Cablegate: Whose Intelligence Is This Anyway?

The first wave of Wikileaks' Cablegate ground ashore Sunday night. (To search, visit rpgp.org's full text search site.) Coverage has been generally good. I have found Der Spiegel and The Guardian's websites invaluable. Gregg Mitchell's blog at The Nation has cut a lively path through some of the most interesting stories.

There has been the usual furore about it all. The same old saws have been repeated by government officials fast losing any credibility. There has even been a bid, hilarious if it wasn't so terrifyingly irresponsible, to have Wikileaks designated a "terrorist organization." Department of Homeland Security Chairman Peter King is to be thanked for this. He gets to add his name to the list of people who have so flagrantly abandoned their responsibility as officials as to have abused the word "terrorism." This is a severe moral infraction against the victims of terrorist atrocities everywhere, and their loved ones. It exemplifies the most perverse distortion of language that we find when power escapes the just bonds to which it is properly subjected.

But one point hasn't to my knowledge yet been made, and I feel it needs to be made...

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