On the other hand, I don’t think the Taliban has the Internet, the ability to sift through this information, at the village level. They do have people in Pakistan with access to the Internet who are quite good with it. But just as it’s difficult for the media to sift through all this stuff, it would be difficult for them. If you were a Taliban techie, you could go through this stuff; but I don’t think it would be easy to get it down to the village level.
What do you think the fallout will be?
They’re going to look for the leaker. Like much of the reporting, the fallout is going to be about whether or not these things should have been leaked, how they got leaked, how do we prevent leaks. That’s where the fallout is going to be.
Nir Rosen is author of the forthcoming book, Aftermath.
This is not for publication- just sending a correction.
The final question is worded incorrectly. "What do you think will be the fallout will be?" should be "What do you think the fallout will be?"
#1 Posted by Chris, CJR on Mon 2 Aug 2010 at 05:46 PM
Rosen, I am with you until the point about AFghan collaborators. Assange has gone to great lengths to not reveal info that would directly endanger western troops. But for afghans, he does not have the same courtesy. Thats classic orientalism, "they" dont matter as much as "us".
#2 Posted by Martin Knutsen, CJR on Tue 3 Aug 2010 at 04:41 AM
"I think it’s a big deal. For people who are familiar with the region or with the war, it’s true that there’s nothing significantly new in terms of the big picture. Anyone familiar with it knows that in general it’s not going well, that Pakistan is both an ally and an opponent, and that the Afghan government is corrupt. So the argument people are making—that there’s nothing new—is true on one level, but it also makes it all the more outrageous. The most shocking thing is that the people who say they knew all this weren’t more shocked before."
Unfortunately this approach seems to take place with much of the media coverage of national embarrassments.
The Downing Street Memos for instance were treated as nothing new:
http://www.alternet.org/story/22282/
The Pentagon media consultants, the depth and expense of the surveillance state, the billions of lost American and Iraqi money to lax accounting and fraud:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/07/27/iraq.audit/index.html
it's all nothing new, and the press acts like we're criminalizing politics and becoming a banana republic if we dare go in too deep to find something new.
What this might show is that it's not new; not to the press, the politicians, and the officers they all pal around with. It's a tight little club in which very little is new and less is interesting unless it's another round of Sally Quinn gossip at an industry sponsored salon.
And the "nothing new" canard is often used to obscure real scandal such as the Valerie Plame scandal in which supposedly "everybody knew" Joe Wilson's wife was a cia operative and therefore Novak revealed "nothing new" when he blurted out her identity in print.
It's all common knowledge and collective wisdom circulating within the civil circles of David Broder's chums and pals in a village hardly connected to the world it talks about.
It's a high school clique in print and on tv, and there's nothing new about it.
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 3 Aug 2010 at 06:07 AM
Exhibit A from one of the mouthpiece's himself
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/16/AR2005061601570.html
Today's press is a preventer of change and a defender of corruption because corrupt people talk to them and love to gossip.
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 3 Aug 2010 at 06:16 AM
Thanks Chris, correcting it now.
#5 Posted by Joel Meares, CJR on Tue 3 Aug 2010 at 08:12 AM
Good to hear from Rosen, everyone’s favorite Taliban embed. At least we know you dropped whatever pretense of objectivism you may have once claimed.
The leaker should spend the rest of his life in Ft Leavenworth and Assange should receive an assassins bullet.
#6 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Tue 3 Aug 2010 at 01:22 PM
Mr Rosin after his latest comments needs to be put out with the rest of the trash. He is no better than a festering blemish on the body of Humanity
#7 Posted by John Mark Jones, CJR on Wed 16 Feb 2011 at 12:47 PM
Hey Joel, you hear that your buddy Nir just resigned from NYU’s Center on Law and Security after tweeting his glee over Lora Logan's rape because she wasn’t sufficiently anti-war for his taste?
I guess Nir didn’t get the “lets be civil” memo.
#8 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Wed 16 Feb 2011 at 02:05 PM