for quite a while, Wikileaks published ONLY those cables that either they had vetted and redacted themselves or that had already been published by The New York Times, WaPo, or one of its other partners. The "dump" occurred only because
“a series of unintentional though negligent acts by multiple parties — WikiLeaks, The Guardian‘s investigative reporter David Leigh, and Open Leaks’ Daniel Domscheit-Berg” led to the release of all documents in unredacted form. Domscheit-Berg, who sought to share in the glory of the WikiLeaks operation, essentially stole a copy of the encrypted files from WikiLeaks, which led, unintentionally, to the circulation of the encrypted version of the unredacted cables. But this by itself would not have created the problem, except for the fact that David Leigh of the Guardian chose to publish the password to the file in a book, last year. {See Glenn Greenwald at http://www.salon.com/2011/09/02/wikileaks_28/ .}
" . . . . at that point, as Greenwald and others have noted, . . . “virtually every government’s intelligence agencies would have had access to these documents as a result of these events, but the rest of the world — including journalists, whistle-blowers and activists identified in the documents — did not.” So, WikiLeaks finally released everything, and I think this was the right thing to do."
More at
http://www.support-julian-assange.com/author/irma-vrbnjak/ .
I think even Wikileaks would agree that the unredacted dump was regrettable; but it did not happen solely because of Wikileaks' own mistakes; and once those mistakes had been made, as this article points out, it would have been worse than counterproductive to let the situation persist in which all the bad guys to had access to the complete cache but none or few of the good guys.
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