A decade after the whistleblower, Edward Snowden, revealed large-scale snooping by Washington on global leaders and ordinary Americans, massive leaks from the Pentagon have, once again, exposed the grim realities of how the United States of America views the world and operates in it. Several confidential military documents made their way onto the social media platforms, Discord and 4chan, in March and April, allegedly sourced from a 21-year-old airman who has been arrested. The documents, which have provided fodder for a seemingly endless stream of news articles for major US publications, suggest that the American intelligence community has a less rosy opinion of Ukraine’s military poten­tial in the face of Russia’s ongoing war than Washington publicly admits to. They show that the US believes casualty numbers on Uk­rainian and Russian sides are higher than the counts Kyiv and Moscow have put out. They also appear to reveal that the US and its Western allies, especially the United Kingdom, are much more deeply entrenched in the conflict than they have publicly accepted. According to the documents, special forces of the US and the UK are already stationed within Ukraine’s territory, raising the risks of a direct hot war between Moscow and the West.

There are two other takeaways from the documents and the response to their revelation. First, the leaks show that for all its talk of building alliances and friendship among democracies, Washington trusts no one. The documents indicate that US intelligence agencies have been snooping on the presidential office of South Korea, a key ally, and on the activities of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a man Washington has backed with arms and aid. Given how previous revelations that the US had spied on the then German chancellor, Angela Merkel, had sparked a diplomatic spat between Washington and Berlin, the latest leaks suggest that America has not felt the need to change its ways. The second key takeaway is the reason for this indifference. Instead of questioning the US government on discrepancies between public positions and actual assessments and policies revealed by the leaks, much of the US mainstream media has focused its attention on the leaker. At a time when governments globally are looking to censor more, the press should not be doing that work for them.