Examples of mainstream media coverage of Wikileaks and Manning releases of information are seen here in CNN and ABCNews 2010 reports on U.S. private contractors paying the Taliban for safe passage on supply roads.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/07/27/afghanistan.wikileaks.corrup...

Truckers shaken down from both sides in Afghanistan, reports show
By the CNN Wire Staff
July 27, 2010

(CNN) -- Truckers moving vital supplies along the roads of war-torn Afghanistan have faced shakedowns by both the Taliban and Afghan authorities, with Taliban fighters charging up to $500 for safe passage, leaked U.S. military reports show.

A trucking company working in Afghanistan told American forces "that they were approached by Taliban personnel to talk about payment for the safe passage of convoys through their area," one 2007 report states. "The current price for passage is $500 US per truck from Kandahar to Herat…

It said the negotiations were conducted in Quetta, the city in northwestern Pakistan where the Taliban is believed to have set up a kind of government-in-exile while it fights U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Local contractors coroborrated the information, "and the other companies state they are paying money for safe passage," the November 2007 report states.

The report was among the more than 75,000 documents released Sunday by the online whistleblower site Wikileaks. It is just one of several reports documenting the problems faced by drivers across Afghanistan, where U.S. and allied troops have been battling the Taliban for nearly nine years.

The U.S military outsources much of the security for truck convoys carrying food, water, equipment, fuel and ammunition to remote and dangerous areas in Afghanistan, and those contractors hire local Afghans who pay bribes for safe passage, according to a June report from a House oversight and government reform subcommittee. That report found portions of a $2.1 billion Pentagon contract to truck supplies to U.S. troops was being indirectly paid to Afghan insurgents and corrupt public officials as protection money...

https://abcnews.go.com/WN/Afghanistan/united-states-military-funding-tal...

abcNEWS
Report: U.S. Bribes to Protect Convoys Are Funding Taliban Insurgents
Rep. John Tierney concludes, "Tony Soprano would be proud of it."

By NICK SCHIFRIN KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, June 22, 2010

"One senior Department of Defense official in Afghanistan stated that there have been significant discussions within the Department [of Defense] of the problem of protection payments to local warlords and the Taliban, but no action has been taken" today's report says. "In [the senior official's] view, the contracting officers with responsibility for the contract 'intentionally turn a blind eye to the problem and refuse to look past the prime [contractor] to see how the security subcontractors operate -- hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.'"

… In the end, the subcommittee and the American trucking executives don't only worry that American money is going to fund the Taliban. They are also worried that the contracting system is perpetuating Afghanistan's security problem; the payments to local contractors, they say, encourages instability along the roads and props up the kinds of warlords and local thugs who Afghans came to hate during the civil war of the early 1990s. And they say if Americans are seen to be supporting those people, then the Afghan public will refuse to support the Americans or the government -- whose police and army have been bypassed by the U.S. contracting system.

"If one of the foundational aspects of counter-insurgency is to have a government in Afghanistan that people from that country can trust and put their faith in and believe that it's not corrupt, it doesn't seem to make much sense to me to put that kind of money at risk of feeding corruption and building up powers that are not the government," Tierney says. "When people see police and army people getting paid off and gangsters running around making huge amounts of money while a truck driver might make $200 a month -- but the guy that's armed might make $20 million in a year -- that does not lend itself to people having a great deal of confidence that the system is going to work for them."