Wikileaks, news, and the stories within the story
At the start of this month I suggested that Rolling Stone’s McChrystal expose was the story of the year. I was wrong. Whistleblowing website Wikileaks’s release of more than 75,000 classified military documents — collectively referred to as the Afghanistan war logs — is now the story everyone is talking about, and it is unlikely this will change anytime soon.
A security breach/freeing of information (as you like) such as this is pretty much unprecedented, although many are comparing it to the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers (including DanielEllsberg, the man behind that leak).
Just as with the Pentagon Papers, the leak and the subsequent publication of previously classified information are just part of a complex knot of stories. Who leaked this? What do we make of what we read? What next for Afghanistan, for the US military and indeed for ISAF as a whole? — these are only the immediate questions.
