What a week its been for us document hounds!! The dust is still settling from the wikileaks dump of over 70,000 raw, uncensored US military intelligence reports from Afghanistan. They have certainly revealed some interesting tidbits [Major caveat: just because the docs report these things does not make them true; they were composed quickly in the rough Afghan terrain under harsh battle conditions and often relied on unconfirmed sources , even rumors]:
- According to first hand accounts, the Afghan police and army are incompetent and corrupt.
- The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agents routinely supported (support?) the Afghan insurgency.
- There is a mysterious Task Force 373 (assassination squad?) reminiscent of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam.
- There are reports of attacks from “Turkish fighters” (Turkey is our NATO ally).
- The Taliban used a surface to air missile to shoot down a US Chinook helicopter (This has not been seen since the Afghan-USSR war; the DOD now denies that this happened).
- Reports of the Taliban’s attempts to obtain chemical weapons.
- And the bombshell -sorry, no pun intended- a (probably false) report that Bin Laden had already died in a Peshawar hospital in June 2007.
