By now, you’ve heard about Wikileaks’s Pentagon Papers-esque document leal. Rather than add a few snowflakes to the media blizzard today, we’ll direct you to some of the best coverage. We’ve been following it at the Guardian, one of three outlets, along with the New York Times and Der Spiegel, on which Wikileaks dumped the documents. It’s hard to imagine the latter two improving on the Guardian, which sprang out of the blocks in fine form.

Here’s the Guardian’s home page for itscoverage: Afghanistan: the War Logs

And, to keep from overwhelming you’ll, we’ll just send you to three blogs for today. First, Siun at FireDogLake: Wikileaks’ Release of Secret Afghan War Archives

Next, Steve Hynd at Newshoggers: The War Logs: The Largest Pentagon Leak Ever

Finally, Glenn Greenwald at Salon: The WikiLeaks Afghanistan leak (Big “sic” to Salon for capitalizing the “L” in Wikileaks, not to mention repeating the word “leak” — just signs of how much everyone is rushing to jump on this story.)

Bear in mind that the man who transferred the documents to Wikileaks, SPC. Bradley manning, was taken into custody by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division in early June. Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter at Wired’s Threat Level report:

“When Manning told [infamous hacker and also a Wikileaker Adrian] Lamo that he leaked a quarter-million classified embassy cables, Lamo contacted the Army, and then met with Army CID investigators and the FBI at a Starbucks near his house in Carmichael, California, where he passed the agents a copy of the chat logs. At their second meeting with Lamo on May 27, FBI agents from the Oakland Field Office told the hacker that Manning had been arrested the day before in Iraq by Army CID investigators.

“Lamo has contributed funds to Wikileaks in the past, and says he agonized over the decision to expose Manning — he says he’s frequently contacted by hackers who want to talk about their adventures, and he has never considered reporting anyone before. The supposed diplomatic cable leak, however, made him believe Manning’s actions were genuinely dangerous to U.S. national security.”

In fact, whatever SPC. Manning’s motivations, they may be eclipsed by those of Lamo, whose credibility is considerably more questionable than Manning’s will ever be. (Most of that information I received “on background.”) Will Manning eventually be seen as the second coming of Daniel Ellsberg?

In the meantime, please include Focal Points among the sites you follow for analysis of the leak that is to leaks as Deepwater Horizon is to oil spills.

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