Yesterday, Wikileaks released a selection of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables dating from the mid-sixties to the present day — widely presumed to have been provided to them by the currently-incarcerated Private Bradley Manning — accessed through the military’s SPIRNET system that was intended to reduce the bureaucratic “siloing” on information deemed partially responsible for the intelligence failures in a pre-9/11 world. Those cables were provided earlier under embargo to five international media outlets: the New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, La Monde and Der Spiegel. For most readers, it made for a dizzying array of information: the cables themselves incorporated both banal gossip and important intelligence, and each media outlet attempted to give as much context to their release (and the reactions to their release) as to the nuggets of information found therein.
But for all the Administration’s condemnations and the muted international response to date, there were five astonishing revelations uncovered by the 120 reporters given early access to the documents.