Wikileaks recently published the Afghan War Diary--over 90,000 classified US war logs recorded during the Afghan war in the years 2004-2009. The logs were made available to the Guardian, New York Times and Der Spiegel some weeks ago for analysis and evaluation. All three verified their authenticity.
See today's Guardian report for an overvew and summary of the scope of the logs.
This is the biggest ever war time leak and the contents of the diary confirm the anti-war movement's arguments about the pointless nature of the war and the need to bring the troops home.
Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama's "surge" strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US naval personnel captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.
The war logs also detail:
- How many more unreported civilian deaths have occurred than we have been led to believe by the media.
- How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial. This is effectively a death squad. See this report about a mission that went wrong from Der Spiegel.
- How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.
- How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.
- How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.
See the Stop the War Coalition response to the war logs here.
The logs and guides to reading them can be viewed at following sites:
Wikileaks | Guardian | New York Times | Der Spiegel
See a video of Wikileaks found Julian Assange talking about the biggest leak of wartime documents in intelligence history.
