I do not take wikileaks as a source for new information, rather, only to confirm what we long suspected based on a critically informed perspective. The leaked cables are insightful not for what they tell us at face value but what we can extract out of them after a careful scrutiny. Otherwise, these fragments of documents, even in instances where they are authentic, can be very misleading. In this clip, Jeremy Scahill engages in this critical exercise. He also wrote a piece for The Nation on this topic on Dec 1. ------- One should not discount the possibility of a good number of forged and fragmented documents intentionally released to the Wikileaks by government apparatuses. That reason alone is enough to suggest that the Wikileaks cannot be a measure of truth per se, but it is the perspective with which one judges its content, and since there can be multiple perspectives, the truth of these leaks will remain contested. Further, the accuracy of some documents in the leaks should not be taken as a verification of the accuracy of the rest of the documents. On the question of verification, the Wikileaks website itself suggests that, the "simplest and most effective countermeasure is a worldwide community of informed users and editors who can scrutinize and discuss leaked documents.” Lastly, in any review of these leaks, one should also interrogate the sources used and the background and politics of the people working for the Wikileaks. Because these considerations have a huge impact on what the Wikileaks editors choose to release (and what they do not), their timing, and their targets. Perhaps, their politics and agenda will become clearer with the release of more leaked documents. Show Less >>