William A. Jacobson
Legal Insurrection
2/5/2011
I have kept away from writing about “news” generated from WikiLeaks disclosure of stolen U.S. diplomatic cables.
One of the main problems with using stolen diplomatic cables is that one is unlikely to get the full story in a single cable, leaving the ground clear for the collective imagination. Most of the time this collective imagination seems to be directed towards undermining U.S. policy.
Wikileaks cables make for good headlines, I’m not so sure they make for real news.
One such example is the understandable controversy over whether the U.S. secretly agreed to give the Russians information on Trident missiles transferred from the U.S. to Britain for use on British submarines.
The Telegraph reports, based on a Wikileaks cable release, that there was such an agreement and that it was contrary to British request. Reading the actual cable leaves the situation a little unclear…
The article continues at Legal Insurrection.
