From a historian's perspective, these leaks are like Christmas come early. I can promise you, there are a lot of US Diplomatic Historians salivating over this latest cache of documents. It's a dream for a historian, contemporary documents available in a timely fashion for their analysis. At least you can take solace in the fact that there will be very good histories written about this era, rather than the usual skims that must be accepted in the absence of much primary material.

What I find perversely humorous about the wikileaks story is how it contrasts with the big issue of hand wringing among military historians who work in the contemporary subject matter, say OIF: the volume of material generated in the age of computers, the number of versions any given document goes through, and how all of this will be collected and identified, and how anyone will be able to tell the "final" version of, say, a campaign plan. Having done a lot of archival document database work, I have a pretty good sense of how it would need to be done -- but I'd rather take a bullet to the head than get back into that work.

Jill