WikiLeaks Documents Stir up Controversy

One the most important developments that affected the last stage of the Vietnam War was the leak of the secret Pentagon Papers to the press.

These documents were officially called “United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967,” and they were first published in the New York Times in 1971 as a serial. Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had ordered them to be written; after these documents came out, they were published as a 5 chapter book. The documents revealed the hypocrisy and serious strategic mistakes of the American government that had been hidden from public. This resulted in an overwhelming public reaction that had a huge effect on ending the war.

After 40 years, another hidden document crisis seems to be shocking America and affecting a war, this time the war in Afghanistan. The news about these documents was published via the New York Times in the U.S., The Guardian in England and Der Spiegel magazine in Germany. Obama’s government criticized the leak by claiming it was a threat to national security.

WikiLeaks, who gave the documents to the above-mentioned newspapers for inspection, is a web site. The documents can be found at http://wardiary.wikileaks.org. In fact, before this document leak, WikiLeaks was not even a very popular website. Previously, it gained some notoriety by publishing a few secret videos about Iraq and Guantanamo. In the Iraq-related case, the video showed an American Apache helicopter cruelly killing 12 civilians in 2007. In the Guantanamo case, the site published a military directive on how to treat detainees.

Of course, WikiLeaks is hiding its news and information sources rigorously and keeps on defending itself against enquiries. For instance, it uses a Swedish server (ISP PeRiQuito). This collection of documents, called the “Afghan War Diaries,” belong to the period from January 2004 to December 2009 and have been claimed to contain up to 92,000 documents. Most of them are operations reports and things of similar nature. These documents are quite important for sure since they were written by combatants in the combat area, indicating the conditions of war. There are some other reports and evaluations in this “war diary.” It is not yet clear that how many of these 92,000 documents were inspected by the time these newspapers and magazine published reports on them. However, of the data that reached the public, this is the most important information:

As a result of the bombs placed on roadsides and bombardments of NATO-ISAF forces, several civilians have been killed, but the public has not been notified. Nobody knows about these hundreds of deaths.

The Taliban possesses heat sensitive anti-aircraft missiles and has used them against NATO-ISAF planes and helicopters from time to time, in an effective and fatal way. This truth has been hidden and the nation was not informed. For example, one of the combat area reports claims that in 2007, a Chinook-47 heavy weight shipping helicopter was shot down by one of these missiles.

Another document claims that an American special force coded as Task Force 373 created a target list of 2,000 Taliban members; the document explains the secret operations used to catch or kill these people.

Another document claims that unmanned and armed aircraft called Reapers were used by American and British forces against Taliban and Al Qaida targets. Reapers are not commonly known, so we will mention them in another article.

Other documents apart from these claim that Iran and Pakistan are helping the Taliban out. A lot of the blame falls on Pakistan’s secret service, called ISI, and especially the former president of ISI, General Hamid Gul. Today, I struck this fresh topic while the iron is still hot. But rest assured, there will be several discussions on the WikiLeaks documents from now on. I am not sure whether these documents will lead to results like the Pentagon Papers did; however, it is obvious that these are important documents and their effects and results will be understood in the future.