime were opposed to us, politically!" is flawed, for we had successfully conducted combat operations against their regular forces and won by any reasonable definition of the phrase. We now find ourselves in a long and bloody occupation---for that is what this is, and an occupation is not a war.
To be even more blunt about this, we cannot simply ascribe the bombing of an Afghan village as an unfortunate side-effect of total war.
We are not engaged in total war, we are not engaging an enemy which has hills and manufacturing capacity worth our bombs and weapons--this is no Dresden or Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Hiding behind "War is hell" at the very least requires us to be engaged in an honest war, and this we are not.
I think we're using the instrument of 'war' for an end which it is not suited for. As you point out, we're not engaged in total war, at least not any more. The lines are clearer in that case: kill or capture all soldiers, do your best not to kill civilians but recognize that mistakes are made.
And maybe that was the case in 2001-2002, but this has morphed into a sort of hazy nation-building / police-action kind of thing. But the tools and methods more suited to total war are still being employed, with the same brutal side-effects.
Minor nit-pick: total war is exactly about killing civilians. It is about the total mobilization of your nation's resources and assets--military and otherwise--in support of a violent enforcement of your political policies. Civilians are fair game, because they are assumed to be working in direct support of your opponents war-making capabilities.
That said, I submit that we were never engaged with an opponent capable of conducting meaningful total war against our nation, and as such any loss of civilian life is unjustifiable.
You make the mistake of believing there is any actual threat behind the voiced justifications for their actions.
How would I say the truth?
The world is a beautiful and amazing place full of divinely creative and wonderful humans. We all need to work together toward a singular goal: evolving our civilization and exploring the truths of existence and the universe. We should see that we are a singular species on this planet that has evolved to a level of intelligence that allows us to explore the wider universe around us and gaining understanding and ultimately wisdom of this universe, existence and ourselves should be our cohesive, singular goal.
The world is a beautiful and amazing place full of divinely creative and wonderful humans. We all need to work together toward a singular goal: evolving our civilization and exploring the truths of existence and the universe. We should see that we are a singular species on this planet that has evolved to a level of intelligence that allows us to explore the wider universe around us and gaining understanding and ultimately wisdom of this universe, existence and ourselves should be our cohesive, singular goal.
I see how it makes sense for the Army to say exactly that. I wonder why nobody thought about it before. If only the US Army would think about how wonderful people are, there would be no need for anyone to defend oneself anymore. Really, somebody should tell them.
It doesn't go unnoticed across the world how Americans refer to Americans as "Americans" instead of just "people". It is always said as though there is difference and that Americans have more intrinsic value.
That's why nobody cared about the NSA spying on foreigners. Like your privacy (or any other human right) was more valuable depending on where you happened to be born.
Unless Assange is going to claim that the bomber crew knew there were that many women and children there and dropped the bombs anyway I don't see how a video of a horrific event is really supposed to add to the horror. "Massacre" could be said to follow from the Wikipedia article video or no video; "War Crime" is much more serious but requires actual evidence of that, such as occurred at My Lai during Vietnam.
Yes, destroying civilian targets with no valid military usage is considered a war crime.
Destroying a civilian building being used as a military facility, on the other hand, is not a war crime, except if there was no valid military purpose to the strike or the strike was not proportional to the military value that might be gained (e.g. it would never be acceptable post-Geneva to kill 1000 civilians just to destroy an enemy soldier). That was one of the justifications the Germans used to sink Lusitania (which despite American and British protestations, it appears the Germans had actually been right in retrospect).
If you go into a field and there's a bunch of armed VC villagers who start shooting back at your then an air strike is militarily justified, until the defense ceases.
If you go into a field and there's a bunch of women and children (unarmed!, and I hate that I have to mention that...) then there is no valid military purpose to an air strike.
Now, from just the air if you have good intelligence that there is a grouping of enemy soldiers at a concentration point then even under Geneva that might be all the valid military purpose you need to approve dropping bombs at that location, even at risk of collateral damage.
A war crime would be a military action taken out of proportion to the valid military purpose that might justify it. E.g. if it was known that there were lots of civilians and just a few fighters at that location. Or if you shot a soldier in the act of surrendering (note how rarely U.S. soldiers are afforded even the opportunity to surrender in the few times Taliban managed to encircle a U.S. squad).
I, too, wish that we lived in that wonderful world where civilians are not used as human shields and that all intel is perfect (God knows NSA is trying!) but that's not the world we live in. The world we live in has both Geneva Conventions and the precedent of Nuremburg and does not simply define "war crime" as "things that happen which we don't like".
If you try to redefine "war crime" we'd simply have to come up with yet another definition to mean what it's supposed to mean for things like war crimes tribunals.
You were asked, if you accept "oops" as a valid excuse, is it possible to successfully prosecute any war crime? Can you think of any examples of war crimes where "oops" could not be used as a defense?
"If you go into a field and there's a bunch of women and children (unarmed!, and I hate that I have to mention that...) then there is no valid military purpose to an air strike."
If you accept "oops" as an excuse, then guess what? That air strike was an "oops".
Another very obvious example was the My Lai massacre itself. It's really hard to find a valid military purpose for either carrying out the order to bayonet a child, or giving the order to kill a child.
But the fog of war is not as hazy on the ground. During WWII (which was admittedly a total war) you could drop all the bombs you wanted at a tank factory and still manage to hit the school a kilometer away. That wouldn't have made dropping the bombs a war crime by any stretch of the imagination though; the raid itself had a valid military purpose.
Yes, the perpetrators got off with essentially no punishment whatsoever, the U.S. tried to cover it up, one of the very few heroes was actually punished even further for allowing the story to come out.
All deplorable, and a very deep stain to have associated with the U.S. for all time.
But what does that have to do with the definition of a war crime?
How the fuck do you think this is about the definition of war crimes?
This is about what we consider valid defenses, and our ability to prosecute war crimes. Do you not understand how our absolute failure to prosecute the My Lai Massacre might be relevant to how we prosecute war crimes?
Christ, it is almost as though you have absolutely no interest in understanding what people are saying to you.
An ancillary irony is the B1 Bomber, yet another example of a zombie military-industrial complex project that should have died decades ago. There's no good reason for it to be flitting around Afghanistan in the first place.
Of course it would have been much less horrific if it was mostly civillian men instead of mostly civillian women?
Or would it be more okay because civillian men are more likely to be guerilla soldiers? So then it wouldn't be so terrible to kill them "just in case"?
I love how killing >guerrilla< soldiers is ok. You invade a country, collapse the fragile infrastructure and then accuse the locals of being the problem - there is no chance than they're fighting for something worth believing in... It's just, well, their country.
Btw, I don't mean you specifically, I mean the US military/government members who supported this.
I know that even the most justified war is ugly : there are accidents and mistakes and innocent people die at times, despite the best precautions.
Im aware that the freedoms I have every day, are a result of a coalition of democratic countries winning WWII and other conflicts. Many of my freedoms were won by American strength : military, economic and technological. I'm not an American, but I hold up the Constitution, the rule of Law and Democracy as high ideals - the best way humans have come up with so far of coexisting on this planet.
But a Democracy cannot exist where there is no free speech nor the right to question the government and the law. Citizens need information on whats happening : we need freedom to speak and anonymity to discuss in private, if we are to have a functioning Democracy.
I think Bradley Manning had a moral obligation as a soldier and as a citizen, to release the information he did. From what I read it seems that he was careful not to share information that would get other soldiers and spies killed, nor give the enemy any material advantage in the war.
What I think should happen is that this should be a civil trial by jury to decide whether he acted legally and morally. He leaked news of military 'mistakes', so he should not be tried by that same organization. A civil jury should decide whether the obligation to uphold the Constitution, by leaking, outweighed his obligation as a soldier to keep the information secret.
Even more worrying here is that the Obama administration is pushing for this to be tried as 'giving information directly to the enemy' ie. treason, when clearly the motivation was not that.
If there were no Wikileaks, no Press, no privacy.. how would we keep our secret organisations in check, and have any confidence they are following their mandate ?