The War Logs: An archive of classified military documents

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html

by tysone • 16 years ago

100 98 16 years ago

nytimes.com

Rod5• 16 years ago

Also on the Guardian and the Spiegel:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/afghanistan-the-war-l...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,708314,00.h...

The leaked files on WikiLeaks:

http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010

mturmon• 16 years ago

The Guardian's reporting package is considerably more comprehensive than the NYT.

ilamont2• 16 years ago

The "explosive" Wikileaks collection will not have the same impact as the Pentagon Papers. The documents seem to amplify or confirm what many have suspected for years in terms of Pakistani intelligence collaboration with militants.

Rod5• 16 years ago

Exposing the truth is not a popularity contest. The goal is not to take Ellsberg's place, the goal is to inform the people of what their government is doing with the taxpayers' dollars.

Yes, we already knew about Pakistan's intelligence collaborating with the enemy. But did you know for sure that the Taliban were shooting down U.S. choppers with stinger missiles? I did not. I do now.

curtis2• 16 years ago

Do you mean specifically "Stinger" missiles, or simply "man portable surface to air missiles"? The difference is fairly important.

jsz0• 16 years ago

Seth Jones has talked about the heat seeking missiles going back to early 2008. The only reason I happen to know this is because he was on NPR a few months ago talking about it along with the Pakistan connection. Certainly didn't see much coverage of this in the mainstream media until now. Wikileaks does a good job getting people's attention at least. Too bad they weren't around in late 2002 / early 2003.

rdtsc2• 16 years ago

Indiscrimnate killing of civilians followed by a cover-up is "explosive" enough for me.

If I may ask, what were you expecting? US Marines sacrificing Iraqi babies and drinking their blood?

ilamont2• 16 years ago

That's not a surprise either, sadly. Incidents of indiscriminate or careless killing of civilians have surfaced throughout the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, from the very first days of both conflicts. The military has played down most of them, or issued denials, unless confronted by overwhelming evidence that can't be easily denied such as video and photographs.

EDIT: Added new phrase after the last comma

matt1• 16 years ago

Is it a crime to download or analyze the data in these documents?

Edit: Clearly it's not if the NYTimes is doing it, but out of curiosity, why isn't it?

blhack• 16 years ago

Clearly it's not if the NYTimes is doing it

Don't be so sure about that. NYTimes has a LOT of lawyers.

rdtsc2• 16 years ago

Classified info, even if it has been leaked, is still classified info.

US govt. has been known to visit companies that had un-expectedly come into contact with classified data (usually accidentally as a result of working on some military project for ex.). They take over for a while, issue "gag" orders, take people statements, find out who saw the data, then they take all the storage media and shred it.

But of course, practically, I am not sure what they will now when everyone on the Internet can access this data. I guess they can still selectively enforce the law if they wanted to ... ? Or at least threaten to inforce the law.

_delirium• 16 years ago

I think there's much less power over people who don't have security clearances. In the cases you describe, the companies are government contractors whose employees probably have clearances, and have agreed to all sorts of checks (and are required to follow certain procedures as a result of getting their clearances). The companies most likely agree to those clean-up visits anyway, if they want to keep getting government contracts, so it's not necessarily even using the government's law-enforcement power.

If leaked information gets to a normal civilian who's never gotten a security clearance, though, I don't think that's illegal, if they didn't have a hand in leaking it themselves. That was basically the outcome of the Pentagon Papers case: that the people who leaked the papers to the NYT could be prosecuted, but the NYT couldn't be stopped from republishing them. Not that that'll necessarily save someone from getting hassled.

rdl25• 16 years ago

Not a crime. The US doesn't have an equivalent of the UK's official secrets act. I don't think it's actually a crime, although there could be court injunction against publishing, which you could then be in contempt of if you went ahead.

If you have a security clearance, it's possibly unwise to download/have this information on your own, especially if you have had secret access to it, mainly because there is going to be a bunch of counterintelligence to figure out how things were leaked (presumably PFC Manning, but who knows?). It would complicate things during an investigation if you had information on your hard drive, even if you could document that it had come from an outside commercial source. With some information, even if it is "known" by the public, having access to it through classified channels is a way to vet the information, so if someone posted "super secret a" to a website, and you commented "oh, yes, I've heard of that", you would actually be corroborating information and leaking classified information.

FWIW, nothing in these seems to be particularly damning of the US. It is basically "war is hell", "mistakes are made", "we like to put a spin on things". It's pretty much par for the course for special operations forces to do things and then have the positive outcomes attributed to indigenous forces, and the negative outcomes hushed up.

There probably would be some net benefit to prompt declassification and publishing of much of this information. I don't condone illegal leaks, but there is definitely a public interest in having the public informed about what is going on. Aside from the reporting on TF 373, nothing in the NY Times or Guardian analysis of the documents (I haven't looked at the raw documents) is a big deal. As far as I can tell, nothing particularly sensitive about 373 was published, either.

grandalf6• 16 years ago

I thought the finding that the insurgents are using US provided stinger missiles against US aircraft was fairly damning... it shows that past US intervention has unforeseen consequences.

Also, it's pretty significant (to a lot of people) to observe that all this continued under Obama... that there has been no improvement in the way the war effort is being waged.

jfarmer• 16 years ago

See NY Times vs. USA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_St...

mkramlich• 16 years ago

It would be funny if it were a crime to download this data and yet not a crime to cause the deaths of innocent Afghan civilians.

rdl25• 16 years ago

Members of the military absolutely can be prosecuted under the UCMJ if they commit crimes, including murder of innocent Afghan civilians. There have been numerous prosecutions -- in fact, the "guncam" footage from Iraq was actually recovered, allegedly, from JAG, the legal arm of the military, which was reviewing it to see if crimes had occurred which would need to be prosecuted.

The standards for use of force in a war zone are different from other places, but fundamentally, members of the military must obey the rules of engagement set by the military (at the direction of the civilian leadership, i.e. the President).

There is a much stronger argument about contractors, especially in Iraq from 2003-2006, using unlawful force and not being prosecuted, than military.

elblanco• 16 years ago

Important to all this, "The editors in chief of SPIEGEL, the New York Times and the Guardian have agreed that they would not publish especially sensitive information in the classified material -- like the names of the US military's Afghan informants or information that could create additional security risks for soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. "

tomjen32• 16 years ago

It is properly good that they don't publish the names, but "information that could create additional security risks for soldiers stationed in Afghanistan" is outside what a newspaper should care about - it should be focused on getting news, not help or hinder a war.

pistoriusp2• 16 years ago

If you're a citizen of a country at war wouldn't hindering the war be considered treason?

Besides that. Why would you want to potentially harm someone when a tiny bit of effort would prevent potential harm?

There's something good to be said about been good. We are not robots.

eli• 16 years ago

Uh, I disagree. One of the tenets of journalism is to minimize harm. There is probably information in those documents that could legitimately be used to kill people.

grandalf6• 16 years ago

Has anyone on HN donated to Wikileaks? I have to admit I'm afraid to do so.

rdl25• 16 years ago

I do think they did a more respectable job of releasing this information than they did with the Iraq Apache guncam footage. It's unedited, relatively unbiased, and they did go out of their way to redact specific irrelevant but potentially damaging information (names of Afghans). I think the involvement of "real journalists" probably helped a lot.

grandalf6• 16 years ago

I agree. They showed a bit of discretion and also managed to provide a resource to established media outlets.

With this sort of collaboration, vetting, etc, I really think it's hard to make the case that Wikileaks is a bad thing. In this case it empowered/emboldened the NY Times to write a series of stories that never would have been written.

DenisM• 16 years ago

I did a few months ago, before the controversial Apache video. Still here. :)

arethuza• 16 years ago

Why would you be afraid?

grandalf6• 16 years ago

The US appears to be close to declaring Assange a terrorist. Do I want to be documented as having donated to a terrorist organization? Not sure.

Ras_2• 16 years ago

"Eight Americans were killed and 23 were wounded when 175 to 200 insurgents outnumbered and attacked this isolated command outpost in Nuristan Province.

This report shows how insurgents were successfully able to cut off small, isolated outposts like Keating and exposes the weakness of an early American strategy to set up these centers near the border of Pakistan."

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/26warlogs.html#repo...

Immersive, in a horrible, but educating way. Confusion, helplessness...

rdl25• 16 years ago

It would be kind of interesting to reformat this as it originally appeared -- line by line as IRC messages in mIRC on someone's plywood shack or tent operations center.

pistoriusp2• 16 years ago

They actually use IRC? That's very interesting to me... Do you know where I could read a bit more about that?

I find it fascinating that these people are typing to each other? Is it to make sure the commands and information is 100% clear? Is IRC the most efficient manner to do it?

Do they use mIRC?

Ras_2• 16 years ago

Founding IRC: http://www.mirc.com/help/jarkko.html

Very similar to the birthing of Linux.

nmftt• 16 years ago

Uncensored @ http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/afg/event/2009/10/AFG20091003n...

flipbrad• 16 years ago

Some thoughts on reading that log: - have a look at the stats on that: 8x US Killed IA (in action) 23x US Wounded IA 3x Afghan National Army KIA 10 x ANA WIA 2 x ASG

2 Enemies KIA

11 x GBU 31 (2000 lb bombs) 26 x GBU 38 (500 lb bombs) 1 x Hellfire 3 x 20mm strafing runs. 19x 105 (AC-130) attack airplane

- illiteracy (in the moment, it's excusable) aside, the level of organisation and effort that went into that brief moment in history is truly admirable. But one can only imagine how it could be better spent... these aren't just dollars being spent, it's serious, high quality, highly organised man hours; intense effort, training and organisation. I realise these are personal politics, but really: it makes it hard to enter arguments about welfare state resource wastage when you think about warfare stage waste.

rdl25• 16 years ago

Money, and lives ("blood and treasure").

Also note the 23 US WIA and the ANA/etc. WIA, of which 5-10 are going to be permanently disabled, and all of which together probably cost more in medical treatment than the munitions expended. Plus of course all of the time spent training those people to do an inherently negative-sum task.

This is why the decision to go to war should not be taken lightly, and why it is important that if you do go to war, you fight it to win as quickly as possible.

numeromancer3• 16 years ago

What kind of soul-rot afflicts a man who can't say "What the documents circulated by WikiLeaks say isn't true anymore", but must say instead "The documents circulated by WikiLeaks do not reflect the current on-ground realities"?

bjelkeman-again• 16 years ago

It is just an attempt at disparaging the content. The more highfalutin language used the better. Of course things change, they change everyday. These kind of comments are often used to confuse the issue without saying anything meaningful.

roel_v4• 16 years ago

Why does a more eloquent word choice say something about a man's morals? Why is the 'isn't true anymore' variety morally superior to the other one?

cabalamat• 16 years ago

I assume the point the original poster was making is that when people use complex and obfuscatory language, they typically do so in order to deceive.

rdl25• 16 years ago

He's Pakistani; Pakistani (and Indian) English tends to have different phrasings -- probably tending toward stilted and archaic to western taste.

I think he was just trying to say "it's not like that NOW" without saying it was necessarily true in the past. Passive voice, indirection, implication, etc. all have a long tradition in bureaucracy.

Also, he's an ISI commander, so there is no chance he has soul-rot, as he has no soul.

numeromancer3• 16 years ago

I don't know Pakistani, but I don't think that's the cause of the awkward phrasing. It's more likely that he has picked up bureaucratic English too well.

DanielBMarkham2• 16 years ago

Much of the information — raw intelligence

As a libertarian I am deeply concerned with the huge intelligence complex the United States has set up. I am concerned with the loss of person freedoms in the country, and I am concerned that our political leaders -- of every party -- lie to us rather than deal with some of these serious issues.

But I refuse to take an all-or-nothing view. Our intelligence services also exist for a very good reason, and they do necessary and critical work.

That's why I remain convinced that this leaker should receive the death penalty. It's not up to each person in an intelligence organization to make huge moral judgments about the disposition of millions of documents. If you have moral problems, resign.

And to suggest, as some have, that the newspapers have any idea what to publish or not is ludicrous. Intelligence is a process of putting puzzle pieces together. Unless the newspapers were to know what every other foreign intelligence service knew, they couldn't know which pieces fill out the puzzle for which agencies -- or what impact each little piece could have.

Hell, I'm even for publishing secret documents if they show how the political class is bullshitting us, as in the Pentagon Papers. But this goes way far and beyond that. We will never know who got killed because of this jerk.

And now for the political/systems note. It seems that as society is getting more and more full of rules that we get these sudden breakouts of flash-back. It's almost like the more the system tries to control itself, the bigger the oscillations and the more unstable it becomes. Just guessing.

w00pla• 16 years ago

> That's why I remain convinced that this leaker should receive the death penalty.

That is the standard penalty for high treason. The USA should also maybe consider taking Julian Assange prisoner as an enemy combatant.

> And to suggest, as some have, that the newspapers have any idea what to publish or not is ludicrous.

The aim of newspapers is to create controversy to increase circulation. They will often do things such as this.

On slow news days they will stoke controversy with ridiculous opinions/editorials.

grandalf6• 16 years ago

I don't think it's contradictory to both support Wikileaks in principle and also condone stiff penalties for leakers in principle: Such penalties are legitimate insofar as the state is legitimate, and even most libertarians grant it some legitimacy.

Surely if a leak is worth leaking then it's worth suffering the penalty for leaking it if caught. Thousands of people are dying in Afghanistan and so the people who risked their careers, lives, etc. to get this information out are heroes.

The value of Wikileaks comes from the sensitivity of the information... If there were no penalty for disclosing it, then it wouldn't really be secret. The existence of Wikileaks diminishes the ability of any organization to conduct secret operations, and so we can expect secrecy to be used less often and more judiciously by everyone.

DanielBMarkham2• 16 years ago

I agree. I think there is a difference between passionate advocate of a cause that requires some public leaks -- and being able to accept the consequences, and being an armchair, couch-potato anarchist.

Last night my youngest son and I watched "Tora Tora Tora!", the story of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Back then, the United States had cracked the Japanese embassy codes. We were literally reading all their messages before they were.

This information -- that we had cracked the codes and what the traffic contained -- was limited to only 12 people in the entire government. After the president left one of the reports in a waste-basket, he was taken off the list.

Revealing even one of these messages would have been cause for long-term imprisonment. For a member of the military, sworn to protect the constitution, to release hundreds of thousands? I can't imagine any worse intelligence catastrophe. And that includes losing the A-bomb secrets.

The activist (or foreign intelligence service) has a cause and is will to suffer the consequences for using the information. The anarchist has only chaos as a cause. The activist selects what to leak, selects how to leak it, and sometimes dies for the revelation -- a fair penalty since leaking information can easily cause the deaths of others. The anarchist simply wants openness and lack of secrecy -- their enemy is reality itself, the fact that secrecy is necessary in some cases. A much more dangerous situation.

rdl25• 16 years ago

To be honest, based on my knowledge of Afghanistan, and of military operations to date, there hasn't been substantial harm due to the release of this information. (I haven't read through it all, but just looking at some of the high points). To some extent, it actually helps US policy interests, and a really paranoid individual could think this was an intentional leak. (it makes it more deniable and polite to ratchet up the hate on the ISI if it is in the form of a "leak")

Given that it all appears to have been SECRET and not TS or TS with a codeword/SAP, it's only potentially "serious harm to national security", not "grave", and almost all of it was highly time sensitive. Flight schedules for helicopter missions I fly on are actually SECRET until they fly; afterward, they are basically public record. By waiting 6-12 months at least to release this information, the original leaker seems to have done a reasonable job of balancing OPSEC considerations.

The most serious allegations of leaked information so far are the diplomatic cables off JWICS, which would be potentially TS, and could cause lasting harm. As well, individual source names could be sensitive, although in my experience there is enough turnover among Afghans, as well as bad intelligence on the US part, that after a year or so, the names of any sources would be outdated anyway.

The newspapers can make a pretty reasonable first approximation of what in a body of information is particularly sensitive. This is all routine operational material, so the sensitive details are operational capabilities, individual sources, and other procedural details, items which actually have the least value to the public in being disclosed. The information which is most compellingly in the public interest is "what happened", which is already well known to any interested party. Given that this information was all relatively low levels of classification, there isn't anything super secret squirrel revealed here; anything super-secret squirrel would have been hidden from this classification as well.

I would like to see prompt declassification of as much as possible, and virtually every item in this release is something which should be declassified 1-2 years after the operation. Classification should never be used to cover up incompetence or mistakes or wrongdoing, only to protect national security.

There absolutely should be an investigation, and probably a court martial (assuming it was a military member who leaked the info). The trial would need to include motivations and other factors, but I can see situations where 5-10 years would be adequate, and maybe 25-50 (i.e. effectively life), but I would be very uncomfortable with life or capital punishment over this particular release. There are people from the cold war (Ames, Hanssen) who are vastly worse than this release, and they did it for money, not for any kind of "the truth must be released" motivation. They got Life, even though their information clearly resulted in the deaths of US affiliated agents, so I think that should be an absolute upper bound.

Jach• 16 years ago

I know this isn't exactly on topic, but a query for summary like '%killed%' returns 666 records...

The War Logs: An archive of classified military documents

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