The Best Kept Secret in Fantasy Football

Jene Bramel writes for Footballguys.com, an encyclopedic resource for fantasy football knowledge.

Most fantasy football owners use lineups dominated by offensive positions. It’s easy to see why. Television cameras follow the offensive players and the football from the snap of the ball until the whistle is blown. Maybe more important, a majority of early fantasy football leagues were based on touchdowns and offensive yards because those stats could be tracked on television and in the newspaper box scores we relied upon to score games before the Internet revolutionized fantasy football.

Unfortunately, those factors keep many fantasy football players blind to the best kept secret in the game: individual defensive players.

If you’re not using individual defensive players (IDP), you’ve limited the potential player pool by over 50 percent. You’re passing on the excitement of rooting for a DeMarcus Ware sack to give you a victory on “Monday Night Football.” You’re missing the added rush when Darrelle Revis picks off a pass or when Ray Lewis makes another big hit. You’re having half the fun.

Though IDP leagues have exploded in popularity over the past decade, only one in five fantasy leagues (according to a top league management software site) use IDPs and enjoy the full fantasy football experience. The reliability and availability of defensive statistics have made scoring and following defensive players much easier in recent seasons, but many fantasy owners are still wary of introducing defensive players to their leagues. They worry that IDPs score too randomly or inconsistently on a weekly and yearly basis or that great defenders make bad IDP starters while average defenders too often become stud IDP starters.
Those worries are easily put to rest.

1. IDPs do not score more randomly than offensive players.
 
The most common argument against using IDPs is that the top scoring defensive players change too much from week to week and season to season, making the success or failure of your team too dependent on luck. In fact, defensive players do remain consistent from week to week and season to season. The percentage of defensive linemen and linebackers that repeat as fantasy starters the following year is nearly equal to the number of quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers and tight ends that do so. When you consider that the pool of N.F.L. defensive starters is deeper than the pool of N.F.L. offensive starters, IDPs are every bit as consistent from season to season.

The very best IDPs have a below-average week three to five times a season. That may sound high, but Chris Johnson and Adrian Peterson both had three well-below-average games last season. Larry Fitzgerald and Andre Johnson each had a similar number of disappointing weeks. That variability is even more pronounced in non-PPR leagues. The comparison also holds with lesser starters.

Much of the “randomness” in the week-to-week and season-to-season differences in top offensive players comes from matchup, depth chart, coaching and coordinator changes. The same differences affect defensive players. Understanding the impact of those changes and correctly predicting how they affect player value is possible on both sides of the ball.

2. Good N.F.L. offensive players can also sometimes be poor fantasy players. 

It is true that, without a tweak or two to your scoring system, a shutdown cornerback like Nnamdi Asomugha or a Pro Bowl nose tackle like Pat Williams will not be as valuable in IDP fantasy football as they are to their teams on Sundays. But that’s not exclusive to defensive players. Kevin Faulk has long been a critical part of the Patriots’ passing down packages but never more than an afterthought in fantasy leagues. Lorenzo Neal was vital to the success of many stud fantasy running backs but was never worth a start himself. Lee Evans arguably has the talent to be a top-20 fantasy receiver but has yet to play on an offense that can provide enough quality targets. And one of the greatest N.F.L. quarterbacks was never more than a middling fantasy option; Emmitt Smith’s dominance in the red zone relegated Troy Aikman (who never threw for more than 3,500 yards in a season and had only one season with more than 20 touchdown passes) to fantasy obscurity.

Faulk, Neal, Evans and Aikman are rightly considered exceptions on the offensive side. Asomugha and Williams are the same rare exceptions on the defensive side. By season’s end, Pro Bowl defensive talent like Jared Allen, Trent Cole, Julius Peppers, Patrick Willis, Ray Lewis, Jon Beason, Charles Woodson and Brian Dawkins will rank among the best IDPs. Like their offensive counterparts, the N.F.L.’s best defenders are more often than not top fantasy performers.

3. Poor defensive players aren’t more likely to be top IDP starters. 

A perfect situation – e.g., a bad offense allowing lots of snaps for its defense and a poor surrounding cast leading to lots of opportunity – sometimes elevates a mediocre N.F.L. defensive player to IDP stardom. Players like Kirk Morrison and Gibril Wilson are certainly valued more by their fantasy owners than their N.F.L. teams. Similar situations occur with offensive players. For every Gibril Wilson, there’s a Bernard Berrian or Eddie Royal. For every Kirk Morrison, there’s a Matt Forte or Steve Slaton. Both sides of the ball have their outliers. But both sides of the ball will generally see the most talented rise to the top, while the less talented fall toward the bottom of the year-end rankings.

There is a learning curve involved in becoming a good IDP owner. You’ll need to learn which defensive roles provide the most opportunity. You’ll need to learn how to take advantage of whatever scoring system and lineup your IDP league decides to use. But the extra work will be worth it. Your eyes will be open to another side of the ball on game days. You’ll better understand football strategy – offensive and defensive.

If you’re interested in learning more about IDP leagues, two articles published at Footballguys.com can help flatten the learning curve for you. Incorporating IDP Concepts is a quick introduction to all things IDP, and Breaking Down Defenses by the longtime IDP guru John Norton is a beginner’s guide to understanding the differences between defensive fronts and the roles of each defensive position.

Try an IDP league this year. Your Sunday football experience will never be the same. And you’ll soon share my standard response to those who ask,
“Why IDP?”
“Why not IDP??”

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The Story Behind the Publication of WikiLeaks’s Afghanistan Logs

You wouldn’t be reading the coverage of the so-called Afghanistan logs—in The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian—if Nick Davies, a senior contributor to the British paper, hadn’t tracked down WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Brussels one month ago.

Davies’s interest had been piqued in mid-June when Bradley Manning, a junior army intelligence analyst and the alleged source of several high-profile WikiLeaks disclosures, was quoted in chat transcripts claiming to have leaked a voluminous amount of yet-to-be disclosed diplomatic cables.

Whatever Assange had, and whomever its source, Davies knew that WikiLeaks would publish again—and hoped to convince him to let The Guardian look at any future release before WikiLeaks splashed it on its own site.

After e-mails to Assange’s listed accounts netted nothing, Davies contacted a half dozen people close to him, hoping to reach and woo Assange. One of them came back with a tip that a skittish Assange planned to honor a commitment to speak before the European parliament on Tuesday, June 21, despite the cries of “manhunt” surrounding him. Davies asked The Guardian’s Brussels reporter to corner Assange and tell him that he was on his way.

“While I was on the train going under the Channel, I had tried to work out what I would say to him,” remembers Davies. “It wasn’t going to work if I said ‘I’m a greedy reporter, I’d like to take all your information and put it in my newspaper.’”

Instead, Davies planned to tell Assange that The Guardian would allocate a team to identify stories in WikiLeaks’s unreleased documents that would benefit from careful research, some of which his paper would report out and some that could be parceled to other outlets. On June 22, during a six hour coffee-soaked meeting in a Brussels café, Davies says Assange suggested another idea—that The Guardian and The New York Times be given an advance look at some information the site had on the Afghanistan war, with each paper publishing their own takes on the documents. Within the next twenty-four hours, Davies says Assange told him Der Spiegel should be included as well.

Davies thought it unwise from a security standpoint to share Assange’s offer via the phone. Early Wednesday morning, Davies says he trained back to England to notify Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian’s editor in chief, who, in turn, called Bill Keller and, later, Mathias Müller Von Blumencron, top editors at The New York Times and Der Spiegel.

Rusbridger says he informed Keller of the terms of the deal: Though there was no fixed date of publication, WikiLeaks would agree to keep the documents under wraps for a term of “a few weeks.” All the organizations would publish simultaneously with WikiLeaks, once it determined the final publication date. The date had to work for the weekly Der Spiegel and the daily print outlets; it was eventually set for 10pm London time, Sunday, July 25. (Rusbridger says that as the organizations grappled with “the amount of work required to make sense of the material” Assange was asked, and agreed, to push back an earlier deadline. Davies pegs this delay as about a week.)

Meanwhile, in Washington, Times reporter Eric Schmitt had just returned from a reporting trip to Iraq. Dean Baquet, his bureau chief, advised him of a quick turnaround to undertake a “special project” in London. Schmitt says he was briefed by Keller, and touched down in London late Saturday, June 26. After a Sunday lunch with David Leigh, The Guardian’s investigations editor, Schmitt was shown to a room that the journalists analyzing the documents would come to call “the bunker.”

The room—tucked away on a floor used by The Guardian’s advertising staff, deliberately out of view of curious newsroom eyes—featured two rows of a half-dozen or so desks, facing each other. A floor to ceiling window looked across The Guardian’s office building.

Davies was having further discussions with Assange in Stockholm, and, until Monday when he joined the staff in the bunker, was somewhat out of touch with the effort he had kicked off in London.
“At this stage, we were still working in this state of anxiety, and I was not having phone calls with the U.K. If the NSA and our GCHQ were doing their jobs, they should have been trying to figure out what WikiLeaks would leak next,” says Davies.

When John Goetz, a Der Spiegel reporter, was first told of the invitation to come to London, the atmospherics were similar.

“My boss said there was an exciting project with a lot of secrecy. We weren’t supposed to talk on the phone,” remembers Goetz. “There was a lot of stuff that wasn’t clear. At that point, there was a real concern about security. You couldn’t write e-mails, and people were talking about encrypted phones.”
Goetz arrived at the bunker on Wednesday, June 30. That afternoon, Assange came too.

Assange, in the wake of Manning’s detention, feared that he or others involved with WikiLeaks might be arrested or face other hostile action. If that had happened, some of the reporters had the impression that Assange was ready to publish the documents on the WikiLeaks site immediately, whether the print outlets were ready or not.

“In the beginning, it felt like we had to be very fast about this,” says Davies.

While in the bunker, the reporters searched a raw dataset on Apple computers provided by The Guardian. They began to sort through the documents, trying to find the most noteworthy stories hidden among them.
“At this point it was a huge Excel spreadsheet,” says Schmitt. “For some weird reason, the data started in January of ‘04 and it ended in like April of ’09. And we couldn’t figure out why does it end there? Assange later comes and says it doesn’t end there—you just gotta open up a new screen or whatever… It was clear that we were going to need some technical assistance here.”

The Guardian’s computer staff attempted to make the database easier to manage, but Schmitt soon decided that he had to get a copy of the documents back to New York. WikiLeaks and the Times’s technical staff cooperated on a method to securely transfer the information back to a New York Times computer assisted reporting team.

With copies of the data outside the bunker, there wasn’t much reason for Schmitt and Goetz to stay in London. They left on Friday. (Schmitt never returned, but Goetz made two further trips to London with a colleague, in part to interview Assange, who had stayed on in England, at one point sleeping on Davies’s Sussex sofa.)

But from Wednesday until their departures, the journalists had collaborated on feeling out what was in the logs.

“Everyone was autisticly connected to their screen,” says Goetz. “The whole time, we’re going through, talking out loud, saying ‘I found this, I found that.’”

Before leaving, reporters from the three outlets sat down and divvied up some tasks. Der Spiegel offered to check the logs against incident reports submitted by the German army to their parliament—partly as story research, partly to check their authenticity—and to share their findings. Davies, Goetz, Leigh, and Schmitt brainstormed about fifteen topic areas for which The New York Times’s computer assisted reporting team would try to find relevant logs to be shared with the group. Der Spiegel and The Guardian did their own searching, and also shared fruitful results, search terms, and methods.

“You get to the point where all three organizations have the same material under that heading, and each of us goes off separately to write our copy,” says The Guardian’s Davies. “I thought that collaboration was really rather heartwarming, and unusual.”

Although Assange has since spoken in a way that could suggest WikiLeaks was a journalistic collaborator in the effort, the traditional journalists don’t agree with that description.

At a press conference on Monday, Assange said that, along with The Guardian, “we had Der Spiegel and New York Times and us in a collaborative basement, if you like, working on this material.” The WikiLeaks website speaks of the three outlets as its “media partners.”

“I’ve seen Julian Assange in the last couple of days kind of flouncing around talking about this collaboration like the four of us were working all this together,” says Schmitt. ”But we were not in any kind of partnership or collaboration with him. This was a source relationship. He’s making it sound like this was some sort of journalistic enterprise between WikiLeaks, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, and that’s not what it was.”

“He was in and out,” says Schmitt. “He’d come and you’d ask him questions about certain types of data, and certain questions—some of them he answered and some of them he didn’t. Where did you get this material? He wouldn’t answer that. Did it come from Bradley Manning? He didn’t answer that. What else may be coming? He’d be very coy about these things.”

John Goetz says he, Eric Schmitt, and Nick Davies shared two dinners outside the building with Assange during the time they were all in London; one time where they joined by other staffers from The Guardian for Chinese food.

“It was just a continuation of the work,” remembers Goetz, adding that the dinners were full of “talk about stuff we had seen, stuff we thought was interesting, the date issue, all of the above… It’s not like we went to dinner and stopped talking about our common project.”

“There’s a really interesting collaboration between the three news organizations. But Julian, he’s a source,” says Davies. “All three media organization interviewed him in order to be able to write a profile of him, explain various things about the material, challenge him on various points. So he was there for that function.”
Goetz and Davies also say they had conversations with Assange encouraging him to be careful about the lethal harm that could come to people identified in the logs if he released certain documents unredacted.
While the frequent information sharing, which continued long after the group split geographically, gave the outlets some idea of what each was working on, no one was let in on specific stories. Nor were drafts or copy shared.

“Sunday night, when it all went online at 10 o’clock in the evening U.K. time, we were sitting there saying ‘What has Eric written? What’s Goetz written?’” says Davies.

The packages provided a detailed, contextualized analysis of the originally unwieldy and confusing database with which that the reporters had originally been provided. Davies says ensuring that the reporting power of these high-profile newsrooms was brought to bear on the logs was exactly, back in Belgium a month ago, what Assange had said he hoped for by providing the outlets an advance look, instead of following WikiLeaks’s usual past practice of simply uploading the once-secret documents to their own site.

“I remember one of the things he said was that there was a problem when you put raw material on a Web site—each individual news organization says ‘Well we’re not going to invest weeks trying to make sense of that, because for all we know, another media organization over the hill is already doing that. And two days before we’re ready to go, they’ll go, and all our effort will be wasted,’” says Davies. “He isn’t just putting it out there for the sake of it. He’s putting it out there because he wants the world to understand whatever the subject of the information is. And our operation has hugely increased that possibility.”

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The End of the Fox News Era?

The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American politics. This is not, as the now trivialized phrase has it, a “teachable moment.” It is a time for action. 

The mainstream media and the Obama administration alike must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its own propaganda to be accepted as news by persuading traditional journalists that “fairness” requires treating extremist rants as “one side of the story.”

And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama, and against progressives in this year’s election.

The administration’s response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. The obsession with “protecting” the president turned out to be the least protective approach of all.

The first reaction of the Obama team was not to question, let alone challenge, the video. Instead, it assumed that whatever narrative Fox News might create mattered more than anything else, including the possible innocence of a human being outside the president’s inner circle. She could be sacrificed without a thought.

Obama complained on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack “jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.” But it’s his own apparatus that turned “this media culture” into a false god.

Yet the Obama team was reacting to a reality: the bludgeoning of mainstream journalism into looking timorously over its right shoulder and believing that “balance” demands taking seriously whatever sludge the far right is pumping into the political waters.

This goes way back. Al Gore never actually said he “invented the Internet,” but you could be forgiven for not knowing this because the mainstream media kept reporting he had.

There were no “death panels” in the Democratic health care bills. But this false charge got so much coverage that last August, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 45 percent of Americans thought the reform proposals would likely allow “the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly.” That was the summer when support for reform was dropping precipitously. A straight-out lie influenced the course of one of our most important debates.

The traditional media are so petrified of being called “liberal” that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines.

Thus did Andrew Alexander, The Washington Post’s ombudsman, ask why the paper had been slow to report on, as he put it, “the Justice Department’s decision to scale down a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party.”

Never mind that this is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who stopped no one from voting. It was aimed at doing what the doctored video Breitbart posted set out to do: persuade Americans that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.

And never mind that, to her great credit, Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, dismissed the case and those pushing it. “This doesn’t have to do with the Black Panthers,” she told Politico’s Ben Smith. “This has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration.”

Instead, the media are supposed to take seriously the charges of J. Christian Adams, who served in the Bush Justice Department. He’s a Republican activist going back to the Bill Clinton era. His party services included time as a Bush poll watcher in Florida in 2004, when on one occasion he was involved in a controversy over whether a black couple could cast a regular ballot.

Now, Adams is accusing the Obama Justice Department of being “motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law.”

This is racially inflammatory, politically motivated nonsense—and it’s nonsense even if Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh talk about it a thousand times a day. When an outlandish charge for which there is no evidence is treated as an on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand issue, the liars win.

The Sherrod case should be the end of the line. If Obama hates the current media climate, he should stop overreacting to it. And the mainstream media should stop being afraid of insisting upon the difference between news and propaganda.

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Reuters Gets a Wall Street Take on Elizabeth Warren

What would it sound like on Wall Street if we got a regulator like, say, Elizabeth Warren, who is resolutely not captured by the industry she regulates?
Something like sputtering rage:

“I get disgusted every time I hear her speak. It’s like she’s sitting in some ivory tower, not understanding the ramifications of anything she says,” said Anton Schutz, president of Mendon Capital Advisors. “Any person you put in that role really ought to have some industry experience.”

Reuters gets that gem of a quote in a story today headlined “Wall Street loathing for Warren lifts regulator bid.”

Even better, it directly offsets it with a great quote explaining that worldview:

Her supporters call Warren’s critics insincere in citing a lack of “banking experience.”

“What they mean is a certain kind of ‘experience’. Traditionally bank regulators have often come from K street (lobbying) law firms working on banking law for banks,” said Travis Plunkett, legislative director of the Consumer Federation of America, who has worked with Warren for decades.

It gets another on-the-record quote:

“I don’t think she can run that new agency in a fair, balanced way where she can listen to all the constituencies, not just the consumer advocates,” said Alan Kaplinsky, a lawyer for Ballard Spahr, who advises banks and consumer financial companies.

And here’s the kicker:

A Republican aide, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said Republicans are looking for someone with more bank regulation and industry experience.

Naturally—and not necessarily in that order.
How dangerous would a Warren be to these guys’ interests? See this Barney Frank quote:

House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, one of her most ardent supporters, told Reuters in an interview that he wants banks to make less profit from things like overdraft fees and more from lending. “I would like to impinge on bank profits in this area,” Frank said.

Anyone who doesn’t think that bank profitability is the paramount consideration for a regulator is a blasphemer on Wall Street—and Warren’s our foremost heretic.

If she’s actually picked and confirmed (hardly an odds-on bet in an administration that picked Geithner and renominated Bernanke), this will be a fun story to cover.

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WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange: "Transparent Government Tends to Produce Just Government"

We spend the hour with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, talking about the biggest leak in US history: the release of more than 91,000 classified military records on the war in Afghanistan. As the Pentagon announces it is launching a criminal probe into who leaked the documents, Assange asks what about investigating the "war crimes" revealed in the leaked military records? He also talks about the media, why he isn’t coming to the US anytime soon, and what gives him hope. "What keeps us going is our sources. These are the people, presumably, who are inside these organizations, who want change," Assange says. "They are both heroic figures taking much greater risks than I ever do, and they are pushing and showing that they want change in, in fact, an extremely effective way."



Guest:

Julian Assange, founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks

Related stories

• Guardian Editor on Coverage of Afghan War Logs: European Audience "Troubled More...by the Toll this War is Taking on Innocent People"
• WikiLeaks Founder Says "Evidence of War Crimes" in Afghan War Logs, White House Downplays Leak, Claiming "No Broad New Revelations"
• The New Pentagon Papers: WikiLeaks Releases 90,000+ Secret Military Documents Painting Devastating Picture of Afghanistan War
• "WikiLeaks Is Not One Person...We Are All the Threat"–Hacker Magazine Editor Says WikiLeaks Is Bigger Than Julian Assange
• Fmr. Marine, State Dept. Official Matthew Hoh is First U.S. Official to Resign Over Afghan War

AMY GOODMAN: On Capitol Hill, the House has voted to approve an additional $37 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The measure passed by a vote of 308 to 114. A hundred two Democrats joined twelve Republicans in opposing the bill. Last year, only thirty-two Democrats voted against the war funding. A number of Democrats voting against said they were influenced by the revelations in the massive archive of the leaked military records published by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks Sunday. The more than 91,000 classified military records paint a devastating picture of the war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, how a black ops special forces unit hunts down targets for assassination or detention without trial, and how Pakistan is fueling the insurgency. The war spending now goes to President Obama for his signature.

On Tuesday, Obama made his first public comment on the leaks. The President spoke at the Rose Garden after a meeting with congressional leaders to discuss the war funding.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I also urged the House leaders to pass the necessary funding to support our efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I know much has been written about this in recent days as a result of the substantial leak of documents from Afghanistan covering a period from 2004 to 2009. While I’m concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations, the fact is these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate on Afghanistan. Indeed, they point to the same challenges that led me to conduct an extensive review of our policy last fall.

So let me underscore what I’ve said many times: for seven years, we failed to implement a strategy adequate to the challenge in this region, the region from which the 9/11 attacks were waged and other attacks against the United States and our friends and allies have been planned. That’s why we’ve substantially increased our commitment there, insisted upon greater accountability from our partners in Afghanistan and Pakistan, developed a new strategy that can work, and put in place a team, including one of our finest generals, to execute that plan. Now we have to see that strategy through.

And as I told the leaders, I hope the House will act today to join the Senate, which voted unanimously in favor of this funding, to ensure that our troops have the resources they need and that we’re able to do what’s necessary for our national security.


AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, the man President Obama tapped to head US Central Command and oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also denounced the leaks. General James Mattis was nominated to replace General David Petraeus. At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General Mattis was questioned by Arizona Republican John McCain.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: What effect does this publication of these top-secret communications—what effect does that have on the degree of candor that military officers and senior NCOs in the field, who are doing their best to report, the best of their ability, what effect does this have on them?

GEN. JAMES MATTIS: Sir, I would speculate that due to the urgency of the operations in a combat zone, it probably won’t have much, because at the moment they’re actually reporting, they’re probably more eager to get the truth up the chain of command. That said, I just thought it was a—just an appallingly irresponsible act to release this information. It didn’t tell us anything, that I’ve seen so far, that we weren’t already aware of. I’ve seen no big revelations. One of the newspaper headlines was that it’s a—the war is a tense and dangerous thing. Well, if that is news, I don’t know who it’s news to that’s on this planet.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: But there is also reports that certain elements of ISI are at least cooperating to some extent with the Taliban. Is that correct?

GEN. JAMES MATTIS: That’s correct, yes, sir.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: And could that be because they’re hedging their bets as to whether the United States is going to remain or not?

GEN. JAMES MATTIS: Sir, I need to get more current. However, history didn’t start at 2001, and some of those same groups we had a relationship with back when we were fighting the Soviets. So it’s no surprise to me that there may be some continued relationship there, but whether or not it’s because they’re working with them, they’re trying to infiltrate them, there’s any number of motives, and I’m just not current enough to say why. I think, though, that it’s hard to wipe the slate clean and just start over at any one point. And clearly, the offensive against many of the people they allegedly used to work with is showing they’re no longer friends with most of them.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: And let me just be clear again. You said that you were appalled at the publication of these—that the WikiLeaks—that just happened?

GEN. JAMES MATTIS: Yes, sir. I thought it was grossly irresponsible.


AMY GOODMAN: General James Mattis speaking at his confirmation hearing to head US Central Command.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has announced it’s launching a criminal investigation into the source of the leak. Private Bradley Manning is a person of interest in the probe. He’s the Army intelligence analyst arrested last month on charges of leaking a military video of the helicopter gunship attack in Baghdad that killed twelve people. He was charged this month with downloading more than 150,000 classified diplomatic cables.

Well, today we spend the hour with the founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. He says it’s the crimes documented in the records that should be investigated. He joined us yesterday from London for an extended interview about leaking the Afghan war logs, the media, why he isn’t coming to the United States anytime soon, and what gives him hope.

I began by asking Julian Assange what he thought of the most important revelations in the 91,000 documents he published on Sunday, the biggest leak in US history.

JULIAN ASSANGE: So, everyone’s asking for a specific revelation that is the most important—you know, a massacre of 500 people at one point in time. But, to me, what is most important is the vast sweep of abuses that have occurred during the past six years, the vast sweep of sort of the everyday squalor and carnage of war. If we add all that up, we see that in fact most civilian casualties occur in incidences where one, two, ten or twenty people are killed. And they really numerically dominate the list of events, so it’s, of course, hard for us to imagine that. It’s so much material. But that is the way to really understand this war, is by seeing that there is one sort of kill after another every day going on and on and on in all sorts of different circumstances.

AMY GOODMAN: You have said you feel there is evidence of war crimes here. Can you talk about that? And specifically, what are the examples that you feel are the most important?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah. Yeah, well, these reports can be quite terse, so I wouldn’t want to prejudge the issue and say for sure that a war crime has committed—been committed. But some are deeply suspicious, and there are examples which have been not mentioned in the Western press but, as we’ve discovered, have been mentioned elsewhere that are almost surely war crimes.

As an example, in the material, there’s a Polish My Lai. Polish troops were hit by an IED and the next day went to the closest village, which I guess they felt had supported the IED attack, and shelled the village. Similarly, we see something like Task Force 373, a special forces assassination squad so secretive that it changes its military code name every six months, working its way down the JPEL, Joint Priority Effects List, kill or capture list, usually a kill list. And we have seen events where it has performed secret missile strikes on a house, from within close proximity, and ended up killing at least seven children, and a number of other incidences. The report itself about that says at the beginning that the information about 373 being involved in that event, together with the use of the HIMARS missile system, this ground-to-ground missile attack, is to be kept secret even from other people in the coalition of forces which equal ISAF, I-S-A-F.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel you have accomplished what you wanted to with the release of these documents?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Not yet. We’ve made a good initial forray: fourteen pages in The Guardian on Monday, seventeen pages in Der Spiegel, front page of the New York Times, together with underlying support. But altogether, the journalistic coalition that we put around this material to try and bring it out to the public and get impact for it has read about 2,000 of these reports in detail. There’s 91,000 reports. We really need the public, other journalists and especially former soldiers to go through this material and say, "Look, this connects to that," or "I was there. Let me tell you what really happened. Let me tell you the rest of the detail." And over the next few days, we’ll be putting up easier- and easier-to-use search interfaces, the same ones that our journalistic teams use to extract this data. Already if you go to war diaries—wardiary.wikileaks.org, you’ll see several different ways of browsing through this. You can look through some 200 different categories that the US military applied to these reports. As an example, there’s 2,200 escalation of force events self-described by the US military.

You have to be careful when reading the material. Reports that are made by military units that were involved in an attack or a counterattack are often biased, just like we know that when a police officer is involved in a shooting and creates the report about that shooting, the facts are likely to be distorted or twisted. Similarly, when a military unit is involved in killing someone who turns out to be a civilian, we see lots of exculpatory language or hiding of facts. And where we know an additional sort of public record or a full investigation has occurred, as an example Kunduz, the bombing that occurred in 2005 which especially the German press investigated in great detail, we can go back and see the initial report that the troops filed about what they did, and we see, instead of civilian kills, no mentions of civilians at all. Instead of over a hundred people killed, we just see fifty-six. And we can see that in report after report. So the sort of corrupt reporting starts on the ground and then moves its way up through the Pentagon and the press relations people and is then put into a politically sort of digestible form. But what you don’t see straightaway is a sort of contradiction by the base material and what is put out in public, although we are starting to see that in different events. But because this internal military reporting specifies where an event happened, which units were involved and when, and were done sort of on the same day, why there is simple cover-ups. They cannot be complex cover-ups in this material. So, by joining together several of these reports together with the public record, we’ve been able to discover the material of the sort of civilian casualty cover-ups or the involvement with the ISI and the Taliban that the New York Times published. We’ve been able to bring this material out, even though any individual report can’t be strictly trusted.


AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange. We’ll be back with the founder of WikiLeaks in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to my interview with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.

AMY GOODMAN: The New York Times says it consulted with the White House, showed them the documents to, oh, redact whatever would endanger people, sources on the ground. How have you—or I should say, Julian Assange, have you communicated with the White House at this point?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, there’s quite some disingenuous messages coming out of the White House in relation to the lead-up to publication. Our media team didn’t want to all be stepping on each other’s toes, so we selected the New York Times to be the group that would approach the White House and try and get what their statement was on the matter. That said, you know, there is a bit of a difference between how the Times and the Washington Post was involved in this issue. But how the American press tends to deal with government agencies prior to publication and the standards that we have and the standards the European press has, we don’t see that an organization that is—we don’t see, in the case of a story where an organization has engaged in some kind of abusive conduct and that story is being revealed, that it has a right to know the story before the public, a right to know the story before the victims, because we know that what happens in practice is that that is just extra lead time to spin the story. And we see some sort of pathetic attempts by the White House to engage in a bit of spin about whether we contacted them or not. In fact, we did contact them through the New York Times as a coalition.

AMY GOODMAN: And they praised the New York Times.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes, they praised the New York Times. I mean, you have to understand, the New York Times is a mainstream organization, and it does work within a particular milieu and particular constraints that appear to be present. But we aren’t totally happy about the way that the Times has sort of defensively written. That does seem a little bit unprofessional. So, as an example, the New York Times stated that it chose not to link to our website. I mean, it is just ridiculous. The public can see that and Google it, if they want. If the New York Times, for whatever reason, wants to not link to WikiLeaks for its own defensive politics, then it can do that, and it’s perfectly entitled to. But to deliberately say that that is being avoided smacks of unprofessional conduct, to me. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s been approved by the editor to do that, but it does seem to be quite pusillanimous to be engaging in that kind of defensive conduct, instead of pursuing the real meat of the story.

AMY GOODMAN: But it is WikiLeaks that reached out to these three news organizations—Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times—to release simultaneously on Sunday these secret documents, is that right?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes, that’s right. Our promise to our source is that we will try and get the maximum possible impact for their material. And we could see that this was an issue where we could actually pull together a coalition of both influential media organizations and media organizations which have the capacity to engage in some research. That was a—in itself, that’s an unusual collaboration to have brought together these four groups, have them exchanging research data, and all agree on the same publication timeline.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, you mentioned your sources. Who are your sources?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, obviously, we can’t say, as an organization that specializes in source protection. We are also obligated, under the Swedish Constitution’s right to anonymity, to not reveal our sources. Revealing our sources is, in fact, a criminal offense in Sweden. And also, that holds for our contractors and computer programmers. Now, that said, we can see that the material did come from the United States government somewhere. And that’s obvious from some of the other material that we have put out over the years. It’s one of the hopeful things about these sort of publications, is that it’s not just us exposing abuses of war, it’s not just us exposing corruption in Africa; rather, it is insiders who are men or women of good conscience who are deciding to help expose the situation, because they want their own organizations to be reformed. So there are good people within the United States government, and supportive of us and our ideals, and those people step forward to make events like this a reality. Now remember, we have put in a lot of work into this, and we have had some legal and surveillance difficulties in the past few months, but the real heroes behind this material is, of course, our sources.

AMY GOODMAN: The Pentagon has announced it is starting a criminal investigation to find your sources. Your response to that?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes. We are concerned that the United States has not announced that it is going to conduct criminal investigations into the large number of previously undisclosed civilian casualty events that are revealed by this material. Why is it that an investigation is announced to go into the source, before an investigation is announced to deal with the potentially criminal conduct that is revealed by this material? The rest of the world is taking note. There’s fourteen pages in Monday’s Guardian newspaper, nearly—more than one-third of the entire paper dedicated to this issue; seventeen pages in Der Spiegel, the most influential publication in Germany. So, Europe is certainly taking note of the tenor that is coming out of the White House and to concrete reactions coming out of this material. It’s clear what the European population wants to see, and hopefully that’s also what the US population wants to see, which is a clear response to deal with the problems that are occurring in Afghanistan, not a clear response to try and stifle or cover up further allegations of abuse.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, in a memo, a US government secret memo that WikiLeaks posted in March, marked "unauthorized disclosure subject to criminal sanctions," it concludes, quote, "'WikiLeaks.org represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, OPSEC and INFOSEC threat to the U.S. Army'—or, in plain English, a threat to Army operations and information." Can you respond to this?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah. This was a 2008 counterintelligence analysis of us by the US Army. Now, some thirty-two pages—and these initial headers, you don’t need to worry about. In order for a counterintelligence agent to be writing a report—analyst to be writing a report about anything, they have to justify why they are writing a report with language like that, and the same with the conclusions.

Now, what’s more interesting about that report is the middle. It says that—it recommends that we be attacked by destroying our center of gravity—that is, the trust that confidential sources have in us and the trust that the public has in the integrity of the material that we release. It goes on to explain examples of why we maybe should be attacked. And those examples are examples which have embarrassed the US military, revelations of abuses at Guantanamo Bay, abuses in Fallujah, and potentially illegal use of small chemical weapons in Iraq. Now, it says that one of the ways of attacking that center of gravity is by publicly prosecuting whistleblowers. It even uses that word, "whistleblower," not US military personnel or other personnel who are engaging in irresponsible leaking, but rather whistleblowers, people who are blowing the whistle on abuse. Now, we don’t know whether the recommendations of that report were treated seriously or were followed. It’s quite possible that the analyst who wrote that report was not treated seriously, was viewed as politically too hard to go after us in that way. But it is concerning that that intelligence analyst felt that the US Army culture was such that it was even acceptable to produce a report like that about press criticism and how to stop it.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, what about your safety? Daniel Ellsberg, the most famous whistleblower in America, who released the Pentagon Papers, expressed concern about your safety. Can you talk specifically about what the US government has done, in relation to the Australian government and in other ways, in dealing with you?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah. So, some months—well, between one and two months ago, there were concerning noises coming out of the US administration that we were aware of from our sources there. And I was given warnings, by Sy Hersh and other people who are connected to that world, to watch my back. Subsequently, we have discovered that the US administration, according to a well-placed Australian national security journalist and former diplomat, that an approach was made to Australian intelligence by the US for them to conduct extensive surveillance and possibly raids or detainment of our people in Australia. That was largely rejected, according to this reporter, by the Australian government for political reasons. It’s quite sensitive for the Australian government to engage in a cooperation that would lead to an Australian citizen, especially an Australian journalist, ending up in an overseas prison or being prosecuted in some way. Within the United Kingdom, of course, there is fairly extensive surveillance of political people, people who are viewed as politically sensitive in the United Kingdom. That said, we do have extensive political and media support here. And I would be extremely surprised to see any aggressive action by intelligence within the UK or by overseas intelligence operating within the United Kingdom. I think that would be unlikely to be tolerated.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian, do you feel you can come into the United States?

JULIAN ASSANGE: My legal advice is to not attend the United States, and I cancelled three media appearances in the United States, including at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Las Vegas. Now, on that same panel that I was due to speak at was Valerie Plame, the former CIA officer, but also Scott Risen, a New York Times reporter who wrote a book—

AMY GOODMAN: James Risen.

JULIAN ASSANGE: —revealing some—I’m sorry, yes, James Risen, who wrote a book revealing some details of some bungled CIA operations. He also did not speak at that panel for legal reasons relating to protecting his sources.

AMY GOODMAN: Congress is now rushing to pass a critical war-financing bill, reportedly as early as today, fearing disclosures could stoke antiwar sentiment in this country, the WikiLeak exposures. Your response to this?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Congress should understand that, as a result of these exposures and what seems to be a general shift in feeling about the war in Afghanistan, that the population is watching intensely to what will happen. So I would ask that those—that war bill of $60 billion worth of funding have its proper airing. If it doesn’t, we may be pushed into a position where this past nine years will extend possibly another nine. Maybe right now is the moment to try and restructure this war in Afghanistan. It’s clear that there’s no easy way out of the conflict, but it is also clear that the war is escalating on all sides, that the number of kills going up, both civilian and military, is unsustainable. Something has to change, and it might as well be now. And the funding bill can be used as that moment where change has to happen.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, I’d like you to respond quickly to the responses of the administration, of the Obama administration: one, that this is old news, that it goes until December '09, exactly when the Obama administration changed its policy with the surge.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, so, this is a bit of rhetorical trickery by the White House. The material goes to December 31, ’09, so it's valid up to the beginning of 2010, for a six-year period. So it does cover a sweep of the war which hasn’t yet turned around. Now, Obama’s policy change came in on the 1st of December, so there is, in fact, an overlap. We can see some of what happens. But looking back through the data at successive policy changes—for example, the policy changes introduced by McChrystal—what we don’t see is a real change to how things happen on the ground. So a policy change is just words, but what actually happens on the ground, well, we can see it from this data. Very little happens. The US military and the soldiers in Afghanistan are a very, very big ship to turn around. Their interaction with that environment and with the Taliban and with the local population has its own dynamic that is independent to the policies that are tried—that people try and push down from on high. We can see that, as an example, when McChrystal tried to introduce more metrics, more measurements, of how civilian casualties were occurring. Fields pop up in the database around that time. But we see that troops that are causing civilian casualties simply don’t fill out that field, or they lie about whether the casualties have occurred, or they misrepresent whether it was a civilian casualty versus an insurgent casualty. That sort of—that culture and interaction between Taliban and US forces and other elements operating in Afghanistan is very difficult to change. And so, we don’t expect that the situation, as it stands now, some seven months after this data stopped being collected, would be that different to the previous six years, which we can see in the material that has been released.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, the charge that WikiLeaks releasing these documents is a threat to national security and people on the ground in Afghanistan?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, this is a nonsense. First of all, whenever we hear this term, "threat to national security," what are we talking about? It’s time people stop responding to that question, unless it’s well phrased. Do we mean the national security, the security of the entire nation of the United States? It is clearly an obvious nonsense that—probably almost any kind of information could be a threat to the national security of the United States. Now, do we mean threats to a few soldiers in Afghanistan? That is a more reasonable question and a serious one. Well, the material is seven months old. It doesn’t talk about particular movements of soldiers now or any ongoing sort of operation that’s going to occur, so it’s not of tactical significance. But it is of significance for investigators. It is of significance for understanding the broad sweep of what is happening in Afghanistan. Remember, it is this data that the US military uses internally to monitor the situation, that it uses to develop those aggregate figures about civilian casualties, Taliban, the ratio between killed and wounded, the ration between killed and detained over time. Now, all that original reporting, unmassaged by the Pentagon press office, is available to academics, historians and the general public to understand that war.


AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. I spoke to him yesterday in London. The war funding bill passed by the House last night. We’ll be back with Assange in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to my interview with the founder of WikiLeaks.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, the data that you—the documents you have withheld, is it some 15,000? And what are you planning to do with them?

JULIAN ASSANGE: That’s correct. It’s some 15,000 that sometimes mention the names of informers in Afghanistan. And because of the security situation there, we want to look at these in a bit more detail, with a bit closer scrutiny, before we release them. But we will release them as soon as possible. In the rare incidences where there are people named who are innocent informers, we will redact those names. And once the security situation in Afghanistan improves, we will release the full text of that material.

AMY GOODMAN: So you have released more than 91,000 documents, and you have 15,000 more to go?

JULIAN ASSANGE: There are more than 91,000 documents in the full collection that we shared with our media partners. We have released to the public about 76,000, and we will release another 15,000 over the coming months.

AMY GOODMAN: And those who say, particularly the Obama administration—Robert Gibbs, the spokesperson, said President Obama was alarmed by this release. Your response?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, organizations that we expose typically are alarmed by the material we release, that is true. Now, if we sort of dissect that, Robert Gibbs has not read this material in detail. The people who know it best at the moment are us and the three media organizations that we worked with. Other people talking about this really don’t know what they’re talking about.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned the Washington Post. Did you work with them in releasing these? They’re not included in those three newspapers.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, they’re not included, although we have had a subsequent overture from the Post. Last Monday, the Post produced some really quite fine work by Dana Priest, looking at the growth in the US sort of intelligence contractor industry. Approximately 900,000 people almost now have top-secret security clearances, according to the Post, and there’s almost a bit of a shadow state developing, which the rest of the community is not aware of the work of. That’s a good sign from the Post.

But we have seen other things that are a bit disturbing. For example, Dana Priest’s article on the CIA black sites had all the names of the countries removed from it after a request by the White House to the editors of the Post. Similarly, it is standard Washington Post practice, whenever Dana Priest is to reveal a new story showing significant allegations of abuse, say, by the CIA, to call up the press office the night before to give them the heads-up, as a courtesy move. That doesn’t seem like independent journalism to us. It seems to us that a journalist’s relationship should be with the public, on the one hand, and with their sources, on the other hand, who are providing them with information to give to the public. It seems that the Post is engaging in a sort of an unclear cooperation with the very organizations that it’s meant to be policing. So we’re a little bit hesitant about dealing with them.

But the recent Dana Priest article covering the extensive expanse of money going into the top-secret industry in the United States is encouraging. So perhaps, if that’s a sign of the movement by the Washington Post to a more combative form of journalism, then we would be happy to work with them.

AMY GOODMAN: The total history of the Afghan war, from 2004 to 2010, that you have released in these documents, what isn’t included? For example, US special forces, CIA?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah. Yeah, that’s an important question you raise. So it is not everything. It is most of what the regular Army was involved in, where they considered it important enough to report a significant action. So that is most deaths that the US Army was involved in, except for the ones that some units possibly didn’t report at all, because they were trying to cover it up. Now, it doesn’t include most special forces operations. It does include some, where the regular Army was also involved in the same operation. It doesn’t include CIA operations or CIA drone attacks, except, once again, occasionally where the regular Army was involved in that. It does include, interestingly, a number of US embassy cables that were sent to the Marines, intelligence and others who were working in Afghanistan, because the embassies believed that the information being revealed was relevant to the war in Afghanistan. It does include a number of reports by informers or reports by US intelligence on meetings with, say, governors in Afghanistan. There’s quite a lot of reports about corruption within the Afghani government, reports about drug eradication and poppy growing and so on.

AMY GOODMAN: Private contractors like Blackwater?

JULIAN ASSANGE: There are a number of references to private contractors, yes, and some reports fed into the system, not directly by private contractors, as far as we can tell, but by contact from private contractors to US Army or US Marines.

AMY GOODMAN: What has come of Bradley Manning, who has been arrested? Is it true that you are trying to raise money for his defense? Was he the source, as he said in his email back and forth, his chatting back and forth, of the video from July 12th, 2007, of the US military Apache helicopter opening fire on Iraqi civilians?

JULIAN ASSANGE: In relation to a military source, alleged military source, Bradley Manning, who has been charged with supplying—the charges don’t say to us, but supplying to someone the helicopter video showing the killing of two Reuters journalists in Baghdad in July 2007, he is now being held in Kuwait itself. A bit of a problem. Why isn’t he being held in the United States? Is it to keep him away from effective legal representation? Is it to keep him away from the press? We’re not sure. But there doesn’t seem to be any reason why he could not be transferred to the United States. We obviously cannot say whether he is our source. We in fact specialize in not knowing the names of our sources. But nonetheless, he is a young man being held in dire circumstances on the allegation that he supplied this material to the press, and we were the initial publisher of that Iraq video. So we are trying to raise money for his legal representation. We have committed $50,000 of our own funds, that if the general public could contribute or other people could contribute, I know that his military counsel would find that of significant value. The lawyers that we have spoken to say that his representation will cost $200,000, assuming that it’s a regular sort of trial, it goes ahead. People can go to bradleymanning.org, where there is a grassroots campaign that his friends and family and some internet activists have become involved to try and support him.

AMY GOODMAN: And for those who say you’re an antiwar campaigner, and so, though the documents aren’t suspect, because they’re clearly from the US government, your motives are, what is your response?

JULIAN ASSANGE: We have clearly stated motives, but they are not antiwar motives. We are not pacifists. We are transparency activists who understand that transparent government tends to produce just government. And that is our sort of modus operandi behind our whole organization, is to get out suppressed information into the public, where the press and the public and our nation’s politics can work on it to produce better outcomes.

AMY GOODMAN: And do you have more documents to release on Iraq?

JULIAN ASSANGE: We have an enormous backlog of documents, stemming all the way back to January. During the past six months, we have been concentrating on raising funds and dealing with just a few of our leaks and upgrading our infrastructure to deal with the worldwide demand. So that huge backlog is something that we are just starting to get through, and this latest Afghan leak is an example of that.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Julian Assange, I know you have to go, but what gives you hope? You face great risk. What keeps you going?

JULIAN ASSANGE: What keeps us going is our sources. These are the people, presumably, who are inside these organizations, who want change. They are both heroic figures taking much greater risks than I ever do, and they are pushing and showing that they want change in, in fact, an extremely effective way.

AMY GOODMAN: If people want to get you information, how do they do it?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Go to wikileaks.org, W-I-K-I-L-E-A-K-S-dot-O-R-G. In relation to this recent Afghan story, people should look at wardiary.wikileaks.org.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, the founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, speaking to us from London. The Pentagon says they’re opening a criminal investigation into who provided more than 91,000 Afghan war records to WikiLeaks. To get a copy of today’s interview, you can see also all our coverage of WikiLeaks, go to our website at democracynow.org.

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WSJ’s Stimulus-Debate Story is Debatable

The Wall Street Journal goes big with a story on the debate over stimulus spending. But the piece doesn’t deliver the punch it promises. Instead, there’s a lot of he-said, she-said, and even a sleepy dose of Keynes-said, Friedman-said.

All in all, there’s not much here to help readers understand what’s actually under debate and what’s not.
This is the headline:

Debate Heats Up Over Stimulus Spending

But the story starts to zig and zag, and makes it hard to tell if the debate that’s heating up is about the 2009 stimulus package, or whether to embark on a new one.
The lede left me expecting some real excitement:

Eighteen months after President Barack Obama administered a massive dose of spending increases and tax cuts to a weak economy, a brawl has broken out among economists and politicians about whether fiscal-stimulus medicine is curing the illness or making it worse.

Wow. A good, ole-fashioned (but just broken out) brawl. And, that lede suggests, perhaps some words of wisdom from that rare breed, an economist who things the stimulus made things worst.

‘Fraid not.

Actually, it’s hard to find much fresh blood in this economic argument. And it seems to wave the white flag on some of what it promised at the top:

Most mainstream economists agree on some points: The U.S. economy needed some kind of fiscal help in 2009 as the financial system teetered and the Federal Reserve pushed interest rates near zero. The deficit has to be reined in eventually, in part by restraining the growth of spending on health and other benefits. And developing a long-term plan to do so now would reduce risks of a future financial market calamity and help hold interest rates down.

OK, I get all that.
But then there’s this:

But today, neither side can say with certainty whether the latest stimulus worked, because nobody knows what would have happened in its absence.

That’s really trying to have it all ways at once—and reminds me of my daughter, whose new favorite response to almost any question is, “More or less.”

Is it really true that no one can say with certainty whether the latest stimulus worked? Or is it just that it’s hard to measure precisely how much it worked, and what would have happened without it?
As we’ve said before, figuring out good ways to cover the stimulus is harder than knowing that it needs to be covered. There’s a ton of data, heated debates about the economic differences between saving existing jobs and creating new ones, and a lot of plain political posturing. But you really can’t get good answers if you don’t ask meaningful questions.

It’s odd that this long WSJ story doesn’t mention something that got a decent amount of coverage last week, including on its own pages: what steps the Fed could take to help the economy if the outlook worsens.
Instead, there’s this, which gets presented as a bit of he-said, but really is a pretty widely held view:

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke backed fiscal stimulus in early 2009. Now he says the economy still needs fiscal stimulus, but says it must be accompanied with a credible plan to reduce future deficits. Like the Obama administration, he doesn’t think that plan should be implemented until the economy is on more solid footing.

By now, most readers will have given up on hopes of any brawling. Instead, there’s some pretty standard, and pretty staid, stuff:

Underlying the debate is a long-running argument about how much of a lift the government gets from spending more or taxing less.

The piece continues with a few old economic hands explaining long-held positions. For econ fun, there’s also a bit about a study written by Christina Romer, President Obama’s economic adviser, and her husband, about the positive effects of tax cuts—something that’s sure to come up again and again in the looming tax debate.
And in the category of econ drama, there’s this, after a mention of Romer’s argument that every dollar spent by the government created about $1.50 worth of demand:

Some economists say that’s too high. Valerie Ramey of the University of California at San Diego, initially thinking as a Keynesian, developed doubts after sifting through historical examples. During the military build-ups of World War II, the Korean War and the Reagan era, a dollar spent added roughly a dollar of growth, she says. Although Ms. Ramey supported stimulus in 2009 because the economy was so weak, she doesn’t advocate more now. “We just don’t have enough evidence to prove that it’s good.”

Cool. She changed her mind. But she’s still not arguing that stimulus didn’t work—she just doesn’t want to do more now.

“We just don’t have enough evidence,” Ramey said. Journal readers might be thinking the same thing.
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Thank God for the Whistle-Blowers

What WikiLeaks did was brilliant journalism, and the bleating critics from the president on down are revealing just how low a regard they have for the truth. As with Richard Nixon’s rage against the publication of the Pentagon Papers, our leaders are troubled not by the prospect of these revelations endangering troops but rather endangering their own political careers. It is our president who unnecessarily sacrifices the lives of our soldiers and not those in the press who let the public in on the folly of the mission itself.

What the documents exposed is the depth of chicanery that surrounds the Afghanistan occupation at every turn because we have stumbled into a regional quagmire of such dark and immense proportions that any attempt to connect this failed misadventure with a recognizable U.S. national security interest is doomed. What is revealed on page after page is that none of the local actors, be they labeled friend or foe, give a whit about our president’s agenda. They are focused on prizes, passions and causes that are obsessively homegrown.

Our fixation on al-Qaida has nothing to do with them. President Barack Obama’s top national security adviser admitted as much when he said last December that there were fewer than 100 of those foreign fighters left in Afghanistan. Those who do remain in the region are hunkered down in Pakistan, and as the leaked documents reveal, that nation is just toying with us by pretending to cooperate while its intelligence service continues to support our proclaimed enemies. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal made clear in his famous report, the battles in Afghanistan are tribal in nature and the agendas are local—be they about drugs, religion or the economic power of military blackmail. The documents contain a steady drumbeat of local hustles that are certainly deadly but rise to the level of a national security threat against the U.S. only when we insist on making their history our own.

It has ever been so with the Afghans, and our continued attempt to bend their passions to our purposes will always lead to horrid results. That is, in fact, just how their nation came to be the launching pad for the 9/11 attacks, which is the ostensible purpose of our occupation. We meddled in their history in a grand Cold War adventure to humble the Soviets by attacking the secular government in Kabul with which Moscow sided.

When presidential press secretary Robert Gibbs intones, “We are in this region of the world because of what happened on 9/11,” he is mouthing a dangerous half-truth. The opposite is the case: 9/11 happened because the U.S. was in the region, and not the other way around. Entanglement with Afghanistan has been based on a tissue of lies since day one, when Jimmy Carter first decided to throw in with the religious fanatics there, as current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates revealed in his 1996 memoir. Gates had served on Carter’s National Security Council and in his book exposed what the publisher touted as “Carter’s never-before revealed covert support to Afghan mujahedeen—six months before the Soviets invaded.”

Our government recruited terrorists from the Arab world to go to Afghanistan and fight in that holy war against godless communism with even greater enthusiasm during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who proclaimed the Muslim fanatics “freedom fighters.” As the 9/11 Commission report stated, those freedom fighters included Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks.

Three years before that attack, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, was asked in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur if he regretted “having given arms and advice to future terrorists,” and he answered: “What is most important to the history of the world? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

One of Carter’s advisers back then was Richard Holbrooke, now Obama’s top civilian adviser on Afghanistan. Clearly he knows quite a bit about stirring up Muslims, and someone should ask him about the brilliant decision to give heat-seeking Stinger rockets to those same fanatics who then turned them against our side, according to the recently disclosed documents. They never learn. It was Holbrooke who helped design the Vietnam-era assassination programs exposed in the Pentagon Papers and now replicated in the Afghanistan documents.

Thanks to Daniel Ellsberg, who risked much to make the record of the Vietnam War public, we learned about the madness that Holbrooke and others were creating. We should be grateful to the whistle-blowers who gave us the Afghanistan war documents for once again letting us in on the sick joke that passes for U.S foreign policy.

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Bubble Boys The WikiLeaks documents put an underreported war back on the nation’s radar. It doesn’t matter that the pundits are yawning.

The hardening conventional wisdom on the Afghanistan “war logs” is that they are not the Pentagon Papers. Nor are they, as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange rather grandiosely claimed, the equivalent of opening the Stasi archives. Having digested to varying degrees Sunday night’s breaking story—poring through what they can of the 92,000 raw documents as well as lengthy pieces based on those documents from The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian—columnists, pundits, and editorial boards emerged on Tuesday to roundly echo the line Robert Gibbs gave reporters Monday: “There weren’t any new revelations in the material.” So, let’s move on.

This “nothing to see here” assessment has been pushed in some prominent quarters—the Times’s op-ed page, aWall Street Journal editorial yesterday, and in much of The Washington Post’s Tuesday coverage. The central point is that even the reasonably informed newsreader would have been well aware of the revelations in those leaked documents that, the Guardian wrote, provided “a devastating portrait of the failing war”: the secret assassination squad, the collusion between the ISI and Taliban, the loss of civilian lives. This is simply war. And a war we’ve been reading about since 2001.

But in rushing to declare what the war logs are not, many in the media have been quick to pass over what they are. Or, at the very least, what they might be: If not something “new,” “shocking,” and Pentagon Paper-esque, certainly a trove of material to add texture, detail, and anecdote—in other words, reporting—to a war that, despite the good work of some brave and diligent correspondents, has gone largely underreported in recent years. To assume, as many commentators have, that the average reader is so well-versed in the Afghan war that nothing in the reports is revelatory, is perilous—and betrays the insider mentality that journalism too often suffers from. To assume further that they would not benefit from the extra information the reports provide—and the outlets to which the documents were leaked provided in synthesized form—seems to argue against the very idea of journalism.

Richard Cohen articulates the main criticism of the much-hyped leaks in a slightly snide column published in the Post yesterday (the paper’s front page story downplayed the leaks, “After war leak, anger but no calls for change.”)

The news in that massive data dump provided by the dauntingly mysterious WikiLeaks (who? what?) to one American and two European publications is that there is no news at all. We already knew that the war in Afghanistan was not going well. We already knew — or, in the words of the New York Times, “harbored strong suspicions” — that Pakistan’s military spy services was aiding the Taliban (with friends like this …) and we already knew that Afghanistan’s army and police would be reformed and able to stand up to the Taliban some time around when pigs fly and Washington balances the budget. No need to wait by the phone.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial yesterday repeated the charge, framing the leaks as affirmations of what the Bush and Obama administrations have been telling us all along.

Far from being the Pentagon Papers redux, the larger truth is how closely the ground-eye view in these documents reinforces what U.S. officials were long saying: that the war wasn’t going well, the Taliban were making gains, and a new and invigorated strategy was needed to combat them. Both the Bush and Obama Administrations made the same diagnosis in recent years, neither one kept it secret, and this year Mr. Obama followed through with an increase in troops levels and a renewed counterinsurgency.

The most politically explosive documents concern the conflicting loyalties of Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. Nearly 200 reports allege that the Pakistani military intelligence arm is in cahoots with the Taliban, despite claiming to side with America. This is undoubtedly true but also no surprise.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan, arguing that classified material isn’t necessarily interesting, put it more bluntly:
“If any of this startles you, then welcome to the world of reading newspapers. Today’s must be the first one you’ve read.”

That is the central argument of Andrew Exum’s op-ed in Tuesday’s Times, “Getting Lost in the Fog of War”, which has drawn much comment online. Arguing that the three big revelations of the WikiLeaks documents—links between Taliban and ISI, Afghan civilian casualties, the secret commando taskforce—are not revelations at all to anyone generally abreast of the news, he opens dismissively:

ANYONE who has spent the past two days reading through the 92,000 military field reports and other documents made public by the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks may be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. I’m a researcher who studies Afghanistan and have no regular access to classified information, yet I have seen nothing in the documents that has either surprised me or told me anything of significance. I suspect that’s the case even for someone who reads only a third of the articles on Afghanistan in his local newspaper.

It’s a pretty broad statement, especially coming from a writer who, though he has no regular access to classified information, describes himself as “a researcher who studies Afghanistan.” Head to Exum’s bio at the Center for a New American Security where he works, and you will also discover he served in the U.S. Army from 2000-2004 (including leading platoons in Iraq and Afghanistan), was an adviser on the CENTCOM Assessment Team and civilian adviser to General Stanley McCrystal, and in 2004 released a book titled This Man’s Army: A Soldier’s Story from the Frontlines of the War on Terror.

I’m not surprised he wasn’t surprised.

Exum’s is typical of the response of some who live inside the media-military bubble; the assumption that because it is not news to those whose job it is to be well versed in and write about the issue, it must be not be news to those they assume are reading their work. And, if it’s not news, then why the fuss?
The first instinct is to dismiss the leaked material, and, in the case of Exum, train their sights on Assange, the leaker.

Mr. Assange has said that the publication of these documents is analogous to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, only more significant. This is ridiculous. The Pentagon Papers offered the public a coherent internal narrative of the conflict in Vietnam that was at odds with the one that had been given by the elected and uniformed leadership.

The publication of these documents, by contrast, dumps 92,000 new primary source documents into the laps of the world’s public with no context, no explanation as to why some accounts may contradict others, no sense of what is important or unusual as opposed to the normal march of war.

It’s necessary to push back against Assange’s claims, but it is also necessary to move beyond them. Rather than taking the bait and engaging with the rather inane question of whether the WikiLeaks dump resembles the Pentagon Papers, we should be asking ourselves what we can do with the stuff we now have on hand, whatever it is. How can we use all these detailed fragments to give readers a better understanding of this war that is being fought in their name? The Times, Guardian, and Der Spiegel had a month to work that out. Many of the outlets given just the two days since Sunday night have, apparently, decided to do very little beyond downplaying the material’s significance and going to the White House for a response. And calling Assange names.

The question seems to be one of just how important the WikiLeaks documents are. And the answer seems to depend on how you define importance. Are they important in the sense that they are earth-shattering, policy-changing revelations? Today we’ve seen most weigh in with a thudding and unanimous “no.” But are they important in that they can provide added context to a war that, despite Exum’s claims, the public does not know a whole lot about? Absolutely.

Just look, for one example, at Times reporter C.J. Chivers’s reconstruction of the battle that killed eight U.S. soldiers at Combat Outpost Keating in Afghanistan’s northeast. It has attracted singular attention for its ability to put readers in the moment. Details in the story of the frantic nature of the fighting, the confusion, and the sacrifice might not be new—Chivers is something of a specialist at such stories—but they add texture and gripping narrative to the story of the war. Chivers fills out a sketched narrative and provides contextualized first-hand understanding of how the war is conducted. Vignettes like this help readers navigate that “fog of war” Exum talks about.

Chivers, and many of his colleagues at the three outlets to which the logs were leaked, did some outstanding work—both in written reports and impressive multimedia pieces—with the raw material they were handed. It’s not expected that those not given the time advantage would be able to do the same. But it’s troubling that there is a reductive instinct to dismiss what might not be novel.

It’s equally troubling to see backlash against a story that has put the war so firmly back on the front pages. If we are to agree that the war is an important story—and none of the columnists, reporters, or editorial writers are suggesting otherwise—then, in the crudest sense, this leak represents a peg. It’s a reason to revisit it. A reason to recapture the attention of those for whom Afghanistan might have fallen somewhat off the radar. Remember, it’s a big country, and not everyone is a “researcher who studies Afghanistan.”

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Amy Goodman - WikiLeaks’ Afghan War Diary

Wikileaks.org has done it again, publishing thousands of classified documents about the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The website provides a secure platform for whistle-blowers to deliver documents, videos and other electronic media while maintaining anonymity. Last March it released a video shot from a U.S. military helicopter over Baghdad, exposing the Army’s indiscriminate killing of at least 12 people, two of whom worked for the Reuters news agency. This week, WikiLeaks, along with three mainstream media partners—The New York Times, The Guardian of London and Der Spiegel in Germany—released 91,000 classified reports from the United States military in Afghanistan. The reports, mostly written by soldiers on the ground immediately after military actions, represent a true diary of the war from 2004 to 2009, detailing everything from the killing of civilians, including children, to the growing strength of the Taliban insurgency, to Pakistan’s support for the Taliban.

After the documents were released, WikiLeaks founder and Editor in Chief Julian Assange told me: “Most civilian casualties occur in instances where one, two, 10 or 20 people are killed—they really numerically dominate the list of events. ... The way to really understand this war is by seeing that there is one killed after another, every day, going on and on.”

Assange described a massacre, what he called a “Polish My Lai.” On Aug. 16, 2007, Polish troops returned to a village where they had suffered an IED roadside bomb that morning. The Poles launched mortars into the village, striking a house where a wedding party was under way. Assange suspects that the Poles, retaliating for the IED, committed a war crime, concealed in the dry bureaucratic language in the report:

“Current Casualty list: 6x KIA (1x male, 4 female, one baby) 3x WIA (all female, one of which was 9 months pregnant)”

KIA means “Killed in Action,” and the tens of thousands of classified reports are dense with KIAs. Assange says that there are 2,000 civilian deaths detailed in the reports. Other entries describe “Task Force 373,” a U.S. Army assassination unit that allegedly captures or kills people believed to be members of the Taliban or al-Qaida.

The Obama administration is running for cover, and its response has been confused. National security adviser Gen. James Jones condemned the disclosure of classified information, saying it “could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security.” At the same time, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said “there’s no broad new revelations in this.”

The threat posed by this historic leak is not a threat to the lives of American soldiers at war, but rather to a policy that puts those lives at risk. With public support already waning, this leak can only strengthen the call for the war’s end.

“I’ve been waiting for it for a long time,” tweeted Daniel Ellsberg, the most famous whistle-blower in America. Ellsberg is the former military analyst who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, thousands of pages of a top-secret government study revealing the secret history of the Vietnam War. Many credit Ellsberg’s action with helping to end the Vietnam War. Ellsberg told me this week: “I’m very impressed by the [WikiLeaks] release. It is the first release in 39 years on the scale of the Pentagon Papers. How many times in these years should there have been the release of thousands of pages showing our being lied into war in Iraq, as in Vietnam, and the nature of the war in Afghanistan?”

Assange has been advised by his lawyers not to enter the United States.

Homeland security agents descended on a recent hacker conference in New York where he was scheduled to speak. He had canceled. He said the Obama administration also tried to get the Australian government to arrest him. Speaking to me from London, Assange said: “We are not pacifists. We are transparency activists who understand that transparent government tends to produce just government. That is our modus operandi behind our whole organization: to get out suppressed information into the public where the press and the public and our nations’ politics can work on it to produce better outcomes.”

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

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How do we know when we are at war?

Peter Leahy, formerly Chief of Army, is Director of the National Security Institute at the University of Canberra. He is the author of the new Lowy Institute Perspective 'How do we know when we are at war?'

Today Australia is at war. You wouldn’t know it if you used the old indicators of war such as a declaration of war, mobilisation or large scale conflict between states. But today our soldiers are being shot at, they see the suffering and the destruction of war, and they carry their dead and wounded comrades from the field of battle.

War has not gone away. It is now: intrastate and smaller; more frequent; of longer duration; being waged by non-state actors; and being conducted in cities and towns. In 2009 there were 17 major armed conflicts active in 16 locations around the world. Australia is involved in or has been physically involved in five of these.
We are confused about war. The disciples of Clausewitz suggest that we are not involved in 'real' wars. Yet often what starts out as something other than a war can quickly escalate and end up looking a lot like one.
Witness Somalia, which began as a humanitarian mission. There may be a concept of low-intensity war but there is no such thing as a low-intensity bullet. Our politicians, who misuse the rhetoric of war to declare war on terror, drugs and banks, further confuse the issue of when we really are at war.

The reluctance to accept or even talk about war has a negative impact. How do we know we are preparing for future war in the most effective way? Should we reconsider the balance between existing defence, diplomatic and security resources and budgets?

With no public debate on national objectives, end states and potential deployment duration we can’t be sure that we are using the most appropriate strategy to pursue our national interests. Without a strong narrative from government justifying a deployment public support tends to diminish over time. This introduces the risk that the military will be caught between declining public opinion and government policy.

Today an effective war strategy requires a balanced whole-of-government approach rather than a solely or even primarily military response. In counterinsurgencies and stabilisation operations an over reliance on the military is bad strategy. It used to be said that war was too important to be left to the generals. It now must be said that war is too important not to involve the civilians.

In order to redress the problem of knowing when we are at war I have five recommendations:

1. Both houses of parliament should be required to authorise by resolution any decision to commit the Australian Defence Force to warlike operations or potential hostilities within sixty days of the decision to commit forces. ADF deployments should then be reconsidered by the parliament on an annual basis.

2. The Australian Government should provide and routinely update a clear statement of national interests and the strategy to be followed. The strategy statement should include the elements of power to be used, the end state to be achieved, a discussion of the exit strategy and likely time frame for the commitment of force.

3. An available, deployable, sizable and robust civil contribution to Australia’s national effort should be established.

4. Military acquisition methods should be modified to allow the accelerated and continuous acquisition of military equipment to cope with rapidly emerging threats.

5. The relationship between the military, media and government should be reset to develop greater trust and confidence.

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