Monday, July 26, 2010
My first reaction on reading down the list of things supposedly exposed was, "Huh? That's it?" I mean, didn't we already know all this already? But leave it to the press to try to sensationalize things in an attempt to undermine a war effort. (That the original leaker should be found and hung prosecuted to the full extent of the law is another issue altogether.) Max Boot seems to agree: Wikileaks, Insignificant
The Pentagon Papers they're not. The New York Times and the Guardian, among others, are touting the massive leak of 92,000 classified documents relating to the Afghanistan War, which was unearthed by the Wikileaks website. What bombshells do these secret memos contain? Pretty much none, if you are an even marginally attentive follower of the news.
In fact, the only new thing I learned from the documents was that the Taliban have attacked coalition aircraft with heat-seeking missiles. That is interesting to learn but not necessarily terribly alarming because, even with such missiles, the insurgents have not managed to take down many aircraft -- certainly nothing like the toll that Stingers took on the Red Army in the 1980s...
Read the rest.
Also, Barry Rubin: Devastating Secret Documents on Afghan War: Tell Us What We Already Know
