Official comment on the Afghanistan battlefield reports released by Wikileaks would have us believe that they contain nothing new. But, many important facts never made it into the official reports, writes Noah Shachtman, who witnessed one of the battles. The reports, often providing little more than place, date and the number of enemies killed, leave out details that, Schactman acknowledges, include the most disturbing and important. He surmises, generously, that the lack of detail was unintentional.

In fact, from the early days of the Iraq war to the present battles in Afghanistan, war reports have whitewashed and manipulated the truth in order to better serve official US propaganda. Looking farther back, to the Vietnam war, we see reports, similar to these, that emphasized casualty figures--an emphasis that was intentional, high-level, and led to mass murder in Vietnam.