wikileaks is getting the attention they want. and anything that
gets into wikileaks is seen as the real thing. some are, some
aren’t surely and only matter of time before wikileaks is used for
disinformation. some variant of operation mincement one day soon
from wikileaks.
Are the WikiLeaks War Docs Overhyped Old News?
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/are-the…
“Longtime Afghanistan watchers are diving into Wikileaks’ huge
trove of unearthed U.S. military reports about the war. And they’re
surfacing, as we initially did, with pearls of the obvious and
long-revealed. Andrew Exum, an Afghanistan veteran and Center for a
New American Security fellow, compared the quasi-revelations about
(gasp!) Pakistani intelligence sponsorship of Afghan insurgents and
(shock-horror!) Special Operations manhunts to news that the
Yankees may have lost the 2004 American League pennant. It’s a fair
point, but it conceals what’s really valuable about the leaked
logs: they’re a real-time account of how the U.S. let Afghanistan
rot.
For one thing — and this supports Exum’s argument — many, if not
most, of these documents are frontline reports. They don’t pretend
to be about anything more than what a unit encounters in its small
patch of the war zone. That both clarifies the focus of individual
reports and limits the degree to which any analyst can responsibly
extrapolate them into clear trends. “Raw intelligence is rarely
decisive,” notes a smart senior military officer who asked for
anonymity, “and certainly not indicative of anything meaningful
until passed through a more calibrated hypothesis or thesis.”
It’s a helpful caveat. We won’t pretend to have waded through
any more than a slice of the 77,000 reports released thus far by
WikiLeaks. But so far, there’s no My Lai, no No Gun Ri, no smoking
gun linking al-Qaeda to the Boston Red Sox. And some of the
heavy-breathing accounts surrounding the documents don’t really
match what the logs say. “Taliban sympathisers listening in to
top-secret phone calls of US-led coalition,” pants the Guardian.
But: “At this time, it is doubtful insurgents have the technical
ability to eavesdrop on conversations,” according to the report
that the Guardian cites to justify its headline.
Adds a former intelligence contractor who used to produce
intelligence summaries, “There will be a lot of interesting tidbits
but nothing earthshaking.” And it’s those “interesting tidbits”
that makes the WikiLeaks trove significant. There’s a bias in
journalism toward believing that what’s secret is inherently a hive
of hidden truth. That operating principle animates reporters’
practice of breaking down governmental secrecy. But it can also
create a misleading expectation that leaks represent huge new
revelations. And when those revelations don’t manifest, it creates
an expectation that the trove is neither useful nor significant. In
this case, that would be a mistake.”