Nicole Colson explains why the classified Pentagon documents on Afghanistan released by WikiLeaks present a damning portrait of who is suffering from the U.S. war.
THE RELEASE of more than 92,000 classified documents relating to the war in Afghanistan by the muckraking Web site WikiLeaks has left the Obama administration and its war partners trying to defend the indefensible.
Along with making the documents available on the Internet on July 25, WikiLeaks took the further step of providing the archive of material to the New York Times, Britain’s Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel several weeks prior to the wider release–so these media outlets were ready with in-depth articles about what the documents revealed.
The Obama White House was quick to denounce the WikiLeaks release. At first, it claimed that the documents didn’t reflect the reality of the war, since they only run through last December–before the implementation of Obama’s “surge” plan announced late last year.
When it was clear that no one bought that one, administration officials turned to criticizing the release for putting “national security” in jeopardy–while also claiming that the documents were “old news” and didn’t really reveal anything that wasn’t previously known (leading to the question of why the documents were classified in the first place.)
This last point was surely damage control–the WikiLeaks documents vividly expose the disastrous state of the U.S. war on Afghanistan.
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