Wiki Leaks Publicizes Nearly 77,000 Reports on Afghanistan

(USA Today) On Monday there was an unauthorized release of more than 90,000 documents to WikiLeaks from six years of the war in Afghanistan.  The debate over America's longest war was fuled Monday by history's most massive leak of classified documents.  The Pentagon launched a damage assessment of the repercussions from the unauthorized publication on a website called WikiLeaks of nearly 77,000 reports tracking six years of the war in Afghanistan, a posting the White House said could imperil U.S. intelligence-gathering.  Pakistani officials denied allegations in the files of complicity between their military spy service and Taliban insurgents.  Critics of the conflict cited the huge data dump--with its portrait of U.S. forces straining to battle a resilient enemy while trying to bolster unreliable Afghan and Pakistani allies--as evidence of why the United States should extricate itself from a war they call unwinnable. 

The reports from January 2004 through December 2009, whose authenticity the administration neither confirmed nor disputed, chronicle the tedium of patrol and the terror of attack.  Included in these reports are accounts of top officials from Pakistan's military spy service attending insurgent strategy sessions where suicide attacks are planned, of Afghan police soliciting bribes from their fellow citizens at checkpoints, of deadly improvised bombs exploding as U.S. troops patrolled.  While the contents of the documents may not have been surprising, the quantity of the disclosure was unprecedented--a huge and instantaneous release made possible in the age of the Internet.  Unlike the explosive Pentagon Papers published in the New York Times in 1971, the files don't show top U.S. officials misleading the public about the war's course. The question this time is whether the harsh spotlight and the weight of detail will crystallize growing public unease about the war.  The documents were posted Sunday on WikiLeaks.org and detailed in reports in the New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian, and the German magazine Der Spiegel, which were given embargoed access to the files several weeks ago. 

Supporters of the war expressed outrage over the leak.  The publication "is deeply troubling and a serious breach of national security," said Arizona Senator John McCain, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee.  "The source of this harmful within the U.S. government should face the full penalties of the law." 

In the cyber world we're living in today, the era of privacy is vastly disappearing.  It doesn't make any difference whether those files are classified or not, there are ways for such websites as WikiLeaks to discover that information.  Did someone from from the Pentagon or the State Department divulge those documents to WikiLeaks?  I don't know.  Whomever did that (if that's the case) deserves to be prosecuted.  There are some things during wartime that don't need to be leaked to the general public for security reasons.  Consequently, those documents show that neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration had a plan for victory in Afghanistan.  Why are our troops still in Afghanistan?  Somebody's making money off our troops fighting in Afghanistan.  Anytime a war is taking place, there's a money trail that follows it.  With the war enduring nine years with no purpose, there's some group that's profiting from this war.  This whole situation is a joke.