By Nick Turse, AlterNet
Posted on September 3, 2010, Printed on September 3, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148063/
In December 2008, I received an email message from Julian Assange -- the now world-famous public face of the whistleblower organization, Wikileaks. I don’t recall why or how it came about, but he invited me to join a counterinsurgency “analysis team” alongside a number of other academics, journalists and analysts.
The idea was to offer us embargoed material, much as Wikileaks recently did with the files of the Afghan War Diary -- a 6-year archive of tens of thousands of classified military documents, dealing with the U.S. war in Afghanistan -- giving the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel advance access to the documents. The reason for doing so was because Wikileaks had released a number of important U.S. military counterinsurgency manuals in the preceding months, but few reporters had shown much interest in them. Operating in a media environment where breaking the story is key and the fear of being scooped limits the amount of time and energy publications are willing to invest on documents sitting out in public, Assange carried out a trial run of a strategy that served Wikileaks exceptionally well this year.
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