The Pentagon Papers They're Not

By Tom Shoop

The 92,000 Defense Department documents posted to WikiLeaks that are all over the news today aren't exactly the Pentagon Papers, argues Fred Kaplan in Slate:

Some of the conclusions to be drawn from these files: Afghan civilians are sometimes killed. Many Afghan officials and police chiefs are corrupt and incompetent. Certain portions of Pakistan's military and intelligence service have nefarious ties to the Taliban.

If any of this startles you, then welcome to the world of reading newspapers. Today's must be the first one you've read.

The documents have been purported to provide an unvarnished picture of the dire situation on the ground in the country, but the Pentagon's own 150-page report on the war earlier this year is in fact "much grimmer than the scattershot of documents in the WikiLeaks file," Kaplan writes.