By now, anyone with even minute interest in the news has heard about WikiLeaks' unveiling of nearly 400,000 secret field reports from the Iraq War Logs. It's a monumental moment, because, as Slate points out in its excellent summary of the reports and the press coverage from mainstream media, although much of the news itself isn't shocking, the leak makes the Iraq War the most documented in history.
The Guardian and The New York Times have been doing some great coverage of the documents, and independent, alternative sources are sure to be scouring the documents with even finer-toothed combs in the coming days, but for now, we should all be reveling in what this means for WikiLeaks, an independent website devoted to blowing any whistle it can. It's officially capitalized on its potential and proved itself as a veritable, hugely important cyber source.
It will be exciting to see how the media, both mainstream and independent, deal with the WikiLeaks reports. My classmate Aaron Edwards has already detailed on his blog the importance of these other sources, especially the mainstream, in ensuring that the leak has a significant result. I'd love to see these sources dissecting the information presented within them more thoroughly and following up on some of the most troubling aspects of the logs, including the clear evidence that U.S. military officials tended to disregard hundreds of reports of regular, persistent torture and direct abuse by Iraq security forces. Now that the whistle's been blown, it's time to see the impact of what's been disseminated to the world.
The Guardian and The New York Times have been doing some great coverage of the documents, and independent, alternative sources are sure to be scouring the documents with even finer-toothed combs in the coming days, but for now, we should all be reveling in what this means for WikiLeaks, an independent website devoted to blowing any whistle it can. It's officially capitalized on its potential and proved itself as a veritable, hugely important cyber source.
It will be exciting to see how the media, both mainstream and independent, deal with the WikiLeaks reports. My classmate Aaron Edwards has already detailed on his blog the importance of these other sources, especially the mainstream, in ensuring that the leak has a significant result. I'd love to see these sources dissecting the information presented within them more thoroughly and following up on some of the most troubling aspects of the logs, including the clear evidence that U.S. military officials tended to disregard hundreds of reports of regular, persistent torture and direct abuse by Iraq security forces. Now that the whistle's been blown, it's time to see the impact of what's been disseminated to the world.
