The folks who brought you "Collateral Murder" (neutral arbiters of information, they insist) on Sunday released over 90,000 documents, many of them classified, revealing intimate details of the war in Afghanistan. The New York Times reports:
A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.
The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year...
The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the are stronger than at any time since 2001.
Follow the link for the gritty details of the documents. For now though, do you think WikiLeaks was right in leaking this information, and the Times (and the UK Guardian, and Der Speigel) right in publishing it? Does the freedom of information trump the soundness of classified information?
