World-News

By John Cook

Buried among the 92,000 classified documents released Sunday by WikiLeaks is some intriguing evidence that the U.S. military in Afghanistan has adopted a PR strategy that got it into trouble in Iraq: paying local media outlets to run friendly stories.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26036.htm



A Civilian Casualty, Up Close

By Kevin Sites

I try to imagine the incongruity of it all. You are riding in your car with your family and in one instant, by being in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time, your wife is now dead.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26062.htm

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US Hunts Afghan War Files Leaker
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/28-1

'Leaked Afghan Files Hid a Losing War, Not Military Secrets'
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2010/07/28-0

WikiLeaks’ Afghan War Diary
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/28-4

How US Ignorance Helped Doom the Afghan War
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/29-12

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The main effect of the Wikileaks documents is political

Independent Institute
by Ivan Eland

07/28/10

[T]he only thing the WikiLeaks documents reveal is how persistent the post-9/11 war and nation-building fever continues to be among the foreign policy elite — even in the face of the dismal results on the ground for almost a decade and a majority opinion in America that the war is not worth fighting...

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2834



Afghanistan’s census of the dead

Slate
by Chris Wilson and Jeremy Singer-Vine

Nearly 77,000 of the 92,000 military documents unveiled by WikiLeaks this week are individual incident reports from the war in Afghanistan. Each report tallies the number of soldiers, civilians, and enemy targets both wounded and killed. While no one was hurt in the majority of the incidents, these reports, read in aggregate, offer a sterile but hyper-detailed picture of the dead and wounded on all sides of the nearly decadelong war. The following visualization focuses on enemy and civilian casualties over the past five years...

http://www.slate.com/id/2261911/



Are we in Afghanistan because we’re in Afghanistan?

AntiWar.Com
by Charles V. Pena

07/30/10

[I]sn’t this war? Yes. And it’s not like we’re intentionally targeting or trying to kill innocent civilians, right? Right (it’s not the moral equivalent of terrorists attacking a civilian target like the World Trade Center or insurgents using villagers as human shields). Plus aren’t civilian casualties an inevitable tragic consequence of war? Yes. If the survival of the United States was at stake, we might not like but nonetheless have to accept those answers. But the conflict in Afghanistan is not a war of U.S. national survival...

http://tinyurl.com/392eugw


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

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Rights Groups File Lawsuit To Allow Challenge To Targeted Killing Without Due Process

http://www.aclu.org/national-security/rights-groups-file-lawsuit-allow-challenge-targeted-killing-without-due-process



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