What if the Secrets Stayed Secret?

[groovedaddy]

I READ the Monday New York Times with what can only be described as a sinking feeling.

Here on display, based on yet another WikiLeaks release, was the breathtaking disclosure of American diplomats’ highly sensitive internal communications about friends and enemies. The discreet world of confidential embassy cables had seemingly been blown apart.

The Times articles, beginning then and continuing even as I write, lasered in on United States diplomats’ reporting about the most explosive situations in the world: Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, an out-of-control and increasingly weaponized North Korea, deep instability and unreliability in Pakistan. And much more, most of it unsettling, some of it gossipy (Sarkozy is a spoiled Frenchman?) and some of it lurid enough to belong on the E! channel (cue the Chechen-strongman-gone-wild in Dagestan).

Even as The Times has unveiled these stories through the week, snapping into focus one disturbing crisis after another, it has been impossible to ignore the hand of Julian Assange, the curator of purloined secrets and founder of WikiLeaks. For this go-round, Mr. Assange had adroitly orchestrated a media rollout headed by The Guardian of Britain and joined by a handful of European news organizations, with The Times picking up the material from The Guardian.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/opinion/05pubed.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a212

[JDPriestly]

1. Excellent but incomplete explanation of the importance of the Wikileaks.

I do think that the publishers and we on DU should make it very clear that the information in the Wikileaks is not necessarily the factual. A lot of it is opinion mixed with facts, conclusions drawn from information some but not all of which is reliable.