LEAKING II

One has to wonder how it feels to see one’s ineptitude or stupidity revealed in the world press. But if this whole episode is considered in the light of normal behavior, it is not what has been revealed but what still might be revealed that must frighten the good folks who govern us.

It’s like a Mob story. So, Sakvatore has snitched, says the Capo, so what’s next?

The importance of this or that leak is a matter of where you are and what you are hiding.

Take such juicy topics as the CIA budget for ‘covert actions’ in Pakistan. It would certainly be interest to read the memoranda (presidential and otherwise) that set out this ‘outsourcing’ of military action to our intelligence agency. Could that other shoe drop?

Or supposing that a-leak-to-come outlines all the links between Halliburton and the cabal headed by Dick Cheney?

The public (and even the government) absorbs the leaks we have already seen, but frantic must be those about which nothing is known. Yet. Imagine our embassy-bunker in Belgrade when the footloose Holebrook – de mortuis nil nisi bonum must prevail here – was acting as architect of a Balkan war that he so nobly later brought to Dayton and peace. Would there be indiscretions in the wrong hands about Austrians equipping the breakaway Slovenes? With weapons shipped via Portugal? Or is there a record of Elie Wiesel’s abortive ten limousine relief expedition to Sarajevo, subsequent to his visit to the CIA’s headquarters in Belgrade?

I am, of course, only speculating. But then so are those who anxiously await further revelations, and so is our government, which is doing all it can to prevent such information from being made public. Wikileaks differs from history only by its capacity to reveal documents for which historians have to wait decades, or even centuries. It is showing us history as it is being made and still hot stuff. The Dread factor is at work.