The whole of Washington’s diplomatic and political corps are up in arms about the latest release of secret documents by the WikiLeaks website. From the White House to Congress to the State Department and Attorney General’s offices, denunciations of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, have been a mix of threats, slander and neurosis.

Over 250,000 diplomatic dispatches and reports, most of them from the last three years, were obtained by the whistleblower website from a low-level soldier in the U.S. Army’s military intelligence branch. The documents offer not only an unprecedented insight into how Washington conducts its “diplomacy,” but also how the American capitalist state uses its embassies and “diplomats” as a spy network and de facto surveillance arm of the CIA.

According to the New York Times, the “highlights” in these dispatches include: a standoff with Pakistan over highly-enriched uranium; plotting with South Korea about how they can annex the North and keep China happy; Chinese support for alleged cyberspace hacking; conspiring with Yemeni officials to make politicians in that country believe U.S. missile strikes on alleged al-Qa’ida elements were done by Yemen itelf; and, bullying Germany to  “weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the U.S.” after a botched kidnapping by the CIA resulted in an innocent German citizen being sent to the Bagram, Afghanistan, concentration camp because his name was the same as a suspected terrorist.

While the media concentrates on the diplomatic gossip and State Dept. rumor mill we see at work in the dispatches, the real story of the WikiLeaks revelations is in the entire body of the dispatches themselves. Not since 1918 has virtually the entire infrastructure of a Great Power’s secret diplomacy program been made public outside of the normal “declassification” process. Never has it been done to a still-existing and dominant Great Power state.

It is this fact that has all of Washington screaming bloody murder over the WikiLeaks release. Once all of the documents are available online, anyone with a computer and Internet access will have the means to explore and analyze how the American capitalist state actually interacts with the rest of the world, and what kind of dirty tricks, shady deals, schemes, arm-twisting, intimidation, extortion, lies, threats, etc., Washington uses to get what it wants.

While we might not be able to directly examine all of the secret deals the U.S. has made with other countries since 1972 (the current “declassification” date for diplomatic documentation), we will be able to look through much of the written process that led to these agreements. This can be more insightful and important than reading the actual written deals themselves, since the preliminary talks and reports by Washington’s diplomatic officials are
often more “honest” in their assessments and statements, and free from guarded language.

This is why American officials, from Obama down, are calling the WikiLeaks release a “national security threat” or an “act of terrorism” [sic!] that is “endangering diplomatic relations” and “embarrassing the U.S.” There is a “gentleman’s agreement” among capitalist countries that such methods and tactics as we see used by U.S. diplomats are just part of the standard operating procedure behind the curtain that separates them from the public.

This latest WikiLeak is far more important than its previous revelations. The Iraq and Afghanistan documents more or less did nothing but confirm what many people already knew (or suspected). But this release is unprecedented and has farther-reaching implications. This is the leak of the century, and it is worthy of all serious study that can be done.