Media Hopes It Has New Pentagon Papers

First we need to repost this July 26 piece:

WikiLeaks is a sign that publishes purloined documents, and it has found some 77,000 pages of documents on the Afghanistan war, with another 15,000 on the way. WikiLeaks released the documents to three media outlets who want to press a case for US withdrawal, even though the documents themselves don't make that case; instead they illustrate what the US is actually doing, and what the enemy is doing.

The piece cited above notes that the release is a Rorschach test, and WikiLeaks leaked them to media outlets they felt would use them to press the case for withdrawal. The problem is the documents don't make that case.

Of course it's been done before - in 1971 the Institute for Policy Studies obtained "the Pentagon Papers," a voluminous cache of documents on US planning and debate before and during the Vietnam War. The New York Times printed excerpts of the papers to make the case for US withdrawal - except it had to all but falsify what the papers actually said to make that case.

It caused a firestorm at the time and was a turning point in the dishonesty of the Mainstream Media. The MSM may hope it achieves success here, but with the way the media landscape has changed there is more reason to hope rationality wins out.


UPDATE: Julian Assage, the creep in charge of WikiLeaks, defended himself on the Today show, this after he leaked the infamous Apache gunship footage trying to prove nonexistent "collateral murder." But as shown here he's guilty of what he slandered the Army for, and as a Wired link in the story shows, some of what Assange leaked isn't true.

UPDATE #2: A look at what the Times didn't do with regard to how WikiLeaks was handling the documents.