WikiLeaks Bombshell on Afghan War: What You Need to Know

Australian founder of whistleblowing website, 'WikiLeaks', Julian Assange, holds up a copy of the Guardian newspaper during a press conference in London. US lawmaker Ike Skelton also slammed Wikileaks for "recklessness" in making public the roughly 92,000 military files and field reports, billed as perhaps the largest leak in US military history.

Photo Credit: AFP - Leon Neal

Despite advance claims of secret documents coming soon, it still felt like this bombshell arrived almost out of nowhere Sunday afternoon: WikiLeaks not only released more than 90,000 docs related to the United States and the war in Afghanistan, but the New York TImes played it for all it was worth (as it turns out, quite a lot). In fact, the Times, The Guardian in London and Der Spiegel had been studying the documents and preparing for this for weeks.The Times highlighted it as "The War Logs" -- Pentagon Papers, anyone? -- with the subhed, "A six-year archive of classified military documents offers an unvarnished and grim picture of the Afghan war." It also raises questions about the media coverage of the war to date.

The White House has slammed the release of classified reports, pointing out the documents end in 2009 just before President Obama set a new policy in the war, and claiming that it is all suspect because WIkileaks is allegedly against the Afghanistan war. 

In a fascinating passage, the Times revealed it also served as a kind of unofficial intermediary for the White House: "We have avoided anything that might compromise American or allied intelligence-gathering methods such as communications intercepts. We have not linked to the archives of raw material. At the request of the White House, the Times also urged WikiLeaks to withhold any harmful material from its Web site." 

It will be interesting to see how the three top newspapers decided, separately, which documents to publish -- and which to withhold. Here's Der Spiegel's main page.  President Karzai is not shocked by any of it -- perhaps a troubling sign. There's so much to read and digest we will simply point you in a few directions here, beyond the WikiLeaks site itself.

-- The main NYT piece, on the Pakistani collaboration: "The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders." A trove of documents, separated by subject matter, here.  

-- Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, says the outfit is studying another 15,000 docs it will release after redacting some names. He comments on the release so far: “It shows not only the severe incidents but the general squalor of war, from the death of individual children to major operations that kill hundreds." Update: Watch his Monday press conference here.

-- The Times editors published a special note to readers on the release explaining how it had obtained and independently verified the documents: "Deciding whether to publish secret information is always difficult, and after weighing the risks and public interest, we sometimes chose not to publish. But there are times when the information is of significant public interest, and this is one of those times. The documents illuminate the extraordinary difficulty of what the United States and its allies have undertaken in a way that other accounts have not."

-- Politico's Ben Smith has this interesting background on the Times: "Washington Bureau Chief Dean Baquet, reporter Mark Mazzetti and a third Timesman presented senior administration officials with synopses of the reports they planned to use, if not the actual documents, at a meeting in the White House late last week, the person said." Mike Calderone of Yahoo: Baquet told him White House praised paper "for being responsible" with WikiLeaks docs.