WikiLeaks is asking Vets to fill in the info...

From this morning's Democracy Now --

AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel you have accomplished what you wanted to with the release of these documents?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Not yet. We’ve made a good initial forray: fourteen pages in The Guardian on Monday, seventeen pages in Der Spiegel, front page of the New York Times, together with underlying support. But altogether, the journalistic coalition that we put around this material to try and bring it out to the public and get impact for it has read about 2,000 of these reports in detail. There’s 91,000 reports. We really need the public, other journalists and especially former soldiers to go through this material and say, "Look, this connects to that," or "I was there. Let me tell you what really happened. Let me tell you the rest of the details." And over the next few days, we’ll be putting up easier and easier to use search interfaces, the same ones that our journalistic teams used to extract this data. Already if you go to war diaries — wardiary.wikileaks.org, you’ll see several different ways of browsing through this. You can look through some 200 different categories that the US military applied to these reports. As an example, there’s 2,200 escalation of force events self-described by the US military. [emphasis added]

Would that we could get to some Afghans....

Perhaps a Pentagon Papers for Iraq or Afghanistan Wars Has Not Been Written -- And That Is Another Indictment #wikileaks

Say what you like about Robert McNamara, he did ask for the Pentagon Papers to be written. I'm not so sure that the people currently atop the U.S. government would be similarly inclined. From Sanford Ungar's The Papers & The Papers: An Account of the Legal and Political Battle over The Pentagon Papers (1972):

In a gesture that was remarkable for an architect of a war that had torn the nation apart, McNamara ordered the collection of a set of documents that, on release, could expose his own judgment to harsh criticism and bitter attack. He wanted scholars to be able to examine the economic, political, and military bases of Vietnam policy when they eventually came to analyze how the war grew out of the inherited postulates of post-World War II American politics ... [McNamara said his objective] "was to bequeath to scholars the raw material from which they could reexamine the events of the time. If historians are to make a careful examination, they need the raw materials. I simply asked that these be brought together, and I have no regrets for having done so." (pg. 27)

Was the Pentagon Papers Supreme Court Case a Victory for Freedom of the Press? #wikileaks

From Sanford Ungar's The Papers & The Papers: An Account of the Legal and Political Battle over The Pentagon Papers (1972):

As months went by, legal scholars and journalists alike began to realize that the 6-3 Supreme Court decision in the cases of New York Times v. United States and United States v. Washington Post had been a rather hollow victory for the press. The unsigned opinion of the court said only that the government had failed to carry its heavy burden of proof to obtain a prior restrain, and the individual justices' opinions had as many nasty words for the press as for the government. Many editors felt strongly that the newspapers were worse off after the Pentagon Papers than they had been before it; and in private conversations high Justice Department officials concurred in that assessment. "We proved on thing emphatically," said on Justice policy maker, "that there can be prior restrain of publication while a case is being reviewed in the courts." (303-304)

I think this is part of the explanation of why the New York Times institutionally seems compelled to go to the government.