wikileaks is getting the attention they want. and anything that gets into wikileaks is seen as the real thing. some are, some aren't surely and only matter of time before wikileaks is used for disinformation. some variant of operation mincement one day soon from wikileaks.
Are the WikiLeaks War Docs Overhyped Old News?
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/are-the-wikileaks-war-docs-overhyped-old-news/
"Longtime Afghanistan watchers are diving into Wikileaks’ huge trove of unearthed U.S. military reports about the war. And they’re surfacing, as we initially did, with pearls of the obvious and long-revealed. Andrew Exum, an Afghanistan veteran and Center for a New American Security fellow, compared the quasi-revelations about (gasp!) Pakistani intelligence sponsorship of Afghan insurgents and (shock-horror!) Special Operations manhunts to news that the Yankees may have lost the 2004 American League pennant. It’s a fair point, but it conceals what’s really valuable about the leaked logs: they’re a real-time account of how the U.S. let Afghanistan rot.
For one thing — and this supports Exum’s argument — many, if not most, of these documents are frontline reports. They don’t pretend to be about anything more than what a unit encounters in its small patch of the war zone. That both clarifies the focus of individual reports and limits the degree to which any analyst can responsibly extrapolate them into clear trends. “Raw intelligence is rarely decisive,� notes a smart senior military officer who asked for anonymity, “and certainly not indicative of anything meaningful until passed through a more calibrated hypothesis or thesis.�
It’s a helpful caveat. We won’t pretend to have waded through any more than a slice of the 77,000 reports released thus far by WikiLeaks. But so far, there’s no My Lai, no No Gun Ri, no smoking gun linking al-Qaeda to the Boston Red Sox. And some of the heavy-breathing accounts surrounding the documents don’t really match what the logs say. “Taliban sympathisers listening in to top-secret phone calls of US-led coalition,� pants the Guardian. But: “At this time, it is doubtful insurgents have the technical ability to eavesdrop on conversations,� according to the report that the Guardian cites to justify its headline.
Adds a former intelligence contractor who used to produce intelligence summaries, “There will be a lot of interesting tidbits but nothing earthshaking.� And it’s those “interesting tidbits� that makes the WikiLeaks trove significant. There’s a bias in journalism toward believing that what’s secret is inherently a hive of hidden truth. That operating principle animates reporters’ practice of breaking down governmental secrecy. But it can also create a misleading expectation that leaks represent huge new revelations. And when those revelations don’t manifest, it creates an expectation that the trove is neither useful nor significant. In this case, that would be a mistake."