Julian Assange Promises More Leaks, Jazz-Hands

Information wants to be fierce!

I've been derelict in mentioning this. Via Hot Air, a summary by an Afghanistan vet who notes the leaks tell us little we didn't know about the war, but a little more about what we already suspected of International Intersex Investigator Julian Assange.

I myself first went to Afghanistan as a young Army officer in 2002 and returned two years later after having led a small special operations unit — what Mr. Assange calls an “assassination squad.”

...

The Guardian editorialized on Sunday that the documents released reveal “a very different landscape ... from the one with which we have become familiar.” But whoever wrote that has not been reading the reports of his own newspaper’s reporters in Afghanistan.

The news media have done a good job of showing the public that the Afghan war is a highly complex environment stretching beyond the borders of the fractured country. Often what appears to be a two-way conflict between the government and an insurgency is better described as intertribal rivalry. And often that intertribal rivalry is worsened or overshadowed by the violent trade in drugs.

...

Mr. Assange says he is a journalist, but he is not. He is an activist, and to what end it is not clear. This week — as when he released a video in April showing American helicopter gunships killing Iraqi civilians in 2007 — he has been throwing around the term “war crimes,” but offers no context for the events he is judging. It seems that the death of any civilian in war, an unavoidable occurrence, is a “crime.”

If his desire is to promote peace, Mr. Assange and his brand of activism are not as helpful as he imagines. By muddying the waters between journalism and activism, and by throwing his organization into the debate on Afghanistan with little apparent regard for the hard moral choices and dearth of good policy options facing decision-makers, he is being as reckless and destructive as the contemptible soldier or soldiers who leaked the documents in the first place.

I don't think his first desire is to promote peace. I think he shares the same Internet Disease many of us have -- his first desire is to promote himself, to make himself a star.

Apparently he got sick of being an ugly-duckling Club Kid and decided to try his hand at international intersex investigation.

Guy's Got One Source? Pfc Bradley Manning was already charged with leaking the so-lied "Collateral Murder" video. The Pentagon suspects he also leaked this stack of minor documents.

This guy should be in jail for the rest of his life.

If this Julian Assange's one big source -- well, I think his fifteen minutes are up, even if he does look like Andy Warhol's scheduling secretary.

Oh: One of the big "gets" here, supposedly, is the revelation that helicopters are being brought down by anti-aircraft missiles, similar to the Stingers we armed the anti-Soviet forces with in the eighties.

The leap made immediately by the left is that these are in fact Stingers, because the left loves that Narrative, We Armed Them And Now The Chickens Are Coming Home To Roost.

But the documents don't say that, at least not that I've seen.

You know, a lot of people now make these missiles. What was advanced tech 25 years ago is now easily knocked-off by the Chinese, Russians, or other similar reverse-engineer techo-parasites.

Could a Stinger even be functional after over 25 years?

Could it be functional after 25 years of being lugged around a rocky environment and secreted in caves that likely get very hot and very cold?

Could it functional after 25 years of being maintained by... well, as Ash would say, primitive screwheads?

The Pashtuns are not Arabs, but as they say of the Arabs: Arabs don't do maintenance. I doubt the Pashtuns are bears about it, either.

Encore for Jazz-Hands: The Glenn Beck goof on Adam Gadahn is below.

posted by Ace at 01:06 PM

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