P.S. my last post on this thread just emerged from moderation limbo.

http://www.google.com/search?&q=What+I+Saw+at+Moba+Khan

Right, or just ask a soldier that has lived 2, 3, 4, or more years of his life there. I’ve heard far more cynical and negative things about war from them. I’ve written the types of reports that were leaked, and I’ve known guys up the chain-of-command to the pentagon that read them. From what I understand, some guys in the field at the the squad, or team, level who write these daily or weekly reports are known by intell folks all the way to the pentagon, because the quality of observations, data, detail, thoughtfulness, etc… are pretty rare. Some guys get known for writing garbage and people don’t even read what they write. So, there’s a selective process that’s not available.
There’s a saying that you hear among soldiers: “Everyone goes home.” In the actual process of war there’s very little idealism among many of the soldiers. The COIN strategy ignores this reality. So, you have a formal mission and message going from the top-down, and you have a massive informal culture from the bottom-up, which are usually at odds and disconnected from each other. In organizational studies with any large company or gov’t, or even a business of 150 people, you start to see this process. Success can only happen if you are able to get the informal culture to either support the formal one, or stop countering it. These “official” documents are largely documenting a formal way of reporting.

“you’ll see how these docs are actually not like ethnographic fieldnotes…but maybe that’s a comment for ZeroAnth.”

Yes, that was from the ZeroAnth essay that was linked.

There was a program to publish the essays, stories and poems of soldiers, which is quite powerful. PBS made a series of short visual clips for these stories called, “Operation Homecoming.” It adds an emic layer onto what other documentary Restrepo was trying to do. I recommend watching the clip Road Work, but here’s the whole thing. All the clips are different:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3348080471759549568&ei=EzuLS-bhAoTqrAKkyJX8Cg&q=operation+homecoming#

http://onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/07/30/01

But I think Assange’s mobilization of the facticity of these docs might undermine this archeological approach: he seems to be (strategically) invoking a binary between real raw facts (i.e. field reports) and cooked unreal ones (e.g. DoD press releases) and in so doing entrenches the erasure of both context and undocumented events.

I also really like Rex’ points about how these doc.s might function within the linguistic and rhetorical environment of the debates around the war, though I wonder if those who speak Militarese–to whose ears these doc.s’ register might sound self-authorizing–might also know more about the context of production, be more skeptical of them, and might also be more persuasive and authoritative critics (their authority being based both in linguistic performance and, in some cases, claims of ‘being there’)?

Also, funny Rick should mention Restrepo: I got to see it last night (I *highly* recommend) followed by a Q&A with Tim Hetherington and Major (formerly Capt.) Dan Kearny. In the Q&A Hetherington said essentially the same thing as Rick: as he was combing through the Wikileaks docs, he thought to himself, why bother, since most of it (including the killing of civilians, FYI) is in the film and is there *in context*.

There are also a lot of soldiers taking notes in the film, and some footage of them phoning their notes in (to what post or base they’re speaking is not exactly clear); sitting in their outpost (and trust me, that OP ain’t no FOB) reading out of their notebooks into the field phone. These scenes strike me as powerful rejoinders to any claims of unmediated, unadulterated, rawness.

Lastly, if you take my point, you’ll see how these docs are actually not like ethnographic fieldnotes…but maybe that’s a comment for ZeroAnth.

Okay I’m done now.

I think Assange is trying to make a point about the natural history of the texts he’s provided: There are less steps of translation and representation between them and the events they (re)describe then there are between, say, a press conference on the the subject which relies on a briefing provided by someone who has read a summary of a report which uses thee documents as its primary material.

Also — to expand on Zoe’s point about how to carefully contextualize sources — because the texts are written in military genres for a military audience, the idea is that the military will have more trouble disagreeing with or questioning these documents than they would, say, the accounts of ‘uncredible’ activist witnesses to the same events. Indeed, as far as I can tell this has been the strategy of the Obama administration: to accept — and thus trivialize — the veracity of the truth claims raised in the text.

To a certain extent, this is an old rhetorical trick — you score more points when you graciously accept your opponents claims and then demonstrate that even on the basis of the most charitable reading of the facts what they have done is monstrous. Representation is always translation/reentextualization — diaries and snapshots are not unproblematically unmediated representations of Direct Experience.

But all of that is different from Zoe’s point (I think) which not merely that we need a critical reading of _all_ documents, including these, but a stronger one: that the circumstances of their composition is such that their accounts of what was the case is not merely mediated, but downright implausible.

Ok I’m done now.

I feel almost dirty for even asking this, but what ultimately happens to soldiers’ and Marines’ GPS tracks? If I were looking for a nice verifiable document I would go looking for one which had created its own metadata.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (where you probably don’t get WiFi and won’t be reading this)

False dichotomy! OBL lives under a rock and I betcha he gets WiFi.

Rilly.

It’s hard to imagine that most of these documents are written by tired sergeants and low level officers after each mission. Some written everyday or every couple of days of a mission from memory. A big complaint from soldiers is how disconnected the General staff is from the actual battle space, and they have hundreds of people sifting through all of this stuff and putting it together in more refined reports with higher security classifications. With all the noise this data dump has made, a person could probably learn more about what they want to concerning day-to-day life in the war with a documentary like Restrepo.

Yes, Assange seems to contradict himself, then again, he is the provider not the one who can or should describe the importance and a ‘how to’. Both he and the media should have considered involvement of expert to demystify and explain the meaning and context of the Afghan WarLogs.

Go for it Savage Minds.