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July 27, 2010
The huge cache of secret US military files about the conflict in Afghanistan obtained by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history.
The Afghan War Diary is a compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports, while written by soldiers and intelligence officers, and mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related details.
The Afghan War Logs reveals how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency. Pakistan is an ally of America.
Western governments involved int he war iun Afghanistan, including Australia, have been less than forthcoming about what is taking place by putting a glossy face on the war, manipulating public opinion and suppressing the truth. Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, said that:
There is no single damning, single person, single mass killing. That's not the real story. The real story is that it's war. It's the continuing small events, the continuing deaths of civilians, children and soldiers...."Military units when self-reporting speak in another language, redefining civil casualties as insurgent casualties ... When US military report on other US military they tend to be more frank. When they report on ally military units, for the example the UK or the Polish, they're even more likely to be frank. But when they report on the Taliban then all evil comes out. Internal reporting is not accurate. The cover-up starts at the ground. The whole task is to make the war more palatable.
Though Wikileaks released the information to the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel Wikileaks is about the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it.
But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This counters the way that the National Security State hides itself behind an essentially absolute wall of secrecy to ensure that the citizenry remains largely ignorant of what it is really doing.
Though the war in Afghanistan is not winding down, but ramping up, it is going far worse than political officials have been publicly claiming. The Afghan War Diary shows why the US military campaign in Afghanistan has achieved so little success--too much civilian slaughter doesn't do much for winning the hearts and minds of Afghan civilians. The diary shows how futile the situation in Afghanistan is.
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In his comments on The Washington Post's Dana Priest series on Top Secret America that details the sprawling, unaccountable, inexorably growing secret national security state Glenn Greenward says:
The National Security state in the US, which expanded after 9/11 is hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. As Greenward points out it functions in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.
In Australia the national security state emerges in episodes such as this. This is a plan by the Attorney General for ISPs to store certain internet activities of all Australians - regardless of whether they have been suspected of wrongdoing - for law-enforcement agencies to access.
Greenberg says that the more secret surveillance powers we vest in the Government, the more we allow the unchecked Surveillance State to grow. He warns:
A sobering warning.