Afghanistan: Wikileaks and the Pentagon's Deceptive Response

Remember the fuss this summer, after Wikileaks released almost 92,000 documents on the US military intervention in Afghanistan, when the Pentagon and US military said that the primary effect of the published material would be the exposure of troops and those helping the Americans, putting their lives at risk at the hands of the Taliban?

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, spared no words accusing Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, "Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family." 

At the time --- while not ignoring the possibility --- it felt primarily like a campaign by the Obama Administration and the Department of Defense, not only to limit the damage of the documents but to turn the story into one of Wikileaks' responsibility rather than the complications of American military action. At the start of 2010, the US Government had been slow to respond to Wikileaks' presentation of the "Collateral Murder" video, showing the apparent gunning down of Iraqi civilians by American planes. This time would be different.

This weekend, however, there was a twist in the Obama Administration's tale. A 16 August letter from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to Senator Carl Levin, the head of the Armed Services Committee, emerged: "The review [by the Department of Defense] to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by the disclosure."

Of course, Gates maintained the line that eventually there might be some indication of damage: "The initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security....We assess this risk as likely to cause significant harm or damage to national security interests of the United States and are examining mitigation options."

This time, however, the White House and the Department of Defense did not race to the press --- Gates' letter only came out through a leak to CNN --- and a NATO official confirmed the key finding by saying there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the Wikileaks documents.

All of this may just be an instructive prelude to an even bigger event:  the media chatter is that Wikileaks --- whose donations site was mysteriously off-line this weekend --- may be releasing as many as 400,000 documents on the US intervention in Iraq since 2003.