© Jenny Morgan (left) and Daniel Gordon (right)
This past June, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of
The Guardian, phoned me and asked, mysteriously, whether I had any idea how to arrange a secure communication. Not really, I confessed.
The Times doesn't have encrypted phone lines, or a Cone of Silence. Well then, he said, he would try to speak circumspectly. In a roundabout way, he laid out an unusual proposition: an organization called WikiLeaks, a secretive cadre of antisecrecy vigilantes, had come into possession of a substantial amount of classified United States government communications. WikiLeaks's leader, Julian Assange, an eccentric former computer hacker of Australian birth and no fixed residence, offered
The Guardian half a million military dispatches from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. There might be more after that, including an immense bundle of confidential diplomatic cables.
The Guardian suggested - to increase the impact as well as to share the labor of handling such a trove - that
The New York Times be invited to share this exclusive bounty. The source agreed. Was I interested?
Comment: In short, Wikileaks were fed documents that they believed to be from a true 'whistle-blower' when in reality they were very likely from a US (or other) government source that wanted to create the impression that big governments can still be called to account in this world. The Wikileaks documents have provided little if anything in the way of an exposé of the truth of what has been happening in Iraq, Afghanistan and within the seedy depths of agencies like the CIA. Wikileaks therefore checks all the boxes of a 'limited hangout'.