Wikileaks – what does this massive leak mean to the US involvement in Afghanistan?
Wikileak’s Julian Assange on the Afghanistan war logs: ‘They show the true nature of this war’
See him talking about it here
Here’s the story according to the recent Guardian piece:
“US authorities have known for weeks that they have suffered a hemorrhage of secret information on a scale which makes even the leaking of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war look limited by comparison.
The Afghan war logs consist of 92,201 internal records of actions by the US military in Afghanistan between January 2004 and December 2009 – threat reports from intelligence agencies, plans and accounts of coalition operations, descriptions of enemy attacks and roadside bombs, records of meetings with local politicians, most of them classified as “secret”.
The source for these leaks is Wikileaks, the website which specializes in publishing untraceable material from whistleblowers, which is simultaneously publishing raw material from the logs. Washington fears it may have lost even more highly sensitive material including an archive of tens of thousands of cable messages sent by US embassies around the world, reflecting arms deals, trade talks, secret meetings and uncensored opinion of other governments. [Imagine that - the general public might get a free glimpse into their own government's shady dealings!].
The Guardian continues: “Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, says that in the last two months they have received yet another huge batch of “high-quality material” from military sources and that officers from the Pentagon’s criminal investigations department have asked him to meet them on neutral territory to help them plug the sequence of leaks. He has not agreed to do so.”
While “true” US foreign policy has always been held close to the chest with a closed fist by the US government, (and more or less deemed “classified” to the public), when information rears it’s head, history has shown it’s been often heavily edited and/or santized by the media depending on the content.
Wikileaks might be the beginning of the end of such a process, and the American public has every right to be witness to the various atrocities and financial dealings of their own government.
Instead of saluting this leak of free information, the mainstream US media has instead started a backlash against Wikileaks. This reads thin as jealousy (at the free publicity Wikileaks is generating), and publicity means revenue for a struggling mainstream media company that’s answering to shareholders.
Media companies should remember that if you’re NOT going to expose information and truth, you don’t have the right to criticize others that will at their own potential legal expense, and only for the benefit of an unknowing public. Where you clearly failed, someone else only succeeded.
