Let's start a conspiracy theory!

By Edward Copeland 

The first two times Wikileaks unloaded their document dumps, there seemed to be a clear motivation: Uncovering untold facts about what the U.S. did or still is doing during both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. There seemed to be an overriding public service in the publishing of the classified documents, not that it seemed as if many paid any attention. The part that bothered me about that was how piss-poor our nation's cybersecurity must be if, as they expect us to believe, a single Army intelligence officer was able to download hundreds of thousands of documents, if not millions, and pass them on to Wikileaks.

The case with the latest Wikileaks document dump though is murky. What purpose can be served by telling world leaders what our various diplomats and leaders in the State Department say about other world leaders behind their backs. What is this high school? Given what is being revealed in the lustiest batch of leaks, it is difficult to discern a political agenda other than to ruin our relations with various nations and leaders around the world, and not just the Obama Administration since some of the leaks date back to actions taken in previous administrations, with particular mention of actions taken by both Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice.

The part of the story that immediately makes me smell a rat is that they are again attributing this leak to Bradley Manning, the same 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst who was based in Iraq but who has been held in a prison cell in Quantico, Va., for the past few weeks. Was he able to find time to download what could have amounted to millions of documented without getting caught? Even if he did do the Iraq and Afghanistan ones, what possible interest would he have had in snooping into the State Department to find out what we were saying about world leaders and other things? Could this be another case as when they tried to say that Abu Ghraib was because of a couple of low-ranking "bad apples" and they didn't go higher up?

Now here comes my conspiracy theory. Who hates everybody, in this administration, most of the Bush administration and especially foreign leaders? Someone who would have had access to a lot of this older information and I'm sure could find his way in to find stuff since he left office.

Dick Cheney, that's who. Sure, I have no proof. I'm making pure speculation, but there has to be one for this latest document dump. Otherwise, the true story is that Wikileaks has no sense of what really matters and doesn't care about repercussions. The other leaks were important. These are mostly trivial and, more importantly, could prove hurtful to U.S. foreign policy for who knows how long just as Obama and his team were making strides to repair the damage that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the gang left.