Slate: Not the Pentagon Papers

[Scurrilous]

No one who's been paying attention should be surprised by the WikiLeaks documents about the war in Afghanistan.

<snip>

"Just because some documents are classified doesn't mean that they're news or even necessarily interesting. A case in point is the cache of 92,000 secret documents about the Afghanistan war that someone leaked to WikiLeaks, which passed them on to the New York Times, Britain's Guardian, and Der Spiegel in Germany. All three published several of these documents—presumably the highlights—in today's editions.

Some of the conclusions to be drawn from these files: Afghan civilians are sometimes killed. Many Afghan officials and police chiefs are corrupt and incompetent. Certain portions of Pakistan's military and intelligence service have nefarious ties to the Taliban.

If any of this startles you, then welcome to the world of reading newspapers. Today's must be the first one you've read.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has likened these documents to the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret history of the Vietnam War that Daniel Ellsberg leaked in 1972. The comparison is preposterous."

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[Name removed]

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[bring_em_home_bush]

8. "Paki" is a racist slur in the U.K.

And oddly enough, I find the "underreported civilian casualties" the most significant part of the story. The ISI's involvement/collaboration with the Taliban predated the war.

[flyarm]

2. Julian Assange was on Larry King tonight and said much more and more scathing is to come!

[Scurrilous]

3. Columbia Journalism Review: The Assange Leaks

<snip>

"Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has compared his organization’s latest leak of almost 92,000 U.S. military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan to “opening the Stasi archives” in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He also compared the leak to Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the Pentagon Papers.

Both claims are a bit difficult to swallow. The Stasi were famous for creating a total surveillance state and gathering comprehensive evidence of political “crimes” against their own citizenry; the Pentagon Papers revealed Kennedy’s involvement in the overthrow of Diem, and Nixon’s decision to illegally bomb Cambodia and Laos. The WikiLeaks archive is… daily incident reports. Incident reports can be revealing, if they say something new. But these don’t."

<snip>

"Which brings us back to Assange, who seems to lack any sort of insight into the war or where it’s being fought; he just has his own ideology, which involves exposing secrets he thinks are immoral to keep. (There are secrets Assange will not leak onto the Internet—the identities of his sources, for example.) Just clicking at random in the Wikileaks War Diary reveals the names of Afghan sources you hope will not be targeted as a result of this leak: Simon Hermes, head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan; Mohammed Moubin, who met with the Paktika Provincial Reconstruction team in 2006; Gul Said, who was assisting the PRT near the American Base at Bagram. On and on it goes, name after name of “collaborators” with the U.S. military, name after name of people whose lives are now in direct danger.

Assange’s justification for putting hundreds of lives at stake—“All of this material is more than seven months old, so it has no operational significance… there is no danger”—is as false as it is naïve. Many of the operations he details through these leaks are still ongoing, and many of the people involved in them are still there, hoping these leaks don’t make them into targets for assassination. Indeed, Adam Serwer, a staff writer for The American Prospect, tweeted this morning, “Former Military Intelligence Officer sez of wikileaks, ‘Its an AQ/Taliban execution team’s treasure trove.’”

In WikiLeaks’s world, though, that’s not their problem. They’re exposing secrets, consequences be damned. But there will be serious, and deadly, consequences from WikiLeaks’s War Diary archive. And odds are they won’t get nearly as much media attention as the initial leak."

http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/the_assange_leaks.php

[EFerrari]

4. Well, Fred Kaplan, Daniel Ellsberg had no problem at all with that comparison.

The New Pentagon Papers: WikiLeaks Releases 90,000+ Secret Military Documents Painting Devastating Picture of Afghanistan War

It’s one of the biggest leaks in US military history. More than 90,000 internal records of US military actions in Afghanistan over the past six years have been published by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. The documents provide a devastating portrait of the war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, how a secret black ops special forces unit hunts down targets for assassination or detention without trial, how Taliban attacks have soared, and how Pakistan is fueling the insurgency. We host a roundtable discussion with independent British journalist Stephen Grey; Pentagon Papers whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg; former State Department official in Afghanistan, Matthew Hoh; independent journalist Rick Rowley; and investigative historian Gareth Porter.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/26/the_new_pentagon_papers_wikileaks_releases

[Number23]

5. Rec'd. This is a huge deal in that classified docs were leaked

but the quality of the documents, not to mention their age, has made it not quite as big a deal as you'd expect.

[The_Casual_Observer]

6. I've noticed that all these "journalists" are poo-pooing this thing

as if the bastards ever reported any of this stuff. The simple fact is that the military isn't telling them anything & they are to lazy to find out anything on their own.

[Scurrilous]

7. White House downplays leaked papers' impact

<snip>

"White House officials and their allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan sought Monday to play down the political and military impact of the unauthorized release of thousands of classified Afghan war documents, saying they portray a reality on the ground that is already largely known.

The secret documents released by the group WikiLeaks.org reveal, in often excruciating detail, the struggles U.S. troops have faced in battling an increasingly potent Taliban force and in working with Pakistani allies who also appear to be helping the Afghan insurgency.

The more than 91,000 classified documents - most of which consist of low-level field reports - represent one of the largest single disclosures of such information in U.S. history. WikiLeaks gave the material to the New York Times, the British newspaper the Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel several weeks ago on the condition that they not be published before Sunday night, when the group released them publicly.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs condemned the leak of the documents, calling their publication "a concerning development in operational security" that "poses a very real and potential threat to those that are working hard every day to keep us safe."

But Gibbs rejected the idea that the documents reveal anything fundamentally new about the war effort, or that the leak is causing any political dilemma for the administration as it pushes ahead with the war policy the president settled on in December.

"What is known about our relationship and our efforts in both Afghanistan and Pakistan are not markedly changed by what is in these documents," Gibbs said. "There's no broad new revelations in this."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/26/MNPR1EK14R.DTL#ixzz0urnN0EjX

[Scurrilous]

9. Top US senator: Don't 'overhype' Afghan war leak

<snip>

"A top US senator warned Tuesday against reading too much in a massive leak of Pentagon documents on the Afghan war and flatly rejected any comparison to the Vietnam-era "Pentagon Papers" disclosure.

"I think it's important not to overhype or get excessively excited about the meaning of those documents," Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry, a Democrat, said at a hearing on the nearly nine-year-old conflict.

Kerry underscored that the leaked trove, made public by the whistleblowing Web site Wikileaks, comprised mostly raw intelligence field reports, some of them "completely dismissable," others "unreliable," and some trustworthy.

"People need to be very careful in evaluating what they read there," he said, notably underscoring that charges Pakistani intelligence officials backed Afghan insurgents were "not new allegations."

"This is something we have been dealing with and many people believe we have made some progress," he said.

Kerry explicitly rejected efforts to paint the leak as being as damaging as the "Pentagon Papers" disclosure that revealed that the US government -- from the president on down -- had misled the public on the Vietnam war.

"There is no relationship whatsoever to that event or to those documents," said the senator, who said the new leak showed "a very different pattern of involvement by the US government from that period of time."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gf-LrC8N0v5YdSCKyj1VpyZxImOA

[EstimatedProphet]

10. Just because no one is surprised doesn't mean the information is worthless

There is value in confirming what we already know. That value comes from the issue being taken from the realm of conspiracy theory into the realm of documented fact. It is unduly snide to make jabs about people not reading newspapers because they think this issue is important, and unworthy of professional reporting.

[JonLP24]

11. It was interesting reading how the civilians were killed

and underreported. Whether or not these are comparable to the "pentagon papers", it certainly is significant imo.

[JonLP24]

12. Daniel Ellsberg describes Afghan war logs as on a par with 'Pentagon Papers'

Former US military analyst leaked documents in 1971 revealing how the American public was misled about the Vietnam war

Daniel Ellsberg, a former US military analyst, has described the disclosure of the Afghan war logs as on the scale of his leaking of the "Pentagon Papers" in 1971 revealing how the US public was misled about the Vietnam war.

"An outrageous escalation of the war is taking place," he said. "Look at these cables and see if they give anybody the occasion to say the answer is 'resources''. He added: "After $300bn and 10 years, the Taliban is stronger than they have ever been … We are recruiting for them."

However, the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers on Afghanistan – top secret papers relating to policy – had yet to be leaked, he said.

People could read the logs to discover what they now need to ask, such as what their money was being spent on, he said. They would have an effect on public opinion, but the question, Ellsberg said, was how they would influence the US and UK governments.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/27/daniel-ellsberg-war-logs-pentagon-papers