CNN 2010-08-02

Patrick Hennessey reads from an incident report he remembers from his time as a captain in the British Army in Afghanistan in 2007. Now for all the world to see on Wikileaks.

Two shots are fired at the bottom of the car. A vehicle crashed off the road. And one of the people in the car sustained leg injuries in the crash.

But he says there’s more to this incident than just the words on the page.

That’s just brewed 1 reporting. Well, two weeks before that, we had the first suicide bomber 2 in Greschke. It had previously 3 not been something that happened in that area. We lost a soldier in that incident.

The thousands of reports leaked online were written by frontline soldiers like Patrick Hennessey. He can see his call sign on these records, but he says there’s nothing secret in them.

Part of the sensation of this story is the impression that there is a massive cue and that something that was deliberately 4 hidden from the public has been revealed. I didn't think any of these was deliberately hidden, any more than the company accounts of some boring insurance firms are hidden. They are just internal rather than external.

U.S. Marine 5 Corp Major Jim Coffman has just returned from Afghanistan. He agrees that the records he’s seen are mundane 6 incident reports. But he says revealing how troops operate and gather intelligence was irresponsible.

I think any time you jeopardize 7 any of our sources and methods from intelligence standpoint, it’s a bad thing. And like I said, whoever is responsible for leaking this information should be held accountable and it is not, uh, it was very irresponsible.

Wikileaks maintains that it has a harm-minimization policy, keeping back 15,000 records to prevent the names of Taliban informants from being released. Wikileaks editor Julian Assange was not available to comment, but he said in a news conference Monday that Wikileaks was not able to vet 8 all of the documents before publishing them. Both Hennessey and Coffman say troops in the field would be little affected 9 by the Wikileaks media storm.

To be honest with you, we were not affected at all. If I were still in Afghanistan, I just got back last month. But if I were still there, I probably wouldn’t even know about any of this.

If troops will feel anything, it will be a slight frustration 10 that people without, really, the kind of qualifications or the responsibility we experienced to know the difference between what is and isn’t sensitive have just flooded the Internet with mostly, unimpressive, uncontroversial stuff, but amongst which there may be nuggets which affect people.

In the meantime, Wikileaks Afghan war diary is out there for all the world to see: friend or foe 11?