| Teesus | Date: Wednesday, 2013/08/21, 10:14 AM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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At a hearing yesterday, Pfc. Bradley Manning took full responsibility for leaking the documents that came to be known as the Afghan and Iraq
war logs and the "Cablegate" archive of classified diplomatic cables to
Wikileaks. Given the fate that likely awaits Manning, it's a bit hard
not be struck and saddened by his statement that he leaked the documents
in order to “spark a domestic debate of the role of the military and
foreign policy in general” and “cause society to reevaluate the need and
even desire to engage in
counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore their
effect on people who live in that environment every day.”
Whatever the impact of Wikileaks documents, it would be hard to argue
they had a major impact on the foreign-policy attitudes of the American
public, or even provided much new information that might cause readers
to revise their attitudes.
But two years after the Cablegate leak, there is one legacy of Wikileaks
that confronts us nearly every day: the cables have become one of the
vital tools of international journalism. Nearly every day, newspaper,
wire service, and magazine dispatches from around the world feature
theremarkable but no longer unusual phrase, " according to classified
State Department cables released by WikiLeaks."
Here are just a few examples from a quick Nexis search of recent coverage:
- The Los Angeles Times' Paul Richter opens an article on Secretary of State John Kerry's trip to the Middle East with an
anecdote from the then Senator's meeting with Bashar al-Assad in 2009.
The conversation, in which Kerry asked Assad why so few Arab leaders
trust him, was pulled from a Wikileaks cable.
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