Afghan 2004-2010: The War Logs

[Wings of Fire]

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010

25th July 2010 5:00 PM EST WikiLeaks has released a document set called the Afghan War Diary, an extraordinary compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010.

The reports, while written by soldiers and intelligence officers, and mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related detail.

The document collection is available on a dedicated webpage.

The reports cover most units from the US Army with the exception of most US Special Forces' activities. The reports do not generally cover top secret operations or European and other ISAF Forces operations.

We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits.

Oh hello interactive map of incidents and suchlike.

Thoughts on this? Should it be allowed etc etc. Quite a bit of this information is verging on personable, and there were at least two small reports I read from it that were written by named officers.

[Daxter King]

They really shouldn't release the names of soldiers IMO, unless they did something devastating/illegal. I believe its important for information about everything to be available though, so overall I approve of Wikileaks. I just hope they don't alter or edit footage in the future like they did in the helicopter fiasco.

[STM]

Hopefully no secret stuff was given away too much and I agree, they shouldn't give individual names unless that person gave consent. It's good to have a detailed list though so we can always remember.

[Josh]

Hopefully no secret stuff was given away too much

It's Wikileaks. Thats their job.

[Dixanadu]

God bless the Internet.

[Bullet Magnet]

What bugs me most is the total absence of discussion of its contents anywhere, so far as I can see. The best anyone can do is debate whether or not it should be released at all. Well bugger that. We're a civilisation of imbeciles.

This is the sort of stuff our journalists should be unveiling, but that seems to be no longer their style. You know, the reason the logs were released to so few outlets was because if they were initially made freely available to everyone no journalist would touch it with a barge pole. Exclusivity is all that makes stories valuable, not the content.