Wikileaks
By lex, on July 26th, 2010
Julian Assange’s collection of hacktivists have published 92,000 classified documents under the heading of the “Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010.” Their servers are currently swamped, but whether that is due to service volume, including our friends in Moscow and Beijing hoovering up intel about classified sources and methods, or whether it is due to a distributed denial of service attack is unknown.
Ninety-two thousand documents is an enormous trove of material – 75 megabytes – and it’s my suspicion that we’ll be hearing a great deal more about this over the course of the next few months, as people with their own agendas and biases comb through the database seeking to find information to buttress their own positions or assault others, including the US armed forces and their allies. There are many squalid little miseries and petty disasters in a war zone.
One of the first “revelations” in the New York Times, which like the UK Guardian and the German Der Spiegel have had access to the data for several weeks, is the degree of treacherousness we’ve been treated to by our friends in the Pakistani ISI:
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.
Taken together, the reports indicate that American soldiers on the ground are inundated with accounts of a network of Pakistani assets and collaborators that runs from the Pakistani tribal belt along the Afghan border, through southern Afghanistan, and all the way to the capital, Kabul.
Much of the information — raw intelligence and threat assessments gathered from the field in Afghanistan— cannot be verified and likely comes from sources aligned with Afghan intelligence, which considers Pakistan an enemy, and paid informants. Some describe plots for attacks that do not appear to have taken place.
But many of the reports rely on sources that the military rated as reliable.
While current and former American officials interviewed could not corroborate individual reports, they said that the portrait of the spy agency’s collaboration with the Afghan insurgency was broadly consistent with other classified intelligence.
PFC Bradley Manning, the 22-year old Army malcontent that provided these documents to Wikileaks may have in this, at least, performed a public service. In a fight, it’s always useful to know who is on your side, and who is arrayed against you. The damage he has done to our intelligence collection, processing and dissemination capability in what is, after all, an intel driven operation, has yet to play out.
But it will.
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