The spin machine rolls on

As the fallout from the Wikileaks revelations continues, government spinners are hard at it putting a gloss on the damaging insights. The Times today blames Wikileaks for putting informers at risk, conveniently ignoring the bigger picture. We pay vast numbers of civil servants, over 4000 in the Home Office alone, to brief journalists, draft ministerial speeches etc, to pull the wool over our eyes. Fortunately there are people who do not swallow this guff. Among them is the comedian Mark Steel, who wrote the following in yesterdays Independent.

"Why are the British and US governments saying the leak of military documents about Afghanistan has "put our soldiers at risk?" It's us who's been kept hidden from this information, not the Taliban. For example, many of the revelations are previously hidden details of civilian casualties, but Afghans in those areas probably already knew about those deaths. I don't suppose local insurgents have said "Well well, I've read the leaked documents, and you know that family whose house was bombed to rubble by an American plane, and the rest of the village arrived and wailed for three days and swore revenge and then there was a funeral that we all went to. Well it turns out they're dead."

One typical story in the documents tells how in March 2007, following an explosion, marines opened fire with automatic weapons as they drove down a six-mile stretch of road, killing 19 civilians including teenage girls in fields, motorists and an old man. But when they made a military report on the episode, they wrote that after the explosion the "patrol returned to base". This was accurate, as far as it went. It just missed out the details in between. 

So the main attack has been the traditional one with a leak, to ignore the lies, disasters and deaths revealed, and instead become furious at whoever exposed it all. If you report a murder to the police, you wouldn't expect to turn on the news later and hear: "The police have said they'll do all they can to catch the sick individual who revealed there had been a murder."

Secrets are essential not because of the danger when information gets to insurgents, but because of the danger when information gets to us. For we might conclude that having an army in Afghanistan for no coherent reason appears to be putting them and the Afghans at a certain amount of risk."

M.Steel Independent 28/07/2010