WikiLeaks and the Afghanistan War Logs

It's strange, since I was just listening to a 20 minute interview with Julian Assange yesterday at TED. I had planned to write about that as soon as this latest breaking news cycle winds down (JournoList, Shirley Sherrod, etc.), and now we've got the release of the Afghanistan war logs, which had been expected. Yeah, since the Iraq Apache video smear (and the detailed coverage at Jawa Report, et al., and my own), I've been gaining a sharper understanding of Assange and his hard-left enablers worldwide. It's simply more clear by the day that America's enemies are not just on the battlefield, but also among the global transnational issue networks working to bring down the United States and its Western allies.

I need to research the war logs and find out more on this, so expect updates. Below is a clip featuring Julian Assange for The Guardian. There's also a big exposé at The Guardian as well, so it's clear that the newspaper's coordinating its coverage with WikiLeaks. See, "Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation." And of course, the New York Times is on the case, seemingly as deeply involved as is The Guardian. See, "Inside the Fog of War: Reports From the Ground in Afghanistan."Also at NYT (FWIW), "Piecing Together the Reports, and Deciding What to Publish":

The articles published today are based on thousands of United States military incident and intelligence reports — records of engagements, mishaps, intelligence on enemy activity and other events from the war in Afghanistan — that were made public on Sunday on the Internet. The New York Times, The Guardian newspaper in London, and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the material several weeks ago. These reports are used by desk officers in the Pentagon and troops in the field when they make operational plans and prepare briefings on the situation in the war zone. Most of the reports are routine, even mundane, but many add insights, texture and context to a war that has been waged for nearly nine years.

Over all these documents amount to a real-time history of the war reported from one important vantage point — that of the soldiers and officers actually doing the fighting and reconstruction.

The Source of the Material

The documents — some 92,000 individual reports in all — were made available to The Times and the European news organizations by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to exposing secrets of all kinds, on the condition that the papers not report on the data until July 25, when WikiLeaks said it intended to post the material on the Internet. WikiLeaks did not reveal where it obtained the material. WikiLeaks was not involved in the news organizations’ research, reporting, analysis and writing. The Times spent about a month mining the data for disclosures and patterns, verifying and cross-checking with other information sources, and preparing the articles that are published today. The three news organizations agreed to publish their articles simultaneously, but each prepared its own articles.

Classified Information

Deciding whether to publish secret information is always difficult, and after weighing the risks and public interest, we sometimes chose not to publish. But there are times when the information is of significant public interest, and this is one of those times. The documents illuminate the extraordinary difficulty of what the United States and its allies have undertaken in a way that other accounts have not.

Most of the incident reports are marked “secret,” a relatively low level of classification. The Times has taken care not to publish information that would harm national security interests ...

There's more at the link, but I stopped at this line. "The Times has taken care not to publish information that would harm national security interests"?

Don't believe it for a second. The New York Times has been the radical left's institutional organ working to bring about an American defeat in Iraq and the War on Terror, and now in Afghanistan.

Recall Heather MacDonald's piece from 2006, on the Times' reporting that helped killed the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. See, "National Security Be Damned":

BY NOW IT'S UNDENIABLE: The New York Times is a national security threat. So drunk is it on its own power and so antagonistic to the Bush administration that it will expose every classified antiterror program it finds out about, no matter how legal the program, how carefully crafted to safeguard civil liberties, or how vital to protecting American lives.

The Times's latest revelation of a national security secret appeared on last Friday's front page--where no al Qaeda operative could possibly miss it. Under the deliberately sensational headline, "Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror," the Times blows the cover on a highly targeted program to locate terrorist financing networks. According to the report, since 9/11, the Bush administration has obtained information about terror suspects' international financial transactions from a Belgian clearinghouse of international money transfers.

RTWT.

See also, Michelle Malkin, "NY Times Blabbermouths Strike Again."

I'll have more later after I read and research a bit. Meanwhile, readers can check WikiLeaks directly: "Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010." And the Der Spiegel piece is here: "Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It" (via Memeorandum).