The most remarkable, and disturbing, aspect about the simultaneous release today of 92,000 internal records of US military actions in Afghanistan to the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times is how blind, complacent, negligent or sycophantic the US (and other Western) media have been over a 6-year period (Jan 2004-Dec 2009) in getting anywhere near the truth about the war in that country.   Or, putting it another way, how come the US establishment military and political have been able so comprehensively and for so long to conceal the truth?   That in itself, apart from the facts which are horrifying enough, deserves detailed investigation and a full-scale inquiry into news management in war situations.

Many of the hideous facts of the Vietnam war were only revealed by the leaking of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg.   We only learnt of the out-of-control shooting-up of civilians in a Baghdad street in 2007 by US Apache helicopters when it was leaked by a young US army intelligency analyst named Bradley Manning and posted on Wikileaks.   The Pentagon had said it couldn’t find the video when Reuters asked for it under FOIA.   And now Wikileaks after this first single revelation is claiming it has several million files which may include US embassy cables concerning arms deals, trade talks, secret meetings, and uncensored criticism from other governments.

How could the media have failed so badly to get at the real truth?   There are several explanations.   One if that the US media (with honourable exceptions like Seymour Hersch) have repeatedly been exposed as extraordinarily subservient – one reason why Bush got away with so much after 9/11.   News was what the establishment deemed to be news.   Even when a journalist breaks through the barrier, as Michael Hastings did in his revelations about General Stanley McCrystal in Rolling Stone magazine, it was he who was excoriated for breaking the unspoken rules rather than the US military for giving wholly misleading accounts about the progress of the war.

Why then haven’t the US media asked more probing questions or followed up with more searching exposures when diverted by evasive or mendacious replies?   As in the UK context, journalists have grown lazy in accepting official explanations, especially if ‘embedded’ with the military in wartime.   They may also be threatened with being cut out of future intelligence if they print  stories inconvenient or embarrassing to the authorities.   But that is exactly what they’re there for.

Given the weakness of so much of the media the internet, blogs, Wikileaks, hacking are finally confronting the culture of spin and the dominance over presentation controlled by the powers-that-be whether politicians, corporations, military or police.   But the monopoly over information in the hands of the powerful (and used with such devastating effect to portray a false reality to serve their interests, as this latest Wikileaks episodes illustrates) has to be broken, not just from outside the system, but within the system itself.

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