In the weeks since WikiLeaks released its treasure trove of Afghan War documents – over 90,000 in all – the reaction can best be summarized as a collective yawn. While the three newspapers publishing the material – The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel – have billed the leak as this generation’s Pentagon Papers, analysts were quick to point out that there is virtually nothing from the leaked documents that has not already been reported. In its broad outlines, the released material hardly seems to qualify as newsworthy; after years of reading about U.S. forces bombing civilians and assassinating people, the latest round of breathless headlines fail to shock. Despite this, however, the material remains of vital importance for a number of reasons.
There is no single “big lie” exposed by the leak – no discussion of oil interests in the region, for example, that would shed light on the U.S. motivation for the war. It is instead a chronicle of smaller deceptions, the countless everyday cover-ups and whitewashes that accompany an occupation force into the field. The strength of the material lies not in its groundbreaking revelations but in the sheer number of incidents it documents, all in chillingly sterile prose: the murdered civilians, callously referred to here as “NC KIA,” or non-combatants killed in action; the falsified press releases, downplaying civilian casualties while inflating the number of enemy dead; the pathetic attempts to compensate the families of the slain; the emphasis on “talking points” and following the official line.
While the clinical language of the after-action reports is horrifying, never acknowledging that the people being killed are anything more than numbers on a page, one experiences a special kind of horror when the military jargon is translated into plain speech. From The Guardian’s account of the bombing of the village of Laswanday:
“The final outcome, listed tersely at the end of the leaked log: 12 U.S. wounded, two teenage girls and a 10-year-old boy wounded, one girl killed, one woman killed, four civilian men killed, one donkey killed, one dog killed, several chickens killed, no enemy killed, no enemy wounded, no enemy detained.”Reflect on that for a moment. Six innocent people killed, three children wounded, the statistics rattled off alongside a number of dead animals. And that damning conclusion, which in a few short words illustrates the wanton destruction of modern war: “no enemy killed, no enemy wounded, no enemy detained.” But here even those termed the “enemy” are guilty only of defending their homeland from invaders, as we ourselves would do.
Will pages and pages of such accounts turn people against the war? Those who have been cheerleading the bloodshed will continue to do so; those who denounce it will find all the more reason to continue their protests. The leaked material will not convince anyone, in and of itself, that the war is a criminal act of aggression and must be stopped. But that was never where its true potential rested. For those wavering in the middle, who agreed with the war’s original goals but have become disillusioned by the cost, this exhaustive record of death and deception may be enough to push them firmly into the antiwar camp.
But all of these considerations are dwarfed in importance by one simple fact: that the documents were released at all. Whether they are used to make a case against the war or for it, whether the public recognizes the horror contained within those thousands of pages or chooses to look away, the information is now out there. Despite the howls of “national security” from the White House and the Pentagon, and in open defiance of a government that has declared it has the right to assassinate anyone in the world for national security reasons, WikiLeaks went ahead with the release anyway. Those involved in the decision are already paying a steep price. Founder Julian Assange cannot return to the U.S. for fear of arrest. Another WikiLeaks employee was detained for several hours and questioned upon entry. And Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old private accused of leaking the documents, now faces over fifty years in prison for disclosing sensitive information.
George Orwell once wrote, “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” This is such a time, and the WikiLeaks documents present such a truth. It may be a truth we already knew, but it is nonetheless heartening to hear that truth repeated in the face of constant, countless lies. In their rush to dismiss the war logs as old news, the analysts missed the point. More important than what the documents actually reveal is the message implicit in their delivery: that citizens have a right to know what their government is doing, even when that government insists on keeping it from them – especially when that government insists on keeping it from them. Orwell was right. In times of universal deceit, the stubborn insistence that two plus two makes four, despite all propaganda to the contrary, remains nothing short of revolutionary.
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Note: Since this piece was written, allegations have surfaced that WikiLeaks failed to redact the names of Afghan informants working for the U.S. occupation forces, thus opening them up to insurgency reprisals. Assange is surely correct in noting the supreme hypocrisy of the military command’s sudden concern for civilians. He is likewise correct in asserting that many informants have provided intelligence leading to air strikes and assassinations, and thus hardly qualify as innocent parties. But it is impossible to know how many of those exposed informants have blood on their hands and how many only delivered trivial, harmless information in order to ensure their family’s personal security or to curry favor with the occupation forces. A better redaction process must be found – and used – if Assange and his team at WikiLeaks hope to retain their moral authority.
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