Controversial information sharing website Wiki Leaks < www.wikileaks.org > has gone to war again with the US War Machine by releasing 91,000 classified documents that it obtained detailing activities in Afghanistan.

They have set up a separate web page on their website called the Kabul War Diary. From the site:

The Afghan War Diary: an extraordinary secret compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports describe the majority of lethal military actions involving the United States military. They include the number of persons internally stated to be killed, wounded, or detained during each action, together with the precise geographical location of each event, and the military units involved and major weapon systems used.

The leak has come from an alleged inside source within the US military intelligence community - a disillusioned junior with a cunning nack to busting into secure systems. The documents are alarming, and detail activities far exceeding what the general public has been lead to believe is occurring on the ground in Afghanistan. Greatly under-reported civilian casualties and assassination teams.
I have previously posted a video from Wiki Leaks of classified footage of a helicopter gunship strike that is quite hard to watch.

I urge you to take a look at the wiki leaks site if you are that way inclined < www.wikileaks.org >

There is a lesson here for all of us in regard to a couple of matters.
Firstly, within all of our businesses and online dealings we must remember about security at all times. No matter how secure you think you are there will always be someone out there that is more clever, so it is a matter of risk management. Get creative with your passwords, and change them often. I tend to do a clean out every couple of weeks, and make new codes up constantly. Be realistic abo0ut what information you chose to publish and store online, even on sites like facebook (especially on sites like Facebook actually) as most of this just falls into the public domain and is a click away.

The second lesson is that it is becoming increasingly hard to believe what comes out of the press machines attached to our collective western governments.
On one hand we are feed information informing us that we are all fighting the "good fight" on behalf of freedom, liberty and justice, yet on the other hand we are collectively being blatantly lied to about quite important things. How can this be a fight for the freedoms of the west, when in fact those freedoms are not being upheld by our "keepers" to our collective society. It seems a bit of a sham really.

It is no surprise that the governments responsible for situations like Iraq and Afghanistan are also now having a hard time convincing the citizens of the value of this fight.

From the wikileaks site:

25th July 2010 5:00 PM EST WikiLeaks has released a document set called the Afghan War Diary, an extraordinary compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010.

The reports, while written by soldiers and intelligence officers, and mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related details.

The reports cover most units from the US Army with the exception of most US Special Forces' activities. The reports do not generally cover top secret operations or European and other ISAF Forces operations.

We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits.

The data is provided in HTML (web), CSV (comma-separated values) and SQL (database) formats, and was rendered into KML (Keyhole Markup Language) mapping data that can be used with Google Earth.

The Afghan War Diary is the most significant archive about the reality of war to have ever been released during the course of a war. The deaths of tens of thousands is normally only a statistic but the archive reveals the locations and the key events behind each most of these deaths. We hope its release will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and provide the raw ingredients necessary to change its course.

Most entries have been written by soldiers and intelligence officers listening to reports radioed in from front line deployments. However the reports also contain related information from Marines intelligence, US Embassies, and reports about corruption and development activity across Afghanistan.

Each report consists of the time and precise geographic location of an event that the US Army considers significant. It includes several additional standardized fields: The broad type of the event (combat, non-combat, propaganda, etc.); the category of the event as classified by US Forces, how many were detained, wounded, and killed from civilian, allied, host nation, and enemy forces; the name of the reporting unit and a number of other fields, the most significant of which is the summary - an English language description of the events that are covered in the report.

The Diary is available on the web and can be viewed in chronological order and by by over 100 categories assigned by the US Forces such as: "escalation of force", "friendly-fire", "development meeting", etc. The reports can also be viewed by our "severity" measure-the total number of people killed, injured or detained. All incidents have been placed onto a map of Afghanistan and can be viewed on Google Earth limited to a particular window of time or place. In this way the unfolding of the last six years of war may be seen.

The material shows that cover-ups start on the ground. When reporting their own activities US Units are inclined to classify civilian kills as insurgent kills, downplay the number of people killed or otherwise make excuses for themselves. The reports, when made about other US Military units are more likely to be truthful, but still down play criticism. Conversely, when reporting on the actions of non-US ISAF forces the reports tend to be frank or critical and when reporting on the Taliban or other rebel groups, bad behavior is described in comprehensive detail. The behavior of the Afghan Army and Afghan authorities are also frequently described.

The reports come from US Army with the exception most Special Forces activities. The reports do not generally cover top-secret operations or European and other ISAF Forces operations. However when a combined operation involving regular Army units occurs, details of Army partners are often revealed. For example a number of bloody operations carried out by Task Force 373, a secret US Special Forces assassination unit, are exposed in the Diary -- including a raid that lead to the death of seven children.