Endangering “informants” in Afghanistan is a murky affair

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange talks to Fox News (!) about the Afghan war logs and provides some context to the release of classified documents and the ways in which “informants” often work:

A bigger problem, according to Assange, was a project the government called the “kill or capture list”– a list of suspected terrorists that a special task force was assigned to take care of. “Informers are being paid by the US military to reveal information about Al-Qaeda or the Taliban,” he explained, “but, in fact, they just make up stories about their political enemies or their business enemies in order to have these people raided.” He continued:

“We noticed an unusual classification in one of the reports. It was ”˜No foreign.’ That means do not disclose to foreign partners including the United Kingdom, Australia, and so on. 373 involved a deliberate missile attack on a house which held seven children and killed the seven children. We saw how people get on to the list. Some governor in Afghanistan doesn’t like you, and recommends you go on the list. The problem is that we can see that’s clearly a corruptable process. Previous media reportage showed that a senior US official had told Karzai, the president of Afghanistan’s brother, if he didn’t behave, he would be put on the list.”

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