Seymour Hersh, the Afghanistan War WikiLeaks, and Getting the Real Story

One of the best investigative journalists who has been reporting on America's wars is Seymour Hersh. Hersh has been ahead of the pack -- revealing hard-to-believe atrocities far before the political marketplace was often ready or willing to accept his reporting.

The extraordinary posting on WikiLeaks of more than 92,000 classified documents on America's military activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan confirms Hersh's claims of battlefield executions and death squads.

The New Yorker's key commentators on Afghanistan have been Steve Coll, George Packer, Hendrick Hertzberg, and editor David Remnick.

I am a big fan of all of these brilliant writers. However, although these generalizations may be unfair to them and may overstate, Remnick, Coll, and Packer have been mostly in the camp of supporting the administration's general course in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- though there are exceptions in the portfolios of each. Hertzberg has been a cautious skeptic of the administration -- and Hersh has been the most dramatically revealing of America's self-deception about success in the Afghan War.

Given what has just been released in this disturbing dump of classified documents, we hope that The New Yorker removes any constraints -- real or nuanced -- on Hersh and gets him back out in the field on this stuff soon.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note. Clemons can be followed on Twitter @SCClemons