Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It

Author:     MATTHIAS GEBAUER, JOHN GOETZ, HANS HOYNG, SUSANNE KOELBL, MARCEL ROSENBACH and GREGOR PETER SCHMITZ
Source:     Der Speigel (Germany)
Publication Date:     7/25/2010
 Link: Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It
Stephan:   This report, particularly when considered along with Dana Priest's wonderful Washington Post investigative piece on the out of control bloated Homeland Security agency, a Defense budget bigger than most of the budgets of the nations in the rest of the world combined makes it clear to me that we are being consumed by the golem of our shadow. Our roads are falling apart, our communications infrastructure is inferior to every other industrialized nation in the world, our children go to bed hungry, we have millions of people without health insurance, millions without jobs. But there is an endless supply of money for war and secret security agencies. Our priorities are completely upside down. I encourage readers to click through and read more about this, and to go to WikiLeaks http://wikileaks.org/ and look at the actual documents. This, and the financial debacle are why we have no money for anything else.

In an unprecedented development, close to 92,000 classified documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan have been leaked. SPIEGEL, the New York Times and the Guardian have analyzed the raft of mostly classified documents. The war logs expose the true scale of the Western military deployment — and the problems beleaguering Germany’s Bundeswehr in the Hindu Kush.

A total of 91,731 reports from United States military databanks relating to the war in Afghanistan are to be made publicly available on the Internet. Never before has it been possible to compare the reality on the battlefield in such a detailed manner with what the US Army propaganda machinery is propagating. WikiLeaks plans to post the documents, most of which are classified, on its website.

Britain’s Guardian, the New York Times and Spiegel have all vetted the material and compared the data with independent reports. All three media sources have concluded that the documents are authentic and provide an unvarnished image of the war in Afghanistan — from the perspective of the soldiers who are fighting it.

The reports, from troops engaged in the ongoing combat, were tersely summarized and quickly dispatched. For the most part, they originate from sergeants — but some have been […]

Read the Full Article