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Now, welcome to the award-winning BestOfTheLeft podcast with Clips Today from Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, The Rachel Maddo Show, The Colbert Report, The Progressive, The Show, On The Media, The Now Show, The Daily Show, and Citizen Radio, with a bonus video clip for our iPhone app users from MarkFurray.com.

Here is your first quote. This isn't a leak, it's a hemorrhage.

That was Mark Mardel of the BBC expressing his surprise at the huge trove of classified documents released that are all about what?

Failures in Afghanistan.

Exactly right. Now, for the last year or so, the Obama administration has been trying to sell us the Afghan war. It's like a very expensive used car.

And ladies and gentlemen, we just got the car facts.

Turns out the previous owner was the Soviet Union and boy did they wreck it.

It was all from the last administration, of course. Everything's going fine now, so there's no reason to do that.

Well, actually, yeah, this is true. The Obama administration has said this is all from, you know, up to like two years ago, so everything's changed.

Now, they're in charge. They've made a lot of changes. For example, they are no longer writing stuff down.

I understand they sent a massive shipment of hope over. Yes, they did.

But we begin tonight with what else, the largest leak of wartime documents in this country since the Vietnam War.

More than 90,000 US government documents obtained and posted by the website Wikileets over the weekend.

The last time classified information of this volume regarding an ongoing war was published, it precipitated a full-on war between the New York Times and the Nixon White House.

It was, of course, the leaking of the Pentagon papers during the Vietnam War by US military analyst named Daniel Ellsberg back in 1971.

The Pentagon papers episode was one of the touchstones in the history of the war that helped turn the public against the Vietnam War.

The 90,000 plus documents posted by Wikileets this weekend are different from the Pentagon papers in so far as they are set of discrete and granular snapshots of the war over the last six years as opposed to a top-down study of the war initiated in Washington.

The Wikileets documents are raw intelligence, incident reports, threat analyses as seen through the eyes of the soldier fighting the war as opposed to an analytical view of the war from policy makers.

So in that sense, Wikileets is no Pentagon papers.

But there is a glaring parallel between the two that can't be ignored.

These Wikileets documents have been notable in that they essentially confirm all of the major points of criticism of the Afghanistan war effort.

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