For all the hoopla about the huge dump of State Department cables by WikiLeaks, you’d think that they had flooded the Internet with hundreds of thousands of unedited material. In fact, as of January 29, WikiLeaks had released a mere 1% of the cables in its possession: 2,846 out of 251,287. Many of documents have been carefully edited, with the names of American officials and others blacked out.

 

In honor of the uprising in Egypt, on January 28 WikiLeaks put online 81 cables related to U.S. relations with Egypt, covering the period from 2007-2010.

 

Other cables show that State Department officials have retained a sense of humor in the midst of their important work. For example, in a February 9, 2007, cable (released on January 27) entitled “Still Dead: Augusto Pinochet, Two Months after the Fact,” U.S. Ambassador Craig Kelly noted, “After the 1975 death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, ‘Saturday Night Live’s Chevy Chase would regularly open his faux newscast with the observation that ‘Francisco Franco is still dead.’ In Chile, former dictator Augusto Pinochet, who died December 10, 2006, not only remains that way, he seems to almost have never existed.”

-David Wallechinsky