Posted on 07/27/2010 12:21:43 PM PDT by SmartInsight
Barack Obama says the 'documents don't reveal any issues that haven't already informed our public debate on Afghanistan'.
But he went on to say the material highlighted the challenges that led him to announce a change in strategy late last year that involved sending an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.
The thousands of documents... dealt mainly with the conduct of the war during the Bush administration.
"We failed for seven years to implement a strategy adequate to the challenge," Obama said today.... That is why we have increased our commitment there and developed a new strategy," he said...
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Ex-spy master blames US for leak
A former Pakistani spy master has hit back at allegations he supported the Taliban, saying the US orchestrated a mass leak of confidential files in a bid to scapegoat him for its failures in Afghanistan.
But Mr Gul's allegations that a hidden US government hand played a role in the huge breach of classified files may resonate in Pakistan,
Not necessarily to hurt the war effort. Rather it may have been to convince the anti-war left that Zero really did do right by sending troops to Afganistan. He needs those votes pretty darn quick.
This is confirmation that Rush... as usual... was right.
One just has to ask — how could some lowly intelligence officer have access to, steal, and provode some 90 THOUSAND documents to an external contact. 2-3 maybe, but nearly ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND — and nobody catches him?
And once everyone knows the documents are out there, the US government makes NO ATTEMPT to retrieve them from Wikileaks, nor to persuade/pressure the news organizations not to realease them.
Something is rotten, and it’s not in Denmark...
I guess treason is just another political tool for Obama...
In other news, Satan saw his disciples working very hard, and will reward them greatly in hell.
Evidence that Obama has a dis-information division in place?
I’d say yes.
I posted this just yesterday:
“Hmm, how do we not know that this was ‘allowed’ by this lamearse, jack squat, idiot-ridden administration to increase the public opinion against the conflict in Afghanistan so as to help back their desire to exit Afghanistan ASAP? =.= “
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2559513/posts
The administration does not seem too alarmed about it, and no doubt the release could have been prevented.
The docs justified sending 30,000 more troops.
But he dismiss the docs that show Iran’s involvement.
1971 : (ELLSBERG STEALS CLASSIFIED "PENTAGON PAPERS" DOCS AND PASSES THEM TO 19 NEWSPAPERS) Ellsberg was a special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense during the Vietnam War. He released the 7,000 page classified study to the Senate and 19 newspapers in 1971 and now [as of Sept 2004] leads the Truth Telling Project.-..... The document that came to be called the Pentagon Papers was a 7,000-page study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam that was classified “top secret.” Ellsberg leaked the study to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later 19 different newspapers. The New York Times began publishing them in 1971. The publication added fuel to an already politically charged debate over U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia and set legal precedents for freedom of the press. --------See Pentagon Papers whistle-blower urges insiders to leak Iraq info, First Amendment Center ^ | Sept. 11, 2004 | AP, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1212923/posts
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[Morton H.] Halperin has a long and controversial track record in the world of Washington intrigue, dating back to the Johnson Administration. Journalists sympathetic to Halperin’s leftwing sentiments give him high marks for blowing the whistle on the Vietnam War, but his activism helped undermine America’s war effort and contributed to the Communist victory.
The Johnson Defense Department placed Halperin in charge of compiling a secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, based on classified documents. This secret history later emerged into public view as the so-called “Pentagon Papers.” Halperin and his deputy Leslie Gelb assigned much of the writing to leftwing opponents of the war, such as Daniel Ellsberg who, despite his background as a former Marine and a military analyst for the Rand Corporation, was already evolving into a New Left radical. In his memoir, Secrets, Ellsberg admits to concluding, as early as 1967, that, “we were not fighting on the wrong side; we were the wrong side” in the Vietnam War. [11] Evidently Ellsberg had come to view Ho Chi Minh’s Communist regime as the wave of the future.
With Halperin’s tacit encouragement – and perhaps active collusion – Ellsberg stole the secret history and released it to The New York Times, which published the documents as “The Pentagon Papers” in June 1971.[12]This was a violation of the Espionage Act, which forbids the removal of classified documents from government buildings. Not surprisingly, “The Pentagon Papers” echoed Halperin’s long-standing position that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, and ridiculed Presidents Kennedy and Johnson for stubbornly refusing to heed those of their advisors who shared this opinion. It marked a turning point in America’s failed effort to keep Indo-China from falling to the Communists.
The government dropped its case against Ellsberg as Nixon’s power collapsed during the Watergate intrigues. Halperin went on to become the director of the [ACLU]... from 1984 to 1992 and head of its "National Security Archives."
From this position, he waged open war against U.S. intelligence services, through the courts and the press, seeking to strip the government of virtually any power to investigate, monitor or obstruct subversive elements and their activities.[13] It did not take long for Halperin to go the next logical step and argue for abolishing America’s intelligence services altogether. “Using secret intelligence agencies to defend a constitutional republic is akin to the ancient medical practice of employing leeches to take blood from feverish patients. The intent is therapeutic, but in the long run the cure is more deadly than the disease,” Halperin wrote in his 1976 book, The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U.S. Intelligence Agencies.[14]
In a March 21, 1987 article in The Nation, Halperin expanded on this theme and, like Ellsberg, took the position that America was the real villain in the Cold War. He wrote, “Secrecy does not serve national security. Covert operations are incompatible with constitutional government and should be abolished.”[15] This was a call for unilateral disarming of our intelligence services to match the universal disarmament of our military which has long been a staple of the radical agenda.
------- "The Shadow Party: Part I," By David Horowitz and Richard Poe, FrontPageMagazine.com, October 6, 2004
The left has been retrying what worked for them once before.
History bump.
Thank you Piasa.
“If persons with access to wrongly concealed facts and analyses bring them to light, the chances become less that a president could launch another unprovoked war—against, say, Iran.”
Devastating, but excellent point.
I agree, that there is much more behind the motivation for releasing all those documents of the Afghan war.
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