Mary Shaw

The now-infamous whistleblower website Wikileaks has finally released the greatly anticipated leaked evidence of how wrong things really are in Afghanistan.

The British newspaper The Guardian summarizes:

A huge cache of secret U.S. military files ... provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.

The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in U.S. military history. The files, which were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, give a blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years, which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and more than 1,000 US troops.

U.S. National Security Advisor General James Jones released a statement alleging that the leaks "could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security."

Excuse me, but the leaks are just shining a light on the reality of that war. And we already knew -- or suspected -- many of these "secrets".

In fact, Michael Isikoff has reported for NBC News that "[an] ongoing Pentagon review of the massive flood of secret documents made public by the WikiLeaks website has so far found no evidence that the disclosure harmed U.S. national security or endangered American troops in the field."

Does any of this sound familiar? It should. Apparently the White House didn't learn from the recent Shirley Sherrod fiasco that they need to do their homework and not just react to every little bit of "news" in a knee-jerk kind of way.

Those little details aside, hiding the truth will not undo the damage we've done in Afghanistan. And the American people have a right to know how our tax dollars are being misused.

When he was campaigning for the presidency in 2008, Barack Obama promised us a more transparent government. To keep that promise, he needs to show us the bad as well as the good. And then let the voters be the judges.

Mary Shaw is a Philadelphia-based writer and activist. She is a former Philadelphia Area Coordinator for the Nobel-Prize-winning human rights group Amnesty International, and her views on politics, human rights, and social justice issues have appeared in numerous online forums and in newspapers and magazines worldwide. Note that the ideas expressed here are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Amnesty International or any other organization with which she may be associated. E-mail: mary@maryshawonline.com