The curious authority of leaks

Claud Cockburn used to say that there are no real secrets. Anyone who spends a week reading all the available newspaers and talking to well-informed newspapers can figure out what the government is up to, and must be up to. The leak of today’s war memo in the Sunday Times is a case in point. In the summer of 1992 2002, it was obvious to any reader of the Daily Telegraph, the British mouthpiece of the neocons, that there would be a war and not hard to guess that Blair would go along with it. Now it turns out that the British government knew this too.