Getting The Story Straight On Wikileaks

Getting The Story Straight

by digby

Greg Mitchell at The Nation has been blogging the Wikileaks story for the last week and it's become the go-to place if you are looking for links or current information about it.I encourage you to at least skim all of his dispatches if you are looking for insight on what's going on.

For instance, in the course of conversations both online and in the real world, I've become convinced that peple do not understand something very important about this last batch of documents and the press is simply not telling them. They were not just dumped on the internet willy nilly. Mitchell explains in this post:


German mag Der Spiegel out with its 2nd issue on its access to cables. A lot on Iraq. One headline: "US Diplomats Bewildered and Bamboozled in Baghdad." Say its based on their reading of 5500 cables.

This raises key point: WikiLeaks itself has still posted less than 900 cables -- due to relying on heavy redacting by its snew org partners. But the same partners do have the complete 250,000 cables. So they, not WikiLeaks, are the ones breaking news and quoting from -- even if not postings -- the cables.


This is just one of many, many midapprehensions that have been allowed to fester (if not actively disseminated)by the American news media and one that I would guess most people do not understand.

Wikileaks is working with partners in the press to release these documents, which are being reviewed and redacted before they are uploaded on to the web and published in newspapers. Right now the only people besides Wikileaks who have access to all the cables are the newspapers they've partnered with.

I imagine that many of the people who are threatening to imprison and assassinate Assange do know this and also understand that they are threatening not just him but the publishers of newspapers all over the world who also have these documents.

Is everyone comfortable with that?

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