I was referring to a lovely PM you sent me one time.
Surely you wouldn't mind sharing it with me, as I have no record of ever sending you a personal message.
That isn't the way it works at all. You have asserted that Wikileaks will cost lives. I've asked you to give me some evidence of that and your response is that I have to demonstrate that it hasn't happened. That shifts the burden of proof onto me, despite the fact that you made the initial assertion, which is a bizarre way to approach the matter.
Again. Show me some evidence that Wikileaks have cost lives and no, "they simply must have" is not a sufficient answer. If it's that inescapable, surely the combined forces of the US Govt, military and various corporations should be able to come up with clear, incontrovertible evidence. I'm all ears here.
Taliban Says It Will Target Names Exposed by WikiLeaks
Militants were alerted to the leaked documents, which reveal details of informants, by news reports.
Christophe Simon / AFP-Getty Images
An Afghan farmer talks to U.S. Marines on the outskirts of Marja, Afghanistan, earlier this year.
The U.S. military has already accused WikiLeaks of having "the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family" on its hands after leaking 92,000 classified documents. The Taliban has now confirmed it is poring through the documents, and intends to hunt down and punish any suspected spies named.
Britain's Channel 4 News interviewed a Taliban spokesperson named Zabihullah Mujahid by telephone. "We are studying the report," he said, referring to the documents, available online, some containing the names, tribes, and family information of Afghan informants.
"We knew about the spies and people who collaborate with U.S. forces," he continued. "We will investigate through our own secret service whether the people mentioned are really spies working for the U.S. If they are U.S. spies, then we know how to punish them."
The Taliban has recently pursued a policy of intimidating those who cooperate with the NATO forces in an attempt to undermine efforts at governance. Many local officials have been killed, and most have been threatened. The militant group is known to execute informants, reports Channel 4, by hanging, beheading, and shooting. It has even, on one recent occasion, strapped "two alleged traitors to explosives before detonating them in public."
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen condemned WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange yesterday. "Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing," Mullen said, according to Reuters. "But the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family."
Gates told reporters that trust between the Afghan people and the U.S. military had been breached. "I spent most of my life in the intelligence business, where the sacrosanct principle is protecting your sources," he said. "It seems to me that, as a result of this massive breach of security, we have considerable repair work to do in terms of reassuring people and rebuilding trust, because they clearly—people are going to feel at risk."
Many media organizations have avoided linking to the WikiLeaks site and have redacted information in their reports. But Mujahid told Channel 4 that the Taliban had begun investigating the leaked information after being alerted by news stories.
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/30/taliban-says-it-will-target-names-exposed-by-wikileaks.html?from=rssTaliban Seeks Vengeance in Wake of WikiLeaks
Leaked U.S. Intel documents listed the names and villages of Afghan collaborators—and the Taliban is starting to retaliate.
After WikiLeaks published a trove of U.S. intelligence documents—some of which listed the names and villages of Afghans who had been secretly cooperating with the American military—it didn’t take long for the Taliban to react. A spokesman for the group quickly threatened to “punish” any Afghan listed as having “collaborated” with the U.S. and the Kabul authorities against the growing Taliban insurgency. In recent days, the Taliban has demonstrated how seriously those threats should be considered. Late last week, just four days after the documents were published, death threats began arriving at the homes of key tribal elders in southern Afghanistan. And over the weekend one tribal elder, Khalifa Abdullah, who the Taliban believed had been in close contact with the Americans, was taken from his home in Monar village, in Kandahar province’s embattled Arghandab district, and executed by insurgent gunmen.
The violence may just be beginning. According to Agha Lali, the deputy head of Kandahar’s provincial council, threatening letters have been delivered to 70 elders in Panjwaii district. While it is unknown whether any of the men were indeed named in the WikiLeaks documents, it’s clear the Taliban believes they have been cooperating with Western forces and the Afghan government. One short handwritten note, shown to NEWSWEEK, said: “We have made a decision for your death. You have five days to leave Afghan soil. If you don’t, you don’t have the right to complain.” The screed, written on the letterhead of Mullah Mohammed Omar’s defunct Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, bore the signature of Abdul Rauf Khadim, a senior Taliban official and former inmate at the American lockup in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who had been released into—and subsequently escaped from—Kabul’s custody last year.
The frightening combination of the Taliban spokesman’s threat, Abdullah’s death, and the spate of letters has sparked a panic among many Afghans who have worked closely with coalition forces in the past, according to a senior Taliban intelligence officer who declined to be named for security reasons. The officer said he has seen reports of Afghans rushing to U.S. and coalition bases in southern and eastern Afghanistan over the past few days, seeking protection and even asking for political asylum. (U.S. military officials would not verify this information.) The Taliban officer claimed that the group’s English-language media department continues to actively examine the WikiLeaks material and intends to draw up lists of collaborators in each province, to add to the hit lists of local insurgent commanders.
The big question going forward is whether the leaked material will make regular Afghans more wary about cooperating with coalition forces. The intelligence officer, unsurprisingly, believes this will be the case. “The impact of this should be good for us and a slap in the face to those who are working with America,” he says. “America is not a good protector of spies.” Locals have long known that the Taliban deals harshly with those it suspects of working against it: the ruthless guerrillas have assassinated scores, if not hundreds, of tribal elders and Afghans of all ages for their alleged cooperation with the coalition. In one particularly gruesome case a few months ago, according to the intelligence officer, the Taliban discovered that a group of recent high-school graduates in Ghazni province had been feeding information to the Americans. The youths were arrested, and around 10 of them were hanged. The Taliban is also shutting down cell-phone networks after dark in an effort to prevent villagers from alerting coalition forces to the insurgents’ locations.
The Taliban has reason to fear such exposure by the local population. As a result of these tip-offs, the insurgents have lost scores of midlevel commanders to coalition antiterrorist operations over the past few months. Now the question is: has the WikiLeaks leak ruined that cooperation? Or will locals continue to undermine the Taliban at the risk of their own lives?
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/02/taliban-seeks-vengeance-in-wake-of-wikileaks.html