Readbook: WikiLeaks Truth, Competence, and Consequences

WELCOME TO THE READBOOK, our daily trawl of content noteworthy, tl;dr, and below-the-fold. Posted early and updated throughout the day. Track updates via Twitter @EditorsCI. Get in touch via email at editors@currentintelligence.net. 

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MORNING EDITION

Day two of the WikiLeaks buzz. Some healthy skepticism has been working its way into the discussion. Some of it has focused on what may or may not be revealed in the war logs: our own Josh Foust published highly critical op-eds at PBS's Need to Know and the Columbia Journalism Review. Some of it has also pointed to the fact that the logs contain documentation of a very particular and specialist kind; deciphering the contents, and trying to build accurate, truthful stories out of them, won't be an easy task. At the Wall Street Journal, Noah Shachtman quite rightly points out the limitations of the reports, and the importance of eyewitness corroboration. Spencer Ackerman cautions that culturally-encoded nuances may not be obvious to the lay reader (disclosure: in offline correspondence, I suggested as much). Foreign Policy Associate Editor Charles Homans writes that common sense and context are crucial to making sense of intelligence. At The Atlantic, Max Fischer takes it a step further, arguing that with the Wiki Leak, everyone can try his or he hand at intelligence analysis - but that it's a science, and journalists will need to approach the reports with jaundiced eye.

Arts & Science. Fischer's piece is excellent, but as I pointed out in short-form on Twitter last night, intelligence analysis - analysis of any kind, really - is both science AND art. More, skepticism can be a comfortable posture among spooks and other experts, especially when faced with the mysteries of a new subject. It can be a great way to mask ignorance, but it doesn't amount to either method or analytical rigor. Its counterpart, gullibility, is just as dangerous. Somewhere between the two, Julian Assange's competency to "mitigate harm" by "vetting" the 92000 files has been called into question. At a Q & A at London's Frontline Club yesterday, war photographer John D. McHugh challenged Assange on this, asking the Australian "how much expertise" he "has in analyzing the data" - claiming, according to the Frontline Club's twitter feed, that some mistakes have been made.

Truth & Consequence. The issue of consequences comes to mind here. With so much room for potential error, it's hard to figure whether the Afghanistan War Logs are a "treasure trove" or just a plain old mine field. More of the discussion is turning to the likelihood of revenge killings, those named in the reports instant candidates for Taliban and Al Qaeda hit lists. Not hard to do even with partial data, as Joshua Foust points out:

The military is rightly accused of overclassifying material, but in this case we have some idea of why: even with the names removed from these reports, you know where they happened (many still have place names). You know when they happened. And you know an Afghan was speaking to a U.S. soldier or intelligence agent. If you have times, locations and half the participants, you don’t need names to identify who was involved in a conversation — with some very basic detective work, you can find out (and it’s much easier to do in Afghanistan, which loves gossip).

If I were a Taliban operative with access to a computer — and lots of them have access to computers — I’d start searching the WikiLeaks data for incident reports near my area of operation to see if I recognized anyone. And then I’d kill whomever I could identify. Those deaths would be directly attributable to WikiLeaks.

Info-terrorism? Former CNN correspondent Jamie McIntyre pushes a bit harder, arguing "By remaining agnostic on the consequences of its actions, WikiLeaks seems to me to to be functioning less in the tradition of good old-fashioned muckrakers, and more like anti-privacy terrorists." Time will tell just how serious some of those consequences might be.  It could be that Assange and WikiLeaks have just inadvertently stumbled into the realm of the unintended though entirely predictable version.

Assange's appearance last night in London. Here's the video, courtesy of the Frontline Club:

Danger Room's Spencer Ackerman and Joshua Foust discuss.