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Wikileaks, causes for concern

By Maximillian Forte | August 2, 2010

Not much new support for the anti-war movement

When it comes to uncovering the brutality of American military and covert operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, there is in fact not much that is new in these records, and not much that will compete with the revelations made in the established media that have had a very high profile. Wikileaks seems to be depending now on individuals to privately sift through thousands of records, and then to presumably publish their findings outside of newspapers, months from now, about events that happened perhaps years ago. This is great for historians, and not so great for anti-war activists who deal in the immediate, in the present. There is little here to compete with revelations of American mass killings of civilians, and disregard for human rights, as revealed by the very regime of Hamid Karzai, or by intrepid reporters such as Jerome Starkey and Michael Hastings. Whatever is found will often not have as much impact as the Rolling Stone article about General Stanley McChrystal, and his own admissions about the failures of the Marjah offensive, and of the dark side of the war that would turn off most Americans if they knew more. They can know more, but with considerable labour, and on their own, and that seems to be expecting a lot of citizens…

New support for fighting the Taleban

Julian Assange assumed his intentions were good enough that they could control the narrative that would be constructed around these records. He may learn differently. Assange told Der Spiegel that he enjoys “crushing bastards,” and he later told CNN’s Larry King that by “bastards” he meant U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The problem is that the news media have already made the question of who is a “bastard” more complicated and ambiguous, for showing the atrocities which the reports allege have been committed by the Taleban. The Guardian was first, speaking of the Taleban’s use of “improvised explosive devices” (IEDs): “the IED…not only strikes foreign troops on ground patrols and in road convoys, it is also an indiscriminate terror weapon killing and injuring thousands of civilians…. Taliban fighters appear to have been prepared to blow up large numbers of people in order to assassinate a single target, such as a high-ranking government official or police chief,” and the article says the reports show that the Taleban are responsible for the majority of civilians killed in Afghanistan. We might suspect that some elements of American public opinion will use this kind of information to renew the call for crushing the Taleban, the only group that patriotic Americans would ever call “bastards,” as if fighting the Taleban was an end in itself, one worthy of so much American blood and treasure.

Support for expanding the war to Pakistan and Iran

Is there a straight, logical line from these records to greater popular support for the anti-war movement? Clearly, there is not. Indeed, some of the first newspaper reports dedicated themselves to showing that Pakistan’s intelligence services and military cannot be counted upon as a good partner for the U.S. For some, that will mean pushing to have more American covert forces in Pakistan, thus further widening and Americanizing the war, the same way as happened in Vietnam and the region around it. Personally, the big shock for me was this article in The Guardian: “Afghanistan war logs: Iran’s covert operations in Afghanistan.” According to the article, “Iran is engaged in an extensive covert campaign to arm, finance, train and equip Taliban insurgents, Afghan warlords allied to al-Qaida and suicide bombers fighting to eject British and western forces from Afghanistan.” A connection between Iran and Al Qaeda? Was it not the suggestion of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda that was used by the Bush administration to successfully capture American public support for the Iraq invasion? And now that the U.S. and the European Union have escalated sanctions against Iran to a point beyond which the next steps can only lead to war, do these records not serve to provide a service to pro-war propagandists? As I write this, the very pro-war Fox News has fixed its attention on this very aspect of the Wikileaks records.

The incomplete and fragmentary nature of the records

In my own research with these records, involving the use of American social scientists in units known as Human Terrain Teams, I have come to some important realizations. These records are only some of the records that we might have had. They are incomplete and fragmentary. Can anyone believe that the records Wikileaks obtained, almost 110,000 of them, are all the records produced by the U.S. military in a period covering six years of war? If not, then what was left out? Why were these records released, and not others? How can we make any credible claim based on these records, without knowing what has been kept from our view? What if what we do not have would somehow modify or reshape what we now claim to know?

The records are not the same as “the truth”

These are records written by combatants on one side in a war. They are written by elements of the American military, with a military audience in mind, and to suit the purposes of that military. That many of the records are based on hearsay, rumours, and unsubstantiated allegations that would not survive review at higher levels of military intelligence, is also the case. The records lack context and often lack depth: short, terse bursts of information. Information is not the same thing as meaning, nor is it understanding. It is just data, and data is dead until an analyst gives it life by adding value. The worst thing that could happen would be to have great masses of people insisting that something is true because it was reported in these records. To add depth and context, one has to cross check these records, examine other records, interview the key participants, understand the larger aims and narratives. The people writing these reports are neither infallible nor objective. If few people understand this, we could end up with arguments that seem to be factually muscular, and yet are intellectually malnourished.

The lack of ethical concern, and an inadequate review process

Julian Assange of Wikileaks has now repeatedly asserted what he told Der Spiegel in an interview: that the source of the leaked records went through his “own harm-minimization process” (we do not know what that process was, nor the identity of the source). Assange added:  “We understand the importance of protecting confidential sources, and we understand why it is important to protect certain US and ISAF sources.” Suddenly, the person who declared he enjoyed crushing the bastards, is very concerned about their protection, but he says little about protecting the identities of the many Afghan sources who are named and whose locations are revealed in the records. Assange says, “we identified cases where there may be a reasonable chance of harm occurring to the innocent. Those records were identified and edited accordingly.” However, I have seen absolutely no evidence to support his claim. First of all, when someone edits an original document, you must indicate in that document something like this: “name deleted,” or “section deleted” or simply black out the text to show that portions are being kept from view. I have seen none of that. Second, the names of Afghan informants have been retained and are in full public view. This subjects them to the possibility of being executed by the Taleban, and it will be thanks to Wikileaks.

Assange has told TIME that, “Our groups—the New York Times, Der Spiegel, the Guardian and WikiLeaks — covered about 2,000 reports in detail.” That is only 2,000 of the total of almost 92,000 that were released. By his own admission, only a small fraction of the records were reviewed in detail. And who is involved in that review process? Does it include military and intelligence specialists? Does it include any of the people who were actually there, in the situations described in the records? Does it include the Afghans who were named? Does it include any Afghans at all? Assange, who has never been to Afghanistan, nor served in the military, would not have the experience and sensitivity to understand what constitutes harmful information, outside of the local context. What if the same is true of those who were responsible for the small scale review that occurred? I understand the need to protect the identity of one’s sources—indeed, that is my argument here—but not the need to protect the identities of those who supposedly assisted Wikileaks in its review process. Name them, tell us their qualifications, let us hear from them.

Why are the news media not even asking these questions?

Dependence on the mainstream news media

There has also been a lack of credibility from Assange on the issue of why Wikileaks chose to suddenly depend on the mainstream news media for the release of the records—or at least he has failed to explain the obvious in a clear manner. When Wikileaks released the now famous video footage from the viewpoint of an Apache helicopter, firing on and killing civilians in Iraq, “Collateral Murder,” it was done independent of the established media. On YouTube alone, that video has been seen in excess of 7 million times. It does not seem that Wikileaks failed to gain notice and interest, and the news media still reported on its release. So why is it that the mainstream news media, so faulted by Assange for failing to do their job in covering the reality of the Afghan war, are now the primary intermediaries for this release?

The answer would seem simple: these written records are numerous and written in a specialized language, requiring journalistic expertise to make stories out of them. A video can be viewed by anyone and immediately apprehended. Or so one would think. There is nothing straightforward about visual imagery, and it can be hotly contested.

Crowd sourcing: an ideal with little substance?

Having first chosen mainstream news media for the release of the first stories based on the records, Wikileaks now turns to the wider public, sourcing opinion and analysis from the “crowd.” If Wikileaks had real faith in that process, it could have better appreciated and understood the wide range of expertise in the worldwide community of bloggers, and understood that the power to gain traction from a story can come just as much from below, as from above. Presumably Wikileaks understood this, and even cherishes this principle, which is what makes its choice of dependence on the news media strange. The crowd is not homogeneous. The crowd, just like with mainstream news media, contains sensitive specialists, and miserable propagandists. There is no escaping this. When one goes crowd sourcing, one must expect a lot of opinion that is based on poor understanding, inadequate training, selective reading, wishful thinking, and a deliberate desire to distort what the records say in order to suit certain political ends. The results will certainly be mixed, and these records will settle very little in our continuing public debates. But we should always expect surprises…including nasty ones.

Full article

Maximilian C. Forte is a professor in anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He writes at Zero Anthropology. He can be reached at max.forte@openanthropology.org

August 2, 2010 - Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering