COMMENT: Wik­iLeaks has made pub­lic a huge cache of State Depart­ment cables, many with the iden­ti­ties of sen­si­tive sources and indi­vid­u­als un-redact­ed.

It remains to be seen what harm, if any, results from this.

Wik­iLeaks is blam­ing the poten­tial com­pro­mis­ing of iden­ti­ties on The Guardian paper in  the Unit­ed King­dom, a pub­li­ca­tion that had pre­vi­ous­ly been tar­get­ed by Wik­iLeaks’ king­pin Julian Assange.

Sup­port­ers of Wik­iLeaks have manged to over­look the appar­ent­ly piv­otal role of Holo­caust denier Joran Jer­mas (aka “Israel Shamir”) and his son Johannes Wahlstrom in con­nect­ing the “whistle­blow­er” orga­ni­za­tion with the “Pirate vor­tex,” as it is termed in the For The Record series deal­ing with Wik­i­Fas­cism and the Pig­gy­back Coups.

“Wik­iLeaks Reveals All, Media Groups Crit­i­cize Move” by Raphael G. Sat­ter [AP]; Yahoo News; 9/2/2011.

EXCERPT: Wik­iLeaks dis­closed its entire archive of U.S. State Depart­ment cables Fri­day, much if not all of it uncen­sored — a move that drew sting­ing con­dem­na­tion from major news­pa­pers which in the past col­lab­o­rat­ed with the anti-secre­cy group’s efforts to expose cor­rup­tion and dou­ble-deal­ing.

Many media out­lets, includ­ing The Asso­ci­at­ed Press, pre­vi­ous­ly had access to all or part of the uncen­sored tome. But Wik­iLeaks’ deci­sion to post the 251,287 cables on its web­site makes poten­tial­ly sen­si­tive diplo­mat­ic sources avail­able to any­one, any­where at the stroke of a key. Amer­i­can offi­cials have warned that the dis­clo­sures could jeop­ar­dize vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple such as oppo­si­tion fig­ures or human rights cam­paign­ers.

A joint state­ment pub­lished on the Guardian’s web­site said that the British pub­li­ca­tion and its inter­na­tion­al coun­ter­parts — The New York Times, France’s Le Monde, Ger­many’s Der Spiegel and Spain’s El Pais — “deplore the deci­sion of Wik­iLeaks to pub­lish the unredact­ed State Depart­ment cables, which may put sources at risk.”

Pre­vi­ous­ly, inter­na­tion­al media out­lets — and Wik­iLeaks itself — had redact­ed the names of poten­tial­ly vul­ner­a­ble sources, although the stan­dard has var­ied and some experts warned that even peo­ple whose names had been kept out of the cables were still at risk. . . .