BRADLEY MANNING: AN AMERICAN HERO

WRITTEN BY OMAR_GAZA

US, August 8, (Pal Telegraph – By Stephen Lendman) Manning, of course, is the courageous Army intelligence analyst turned whistleblower, who admitted leaking:

-- "260,000 classified United States diplomatic cables and video of a (US) airstrike in Afghanistan that killed 97 civilians last year," and

-- an "explosive (39 minute) video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the Reuters news agency" - "collateral murder" he felt obligated to expose.

It got him in trouble. On June 7, the military in Iraq arrested him, saying:

"The Department of Defense takes the management of classified information very seriously because it affects our national security, the lives of our soldiers, and our operations abroad."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the leak "potentially dramatic and grievously harmful....The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships and reputation in that part of the world. Intelligence sources and methods, as well as military tactics, techniques and procedures, will become known to our adversaries."

Unmentioned was the following:

-- our attack, invasion and occupation are illegal under US and international law;

-- war crimes, including murder, torture, and targeted assassinations happen daily;

-- civilian men, women, and children are willfully targeted;

-- since October 2001, millions of Afghans have been killed, injured or displaced, their country perhaps the most hellish anyway, devastated by decades of war, deep poverty, depravation, and unimaginable human suffering, mostly caused by America;

-- the same holds for Iraq, Pakistan, and nations where Washington wages proxy wars; and

-- our presence and imperial aims cause harm, not Manning or WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, exposing truths the public has a right and need to know.

They deserve praise, not prosecutions, compliments, not condemnation, and accolades, not accusations. They're heros, risking personal harm to disclose disturbing truths, what government and media reports suppress, sanitize and distort, letting warlords plunder lawlessly so war profiteers can cash in, Americans the worse off for it.

In his August 4 Anti-Empire Report (www.killinghope.org), author William Blum asked:

"So please tell me again: What's the war about?" Lies, of course, about 9/11 and leaders repeating them, Obama for one last August 17 saying:

"But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which Al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans."

On July 28, 2010, he lied again, saying: "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."

Rubbish according to Blum, saying:

"Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001."

"The only 'war of necessity' that draws the United States to Afghanistan is the need for protected oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area, (and) establishment of military bases (there), making it easier to watch and pressure next-door Iran (besides being a land-based aircraft carrier to target Russia and China). What more could any respectable imperialist nation desire? Oh, did I mention that the military-industrial-security-intelligence complex and its shareholders" will profit handsomely.

In 1996, America helped the Taliban gain power, funneling military aid through Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence). Oil was the hidden agenda, Taliban representatives visiting Unocal in Houston in December 1997 to negotiate a trans-Afghan pipeline from the oil rich Caspian area. It was nearly agreed, the kicker being America's refusal to extend recognition, a small courtesy to avoid war, occupation, and a deepening unwinnable quagmire.

On December 14, 1997, London's Daily Telegraph reported:

"the US government, which in the past has branded the Taliban's policies against women and children 'despicable,' appears anxious to please the fundamentalists to clinch the lucrative pipeline contract."

On December 4, 1997, a BBC correspondent said "the proposal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan is part of an international scramble to profit from developing the rich energy resources of the Caspian Sea."

By recognizing the Taliban government, it would have been built and today's quagmire avoided. Perhaps America's graveyard also, no invader ever occupying Afghanistan successfully, not the Soviets or British, the UK government suffering its greatest ever slaughter and defeat in 1842, losing 16,000 soldiers and civilians, except one man, historians believing Afghans let him live to recount the horror. As a result, Britain withdrew all its personnel and left, a lesson now forgotten, about 9,500 UK troops deployed with Americans and other NATO forces.

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai was a former Unocal adviser when pipeline negotiations took place. He was also a CIA asset. Unocal claimed it abandoned the pipeline project. Secret talks, however, continued up to a few months before 9/11, Taliban representatives visiting the State Department, CIA, and National Security Council. They even had a Queens, New York diplomatic office, and US officials visited Taliban ones in Islamabad.

The French newspaper Le Figaro also quoted Arab specialist Antoine Sfeir, saying CIA operatives met with bin Laden (a CIA asset in the 1980s) and maintained contact with him until his training camp was attacked in 1998.

America's fine line between enemies and friends is their willingness or reluctance to obey - do what we say or we'll boycott or bomb you, a threat with teeth, revealed by Manning and WikiLeaks.

Revealing Disturbing Truths Is Risky

Held initially in Kuwait, a July 29 Baghdad Pentagon press release said:

"US Army officials transferred PFC Bradley Manning from the Theater Field Confinement Facility in Kuwait to the Marine Corps Base Quantico Brig in Quantico, Virginia, on July 29. (He) remains in pretrial confinement pending an Article 32 investigation (like a grand jury or preliminary hearing) into the charges preferred against him on July 5."

"The criminal investigation remains open....findings and recommendations (will determine) whether to recommend (if) the case (will) be referred to trial by court-martial." For sure, that's what's planned, the Pentagon and Obama administration to throw the book at him or worse unless somehow their plans are derailed.

On August 2, Congressman Mike Rogers (R. MI) told Michigan radio station WHMI that Manning should be executed, saying:

"He release(d) this information to a third party who they say will make the determination that there's nothing harmful in it, while we know for a fact that there will be people that will likely be killed because of this information being disclosed. That's pretty serious. If they don't charge him with treason, they ought to charge him with murder."

Asked if he should be punished by death, Rogers said: "Yes, and I would support it 100 percent."

Federal Charges Against Manning

In early July, the Pentagon charged him with four noncriminal offenses, and eight violations of federal criminal law, including one count of violating the 1917 Espionage Act, accessed through the following link:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/07/06/us-will-press-crimin.html#more

Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) charges included:

-- eight violations of federal criminal law, including unauthorized computer access and transmitting classified information to an unauthorized third party; and

-- four noncriminal Army regulations violations, governing the handling of classified information and computers.

If convicted on all charges, he faces up to 52 years in prison.

The Bradley Manning Support Network

Access it for information about Manning through the following link:

http://www.bradleymanning.org/

Its purpose is to:

-- "Harness the outrage felt by millions (viewing) the 'Collateral Murder' video into a coordinated defense of Manning;

-- Raise awareness" about his arrest, charges and likely court-martial;

-- "Coordinate" efforts to support him;

-- "Collect funds (for a) high-quality" defense;

-- "Provide supporters with accurate, updated information as the" pretrial hearing and likely trial progress; and

-- "Provide prisoner support for (him) throughout his imprisonment."

Connected with Assange, he's more vulnerable, a 2008 classified Counterintelligence Center report placing WikiLeaks on "the list of enemies threatening the security of the United States," discussing ways to destroy its reputation and effectiveness, saying:

"Web sites such as WikiLeaks.org have trust as their most important center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insider, leaker, or whistleblower. Successful identification, prosecution, termination of employment, and exposure of persons leaking the information by the governments and businesses affected by information posted to WikiLeaks.org would damage and potentially destroy this center of gravity and deter others from taking similar actions."

With Manning in custody and facing trial, score one for the Pentagon, expected to exploit his case to the fullest to set an example and deter others. He'll likely be convicted and imprisoned, not executed as Congressman Rogers wants.

Law Professor Francis Boyle "believe(s) a treason charge wo(n't) stick (because) Congress has not declared war." The best outcome for military resisters he helped defend was to "get them off of prison time, out of the military, or else minimum time served." He and others also got Amnesty International to designate Capt. Dr. Huett Vaughn, Staff Sgt. Mejia, and Lt. Ehren Watada Prisoners of Conscience (POC).

Watada was the first commissioned officer refusing to deploy to Iraq, saying: "as an officer of honor and integrity, (he could not participate in a war that was) manifestly illegal....morally wrong (and) a horrible breach of American law."

As a result, he faced court-martial, a possible dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and seven years in prison, but got off thanks to Boyle and others. Before his Article 32 hearing, he publicly called the war illegal. Not wanting that revealed in testimony, the presiding judge declared a mistrial. He'd lost control, knew Watada was right, and had to suppress the truth to avoid an acquittal possibility on constitutional grounds.

Afghanistan is also illegal, Boyle explaining that Congress never declared war. The UN Security never authorized it under Article 51, and the Taliban never "attacked the United States or authorized or approved such an attack." In public testimony, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and CIA's then Deputy Director John McLaughlin admitted finding no link between the Taliban and 9/11.

Nonetheless, the Bush administration preemptively attacked in violation of US and international law. Obama is a war criminal pursuing and escalating it, expanding it cross border into Pakistan, and continuing the Iraq conflict and occupation.

American forces may refuse to serve, citing US and international law, including Army Field Manual (FM) 27 - 10, incorporating the Nuremberg Principles, Judgment and Charter and The Law of Land Warfare (1956).

FM's paragraph 498 states that any person, military or civilian, who commits a crime under international law is responsible for it and may be punished. Paragraph 499 defines a war crime. Paragraph 500 refers to a conspiracy, attempts to commit it and complicity with respect to international crimes. Paragraph 509 denies the defense of superior orders in the commission of a crime, and paragraph 510 denies the defense of an "act of state" to absolve them.

These provisions apply to all US military and civilian personnel, including top commanders, the Secretary of Defense, his subordinates, and the President and Vice President. Boyle calls resisting lawlessness "our Nuremberg moment." Those refusing them and exposing crimes should be praised, not prosecuted.

Manning provided evidence and may denounce the war's illegality, perhaps using it as a defense. He found crimes, needing to be exposed, acting honorably and heroically doing it as did WikiLeaks by publishing them anonymously. 

In edited chat logs posted by Wired.com, Manning admitted "want(ing) people to see the truth....regardless of who they are....because without information, you cannot make informed decisions...." He never considered selling it to foreign powers or anyone, saying: "information should be free....it belongs in the public domain....if it's out in the open....it should be a public good," exposing crimes and corruption to generate "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms."

That's honor, not espionage or treason, Manning saying:

"Everywhere there's a US post, there's a diplomatic scandal (to) be revealed. World-wide anarchy in CVS format. It's Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It's beautiful and horrifying. (The documents describe) almost criminal political back dealings. (They belong) in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark corner in Washington, DC (or the Pentagon. Our government is involved in) incredible things, awful things."

He exposed cold-blooded civilian murders, the public unaware that Pentagon rules-of-engagement (ROEs) target them like combatants in every warfare theater. Waging permanent wars of aggression, America acts lawlessly and recklessly. The public has a right to know. Manning and Assange are heros, deserving plaudits for their courage.

A Final Note

On Sunday, August 8, a public rally will be held outside the Quantico, VA Marine base, supporting Manning. War criminals remain free uncharged. Manning, an American hero, faces 52 years in prison for exposing their crimes.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached atlendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

SUNDAY, 08 AUGUST

Source : http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/

Missing the forest

Does anyone actually know the meaning of the term 'Jewish state'? Wouldn't it be better to live in a just democracy?

By Gideon Levy

Sometimes you really can't see the forest for the trees. The forest of political, governmental and institutional racism in Israel is dark and deep. One particular tree in that forest happens to have Israelis all riled up: The state's handling of the children of migrant workers. In the shade of a nearby tree is the state's handling of these children's parents, but this excites the Israelis somewhat less. And there are many other poisonous trees in the forest: Citizenship laws, loyalty laws, conversion laws, the razing of Bedouin villages in the Negev and even the story of the Arab delivery man who was convicted of rape for pretending to be a Jew. Each one galvanized parts of society into action, and this is well and good; but few see the big picture, and the big picture is several times worse than the sum of its components.

Enlightenment came from an unexpected direction; it was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of all people, who accurately defined the problem. In deciding on these children's future, he said, the cabinet is torn between humanitarian considerations on one hand and Zionist considerations on the other. The prime minister of Israel himself presents them as a contradiction, and this is the story in a nutshell.

Each particular wrong must be fought, of course, but we must not forget that all comes down to one large, fundamental truth: Defining Israel as a Jewish state condemns us to living in a racist state. This is the new definition of Zionism that we have subscribed to, and until we realize that we will not be able to uproot all the wild weeds that have seeded themselves here lately. Were we to not expel the migrant workers' children but continue to raze Bedouin villages we would not solve a thing. We will continue to move from one injustice to another until we recognize the racist nature of the state.

Israel is not the only place where racism is on the rise. Europe and the United States are awash in a turbid wave of xenophobia; but in Israel, this racism is embedded in the state's most fundamental values. There is no other state whose immigration laws are blatantly and unequivocally based on the candidates' bloodlines. Jewish blood, whether authentic or dubious, is kosher. Other blood, from those of other creeds or nationalities, is unacceptable. No country throws its doors wide open to everyone, but while other states take social, economic and cultural considerations into account in Israel bloodline is the name of the game. How else are we to understand the fact that someone who was born here, who speaks the language, cherishes its values and even serves in the military, can be unceremoniously expelled while a member of the Bnei Menashe community in India or the grandson of a half-Jew from Kazakhstan are welcomed with open arms.

In contrast to what we have been told there is no significant argument in the wider world, and of course not in Israel, over the Jews' right to a state. The argument is about its character. There is also no argument about the justice of the Law of Return: Israel is the place of the Jews who want to live there. The real argument is over the law's exclusivity, over the fact that it applies only to Jews. That's where it all begins. One could understand the need after the Holocaust, the necessity in the first years of the state, but 62 years after the founding of the state the time has come to reexamine the long-obsolete concepts.

Does anyone actually know the meaning of the term "Jewish state" that we bandy about so much? Does it mean a state for Jews only? Is it not a new kind of "racial purity"? Is the "demographic threat" greater than the danger of the state's becoming a religious enthnocracy or an apartheid state? Wouldn't it be better to live in a just democracy? And how is it even possible to speak about a state being both Jewish and democratic? But anyone who tries to enter the cauldron of this debate, who tries to think outside the box of tired cliche, is automatically fated to delegitimization and slander. Just ask Avraham Burg, who last week announced his intention to set up a political party along those very lines.

Source : http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/missing-the-forest-1.306647

Knocks On The Door

It’s The Newspaper Boy

The peril of having your words rendered suspect and aired nationally

ARUNDHATI ROY

While the Indian government considers deploying the army and air force to quell the rebellion in the countryside, strange things are happening in the cities. On June 2, the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights held a public meeting in Mumbai. The main speakers were Gautam Navlakha, editorial consultant of the Economic and Political Weekly, and myself. The press was there in strength. The meeting lasted for more than three hours. It was widely covered by the print media and TV. On June 3, several newspapers, TV channels and online news portals like rediff.com covered the event quite accurately. The Times of India (Mumbai edition) had an article headlined ‘We need an idea that is neither Left nor Right’, and the Hindu’s article was headlined ‘Can we leave the bauxite in the mountain?’ The recording of the meeting is up on YouTube.


The day after the meeting, PTI put out a brazenly concocted account of what I had said. The PTI report was first posted by the Indian Express online on June 3 at 1.35 pm. The headline said: ‘Arundhati backs Maoists, dares authorities to arrest her’.


Here are some excerpts:


“Author Arundhati Roy has justified the armed resistance by Maoists and dared the authorities to arrest her for supporting their cause. ‘The Naxal movement could be nothing but an armed struggle. I am not supporting violence. But I am also completely against contemptuous atrocities-based political analysis. It ought to be an armed movement. Gandhian way of opposition needs an audience, which is absent here. People have debated long before choosing this form of struggle,’ said Roy, who had saluted the ‘people of Dantewada’ after 76 CRPF and police personnel were mowed down by Maoists in the deadliest attack targeting security forces. ‘I am on this side of line. I do not care...pick me up put me in jail,’ she asserted.”


Let me begin with the end of the report. The suggestion that I saluted the “people of Dantewada” after the Maoists killed 76 CRPF and police personnel is a piece of criminal defamation. I have made it quite clear in an interview on CNN-IBN that I viewed the death of the CRPF men as tragic, and that I thought they were pawns in a war of the rich against the poor. What I said at the meeting in Mumbai was that I was contemptuous of the hollow condemnation industry the media has created and that as the war went on and the violence spiralled, it was becoming impossible to extract any kind of morality from the atrocities committed by both sides, so an atrocity-based analysis was a meaningless exercise. I said that I was not there to defend the killing of ordinary people by anybody, neither the Maoists nor the government, and that it was important to ask what the CRPF was doing with 27 AK-47s, 38 INSAS, 7 SLRs, 6 light machine guns, one stengun and a two-inch mortar in tribal villages. If they were there to wage war, then being railroaded into condemning the killing of the CRPF men by the Maoists meant being railroaded into coming down on the side of the government in a war that many of us disagreed with.

The rest of the PTI report was a malicious, moronic mish-mash of what transpired at the meeting. My views on the Maoists are clear. I have written at length about them. At the meeting, I said that the people’s resistance against the corporate land grab consisted of a bandwidth of movements with different ideologies, of which the Maoists were the most militant end. I said the government was labelling every resistance movement, every activist, ‘Maoist’ in order to justify dealing with them in repressive, military fashion. I said the government had expanded the meaning of the word ‘Maoist’ to include everybody who disagreed with it, anybody who dared to talk about justice. I drew attention to the people of Kalinganagar and Jagatsinghpur who were waging peaceful protests but were living under siege, surrounded by hundreds of armed police, were being lathicharged and fired at. I said that local people thought long and hard before deciding what strategy of resistance to adopt. I spoke of how people who lived deep inside forest villages could not resort to Gandhian forms of protest because peaceful satyagraha was a form of political theatre that in order to be effective, needed a sympathetic audience, which they did not have. I asked how people who were already starving could go on hunger strikes. I certainly never said anything like “it ought to be an armed movement”. (I’m not sure what on earth that means.)

I went on to say that all the various resistance movements today, regardless of their differences, understood they were fighting a common enemy, so they were all on one side of the line, and that I stood with them. But from this side of the line, instead of only asking the government questions, we should ask ourselves some questions. 


Here are my exact words:


“I think it is much more interesting to interrogate the resistance to which we belong, I am on this side of the line. I am very clear about that. I don’t care, pick me up, put me in jail. I am on this side of the line. But on this side of the line, we must turn around and ask our comrades questions.”


I then said that while Gandhian methods of resistance were not proving effective, Gandhian movements like the Narmada Bachao Andolan had a radical and revolutionary vision of “development” and while the Maoists’ methods of resistance were effective, I wondered whether they had thought through the kind of “development” they wanted. Apart from the fact that they were against the government selling out to private corporations, was their mining policy very different from state policy? Would they leave the bauxite in the mountain—which is what the people who make up their cadre want—or would they mine it when they came to power? I read out Pablo Neruda’s Standard Oil Company that tells us what an old battle this one is.


The PTI reporter who had made it a point to take permission from the organisers to record cannot claim his or her version to be a matter of ‘interpretation’. It is blatant falsification. Surprisingly, the one-day-old report was published by several newspapers and broadcast by TV channels on June 4, many of whose own reporters had covered the event accurately the previous day and obviously knew the report to be false. The Economic Times said: “Publicity-seeking Arundhati Roy wants to be Aung San Suu Kyi”. I’m curious—why would newspapers and TV channels want to publish the same news twice, once truthfully and then falsely?


That same evening, at about seven, two men on a motorcycle drove up to my home in Delhi and began hurling stones at the window. One stone nearly hit a small child playing on the street. Angry people gathered and the men fled.


Within minutes, a Tata Indica arrived with a man who claimed to be a reporter from Zee TV, asking if this was “Arundhati Roy’s house” and whether there had been trouble. Clearly, this was a set-up, a staged display of ‘popular anger’ to be fed to our barracuda-like TV channels. Fortunately for me, that evening their script went wrong. But there was more to come. On June 5, the Dainik Bhaskar in Raipur carried a news item “Himmat ho to AC kamra chhod kar jungle aaye Arundhati (if she has the guts, Arundhati should leave her air-conditioned room and come to the jungle)” in which Vishwa Ranjan, the director general of police of Chhattisgarh, challenged me to face the police by joining the Maoists in the forest. Imagine that—the police DGP and me, Man to Man. Not to be outdone, a Bharatiya Janata Party leader from Chhattisgarh, Ms Poonam Chaturvedi, announced to the press that I should be shot down at a public crossroad, and that other traitors like me should be given the death sentence. (Perhaps someone should tell her that this sort of direct incitement to violence is an offence under the Indian Penal Code.) Mahendra Karma, chief of the murderous ‘people’s’ militia, the Salwa Judum, which is guilty of innumerable acts of rape and murder, asked for legal action to be taken against me. On Tuesday, June 8, Hindi daily Nayi Duniya reported that complaints have been filed against me in two separate police stations in Chhattisgarh, Bhata Pada and Teli Bandha, by private individuals objecting to my “open support for the Maoists”.


Is this what Military Intelligence calls psyops (psychological operations)? Or is it the urban avatar of Operation Green Hunt? In which a government news agency helps the home ministry to build up a file on those it wants to put away, inventing evidence when it can’t find any? Or is PTI trying to deliver the more well-known among us to the lynch mob so that the government does not have to risk its international reputation by arresting or eliminating us? Or is it just a way of forcing a crude polarisation, a ridiculous dumbing down of the debate—if you’re not with “us”, you are a Maoist? Not just a Maoist, but a stupid, arrogant, loud-mouthed Maoist. Whatever it is, it’s dangerous, and shameless, but it isn’t new. Ask any Kashmiri, or any young Muslim being held as a “terrorist” without any evidence except baseless media reports. Ask Mohammed Afzal, sentenced to death to “satisfy the collective conscience of society”.


Now that Operation Green Hunt has begun to knock on the doors of people like myself, imagine what’s happening to activists and political workers who are not well known. To the hundreds who are being jailed, tortured and eliminated. June 26 is the 35th anniversary of the Emergency. Perhaps the Indian people should declare (because the government certainly won’t) that this country is in a state of Emergency. (On second thoughts, did it ever go away?) This time censorship is not the only problem. The manufacture of news is an even more serious one.

Source :  http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?265790

When the Next War Comes

By David Horovitz

There is no Arab interest in another round of conflict, says Matan Vilna’i. But still, the deputy defense minister is preparing the Israeli home front for the worst.

‘No, no, no, no, no,” said Matan Vilna’i – to make sure I’d got the point. Then he added, “Absolutely not,” in case I was still missing it.

I’d asked him whether Israel was on the brink of another war – what with the renewed Kassam fire from Gaza, a spate of briefings at which senior officers have warned of the expanded Hizbullah and Syrian missile capacity, and the recent highly unusual IDF decision to reveal the specifics of Hizbullah’s military deployment in the “human shield” villages of southern Lebanon.

“Go back over the years,” urged the deputy defense minister.

“Every spring for generations, there are war threats.

They’re meaningless. They’re right about once every few decades.”

The fact is, he continued, “There is no Arab interest in a war. No Israel interest. After a war, we’d all be back exactly where we were before.”

We were speaking on Sunday, a day before the missile barrage at Eilat and Aqaba, and two days before battalion commander Dov Harari was killed and company commander Ezra Lakia badly injured in the worst incident at the northern border since the Second Lebanon War four years ago.

Those flare-ups underlined the perpetually incendiary tensions on Israel’s frontiers. They also underlined the imperative – despite Vilna’i’s “no, no, no, no, no” assurances – to constantly prepare for the worst.

And that is precisely what the former deputy chief of the General Staff is currently doing: assiduously preparing this country for war – just in case.

Preparing Israel for the new kind of war we get dragged into these days. Wars where the home front is the front line, where civilians are prime targets, and where, Vilna’i added in our interview, we can currently expect precious little international sympathy.

From his office high in the Kirya military complex overlooking the jam-packed streets and homes of Tel Aviv, Vilna’i is overseeing the protection of that vulnerable home front – the construction of a “support network” that is supposed to spring into action if sovereign enemies like Syria and Iran, or their Hizbullah and Hamas proxies, start emptying their immensely expanded missile arsenals into civilian Israel.

To some extent, according to Vilna’i, we are all already at war, and by “we” he means the free world, and by “war” he means the battles against terrorist aggressors fighting from within civilian areas.

The practical aspects of Israel’s capabilities and challenges in this new war environment dominated our lengthy interview, but the conversation also, inevitably, ranged across diplomatic and domestic political issues.

Vilna’i, the bullet-headed ex-military man with the subterranean baritone, is a Labor hawk, an ex-general who came within a whisker of making chief-of-staff and who names Yitzhak Rabin as his mentor.

He’s the kind of Labor pol whom Likud doves cite as being closer to their line of thinking than the strongly pro-settlement- growth likes of Danny Danon and Tzipi Hotovely. And he, in turn – to what would be the dismay of the traditional Likud Right – cites Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as being likely to make “the right decision” on terms for peacemaking with the Palestinians.

“THERE’S BEEN a drastic change in the nature of war worldwide, and we’re at the focus,” said Vilna’i, as he elaborated on the new environment in which military conflicts now play out.

“We’re currently in World War III. It broke out on 9/11.

It’s a war without conventional fronts; a war without armies facing off against each other.

And the focus of this war is the civilian population. When we are acting in Gaza, for instance, we are responsible for the Israeli population, keeping it safe, obviously. We’re also responsible for the Palestinian population, because they are being used as human shields.

The enemy fires from within them. We respond with maximal caution and get hit with the Goldstone Report.”

He neither sighed nor even paused at the injustice of it all.

“That’s the new nature of war.”

In Israel’s particular context, he said, one critical strategic component that hasn’t changed is the centrality of Israeli deterrence. This is a theme that many of Israel’s defense chiefs reiterate in such conversations – the conviction that, even though Israel did not achieve a decisive victory against Hizbullah in 2006, and chose not to try to achieve one against Hamas in 2008/9, both those conflicts bolstered Israel’s capacity to scare the enemy into holding its fire.

As Vilna’i put it, they emphasized to those Iranian-backed proxies to our north and south that it would be wise for them to think twice before engaging Israel again: “In simple language, we’re the neighborhood bully,” said Vilna’i. “So you don’t want to start with us.

Start with us, and you get whacked.”

Again, in common with many Israeli military chiefs, he recalled Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah’s ostensibly rueful public reflection that, as paraphrased by Vilna’i, “If I’d have known what I was going to get [in the Second Lebanon War], I wouldn’t have started.”

In Vilna’i’s assessment, Nasrallah, and by extension Iran, were still licking their wounds at the time of Operation Cast Lead, which is why they chose to keep Hizbullah out of that conflict.

“In 2008, in Gaza, [Hamas’s Ismail] Haniyeh had anticipated that Israeli Arabs would start disturbances, and that Hizbullah would fire rockets at Haifa,” he said. “It didn’t happen.

Israel’s [Arab] citizens understand the rules. And Hizbullah, I imagine, said to itself, ‘We don’t want to get whacked again. Let Haniyeh do this on his own.’” Which begs the question, amidst the latest spate of attacks across our borders, and especially the confrontation near Misgav Am in the North, of whether that deterrent capacity has now dangerously eroded.

Our military correspondent Yaakov Katz noted in Wednesday’s paper that the latest fatal flare-up didn’t come out of the blue. Soldiers from the Lebanese Armed Forces – most of whom are Shi’ite, and many of whom openly cooperate with Hizbullah – have repeatedly trained their weapons on IDF troops at the border in the past year or so. “The IDF has also noticed a radical shift within the LAF top command, which has increased its anti- Israel rhetoric,” Katz added.

“When this is the spirit of the top command, it is not surprising that... the company commander who is positioned opposite Misgav Am ordered his troops to open fire at the IDF on Tuesday.”

Since 2006, Hizbullah has massively strengthened its missile capacity, freely importing weaponry from Syria, and deploying in the heart of the 160 Shi’ite villages in southern Lebanon. In a radical departure from security norms, the IDF last month released precise details of Hizbullah’s deployment in one typical village, Khiam – specifying the locations of command structures, weapons caches, missile launchers and even the improvised explosive devices intended to thwart any IDF ground attack.

The goal was plainly both to prepare the international community, so that the world would better understand how Hizbullah’s ruthless and cynical use of the villagers as human shields would determine the nature of future rounds of conflict, and to make plain to Hizbullah that Israel knew exactly what it was up to – that the intelligence flaws that undermined the 2006 war effort had been corrected. Israeli military sources, indeed, are adamant that while Hizbullah likes to claim that it knows far more about how the IDF functions than the IDF knows about its operations, the reverse is true. The publication of the Khiam specifics proved the point, they say.

For his part, Vilna’i made no grandiose boasts, but he did point to boosted Israeli capabilities in what he said were four crucial components in the new war era, as they apply in the case of Hizbullah.

“First, they know we can hit their missile launch points.

In the Second Lebanon War, within minutes, the IAF, with excellent intelligence, neutralized Hizbullah’s longrange capability.”

If Hizbullah has markedly expanded its arsenal since then, Vilna’i indicated, Israel has markedly expanded its capacity to confront it. “We have wonderful people,” he said. “Working day and night.”

Second, he went on, “we have the capacity to work inside enemy territory, to prevent them firing. Capturing territory. That’s the component that most resembles previous conventional war.”

That’s the component, it might be added, that did not function effectively four years ago, when the political stewards – of a conflict they preferred not even to acknowledge was a “war” – hesitated and changed their minds repeatedly about the deployment of ground forces, and when flaws were exposed in the IDF’s preparation, training, logistics, equipment and more.

The conviction in the defense establishment today is that such failures have been rigorously examined and rectified. Security chiefs also now routinely stress that Israel has made plain it will hold the sovereign state of Lebanon responsible for any cross-border violence and strike back, at Lebanese sovereign targets, accordingly – as even Tuesday’s confrontation indicated.

“We won’t go in that deeply, pursuing each missile,” is how Vilna’i put it. “We’ll strike hard so they’ll realize it’s not worth it.”

Third, said Vilna’i, is that Israel has made major strides in missile interception in recent years. “It’s not a 100 percent capability,” he cautioned, “but it’s important, especially for long-range missiles. We’re the only state that can do this. The Arrow is deployed.”

And finally, he came to the issue of civil defense, his particular focus as deputy minister.

“For a long time, we neglected this because it wasn’t so important. With Lebanon, with missiles hitting even deeper than Haifa, we recognized the new importance.

We needed to find an answer. Ehud Olmert, to his credit, gave responsibility for this to the Defense Ministry rather than the Ministry of Public Security. That was the right decision. From a military point of view, the whole country is the front.”

He waved toward the window and the bustling city.

“Tel Aviv is the home front.”

SINCE DECEMBER 2007, said Vilna’i, the ministry has been legislating, implementing and practicing to protect the citizenry.

“Yesterday I was in Beersheba for a drill: a chemical missile landing in the center of town. I was the general in charge of the Southern Command for five years,” he recalled. “I was in Beersheba during the first Gulf War. We had nothing at the time. We had good people and good will but that was all. Now, there’s an organized command structure. The mayor [Ruvik Danilovich] has answers to all the emergency needs. He has an IDF team supporting him, a police team, a municipal team.”

If war broke out, while the IDF would be doing its utmost to swiftly counter Hizbullah’s goal of firing hundreds upon hundreds of missiles into Israeli residential areas, the home front would be equipped “to ensure routine within the emergency situation.”

“We’re going city by city,” Vilna’i said of the preparatory work. “When a missile hits, we’ll have a network to deal with the damage – to cope with the injured, to make sure there’s water and food.”

He stressed that there was precious little of Israel that would be off-limits to enemy missiles – including Jerusalem. Military sources have indicated recently that Hizbullah has plenty of missiles sufficiently accurate to distinguish between east Jerusalem and the west. Vilna’i was more circumspect, but chilling.

“In a matter of time,” he said carefully, “they’ll be able to distinguish between west and east [of the capital]; next, they’ll be able to identify specific targets [around the country]. They’ll be able to hit strategic targets.

They’ll throw 500 missiles at us – most will hit open areas; others will cause damage. And the impact of a missile,” he said, in his no-nonsense, unemotional tones, “is akin to a bus blowing up, plus the surrounding damage.”

World War II-style bomb shelters were a thing of the past, he noted. The need now was for protected rooms and protected public areas in which people might have to spend a fair amount of time.

“Bomb shelters? That’s a concept from London 70 years ago. Stay down there for a while. That’s the way it was for me in Jerusalem in the War of Independence. In a bomb shelter, there was room to stand for maybe half an hour until the danger had passed. Nowadays, as the Second Lebanon War showed, people may have to spend a month in these rooms.”

About a third of Israeli residents have a protected room, he said, and legislation was in the works to ensure protection for all, “without spending billions and turning the whole country into a construction site.”

As an example, he noted that “there are lots of underground areas in this country. Vast. Here, next to the Habima theater, they’ve just built a five-floor underground parking garage. Well, every floor has an adjacent shelter that can hold 1,000 people. Each city is checking what it needs and the government will work with them.”

FROM THE practicalities of Vilna’i’s job, our conversation turned to the wider context – the diminishing international empathy for Israel in its relentless battle for survival, the superficial misperception of Israel as a Middle East Goliath, and the ostensible international conviction that Israel could do much more to ease its plight by showing greater determination to partner the Palestinians toward statehood.

“So long as we are seen as an ‘occupying people,’ we’re in trouble,” said Vilna’i, who took pains to define Labor as “not a left-wing party,” but rather as “a centrist, Zionist party.

“The world is cynical and not balanced. The UN Human Rights Council has never dealt with Darfur, where there are massacres. It only targets Israel,” he said.

Was he suggesting that if Israel was not present in the West Bank, it wouldn’t have been hit with Goldstone’s critique of Cast Lead? “No, we would have got it anyway,” Vilna’i said. “But the fact that we are seen as an occupying power works against us. Goldstone would have been seen differently.”

So what does he suggest? “I’m not prepared to compromise in any way on Israel’s security needs. We have to take care of ourselves. No one else can,” he began. “The terror threat has also changed.

It used to be cross-border and more recently the whole country is vulnerable to terror too. So terror has become a strategic weapon. And its perpetrators don’t want a peace deal. And we have to face up to it.

“But we also have to look to our place in the free world, alongside Europe, North America, Australia... The occupation plays against us in this. That doesn’t mean we should flee and run. It does mean we have to find the right balances – which is what we’re trying to do with the Palestinians.”

Vilna’i, who is 66, was drafted into the IDF a year before the Six Day War – rising to deputy chief of the General Staff via the paratroopers and the Sayeret Matkal commandoes.

With the passion of one who fought in them, he recalls that after the 1967 and 1973 wars, “the world was amazed by us. We were the extraordinary David.”

He could also have mentioned the 1976 Entebbe rescue, in which he participated, and which underlined Israel’s gutsy, innovative, daring underdog credentials.

“Now we are seen as a Goliath,” he added bitterly. “They forget that we’re still little David – demographically, territorially.”

He said he always reminds visiting politicians from abroad that “you’re sitting somewhere that has thousands of missiles aimed at it, aimed at civilians. There’s nowhere else like this on the planet. Not in Washington, Paris, London or Berlin. In Jerusalem, yes. In Tel Aviv, yes.

People ignore this. They say they’re sick of it [the conflict].

We used to be the heroes of the world. Not any more.”

In this respect, “Tom Phillips is right,” said Vilna’i, referring to the interview I published in this space last week with the departing British ambassador, whose content I had discussed with Vilna’i before we began our conversation.

Except, I noted, Tom Phillips seems to believe that Israel can do a whole lot more to fix things on its own.

Vilna’i appeared to take the point, responding: “Every decision-maker in this country is conscious of his responsibility for the fate of this country. We pulled out of Gaza.

We said we’d be done with it. What developed? The No.

1 terror state in the world. Less than an hour from here.

It doesn’t all depend on us.”

In fact, Vilna’i went on, “every area we’ve left so far, we’ve been hit with missiles from there. And if we relinquish Kalkilya, there’ll be rockets at Tel Aviv. If we relinquish Tulkarm, there’ll be rockets on Netanya. Actually,” he added on reflection, “we have relinquished Tulkarm [to the day-to-day running of the Palestinian Authority], but we’re still militarily overseeing things there.”

His voice, usually so low as to set my tape recorder vibrating, now rose a couple of tones in frustration.

“There are two sides to this game,” he said. “And to my disappointment, the Palestinian side has not handled things right. In Gaza they could have shown the world – to change Gaza into the Hong Kong of the Middle East.

Why didn’t they? Is that my fault?” Still, Vilna’i is forgiving. “Salam Fayyad understands all this,” he said of the PA prime minister. “He’s trying to do [things right] in the West Bank. But the fear is that some extremist terrorist group will take control, as happened in Gaza.”

Were Israel prepared to pull back further in the West Bank, would the PA prove more effective in maintaining control than it did in Gaza? “If this is done in a measured way,” he said carefully, “the answer can be yes, with the stress on the measured process. In the West Bank, they are fighting for their lives [against the Islamists], not ours,” he said.

The PA forces, he elaborated, were “doing well,” by which he meant firmly enforcing law and order. Invoking his mentor, he indicated that PA troops were curbing extremism without exaggerated concern for legal and human rights niceties: “As Rabin said at Oslo: ‘Not Bagatz [the High Court of Justice] and not B’Tselem,’ 17 years late.”

In Gaza, he noted, Hamas didn’t conquer the entire Strip when grabbing power in 2007. “It took over a few key power centers. It literally slaughtered – slit the throats of – the Fatah leaders. It threw some of them off the roofs of eight-story buildings and took over Gaza. The world doesn’t want to remember that. But that’s the fact. So I’m very pessimistic about Gaza. It’ll be a long process.

“The Gaza population already realizes that terrorist control is no good for them,” he asserted. “Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] sees himself as part of the solution.

The way back is via an agreement of one kind or another.

But it’s complicated. Really complicated. Any agreement [with the Palestinians] needs components relating to Jordan on one side and Egypt on the other. In Gaza there’s a limit to how many people can live there. There’ll be a population explosion in the end. The only solution is via the Egyptian border. Territorial swaps are part of it.

The first brick, which we are now trying to build, is a Palestinian state.”

ON THE vexed issue of peacemaking, Vilna’i is evidently somewhat, but not entirely, persuaded of Abbas’s and Fayyad’s intentions and capabilities. He’s also somewhat, but not entirely, persuaded of our prime minister’s readiness to go halfway to meet any genuine willingness for progress.

“With the Palestinian leadership now, there has been a change,” he said firmly. “It’s not [Yasser] Arafat – who’d say one thing in Tel Aviv and something else in Ramallah.

Ultimately, he was a terrorist in his essence. These are different people.”

Vilna’i goes so far as to assert that “Abu Mazen always spoke about peace. He opposed Arafat on this and that wasn’t easy. With all the difficulties, there is an opportunity here. Tom Phillips is right about that.”

Vilna’i recognizes that Abbas and Fayyad have yet to show a strategic willingness to persuade their own people of the need for compromise. But he also asserts that not all of Israel’s leaders are blameless in this regard. Abbas and Fayyad “understand the need” to tell their people it’s time for peace, he said. “But the question – and the very same question applies to our leaders – is what they’re prepared to tell their people.”

Switching quickly to the Israeli side of the equation, he added: “Rabin, for instance, dared to spell out [the imperative for a two-state solution]. In private conversations, all the leaders of the right understand it. All of them have done, for generations. It began with Menachem Begin.

“But there’s a constant problem on the right,” he elaborated, the Labor politician in him fully surfacing now.

“At big public rallies, they say one thing, and in power, they say something else. That cliché about ‘What you see from there, you don’t see from here,’ and so on. Menachem Begin, as prime minister of Israel, in his greatness, decided to leave Sinai. He had Labor as his security net.

Menachem Begin took a decision as prime minister, not as head of the Likud. [Binyamin] Netanyahu is standing in Begin’s shoes.”

And how does Vilna’i anticipate Netanyahu filling those shoes, come the moment of truth? “Everyone except for a tiny minority on the far right recognizes that the only solution is two states for two people,” he reiterated. “All the discussion today is about the complexities of getting to the two-state solution.

Netanyahu will have to make a decision in the next few months. He’s vacillating and I understand that. He’ll have to decide on whether to extend the building freeze.

He’ll have to decide if he’s Menachem Begin or not.”

Again, which will it be? “If you’re asking me, he doesn’t know himself. He’s smart and he understands what’s at stake, believe me.”

In terms of territorial compromise, Israel wanted to believe, 20 years ago, that it could reach an accord while relinquishing less than 90% of the territory in the West Bank. As the years passed, the assessment became progressively bleaker. What does Vilna’i envisage as the final price? “We’ll have to relinquish a great deal more than people think,” he said. “But that was always the case. There was never an American decision to recognize the settlements.

There were intermittent understandings, but never clear recognition, and the Americans are our best ally.”

Returning to his earlier theme, Vilna’i repeated: “The extended occupation is beginning to work against us, and this international delegitimization can only be offset by a peace agreement. I don’t want to be, as Tom Phillips put it to you, ‘Fortress Israel.’ I want to be integrated with the rest of the world.”

And he signed off with an assessment that, if accurate, will dismay plenty of Israelis and please many others: “The prime minister will have to make a decision and in my opinion, he’ll make the right decision. I say that on the basis of my knowledge of him and of the discussions that are being held. The grand strategy is clear. The question will be how it is achieved in terms of internal politics.

And, by the way, I personally don’t think anybody will be in a hurry to leave this coalition – not Shas and not Israel Beiteinu.”

Source : http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=183825 

Outsourcing to India Draws Western Lawyers

By HEATHER TIMMONS

NOIDA, India — As an assistant attorney general for New York State, Christopher Wheeler used to spend most of his time arguing in courtrooms in New York City.

Today, he works in a sprawling, unfinished planned suburb of New Delhi, where office buildings are sprouting from empty lots and dirt roads are fringed with fresh juice stalls and construction rubble. At Pangea3, a legal outsourcing firm, Mr. Wheeler manages a team of 110 Indian lawyers who do the grunt work traditionally assigned to young lawyers in the United States — at a fraction of the cost.

India’s legal outsourcing industry has grown in recent years from an experimental endeavor to a small but mainstream part of the global business of law. Cash-conscious Wall Street banks, mining giants, insurance firms and industrial conglomerates are hiring lawyers in India for document review, due diligence, contract management and more.

Now, to win new clients and take on more sophisticated work, legal outsourcing firms in India are actively recruiting experienced lawyers from the West. And American and British lawyers — who might once have turned up their noses at the idea of moving to India, or harbored an outright hostility to outsourcing legal work in principle — are re-evaluating the sector.

The number of legal outsourcing companies in India has mushroomed to more than 140 at the end of 2009, from 40 in 2005, according to Valuenotes, a consulting firm in Pune, India. Revenue at India’s legal outsourcing firms is expected to grow to $440 million this year, up 38 percent from 2008, and should surpass $1 billion by 2014, Valuenotes estimates.

“This is not a blip, this is a big historical movement,” said David B. Wilkins, director of Harvard Law School’s program on the legal profession. “There is an increasing pressure by clients to reduce costs and increase efficiency,” he added, and with companies already familiar with outsourcing tasks like information technology work to India, legal services is a natural next step.

So far, the number of Western lawyers moving to outsourcing companies could be called more of a trickle than a flood. But that may change, as more business flows out of traditional law firms and into India. Compensation for top managers at legal outsourcing firms is competitive with salaries at midsize law firms outside of major metropolitan areas of the United States, executives in the industry say. Living costs are much lower in India, and often, there is the added allure of stock in the outsourcing company.

Right now, Pangea3 is “getting more résumés from United States lawyers than we know what to do with,” said Greg McPolin, managing director of the company’s litigation services group, who divides his time between India and New York.

Outsourcing remains a highly contentious issue in the West, particularly as law firms have been trimming their staffs and curtailing hiring plans. But Western lawyers who have joined outsourcing firms are unapologetic about the shift to India.

Leah Cooper left her job as managing lawyer for the giant mining company Rio Tinto in February to become director of legal outsourcing for CPA Global, a contract legal services company with offices in Europe, the United States and India. Before hiring Ms. Cooper, CPA Global added lawyers from Bank of America and Alliance & Leicester, a British bank. The company has more than 1,500 lawyers now, and Ms. Cooper said she planned to hire hundreds in India in the next 12 months.

At Rio Tinto, Ms. Cooper said, she became a champion of the idea of moving work like document review to a legal outsourcing company “because it works really well.”

“It really is the future of legal services,” said Ms. Cooper, an American based in London who travels regularly to India and has spoken widely in promoting outsourcing. Still, she acknowledges hostility toward the practice. “When I was doing public speaking, people used to joke that I had better check under my car” for something planted by a junior associate angered by her views, she said.

Many legal outsourcing firms have offices around the world to interact with clients, but keep the majority of their employees in India; some also have a stable of lawyers in the Philippines. Thanks to India’s low wages and costs and a big pool of young, English-speaking lawyers, outsourcing firms charge from one-tenth to one-third what a Western law firm bills an hour.

Employees at legal outsourcing companies in India are not allowed by Indian law to give legal advice to clients in the West, no matter their qualifications. Instead, legal outsourcing companies perform a lot of the functions that a junior lawyer might do in a American law firm.

Even global law firms like Clifford Chance, which is based in London, are embracing the concept.

“I think the toothpaste is out of the tube,” said Mark Ford, director of the firm’s Knowledge Center, an office south of New Delhi with 30 Indian law school graduates who serve Clifford Chance’s global offices. Mr. Ford lived in India for six months to set up the center, and now manages it from London.

“We as an industry have shown that a lot of basic legal support work can successfully be done offshore very cost-effectively with no quality problems,” Mr. Ford said. “Why on earth would clients accept things going back?”

Many corporations agree that outsourcing legal work, in some form or another, is here to stay.

“We will continue to go to big firms for the lawyers they have who are experts in subject matter, world-class thought leaders and the best litigators and regulatory lawyers around the world — and we will pay a lot of money for those lawyers,” said Janine Dascenzo, associate general counsel at General Electric.

What G.E. does not need, though, is the “army of associates around them,” Ms. Dascenzo said. “You don’t need a $500-an-hour associate to do things like document review and basic due diligence,” she said.

Western lawyers making the leap to legal outsourcing companies come for a variety of reasons, but nearly universally, they say they stay for the opportunities to build a business and manage people.

“In many respects it is more rewarding than jobs I had in the United States,” said Mr. Wheeler, who moved to India when his Indian-born wife took a job here in 2006.

“If you’re talking about 15 employees in a windowless basement office, I’m not interested in making that my life’s calling,” he recalled thinking when he started talking to Pangea3. “But building a 500-person office, now that is a real challenge.”

Shelly Dalrymple left her job as a partner at a firm in Tulsa, Okla., in 2007 and is now based in India as the senior vice president of global litigation services at UnitedLex, a legal outsourcing company with offices in the United States, Britain, Israel and India.

When she first joined the industry, she said, growth was being driven by corporations that were pushing law firms to outsource to save money. Now, Western law firms themselves are starting to embrace the industry, she said. “We are seeing law firms who are putting a lot of thought into their future coming to us with interesting and creative ideas,” she said.

Partners in the West are asking legal outsourcing companies in India to create dedicated teams of lawyers for their firms, for example. Those teams could expand and contract depending on how much business the Western firm has. “That means a law firm with 500 members in Chicago can compete with a 2,000-member firm in New York,” Ms. Dalrymple said.

Moving to a legal outsourcing firm, especially in India, is not for everyone. About 5 percent of Western transplants cannot handle it and move back home, managers estimate.

Some find it hard to adapt to India. Other times, the job itself does not suit them — after spending years working nearly independently as a litigator, for example, it can be hard to transition to managing and inspiring a team of young foreign lawyers.

Even lawyers who stay are sometimes wistful about their previous careers. “Of course I miss litigation,” Mr. Wheeler said. But, he added, “watching people learn some of the same skills I did is gratifying.” 

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/business/global/05legal.html?ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=print

Pentagon demands return of leaked documents

The Pentagon has demanded WikiLeaks remove more than 70,000 classified documents published online as well return thousands more unpublished files about the Afghanistan war leaked last month.

Military commanders have urged WikiLeaks to return the unpublished documents which contain sensitive details of Afghans who have assisted coalition forces.

The Pentagon request comes amid increasing concern that the documents may be used by the Taliban to identify potential targets. However, a spokesman said he did not have a "high degree of confidence" that the information would be returned.

WikiLeaks has also posted a massive file of password-protected documents called "insurance" on its website which cannot currently be read online. It is thought that this file may contain thousands of new documents which will be released should anyone connected to the site be arrested anywhere in the world.

Geoff Morrell, a spokesman for the Pentagon said: "The longer they [the documents] hang out there, the more opportunity there is for those who wish us harm – to do us harm to use those documents to their advantage. So we're trying to, as best we can, to mitigate the damage caused by this and compel them to take those documents off the internet and return them to the rightful owner, the United States government."

However, he added: "They've [WikiLeaks] shown no indication thus far that they appreciate the gravity, the seriousness of the situation they have caused, the lives they have endangered, the operations they have potentially undermined, the innocent people who have potentially been put in harm's way as a result."

The Pentagon disclosed that it has a team of 80 people trawling through the documents attempting to assess the damage that they could cause.

The FBI and Pentagon suspect that Private Bradley Manning, a 22-year old intelligence analyst, is responsible for the leaks. Pte Manning is already in custody in Virginia on suspicion of leaking other information to WikiLeaks.

Source : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/7930912/Pentagon-demands-return-of-leaked-documents.html