For all the self-congratulations by the anti-war activists who dumped 75,000 pages of classified US military material onto the Internet, there were few real bombshells in the data drop.
That Pakistan and its spy agency, ISI, have been notoriously unreliable allies against the Taliban comes as no surprise: Bush and Obama administration officials both have said as much on the record.
Nor is it news that allied “special ops” teams have targeted top Taliban leaders — harming civilians in the process.
Nevertheless, WikiLeaks, the Swedish-based anti-war group that disseminated the stolen documents, demanded “war crime” prosecutions.
And The New York Times concluded that the data paint a “bleak” picture of the Afghan war.
The data at issue runs only through 2009, and the White House insists that Pakistan has become a more reliable ally since the counter-insurgency troop-surge policy began last year.
We hope so.
Still, the information contained in the documents should not be allowed to overwhelm the profound irresponsibility of publishing them in the first place.
National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Jones says the disclosure “could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk and threaten our national security” — and there’s no reason to doubt him.
Especially since the group responsible for the leaks is an unabashed foe of US policy and made no attempt whatsoever to vet the documents with the Pentagon for material that might endanger the lives of American soldiers.
As Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, rightly noted: “Our nation’s secrets are classified for a reason.” It’s not up to WikiLeaks — or even The New York Times — to decide what can be released to the public without putting the lives of those in combat at risk.
The leaker is most likely Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old US Army intelligence analyst charged this month with releasing classified information after bragging that he’d turned over 250,000 stolen documents to WikiLeaks.
That may be an empty boast, but if the documents are indeed tied to Manning, he needs to be prosecuted and punished — harshly.
Ultimately, though, it’s up to the government to safeguard its secrets. In this respect, the Pentagon failed miserably.