On Sunday, three news outlets published the results of their investigations into 91,731 classified U.S. military documents that they had received from secret-sharing Web site WikiLeaks. The New York Times, The Guardian , and Der Spiegel each led today with their findings on their front pages and online with multi-dimensional, interactive reports on “one of the biggest leaks in US military history.” The documents, spanning 2004 to 2009 and pertaining to the war in Afghanistan, were concurrently published on the WikiLeaks site.
Mostly, the papers highlight the same discoveries: high incidents of weapons failure among U.S. drones; the actions of task force 373, the secret commando unit tasked with capturing or killing top insurgent leaders; the Taliban’s possession and use of heat-seeking missiles; the hitherto suspected and assumed, but difficult to demonstrate, involvement of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in, and instigation of, Taliban operations against the coalition; and revelations of a higher numbers of civilian casualties than previously acknowledged.
But in shaping their syntheses of these various findings, each paper manages to characterize the discoveries in different ways, mostly to emphasize their relevance to local concerns about the war. The two European papers, both historically against the war, find in the reports cause for great pessimism. The Guardian is particularly brutal in its editorial on the documents:
“These war logs – written in the heat of engagement – show a conflict that is brutally messy, confused and immediate. It is in some contrast with the tidied-up and sanitised “public” war, as glimpsed through official communiques as well as the necessarily limited snapshots of embedded reporting.
… However you cut it, this is not an Afghanistan that either the US or Britain is about to hand over gift-wrapped with pink ribbons to a sovereign national government in Kabul. Quite the contrary. After nine years of warfare, the chaos threatens to overwhelm. A war fought ostensibly for the hearts and minds of Afghans cannot be won like this.”
Der Spiegel finds the coalition vulnerable and its efforts in the region on course for failure. After a summary of the paper’s treatment of the documents, reporters Matthias Gebauer, John Goetz, Hans Hoyng, Susanne Koelbl, Marcel Rosenbach, and Gregor Peter Schmitz write under the subhead, “A Gloomy Picture”:
But such shows of optimism seem cynical in light of the descriptions of the situation in Afghanistan provided in the classified documents. Nearly nine years after the start of the war, they paint a gloomy picture. They portray Afghan security forces as the hapless victims of Taliban attacks. They also offer a conflicting impression of the deployment of drones, noting that America’s miracle weapons are also entirely vulnerable.
And they show that the war in northern Afghanistan, where German troops are stationed, is becoming increasingly perilous. The number of warnings about possible Taliban attacks in the region — fuelled by support from Pakistan — has increased dramatically in the past year.
Intriguingly, The Times chooses a similar lede in its main report, “View is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan”:
A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.
The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.
However, its reading of the reports differs from its European counterparts, focusing less on military failures and more on inconsistencies between official accounts of the war from the White House and the revelations of the WikiLeaks reports. The front page story from which that excerpt was lifted documents many of these discrepancies, including incident reports, claiming the Taliban used heat-seeking missiles, that contradict official statements from the White House.
Is there any institution on Planet Earth that has been caught lying as often as the Pentagon has? Perhaps the British MoD comes close. Having dealt with their press officers, I can say that no street-corner huckster or Ponzi fraudster can match these people for barefaced mendacity.
Yet they deliver all their lies with an air of moral superiority, and insist it's the media that spreads falsehoods. They tell themselves that their lying is honourable and patriotic, that they're protecting civilians who can't handle the truth. But in a democracy it's the people who decide whether to make war, and they can't make that decision without facts. These people attack our own democracies. They're not protecting us civilians from war. They're protecting their war from us civilians.
#1 Posted by OD, CJR on Wed 28 Jul 2010 at 11:00 AM
Thanks for the wrap-up of the coverage. The disparity in tone between the American and European viewpoints I too noted.
I thought both the Guardian and Der Spiegel coverage was in-depth and adventurous, and really value-added in terms of context. That is the role of the establishment press, and in this instance all three outlets succeed. Ironically, given the data dump, the institutional imprimatur is much less relevance. (Bad news for old media!)
But it was the European outlet that showed the most courage in digging into the documents, and suggesting their import. The NY Times wrapped some valuable context around the leaked documents, but was MUCH more timid. Indeed their summary pages (four!) were a disappointment.
I suspect it's the establishment imprimatur that is the Times's problem here. An inability to step away from the real structures of power in the States - including the military. What bothers me is that the Times will roll out an occasional 'tsk tsk' editorial about our conduct in these wars, but not take a stand. Much less make a significant editorial point concerning our ongoing involvement in other areas that desperately need highlighting: Yemen, Somalia, the Saleh and hotspots like Columbia.
It's unlikely we'll get many leaked documents from these places, and the public will be poorer for it.
#2 Posted by PlebisPower, CJR on Sat 31 Jul 2010 at 01:41 AM