Al Qaeda's Anti-Shia Sunni extremism doesn't make this very plausible.

... to be found in we (you) "had to fight". There are many kind of war actions possible, and choosing a nation building effort for Afghanistan was just as idiotic as invading Iraq.

For my money, *if* anything needed to be done in Afghanistan, it was a narrow, precise police action: invade Afghanistan to kill or capture wanted Al Queda members and kick over only those elements of the Taleban that got in the way. Forget the rest.

untenable. When a military is in an untenable situation, the response is a strategic retreat.

How would they go about this in this situation, with a political culture in Washington that is treating them like total pawns.

From the article in The Guardian:

"It was not until late May that the Pentagon finally closed in on a suspect, and that was only after a very strange sequence of events. On 21 May, a Californian computer hacker called Adrian Lamo was contacted by somebody with the online name Bradass87 who started to swap instant messages with him. He was immediately extraordinarily open: "hi... how are you?… im an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern bagdad … if you had unprecedented access to classified networks, 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?"

For five days, Bradass87 opened his heart to Lamo. He described how his job gave him access to two secret networks: the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, SIPRNET, which carries US diplomatic and military intelligence classified "secret"; and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which uses a different security system to carry similar material classified up to "top secret". He said this had allowed him to see "incredible things, awful things … that belong in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … almost criminal political backdealings … the non-PR version of world events and crises."

Bradass87 suggested that "someone I know intimately" had been downloading and compressing and encrypting all this data and uploading it to someone he identified as Julian Assange. At times, he claimed he himself had leaked the material, suggesting that he had taken in blank CDs, labelled as Lady Gaga's music, slotted them into his high-security laptop and lip-synched to nonexistent music to cover his downloading: "i want people to see the truth," he said.

He dwelled on the abundance of the disclosure: "its open diplomacy … its Climategate with a global scope and breathtaking depth … its beautiful and horrifying … It's public data, it belongs in the public domain." At one point, Bradass87 caught himself and said: "i can't believe what im confessing to you." It was too late. Unknown to him, two days into their exchange, on 23 May, Lamo had contacted the US military. On 25 May he met officers from the Pentagon's criminal investigations department in a Starbucks and gave them a printout of Bradass87's online chat.

Does this really sound plausible? My 15 year old daughter has more sense than this kid and they let him download this onto a tape and didn't catch him. Then he just happens to be bragging to someone he doesn't know? It seems like far more of a convenient story than a logical one.

Who is really getting screwed here? Not the military, the administration, which had been screwing over the military with very unrealistic goals and means. I think they just got fragged. IED. Information explosive device.

I think Lamo (Lame-o) says it all.