[sillysaurus]

To be clear: the release was accidental. Assange did not intend to release the cables. They were stored in an encrypted zip file with a password which due to a series of unfortunate circumstances was made public.

It was a disaster for Wikileaks that the cables were released. It was like a nuclear first strike. Assange knew that, and that's of course why he didn't release them. It's truly a shame that they were accidentally made public. These secrets are going to be irrelevant 10 years from now, and came at the cost of dealing a serious blow to the infrastructure which made that information release possible in the first place.

[drone]

I consider the following quote from Assange as contextual when examining how in the world an organization so well-versed in protecting secrets would fail so miserably at basic security...

"Well, they're informants, so if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it."

Of course, that bring to my mind as much conjecture as that which I would rally against.

[sillysaurus]

Interesting. Could you source that quote? I don't disbelieve you, I'm just interested.

[drone]

It was from the Leigh book which accidentally leaked the password. Purportedly, it was said in a meeting with people who were largely friendly towards him at the time.

Further, additional dumps were made unredacted after the fact, and some wikileaker's claimed that it was at Assange's sole bidding. [1] Furthermore, they also intimated that it was unlikely the original leak was anything but intentional, given the password which was used, hints that were given, and the fact that they had never done that sort of thing before. Remember 100,000 cables had accidentally released by the Guardian in Feb. '11, but another 250k were released unredacted in Sept. '11.

I'm not sure to trust anyone, but I'm not putting Assange on a pedestal in this case, and certainly I don't think such a statement would be outside of his character based on the many other interviews and writings of his. Of course, he does deny saying it[2], so take everything with a grain of salt.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/02/wikileaks-publis...

[2] http://www.itproportal.com/2011/05/25/assange-denies-informa...

EDIT: Just to make a point, and not be revisionist, my statement is largely incorrect about timing and numbers. My brain was temporarily jumbled digging through the articles. Guardian leaked the password, Der Spiegel added info on the file locations (purported to be planted by wikileaks in the linked article), and then wikileaks dumped it all in the open.