How I love Wikileaks
So there's this private intelligence firm called Stratfor, and Wikileaks has gotten hold of a big cache of their internal emails and put them up on the Web:
http://wikileaks.org/the-gifiles.html
It makes fun reading. One doesn't really know whether to be more impressed by how sinister it is -- these creeps are apparently all over the place -- or how clownish it is: lots of swagger and tough talk, and at bottom a lot of inane thumbsucking, worthy of a Trotskyite email list, over material discovered in the newspaper or picked up as gossip from some guy in a bar. I've seen one so far that reads as if it actually rested on real conversations with Henry Kissinger, Paul Volcker, and Nicholas Brady:
http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/5509401_re-insight-for-internal-use-only-on-pain-of-agony-.html
... but who knows? This could be fourth-hand gossip. (Stratfor is much given to the puerile habit of top-posting, so you have to start at the bottom of these chains and read up.)
There's definite personality type involved here. I bet a lot of 'em played Dungeons & Dragons at an impressionable age; the one guy I actually know who works for the CIA certainly did. He loves to strike the if-I-told-you-I'd have-to-kill you note, but has the giveaway kinked neck, Blackberry squint, and dyspeptic pallor of the cubicle rat. Email virility.
