WikiLeaks, already leaking, releases all its US cables unredacted

As the secret trove of cables, originally designed to be a backstop for WikiLeaks, began to appear in places like Foreign Policy magazine and other venues, former US State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told the Associated Press that "any autocratic security service worth its salt" was already on top of the dispatches and that other security services around the world "will have it in short order.”

Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch today condemned WikiLeaks' unredacted document dump.

Perhaps the biggest story to emerge from the content so far is a massacre of a family by US soldiers in Iraq, detailed in a cable from Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur investigating executions, to then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

According to Mr. Alston, US forces approached the al-Majmaee family home in the town of Balad in the early hours of March 15, 2006. They received fire. Then the troops “entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them. After the initial MNF [multinational force] intervention, a US air raid ensued that destroyed the house.” Among the murdered – four women and five children, one aged five months.

The incident has now prompted an investigation in Iraq.

The popular Salon.com legal and justice blogger Glenn Greenwald today writes:

As usual, many of those running around righteously condemning WikiLeaks for the potential, prospective, unintentional harm to innocents caused by this leak will have nothing to say about these actual, deliberate acts of wanton slaughter by the U.S. The accidental release of these unredacted cables will receive far more attention and more outrage than the extreme, deliberate wrongdoing these cables expose.

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