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Comment by jon_hendry | Hacker News Reader

The main thing about the Iraq War Logs was that there was nothing particularly new or surprising or shocking. Details about incidents, but nothing war critics didn't already assume had happened many times.

When someone says "We've got horrible things to reveal", your imagination fills in the blanks, extrapolating from what we've already found out to even more horrible extremes.

But then what Wikileaks revealed didn't live up to that. It was pretty much more of the same things we already knew.

It's no wonder the reaction was subdued. It doesn't mean people don't care, it just means we're too burnt out to work up a rage about the sorts of things we already knew were happening.

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What you say makes sense but it is still sad.

With regard to torture, first there was denial. Then we were told it was rouge elements of the military that did these things. Then came rationalization. We had to do it. After Wikileaks proved beyond a doubt the scope of the crimes there's apathy. The country has gotten so apathetic that Bush admits to his crimes in his memoirs and yet has no fear of prosecution.

It's sad that many Americans see ourselves as a force of good and when confronted with irrefutable proof of our crimes the nation, for the most part, just shrugged it's shoulders. I agree with your analysis. I wish reality were different though.

Do you seriously believe the whole "the leak is very serious, but at the same time trivial"-story? It's a classic defense mechanism or tactic, depending on who you ask, in crisis management. I don't know any good English sources for this off the top of my head, but I it's called "trivialization", "minimization" or "disavowal". You can also google "crisis communication", "crisis management" or "image restoration" and you'll probably find something interesting like http://www.ou.edu/deptcomm/dodjcc/groups/98A1/Benoit.htm

"Do you seriously believe the whole "the leak is very serious, but at the same time trivial"-story"

All I know is that nobody looked through the leaked material and found something beyond what we already knew about.

This is really the key and why I've never liked the comparisons to the Pentagon Papers. Wikileaks may have changed the narrative at the margins, but overall the leak didn't reveal much about the big picture that hasn't been common knowledge for a good while.

The Pentagon Papers, on the other hand, revealed that multiple presidential administrations had deliberately lied to the public about what was going on in Vietnam. The Downing Street memo is probably the closest Iraq war analogue.

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