… which hit the stands this evening via NYT, WAPO, the Telegraph and numerous other media outlets; courtesy of Wikileaks, many say.

Interestingly, NYT reports Wikileaks was not responsible for this release, claiming the documents were originally leaked to Wikileaks but were released to the media by “another party”:

These articles are based on a huge trove of secret documents leaked last year to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks and made available to The New York Times by another source on the condition of anonymity.

If not Wikileaks, who? Well, who knows? Openleaks, founded by defectors from Wikileaks last year, might be the source, given that a) those who founded Openleaks claim they took the submissions architecture with them along with access to materials that had been submitted prior to the split and b) the scattershot media strategy is a contrast to Assange’s erstwhile special relationship with NYT, Guardian and Der Spiegel – a relationship criticized by Wikileaks insiders that had contributed to the splintering of the organization last year.

However, an anonymous, indiscriminate release regarding a vulnerable human population strikes me as a strange inaugral effort from an organization designed to be more transparent and careful with human subjects protocols than its predecessor.

Additionally, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, founder of Openleaks, wrote in his new memoir Inside Wikileaks: My Time With Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website that Openleaks had no intention of publishing material removed from Assange’s control along with the submissions platform (presumably because of security risks):

Children shouldn’t play with guns. That was our argument for removing the submissions platform from Julian’s control… we did tnot take this step to damage Julian personally. We were not motivated by revenge. And we did not want to get our own hands on the material, or divert it to Openleaks. We just decided to take away these dangerous toys so that Julian could not do harm to anyone else. We will only return the material to Julian if and when he can prove that he can store the material securely and handle it carefully and responsibly…

If Domsheit-Berg is a credible source (the entire memoir outlines just how insecure sensitive WL materials were during much of its existence), another possibility is that materials still under Assange’s control ended up in a third party’s hands through another means.

Or Wikileaks did the release after all. Or both Wikileaks and Openleaks had the information and tied to get the jump on one another. Or a third party did the leak but Wikileaks wants to get credit by tweeting all the news coverage with “Wikileaks” in the headline while blaming Openleaks – whoever is handling the Wikileaks twitter feed these days is presenting the second version of events:

Domschiet, NYT, Guardian, attempted Gitmo spoiler against our 8 group coalition. We had intel on them and published first.

Thoughts, links and info from readers as things develop are most welcome. If both Wikileaks and Openleaks are behind this release, it may be interesting to watch what variation in the reportage tells us about the contrast in how the two organizations operate. At any rate, the politics of the leak itself will be just as interesting as the evidence in the documents.

My only other reaction for now is that while the past four major WL releases were carefully framed to make US foreign policy decisions in the war on terror look bad, this new release may well have – or have been calculated to have – the opposite effect. While some news sources are stressing that “children and senile old men are among the detainees” other are almost making Obama look too soft on Guantanamo detainees (breaking news from the leak includes detainees’ threats against interrogators and claims of a nuclear holocaust if bin Laden is captured). Benajmin Wittes has a few similar thoughts.

The Administration’s response as of an hour ago is here.