WikiLeaks To Dump Documents Again, As Early as Next Week.

[longfisher]

I sure look forward to it. The government, and I mean every last one of them since Ike, has done nothing but lie to us. Let's get the "transparency" Obama promised.

Actually, I often wonder if 9/11 couldn't have been avoided had Wikileaks existed then. It would have provide a conduit for disgruntled government workers who, particularly in the CIA, felt the U.S. was about to have a cataclysmic terror attack but no one in the Bush Administration would listen.

You may recall that Tenet is said to have been running around Washington "with his hair on fire" screaming to anyone who would listen that the U.S. was in line for a cataclysmic terror attack. And, there was the national security biefing titled "Al Queda Determined to Attack Within America" which was utterly ignored by Bush et. al. weeks before the attack.

Maybe we could all here be talking and debating about abortion (In my family I don't allow it) or vegetarians or something else instead of war had there been an easily accessible place for whistleblowers to act.

LongFisher

[longfisher]

...stand by for more Bush lies to be exposed.

LongFisher

[longfisher]

Like the Afghanistan war logs released by Wikileaks some months back, the Iraq war logs released last night are said to contain nothing we didn't already know from investigative reporting. Rather, they are said to merely susbstantiate what we already knew with tedious and sometimes guesome detail.

So, should we dismiss them as unimportant? Actually, no we shouldn't because the real significance of the war logs is hidden in plain view.

Huh? What's significant that's hidden in plain view, you say?

The hidden significance is that the results of investigative reporting by what some of you partisan dunces would call the "liberal" media which has for decades been uncovering scandal after scandal in Iraq and Afghanistan, virtually all of which were vigorously denied by the Pentagon and the White House (both of them), were shown to be factually true.

Absolutely all the mendacious crap done by U.S. forces and by the Iraqi Shia government forces which was previously exposed by the "liberal" media and vigorously denied by the U.S.'s various agencies, departments and elected officials has turned out to be based firmly in fact. That's highly significant.

So, what's the moral? The moral is that were Americans to adopt a policy of assuming the worst case scenario about their government's actions and the actions of their forces they would be far closer to the truth of the matter than if they assumed the best. They should also learn that the "liberal" media is shown by these document dumps to be engaged in far more accurate reporting than they're given credit for and that the element of subjective bias in their reporting is far less than has been regularly assumed by the right wingers.

Another right-wing myth explodes in their faces.

LongFisher

[longfisher]

"On Saturday, during the press conference announcing Wikileaks’ release of nearly 400,000 classified US military field documents relating to the war in Iraq, Craig Murray, the human rights activist and former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, accompanied by Daniel Ellsberg (the Pentagon Papers whistleblower), presented Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, and the entire Wikileaks organization, with the 2010 Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence Award. SAAII is a movement of former CIA colleagues and other associates of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, who provided information that prevented a deadly troop escalation during the Vietnam War, and, as the members of SAAII have explained, they “hold up his example as a model for those in intelligence who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power.”

[Capt. Jon Tennant]

wiki documents might clear bush on WMD/war crimes charges....here's another revelation most would find "highly significant".



WikiLeaks Show WMD Hunt Continued in Iraq – With Surprising Results


By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But for years afterward, WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins, and uncover weapons of mass destruction.

An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.

In August 2004, for instance, American forces surreptitiously purchased what they believed to be containers of liquid sulfur mustard, a toxic “blister agent” used as a chemical weapon since World War I. The troops tested the liquid, and “reported two positive results for blister.” The chemical was then “triple-sealed and transported to a secure site” outside their base.

Three months later, in northern Iraq, U.S. scouts went to look in on a “chemical weapons” complex. “One of the bunkers has been tampered with,” they write. “The integrity of the seal [around the complex] appears intact, but it seems someone is interesting in trying to get into the bunkers.”


Meanwhile, the second battle of Fallujah was raging in Anbar province. In the southeastern corner of the city, American forces came across a “house with a chemical lab … substances found are similar to ones (in lesser quantities located a previous chemical lab.” The following day, there’s a call in another part of the city for explosive experts to dispose of a “chemical cache.”

Nearly three years later, American troops were still finding WMD in the region. An armored Buffalo vehicle unearthed a cache of artillery shells “that was covered by sacks and leaves under an Iraqi Community Watch checkpoint. “The 155mm rounds are filled with an unknown liquid, and several of which are leaking a black tar-like substance.” Initial tests were inconclusive. But later, “the rounds tested positive for mustard.”

In WikiLeaks’ massive trove of nearly 392,000 Iraq war logs, there are hundreds of references to chemical and biological weapons. Most of those are intelligence reports or initial suspicions of WMD that don’t pan out. In July 2004, for example, U.S. forces come across a Baghdad building with gas masks, gas filters, and containers with “unknown contents” inside. Later investigation revealed those contents to be vitamins.

But even late in the war, WMDs were still being unearthed. In the summer of 2008, according to one WikiLeaked report, American troops found at least 10 rounds that tested positive for chemical agents. “These rounds were most likely left over from the [Saddam]-era regime. Based on location, these rounds may be an AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] cache. However, the rounds were all total disrepair and did not appear to have been moved for a long time.”

A small group — mostly of the political right — has long maintained that there was more evidence of a major and modern WMD program than the American people were lead to believe. A few Congressmen and Senators gravitated to the idea, but it was largely dismissed as conspiratorial hooey.

The WMD diehards will likely find some comfort in these newly-WikiLeaked documents. Skeptics will note that these relatively small WMD stockpiles were hardly the kind of grave danger that the Bush administration presented in the run-up to the war.

But the more salient issue may be how insurgents and Islamic extremists (possibly with the help of Iran) attempted to use these lethal and exotic arms. As Spencer noted earlier, a January 2006 war log claims that “neuroparalytic” chemical weapons were smuggled in from Iran.

That same month, then “chemical weapons specialists” were apprehended in Balad. These “foreigners” were there specifically “to support the chemical weapons operations.” The following month, an intelligence report refers to a “chemical weapons expert” that “provided assistance with the gas weapons.” What happened to that specialist, the WikiLeaked document doesn’t say.

[longfisher]

wiki documents might clear bush on WMD/war crimes charges....here's another revelation most would find "highly significant".



WikiLeaks Show WMD Hunt Continued in Iraq – With Surprising Results


By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But for years afterward, WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins, and uncover weapons of mass destruction.

An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.

In August 2004, for instance, American forces surreptitiously purchased what they believed to be containers of liquid sulfur mustard, a toxic “blister agent” used as a chemical weapon since World War I. The troops tested the liquid, and “reported two positive results for blister.” The chemical was then “triple-sealed and transported to a secure site” outside their base.

Three months later, in northern Iraq, U.S. scouts went to look in on a “chemical weapons” complex. “One of the bunkers has been tampered with,” they write. “The integrity of the seal [around the complex] appears intact, but it seems someone is interesting in trying to get into the bunkers.”


Meanwhile, the second battle of Fallujah was raging in Anbar province. In the southeastern corner of the city, American forces came across a “house with a chemical lab … substances found are similar to ones (in lesser quantities located a previous chemical lab.” The following day, there’s a call in another part of the city for explosive experts to dispose of a “chemical cache.”

Nearly three years later, American troops were still finding WMD in the region. An armored Buffalo vehicle unearthed a cache of artillery shells “that was covered by sacks and leaves under an Iraqi Community Watch checkpoint. “The 155mm rounds are filled with an unknown liquid, and several of which are leaking a black tar-like substance.” Initial tests were inconclusive. But later, “the rounds tested positive for mustard.”

In WikiLeaks’ massive trove of nearly 392,000 Iraq war logs, there are hundreds of references to chemical and biological weapons. Most of those are intelligence reports or initial suspicions of WMD that don’t pan out. In July 2004, for example, U.S. forces come across a Baghdad building with gas masks, gas filters, and containers with “unknown contents” inside. Later investigation revealed those contents to be vitamins.

But even late in the war, WMDs were still being unearthed. In the summer of 2008, according to one WikiLeaked report, American troops found at least 10 rounds that tested positive for chemical agents. “These rounds were most likely left over from the [Saddam]-era regime. Based on location, these rounds may be an AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] cache. However, the rounds were all total disrepair and did not appear to have been moved for a long time.”

A small group — mostly of the political right — has long maintained that there was more evidence of a major and modern WMD program than the American people were lead to believe. A few Congressmen and Senators gravitated to the idea, but it was largely dismissed as conspiratorial hooey.

The WMD diehards will likely find some comfort in these newly-WikiLeaked documents. Skeptics will note that these relatively small WMD stockpiles were hardly the kind of grave danger that the Bush administration presented in the run-up to the war.

But the more salient issue may be how insurgents and Islamic extremists (possibly with the help of Iran) attempted to use these lethal and exotic arms. As Spencer noted earlier, a January 2006 war log claims that “neuroparalytic” chemical weapons were smuggled in from Iran.

That same month, then “chemical weapons specialists” were apprehended in Balad. These “foreigners” were there specifically “to support the chemical weapons operations.” The following month, an intelligence report refers to a “chemical weapons expert” that “provided assistance with the gas weapons.” What happened to that specialist, the WikiLeaked document doesn’t say.

Firstly, those were old munitions, mostly from the Iraq-Iran war.

Secondly, any ongoing fabrication was extremely small scale and, apparently, not sanctioned by the state of Iraq (transaltion, Saddam).

Thirdly and most importantly, the was was sold to us and to the U.N as a war of defense by the U.S., i.e., that Iraq's weapons programs represented an existential threat to the U.S.

Capt. let me ask a question of you. If Iraq's WMDs were an existential threat to the U.S. why weren't they used against the advancing U.S. forces, instead?Answer, because they weren't an existential threat against the U.S. or anyone else, even advancing U.S. troops.

The President and the Vice President of the U.S invaded Iraq because the could, not because they had to. That makes hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead due to murder at the hands of the U.S. and upwards toward 5,000 U.S. service personnel victims of the same murderers (if you've not heard of that angle before there's a book on the topic which some have suggested would make one hell of a great prosecution).

It was a trumped up war and you are not going to rewrite that sad history.

LongFisher

[marine4003]

Will this turn out to be one of those long boring crusades..like lemon and his boat..sheesh,i hope not,but wouldn't be surprised.

[longfisher]

It's reported that some or maybe even most of these documents were supplied the Americans. Interesting twist on leaking, one country leaks documents obtained from another country that's its adversary.

This should be very interesting.

LongFisher