dextrose (guest) 09 Feb 2011 20:53
It seems that ever since Julian Assange rose to prominence in the news, websites everywhere have used his name to provide credibility to their claims. It seems that on the Internet, all one has to say is that their information came from Wikileaks, and -BAM-, instantly true.
I have seen some truly ridiculous ideas being passed off as "secret documents from Wikileaks". The crowning example of stupid I have seen is the claim that Wikileaks was to reveal documents detailing an 11-year secret war between the United States Air Force and a fleet of UFO's in the northern Pacific Ocean.
Then, I have seen more "reasonable" claims. An article published by the Guardian (and linked by Yahoo!) claims that according to Wikileaks, a Saudi Arabian geologist named Sadad al-Husseini told an unnamed US diplomat between 2007-2009 that the country may approach "peak oil" as early as 2012 (which the doomsday theorists are already all over). The thing that interests me, however, is that these claims sound suspiciously similar to articles published as far back as 2005, just repackaged and branded with the Wikileaks name. The Guardian provides the "text" of what they say are the actual cables, but I'm a bit wary on that. They don't provide a link to any of the myriad Wikileaks mirrors for the original source, so I'm inclined to be suspicious.
In any case, I tend to be very suspicious of any article that involves Wikileaks. It's just too easy to make stuff up on the Internet, even when it's from a news site. What are the opinions on Wikileaks from the 2012hoax community?