Obama pulls "U.S. troops' lives in danger" card on Wikileaks. Opinions?

Obama has condemned the release of the Afghanistan documents via Wikileaks, saying that releasing classified documents puts the lives of U.S. troops at risk. But if I may say so, the use of classified documents to cover up information which puts no lives at risks but rather embarrasses the government is something one might accuse Obama of and could definitely accuse Bush of, although this Orwellian tactic goes back much further.

What's your opinion on Obama using the "troops' lives in danger" play? Good idea? Bad idea? Will people believe it? What does it say about him? What do you think?

but shouldn't they be declassified unless they specifically endanger troops' lives?

Do you really believe that Obama is incompetent to properly classify information?

I guess us knowing that the drone airplanes & the afgan government are for shit brings potential harm to somebody, but it probably isn't the GIs.

We're winning thanks to the kill squads / Iraqization / what have you. That makes it all good so long as we can fulfill Hillary Clinton's original stated goal for the Iraq war when she voted for it -- turning it into an oil protectorate so we can secure our economic interests in the region.

Hell, a dedicated stream of oil from Iraq would mean the rest of the world could suffer peak oil and not us, or the other oil-producing countries that would cease exports!

and it wasn't Wikileak that sent them there!

A terrorist may overhear and learn there is a war there, and try and hurt the safe troops stationed securely in that war zone.

So let's just not talk about it anymore.

if we can keep it out of the media entirely, maybe the terrorists and the taliban won't know there's a war going on at all!

...and that's only the beginning of the damage it does. Pot, meet kettle.

How DARE you? I'm Barbara Bush!

Let them take our ideas away from us and then we have to oppose ourselves. Same thing they did with the word liberal. And you're accusing US of cooperating with the enemy?

Let Michael Steele be Michael Steele. He can say that stuff all he wants, we know he's full of it and he'll flip-flop on it as soon as it looks like we're actually going to leave Afghanistan and take all that free money away from his military industrial complex buddies. We should stay consistent. THAT should be the difference between us and them.

It's for political stability. Bush's and Cheney's war in Afghanistan was about profits. For Obama, he just doesn't want to give anyone an excuse to say he lost the war or turn it into a campaign issue in any other way.

Come on. There are current profits, both monetary and political, being made every day in both Iraq and Afghanistan. They're just not for the likes of you and I.

As for political stability, Afghanistan was much more stable BEFORE the U.S. invaded and occupied than it is today, and that only scratches the surface of how much worse we've made matters all over the world with our wars of aggression and our imperialist foreign policy. The point of that policy has ALWAYS been profits, sooner or later.

:crazy:

1) Bush could have stabilized Afghanistan after 9/11 ... he chose not to ... and he left to to fester ... infecting Pakistan along the way.

2) Obama said he would increase focus on Afghanistan as a candidate, said he'd add troops to try and stabilize that country, a task that he knows might no longer be possible ... but given we, the US screwed it up thanks to Bush .. well, one more mess to try and clean up.

3) Troop risk ... the question is not whether the troops are at risk in Afghanistan. They are. The Question is whether 90k leaked documents INCREASE that risk. If any document does, that is treason no less disgusting then when Cheney out a CIA agent.

4) All domestic policy, ultimately is about money. We give aid to a poor nation, that is money. We provide defense for an ally, money. Open or close trade lines ... money. The question is the balance.

and decided that there's no risk of harm to the troops. That's 90k documents that apparently do NOT represent a risk to troops that are needlessly classified. The question is, how do we create a situation where the government has the power to classify documents that need to be classified without classifying hundreds of thousands of documents because they're embarrassing or cover up crimes?

This is an urgent question we need to find an answer to. I agree, I don't want documents released putting troops' lives at risk, and I don't want some guy with a website to be the one to decide which documents those are. But the government is CLEARLY abusing state secrets. What do we do?

A) that's remarkably similar to what Gorbachev likely said about his predecessors;

B) Pakistan was part of the "infection" from the very beginning, again dating to the Soviet occupation days. The Taliban isn't Afghan-- it's Pashtun primarily, and spread first through Pashtun regions in Waziristan before OUR government helped it spread to Afghanistan.




That dead horse doesn't stink any less with repetition. I don't care that Obama promised to expand the war against Afghanistan. It's still immoral and still a war of aggression for profit. Obama's willing participation just makes us all seem less respectable in the eyes of the rest of the world.

As for cleaning it up-- it isn't going to happen. We'll still be having this conversation ten years from now, when Afghanistan will still be an unwinnable quagmire or we will have finally gotten out and left the mess behind. We made the mess when we invaded. We cannot unmake it by occupying or by killing more and more people. If there's anyone left when the rubble is cleared, they will hate Americans no matter what we do now. It's time to stop making the matter worse.




First and foremost, WikiLeaks owes no allegiance to America or to American troops. What treason are you referring to? How can foreign nationals commit treason against the U.S.? That's the most egregious fault in your comparison of WikiLeaks to Cheney's dirty politics.

More to the point, WikiLeaks did not expose ANY operational secrets, or at least they've gone to considerable lengths to avoid them and the general consensus among those who have reviewed the posted materials is that they have been successful. Apparently the main reason for focusing on older material, i.e. from the Bush era, was specifically to avoid revealing any information about current operations. They also removed names of informers and collaborators to protect them from reprisal.

If telling the truth about what the troops do in our names puts them at risk, don't you think we should know what they're doing and have some say in it? And do you actually think any of the leaked information is a surprise to Afghans? I suspect the only folks who don't know how recklessly the U.S. is conducting this crime against humanity are Americans at home.

And finally, of course, there is an obvious way to reduce the risk to troops. End the war and bring them home.




We're talking about foreign and military policy here, not domestic policy, but otherwise, I agree with you wholeheartedly. The best justifications for continuing these wars is that the middle class hasn't been completely depleted yet, and there's still some money to harvest for the military industrial complex to feed upon. And if we succeed in subjugating Afghanistan or at least get farther than the Soviets did and keep our puppet government intact, there will be IMMENSE future profits to be had exploiting the mineral wealth of Afghanistan. Not to mention it's importance for getting fossil fuels out of the region.

But frankly, I believe this whole affair is about political and economic profit-- neither of which accrues to you and I. But SOMEONE is making a butt-load of it.

The dead horse point. How do you clean up a mess by making more mess?

and the other reason we went into Afghanistan, to re-establish the CIA's opium crop, that was initialized during the Afghan war with Russia. The Taliban burned an entire years crop. The very first thing bush did when the troops went in was to bring back the poppies. It's up to 80% of world total. $250 Billion a year in drug money get's laundered on Wall-street every year. The CIA needs money for it's covert ops, can't have the tyranny of secrecy if you have to depend on congress for money.

I just said Obama's motivation is his political future. Bush's was his own profit. The fact that others want the war because they make a ton of cash off it isn't the reason Obama wants it. He isn't about money. He's about being president.

all modern wars are primarily for profit from start to finish.

A $Trillion dollars could the 1000's of times more effectively spent on TV political propaganda here at home than on some kind of war to save political face.

that's about the weakest excuse for a war I've ever heard.

Some people want money from the war. Other people want power. Obama can't spend the billions he's spending on war on his own campaign, and the amount of money it would take to overcome the Republicans claiming he lost the war would be too high, especially once you factor in how much the people who lost money when he pulled out would spend on his opponent.

Much easier to just let the war continue for him. That's his primary focus--stay in power. Let others make their money off the war, and they won't fight him as strongly come next election.

Anyone who intentionally "leaks" information that puts US troops in danger, should be tried, convicted, and shot for treason.

I hope Obama brings the hammer down on the ones that leaked these documents. He will have my unwavering support in the matter if he does.

As Julian Assange says, you can count on that old canard being trotted out because the White House cannot deny any of the ugly truths the leaks reveal-- so let's all pile on the messenger rather than deal with the embarrassing truths in the message!

Because Wikileaks are not Americans, therefore it's not treasonous for them to do anything against the U.S.

Subject to attack by US forces.

...against distributed servers spread throughout the countries of U.S. allies around the world. That's how it goes when the truth is our real enemy.

giving great heart attacks....just like the CIA.

...but that's just me. :rofl:

...is a bad thing?

I've noticed that anti-Obama threads seem to thrive here. How could I be so foolish to support The President of The United States.

:sarcasm:

Blind faith threads thrive as well. It's a mixed bag.

The old right-wing canard. Got it. We who want the truth out so that the American public can cut through the lies and cover-ups (that keep getting our troops killed) to have input into how our troops are used are not supporting the troops.

Eight years of listening to that shit and countering it and debunking it and here it is again. Nice.

"I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that. ." - Britney Spears.

Christ. :eyes:

How dare me, an American citizen, express support for the Commander-In-Chief and the US troops.

That is exactly what it means.

If there's information floating out on the internet saying that we're planning on moving goods from point A to point B at 9:00, then yes, I'd say thatthat information being public would increase the risk to our troops.

Innocents die.

I don't think Cronkite would have done it as a reporter. He's my measure as to how responsible, meaningful reporting was done.

I think governments have to do what they must to protect our forces until the insanity of the war stops.

My pity goes out to the families who lose their children to war, no matter which side it is, and to those on the front lines who survive it and have to live with what they have done.

If this leak will stop the war, then I guess it was worth it. But that doesn't keep this particular leak from feeling very wrong to me, unlike the leak of the yellow cake uranium memo.

How can you suggest that "leaking" a faked document to the public to justify a war of aggression was "good" but telling the real, transparent truth about that war is bad?

The transgressions leaked by Wiki here, along with earlier Iraqi horrors and torture leaks, would have had America in a moral outrage during the Vietnam war. I don't know what has happened to us. We are numbed out.

What good will it do if there is no accountability, other than to put the troops at additional risk, and cause a bunch of panties to get into temporary wads?

...but the first step is ALWAYS telling the truth.

Either one of the Clintons, Carter, Gore, Kerry, Dean. If Obama was a senator he may have reacted differently, but as commander in chief you have different responsibilities than the activists do.

It's the whole bloody fact that we're there in the first place; trying to win an unwinnable occupation so poorly conceived by the Bu$hCo administration.

It's a racket, plain and simple.

I think the administration is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. If documentary information more than 18 months old can truly endanger troops' lives, then we're prosecuting this war far too slowly.

On the other hand, if evidence of our wrongdoing, including war crimes and crimes against humanity puts people's lives in danger, then the simple expedient is not to commit atrocities in the first goddam place. Because by the time the evidence comes out, the perpetrators are long gone, and their replacements are the closest target for righteous revenge.

Makes me wanna holler.

If you don't want to put the troops in danger of retaliation for war crimes, perhaps we shouldn't be committing war crimes.

and reading the stuff on the site, it's obvious, the afghanistan occupation is a colossal clusterfuck.

If something is released onto the internet (where anyone can get it not just americans) that says this is where the troops will be this day and someone who intends hard gets it and if even one american soldier is hurt isnt that a bad thing?

i mean, they already happen to live there. :eyes:

if that's what we were talking about here

HG Wells might have a shot at what you're saying. But AFAIK, we haven't got a time machine in our bag of tricks. :shrug:

obama is no friend of civil liberties

none of that bill of rights crap works for him, unless it's the second amendment, which he can use to appease rapublicans.

And, just as pathetic now.

finally return home after all these years of two unfunded/borrowed money wars and find out there are no jobs to be had and that the IOU to China has to be paid?
I know President Obama sez' Afghanistan is the "good" war and Iraq is the "bad" war and claims the bad one is ending soon, but don't hold your breath. The war machines just keep cranking - to hell with danger.

you want the military to fail-crusade1!!!!11!!ahh!!

No one believes this government when it comes to the never-ending war on terror.

How much danger would the troops be in if they were back home? :shrug:

Do we want another Khobar Towers incident?

What to make of the discrepency, I wonder?




http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38417666/

A helluva lot more than printing the truth about how the war is being conducted.

I haven't read the documents, and I don't know if the release of them would increase the danger or not. I only know that they are in a evidently multi-front war, they're coming back with pieces of themselves missing sometimes, physical and mental. Or in a box.

Thank God for Wikileaks.