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Wikileaks reveals what the leaders debate didn’t
Written by Jeff Sparrow on 26-07-2010
In last night's puppet show, the topic of Afghanistan emerged only briefly but sufficiently long for both candidates to pledge ongoing war until the 'job is done'. Courtesy of Wikileaks, we now have a much greater idea of what exactly that job is.
The whistleblower site has begun releasing a trove of new documents containing an almost blow-by-blow account of the Afghan conflict. Here's what the Guardian says:
Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs recording some of these so-called "blue on white" events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties.
They range from the shootings of individual innocents to the often massive loss of life from air strikes, which eventually led President Hamid Karzai to protest publicly that the US was treating Afghan lives as "cheap". When civilian family members are actually killed in Afghanistan, their relatives do, in fairness, get greater solatia payments than cans of beans and Hershey bars. The logs refer to sums paid of 100,000 Afghani per corpse, equivalent to about £1,500.
US and allied commanders frequently deny allegations of mass civilian casualties, claiming they are Taliban propaganda or ploys to get compensation, which are contradicted by facts known to the military.
But the logs demonstrate how much of the contemporaneous US internal reporting of air strikes is simply false.
There's a ton of new material and it's going to take a while for it all to shake out. One thing's clear, however: if the digital revolution facilitates the kind of on-message media spin evidenced at the leaders' debate, it also facilitates the remarkable revelations offered by Wikileaks. In other words, there's no technological excuse for the shoddy journalism we're so often served up.
14 Responses to “Wikileaks reveals what the leaders debate didn’t”
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Puppet show is right, Jeff. The performance of the worm and its role in the infotainment of election campaiging was particularlt telling. The worm responds to key word cues, as was clearly in evidence last night. As a measure of the quality of an argument it is utterly useless and as a measure of public opinion it is fraudulent. The 7 network referred to it as ‘our polygraph’.
On Afghanistan, perhaps the current Wikileaks document flow will result in some hard talk about the real reasons for the Australian presence there which have very little to do with protecting the Afghani people and a great deal to do with the regional strategic advantage of the ‘roof of the world’ and, as always, access to resources.
The whole logs haven’t been released yet, but the WikiLeaks summary states that most of the information doesn’t relate to ISAF or European operations.
http://www.wikileaks.org/ will be the link when the documents are up.
Spencer Ackerman at Wired (I can’t believe they have the audacity to publish it, but anyway):
I’ve been waiting for this Wikileaks leak, as Assange said several weeks ago when Manning was arrested that he wanted to release the next batch of docs ASAP. Teeing it up simultaneously with the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and the NYT was a fine idea – max coverage over various jurisdictions. Assange apparently had the call on the actual release date. Obviously though he had neglected to note that in Australia, the release would coincide with the Masterchef finale. The Fairfax media’s online coverage this morning of the War Logs – as the G and NYT refer to them – is exactly zero.
The White House’s response so far has been, “but that all happened LAST YEAR!” and in spin emails from the WH Press Office to journalists to state that Wikileaks isn’t interested in transparency but is really just anti-US. That a tiny organisation like Wikileaks can do this with no resources to speak of – the G writes of Assange at their Brussels meeting sleeping on an office floor rather than the ‘expensive hotels’ his critics have alleged he preferred – speaks volumes about the incompetent, fatuous, compliant, politically stupid and insular Australian media.
Makes me think of Orwell, whom I was reading this morning:
Also, this is the latest from the aforementioned White House:
It appears some redacting is already occurring: Tommy Vietor’s name no longer appears and he is now being reported as “A US official who asked not to be named added”.
Glen Greenwald, always worth reading.
Is the journalism shoddy? It can be thorough and professional in its own terms, and still fail to inform the public properly, to ask the right questions, etc. The problem, surely, is ideology.
Sure there’s ideology, but incompetence takes different forms I think and when ideology meets incompetence we get what we now have. Perhaps the delay on this issue appearing in the mainstream media, is that they just didn’t know how to deal with the story. The SMH has a link this morning in a headline “US war effort into damage control” – hardly an eye-opening headline, and placed beneath “Satanists jailed for cannibalism ritual”, stories of the kind to which the SMH is very attached. The link on Wikileaks bizarrely takes the reader to the SMH technology pages. Everything in the way the story is presented says to me that it will be buried ASAP. The SMH also says that Australians ‘feature lightly’ in the leak, despite there being a report of a secret meeting between John Howard and US defence on Howard doubling the Australian contingent in Afghanistan. The US were asked not to tell anyone about the meeting because the Australian Govt didn’t want us (ie: Australian citizens) to know.
I might also add that whenever there are media stories onissues about which I have some knowledge, the reporting is shoddy in the extreme, to the point of being laughable fiction. Which begs big questions about all the subjects about which my knowledge is considerably poorer.
Not a peep from ABC television on this evening’s news coverage. The old ‘don’t give it any oxygen’ routine.
I’ve got a piece on this whole bizzo up at Drum.
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2965202.htm
So Labor’s going to launch an investigation, not into what the revelations reveal about the war, but about the security implications.
Worth recalling, of course, that the Wikileaks url was on the leaked Conroy filter blacklist …