It's been interesting to watch the discourse around the Afghan War Diary in the Canadian corporate press, and to see what they're talking about, and what they're not.

On Sunday, Wikileaks released 91,731 documents about the war in Afghanistan. This is the biggest leak in US history. It'll take some time for analysts to comb through it all, but some reporting trends are already emerging.

Former Canadian top soldier Rick Hillier got space in the CBC yesterday to criticize information in the leak that suggests four Canadian soldiers killed in 2006 were in fact victims of a "friendly fire" attack. Unfortunately, he's shooting the messenger. The tone throughout the article implies that his criticism is an indictment of Wikileaks, who released the documents, rather than of the US military, who almost certainly authored them.

Christie Blatchford moans that she's already bored to death with the whole thing, since we already knew that the war was going badly and that Pakistan has been supporting the Taliban, asking "Are you freaking kidding me? This is news?"

She says "Pakistan" here to cleverly exchange the idea of "some people in Pakistan" for "the government of Pakistan". The media have told us for years that the occupying forces have had to extend the war across the border, aerially bombing with drones, for example, to deal with people in the area propping up Taliban insurgents. Pakistan's government has not been part of the discussion. The leak, on the other hand, is reported to show that the ISI, Pakistan's spy agency, are providing the Taliban arms and intelligence, even though Pakistan are ostensibly US allies. Blatchford points to one Globe article from a few years ago that supposedly makes links Pakistan to the insurgency, but I can't see it behind their paywall.

If this were really as widely known as Blatchford says, why no uproar last year when Canada announced it would like to start selling arms to Pakistan? At the time Pakistan was carrying out a brutal offensive in the north of the country that internally displaced 1.5 million people, but if that weren't enough to raise red flags, you'd think common knowledge that they would end up in Taliban hands would make it noteworthy.

On top of this, it's only the corporate media, led by the New York Times, who have made a big deal of the ISI connection in the first place; the Guardian is saying that there's no real evidence for this in the documents. Centering coverage around this red herring provides a smokescreen for the real issues the leak introduces: war crimes committed by the occupying forces, concealment of information on civilian casualties, and the US dumping money into Afghan media to flood it with material created by the US, among others.

What does Blatchford think about those parts of the leak? Maybe she considers them common knowledge and hence not newsworthy. We'll never know, because she and the rest of the big media outfits will never consider those questions, only touching on whether the leak endangered Canadian troops, whether Pakistanis are trustworthy, and whether the war is going well for the occupying armies.