WikiLeaks' Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010

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

Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010



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Release dateJuly 25, 2010

Summary



25th July 2010 5:00 PM EST WikiLeaks has released a document set
called the Afghan War Diary (AWD), an extraordinary compendium of over
91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010.
The reports, while written by soldiers and intelligence officers
mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States
military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings
with political figures, and related detail.
The document collection will shortly be available on a dedicated webpage.
The reports cover most units from the US Army with the exception
of most US Special Forces' activities. The reports do not generally
cover top-secret operations or European and other ISAF Forces
operations.
We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total
archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source.
After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional
redactions, and eventually, in full, as the security situation in
Afghanistan permits.
The data is provided in CSV and SQL formats, sorted by months, and also was rendered into KML mapping data.

• All entries, CSV format
  
• All entries, SQL format
  
• All entries, KML format
  
• All NATO entries, KML format
  
• Entries by month, KML format
  
• Entries with scale filter, KML format
  

Further information



Context United States
Military or intelligence (ruling)
Central Command

Primary language

English

I think the US government is going to declare cyber war on this news.

metaw3 wrote:I think the US government is going to declare cyber war on this news.

As if they haven't already.

The Obama regime is an even bigger opressor of freedom of choice as Bushes' reign.

What are they afraid of?

I know it's bad already for the net but I mean they are going to change tactics.

It's nothing for us who follow this stuff, but for the masses this leak creates a precedent setting the stage for more and more sensitive leaks.

They are afraid to lose their de facto "rule by secrecy".

I just wonder who is responsible for all those "leaks"...

WikiLeaks may have just changed the Media, too



The website WikiLeaks has published more than 90,000 leaked U.S. military records about the war in Afghanistan. Marc Ambinder has a lot more about the content of the classified archive, but there's another fascinating aspect to the story: WikiLeaks gave the New York Times, Guardian, and Der Spiegel access to the archive several weeks ago.

The rogue, rather mysterious website provided the raw data; the newspapers provided the context, corroboration, analysis, and distribution.

"WikiLeaks was not involved in the news organizations' research, reporting, analysis and writing," Times editors said in an online note. "The Times spent about a month mining the data for disclosures and patterns, verifying and cross-checking with other information sources, and preparing the articles that are published today."

While the impact of the documents and newspaper reportage on the war in Afghanistan will take a while to suss out, the publication of these documents will be seen as a milestone in the new news ecosystem.

Unlike the Pentagon Papers situation, we're "watching the traces of a major story unfold in real time," said C.W. Anderson, who studies media culture at CUNY. "If you're a PhD student or comm / journalism researcher who wants to study how news diffuses in 2010, here's your case study," he tweeted.

This story - and the organization behind it - is obviously singular. It's being described as one of the largest leaks in U.S. military history. (Though it's worth noting that the value of the information is not totally clear yet.) But it also fits into a broader trend. Traditional media organizations are increasingly reaching out to different kinds of smaller outfits for help compiling data and conducting investigations. NPR is partnering with several journalism startups to deliver their information out to a larger audience. The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University broke a large story on renewable energy in association with ABC's World News Tonight. ProPublica's 32 full-time investigative reporters offer their stories exclusively to a traditional media player.

New conduits have opened into the most highly regarded newsrooms in the country; while that's probably a good thing, it adds a layer of complexity to a story like this. While ProPublica and others are certainly journalism outfits, WikiLeaks is neither here nor there. The video that caused their last news splash - 'Collateral Murder' - seemed like an attempt at an editorial. The group was harshly criticized in many quarters.

This time, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told the New York Times that "some 15,000 documents would be withheld from release for a few days until WikiLeaks could redact names of individuals in the reports whose safety could be jeopardized."

The New York Times' David Carr may have nailed the issue when he tweeted that it was the "asymmetries" that WikiLeaks introduces into the equation that have the government spooked. An administration official told Politico, "t's worth noting that WikiLeaks is not an objective news outlet but rather an organization that opposes U.S. policy in Afghanistan." But the truth is that we don't really know what WikiLeaks [i]is, or what the organization's ethics are, or why they've become such a stunningly good conduit of classified information.

In the new asymmetrical journalism, it's not clear who is on what side or what the rules of engagement actually are. But the reason WikiLeaks may have just changed the media is that we found out that it doesn't really matter. Their data is good, and that's what counts.

Source: Theatlantic.com

Read also: WikiLeaks released secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan

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it's good to see this report being taken up by mainstream media.

blessings spiritwarrior

I wonder if it will affect the upcoming Iran aggression. Can they go to war even if the public opinion is against them? They will need a false flag to rally public opinion. But then there could also be a leak about this false flag. Their game is screwed up without secrecy. Is it too late to kill Assange? Killing Assange now can turn out to be like killing Che. And if Assange gets away with it, not only will he post more sensitive data in the future, but you're also gonna see new sites/groups doing the same. For a long time they played the card of non credibility for the Internet but now they're losing it.

A completely different take:

http://geraldcelentechannel.blogspot.com/2010/07/wayne-madsen-wikileaks-soros-internet.html

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Pentagon responds to WikiLeaks:

http://cnn.com/video/?/video/politics/2010/07/26/jk.wikileaks.pentagon.response.cnn

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Thanks for this thread

um, haven't read all this or the links, so parden my intrusion , but thought I would add, I saw somewhere that Julian Asange disses the 911 info as false conspiracy, and conspiracy that gives HIS type of info a bad name, hope I got this wrong. All I can say is it really mkes me wonder how this "leak" has achieved so much attention in the MSM, there is so much information out there that could also be taken up, but isn't, why this, why now? A lot of controversy around wikleaks and Asange.

I wonder if it was leaked accidently on purpose.

metaw3 wrote:I wonder if it will affect the upcoming Iran aggression. Can they go to war even if the public opinion is against them?

I remember way back before the onset of the Irak war I had never been witness to so many manifestations of strong disagreement about this invasion worldwide. I have seen people making spontaneous demonstrations East and West against the very idea of that war to take place.
This carried great hope . I was sure the masses would be heard.

Who still amongst citizens would want a war today ?

In former times you would conquer your neighbour's land for food and hope of better survival.
But nowadays people are well aware that war is done for no good reason but to disturb Earth's balance , kill our sons and husbands and empoverish everyone but the few elite.

I think that since the vietnam war it became clear to the majority of people how much the very idea of war is vain .


Love from me
mudra

metaw3 wrote:I wonder if it will affect the upcoming Iran aggression. Can they go to war even if the public opinion is against them? They will need a false flag to rally public opinion. But then there could also be a leak about this false flag. Their game is screwed up without secrecy. Is it too late to kill Assange? Killing Assange now can turn out to be like killing Che. And if Assange gets away with it, not only will he post more sensitive data in the future, but you're also gonna see new sites/groups doing the same. For a long time they played the card of non credibility for the Internet but now they're losing it.

Obama and his slaves in the western democracies do not care about what the majority of the population thinks about wars . I remember the majority of the population was against the invasion of Iraq , but the crims in charge went ahead anyway .
From my point of view , there will be a few spin off from publishing those documents . I noticed that when downloading them the server was very slow , possibly a sign of a lot of activity . This will allow other people to go through the documents and find more interesting stuff .
This disclosure will encourage other potential whistle- blowers to do something .
The credibility of the USA administration is shot to bits , everybody knew it before this , but now more people are aware of it . How can Obama justify a possible attack on Iran when the USA is losing in Iraq and Afghanistan ? The only possibility is to have Israel attack Iran and then defend Israel from the retaliation . This would be desperate act of a Criminal leader.
To kill Assange now would be too obvious and too late . People are getting fed up about the US criminals going around assassinating citizens of other countries .
But the way forward has been shown , important leaks are disasters for the credibility of government administrations that have made a policy of secrecy and lies. The argument that those revelations put in danger members of the invasion army does not hold water . There is no justification for bombing innocent people from 2 Km up in the sky . There is no valid reason to be in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan .

My wife has just pointed out to me that Julian Assange has mentioned that people get distracted by the 9-11 conspiracy . Well, I find this statement strange .

very telling.

Wanted by the CIA: Julian Assange - Wikileaks founder
SNIP
"
By Matthew Bell
Monday, 19 July 2010
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There are not many journalists who, when you ask them if they are being followed by the CIA, say "We have surveillance events from time to time." Actually it's not a question I've ever asked before, and Julian Assange does not call himself a journalist.

But the answer is typical of this 41-year-old former computer-hacker: cryptic, dispassionate, and faintly self-important.


As the founder of Wikileaks – a website that publishes millions of documents, from military intelligence to internal company memos and has, in four years, exposed more secrets than many newspapers have in a century – Assange has become the pin-up of web-age investigative journalists. The US has wanted him for questioning since March, after he posed a video showing an American helicopter attack that left several Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists dead.


Understandably, he now avoids the US, and keeps his movements secret, though it's thought he operates out of Sweden and is spending time in Iceland, where a change in the law is creating a libel-free haven for journalists. But if the CIA spooks wanted him that badly, couldn't they have turned up, as a hundred adoring student journalists did, to hear him talk at the Centre for Investigative Journalism 10 days ago? "

SNip
"His obsession with secrecy, both in others and maintaining his own, lends him the air of a conspiracy theorist. Is he one? "I believe in facts about conspiracies," he says, choosing his words slowly. "Any time people with power plan in secret, they are conducting a conspiracy. So there are conspiracies everywhere. There are also crazed conspiracy theories. It's important not to confuse these two. Generally, when there's enough facts about a conspiracy we simply call this news." What about 9/11? "I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud." What about the Bilderberg conference? "That is vaguely conspiratorial, in a networking sense. We have published their meeting notes."



http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/features/wanted-by-the-cia-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-14880073.html#

Old news.

Alex Jones is positive that this will only help the US government:

http://www.infowars.com/new-york-times-crawled-to-obama-for-instructions-on-wikileaks-docs/

Kurt Nimmo | It now appears the Wikileaks documents were used to provide an excuse and rationale to increase hostilities against Pakistan.

lindabaker wrote:Wish I had saved a link from a recent US mainstream article. I was out of town without my netbook, sorry. Point being: the article talked about the "recent discovery" of a huge cache of minerals in Afghanistan. Purported to be worth Trillions of Dollars. (That's beyond huge.)

I found it for you Linda :

U.S. Geologists Uncover Staggering $1 Trillion Cache of Unmined Mineral Resources in Afghanistan (Updated)

With huge quantities of rare-earth elements valuable to high-tech industries like lithium-ion battery production, will Afghanistan become the "Saudi Arabia" of the future?

By Seth FletcherPosted 06.14.2010

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-06/us-geologists-uncover-staggering-1-trillion-cache-unmined-mineral-resources-afghanistan

Yesterday, the Pentagon announced that American geologists have discovered an estimated $1 trillion worth of untapped geological resources there, including vast reserves of rare earth metals and lithium, which are becoming increasingly sought-after for high-tech manufacturing. The cache is large enough to have profound geopolitical implications. But judging by the state of play at another remote, developing-world mineral stash—the lithium deposits of Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, which I recently visited—it’s not easy to go from desolation to natural-resource riches.

Science, Seth Fletcher, afghanistan, electric cars, elements, geology, lithium, miningIt's truly a bonanza: Those rare earth metals essential for building motors for hybrid and electric cars that China thought they had cornered? Afghanistan may be sitting on $7.4 billion worth. That’s not counting niobium, another rare and essential metal--the war-torn, deeply impoverished country may have $81.2 billion of the stuff. As for lithium, the essential battery-building mineral that has led so many to suggest that lithium-rich Bolivia may be the center of the world in an age of electric cars—there’s a chance that Afghanistan may have even more. (We have yet to find much detail about what kind of lithium resources we’re looking at—the geologists we’ve contacted haven’t yet responded—but according to the New York Times, an internal Pentagon document said that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of Lithium,” a nickname that’s also been applied to Bolivia and Chile in the past couple of years.) Then there’s the big money, the meat-and-potatoes. $420.9 billion worth of iron. $274 billion in copper. $50.8 billion in cobalt.

more here : http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-06/us-geologists-uncover-staggering-1-trillion-cache-unmined-mineral-resources-afghanistan

Love Always
mudra

WikiLeaks Report Fictitious, Says Pakistan's Ex-Spy Chief Hamid Gul

by Issam Ahmed
Global Research, July 27, 2010

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20297

WikiLeaks' release of classified US documents include claims that Pakistan's former spy chief Hamid Gul ordered attacks against NATO troops. Mr. Gul speaks with the Monitor about the WikiLeaks reports.

Islamabad, Pakistan -- The former chief of Pakistan’s spy agency has derided as “malicious, fictitious, and preposterous” the leaked United States military documents implicating him in a string of attacks against US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Hamid Gul’s name appears no less than eight times in documents leaked Sunday by the online whistle-blower WikiLeaks. In the reports, the retired general and former head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) from 1987 to 1989 is accused of ordering IED attacks against Afghan and international forces in December 2006 and of plotting to kidnap United Nations staff to use as hostages in exchange for militant prisoners.

The ISI is mentioned in at least 190 reports, and is accused of backing attacks against US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Afghanistan. In one report from March 2007, the ISI is alleged to have donated 1,000 motorcycles to militant leader Jalaluddin Haqqani to carry out suicide bomb attacks in Afghanistan.

“This is utter nonsense,” Mr. Gul says in a telephone interview. Asked to respond to the various WikiLeaks reports in which his name appears, he replied: "Malicious, fictitious, and preposterous – and if this is the condition of US intelligence, then I am afraid it is no wonder they are losing in Afghanistan, and they will lose everywhere they try to poke their nose."

Gul has in the past called himself Washington's "darling" for playing a key role in the CIA's covert support of the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul the 1980s, and he was a principle architect of Pakistan's foreign strategy in Afghanistan. He has held no official position since 1992, though he is still seen as a well-connected military adviser.

“It’s a bloody shame for [the US] if a 74-year-old general sitting in his small house who has nothing to do within the ISI can pull this off,” he says, adding: “If I can pull off the defeat of America in Afghanistan, then history books will record it to my credit, and my future generations will rejoice over it.”

'I know your wrongdoings in Afghanistan'

WikiLeaks did not reveal the source of the leaked intelligence information, which was released weeks ago to The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, which analyzed the data and simultaneously published articles Sunday. In April, WikiLeaks released classified video footage of US military shooting a group of civilians alleged to be insurgents in Baghdad, including two staff from Reuters news agency. In May, the US arrested Bradley Manning, an American intelligence analyst suspected of providing the video to WikiLeaks.

Gul, however, says that the US itself has orchestrated the latest WikiLeaks exposé to shift attention away from its own failings in Afghanistan. Speaking in an elevated tone and at times furious, he says he believes the US may now use the exposé as a way to force Pakistan's hand on policy in Afghanistan.

"They [the Americans] want to bash Pakistan, at this time to come up with this leak. I refuse to believe it is not on purpose,” says Gul.

Pakistan, a country awash in conspiracy theories, is already buzzing with rumors that the US orchestrated the WikiLeaks exposé to undermine Pakistan and pave the way for military intervention here. Gul himself warns that any military intervention in Pakistan will send the country into turmoil. “You touch Pakistan on any pretext, it will ignite an inferno which will inflame every part of the region,” he says.

Gul says he is prepared to testify before US Congress to clear his name, adding that he is also prepared to share his own secrets about the US involvement in Pakistan and Afghanistan. “I know your wrongdoings in Afghanistan and deficiencies in your leadership, your involvement in the narcotics trade, and how your security complexes are minting money and cheating their own taxpayers,” he says.

more at the link: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20297

Love Always
mudra

Sorry posted on wrong thread

Is Wikileaks a classic gatekeeping operation ?


http://kevboyle.blogspot.com/2010/07/wikileakswikipedia-truth-serving-lies.html

it has got a Noam Chumpsky feel...