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I didn’t expect Admiral Mullen and Secretary Gates to go as hard after WikiLeaks as they did in their presser yesterday. Read Josh Foust for a continued emphasis on the danger posed to Afghans who dealt with NATO now that their unredacted names are out there. Adam Serwer has a judicious take as well:
If the documents had been leaked first to a more responsible organization they would have been better handled and still be relevant to the public interest. People concerned about their effect on public support for the war would just be saying pretty much the same thing they are now. The war itself is still the more important issue. As Matthew Yglesias wrote yesterday in response to TIME’s recent cover showing an Afghan woman who had been mutilated by the Taliban as an argument for staying in Afghanistan, “You go to war for reasons of national security. Those reasons either stand up to scrutiny or they don’t.” Assange doesn’t change that calculus any more than she does.
On a related subject, something I’m wondering about and wanted to get your answers on: are you reading the WikiLeaks documents at all? I have sympathy for Jon Stewart’s “it’s not the newness of it that gets me, it’s the fucked-up-ed-ness of it” argument, and I think it’s unfair for journalists (myself included) to say, Oh, this is old news when people’s lives continue to be at stake. But I’m curious if there really are people out there who may not be following Afghanistan closely or consistently but are digging through Microsoft Excel to read the frontline reports that WikiLeaks published? To put it simply: how are you consuming information from the WikiLeaks Afghanistan trove, if at all?
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Not at all directly reading the material. If it’s significant, it’ll find its way into a headline that will find its way to twitter. It’s arrogant to think I could start to look through that stuff and draw any important conclusions myself that smarter people than I won’t.
Steve Coll has an interesting take in the latest New Yorker Political Scene podcast: that there is significant new information there for the highly-initiated, but that the newness depends on already having a very fine-grained understanding of the cpnflict and country. Presumably, though, this info doesn’t change his large-scale view of the conflict, and that probably reflects the larger reality that there was nothing in the leaks with the power to seriously shift major topline narratives. It also reflects the likelihood that the leaks are most likely to confirm people’s prior views of the conflict (though likely obviously to intensify the views of those who see it as pointless or worse) and not draw a whole lot of new eyes to the matter.
When they were first released, I kind of desultorily poked through them, but it pretty quickly became apparent that in order to make any use of these documents I’d have to create a parsing and tagging tool that would save specific queries and results, debug that and then try to think of a bunch of interesting queries and keywords. Then go back and read the results of each query chronologically, adding additional tags as I went.
My assumption is that organizations like Danger Room are actually paying people with better resources than me to do this kind of work, and I have to make a living and feed myself and spend some quality time with a bottle of rum every now and then, so, meh…
mikey
I looked through maybe a hundred of the things, looking mainly at accounts of US soldiers interacting with local Afghans, civilian casualties and ISI complicity.
My main impression is that many of the people writing these reports are really out of their depth when it comes to doing the sort of PR work that they’re called on to do. A common theme was a bunch of soldiers arriving in a village with humanitarian goods, being treated with suspicion and/or hostility, delivering the goods and then shrugging their shoulders and saying ‘well those guys were jerks, but at least that’s done.’ Doing something as simple as instructing their interpreter do the talking rather than having an awkward three-way proxy conversation would go a long way.
I also feel very very very sorry for the Afghanis who’ve been named as collaborators in these reports. They were doing what they thought was best for their communities and now they’ve had a big target sign put on their foreheads. Knowing those names means NOTHING to anyone in the rest of the world, but it does mean a damn lot of things in Afghanistan. Wikileaks has essentially murdered a bunch of people.
I wonder, Mr. Ackerman, if you’ve heard any talk about whether the US military is planning on protecting the informants that have been outed by Wikileaks? That seems like something that the American military ought to be in a hurry to do before the Taliban starts making examples of people…
I tried to see how many names of people I could find in the wikileaks, and find that around 11,500 of the reports has personally identifiable information. Used roughly the method mikeyhemlok suggests.
I didn’t look at ‘em. Just read whatever you, the MSM, and whoever else I trust (more or less, don’t get fat headed) sez. I got a day job that runs into the nite.
I look to people like you to know what is new and/or significant.
If NYT, Guardian had these documents a while ago, did any of them raise the alarm with Wikileaks about the names of informants before publication?
One problem of Wikileaks may be that they are not going to be experts on each subject that is leaked to them, and may not always know the consequences.