What have we learnt from the latest tranche of secret documents heroically dragged into the public domain by Wikileaks this week? Simply, that the entire planet is run by a shady cabal of gangsters, both government and freelance, sometimes in loose cooperation and sometimes in fierce rivalry. Nothing really new there then. The Russian government, we are told, are in league with and up to their necks in organised crime. Yes, we know. Some of their most celebrated gangsters have UK resident status and one owns a very well known football club.

We learn that the UK government has been complicit and therefore culpable for the use of widespread torture both in Iraq and generally in the US manufactured ‘war on terror’. It transpires that the most frightening terrorists invariably have been wearing UK and US uniforms in a war that is totally devoid of any form of international legality. Nothing new there then.

We also learn that large swathes of autocratic, Islamic, women hating, Middle Eastern regimes have a fear and loathing of another Islamic, Middle Eastern, autocratic and woman hating regime. A regime, that may already have a nuclear capability, and one that might well want to use that capability against another nearby, nuclear armed, gangster state. Same old story.

We learn that a prominent member of a certain very well known UK family, whose huge wealth and influence has very little to do with hard work and very much to do with forcible land-enclosures of common land carried out by their direct descendants some tears earlier, has been strutting about on the world stage like a royal gangster, being rude, arrogant and generally neo-colonial in his dealings with everyone he comes in contact with. Just like his old man, I hear you say. Nothing new on this front.

We learn that some rather gangster-ish goings on occurred just prior to the recent British elections by a very prominent member of the Bank of England, who just may have a case to answer for political meddling when his real job is to serve the democratically elected government of the day.

And we also learn that the US state department behaved in a most thuggish manner by instructing its diplomats to spy on UN personnel whenever and wherever they got the chance. A classic case of big power gangsterism if ever there was one.

More recently we learned that Shell, that friendly, family, local service station, is up to its neck in political intrigue in Nigeria, all the better to control the vast oil reserves to be found in that country. Familiar story I hear you say.

There’s a whole lot more, some 250,000 pages of the stuff, some explosive, some , humdrum and some little more than tittle-tattle. The real sport is to separate the wheat from the chaff. This stuff should be in the public domain. Transparency is the minimum demand of public life, something that FIFA, a gangster organisation par excellence, might like to take cognisance of.

For me, the most considered piece on the Wikileaks ongoing saga to surface in the national press came from Henry Porter (The Observer 12/12/10) who put the matter thus:

the leaks are of unprecedented importance because, at a stroke, they have enlightened the masses about what is being done in their name and have shown the corruption, incompetence and sometimes wisdom of our politicians, corporations and diplomats. More significantly, we have been given a snapshot of the world as it is, rather than the edited account agreed upon by our diverse elites, whose only common interest is the maintenance of their power and our ignorance.

Wikileaks is a great new sport, with a global spectator base, offering some outstanding head to head confrontations; with multinational corporations, governments, presidents and billionaires all centre stage. And best of all, it has a totally unpredictable outcome. The next batch of documents, we are told, will relate specifically to the banking industry and are meant to be so explosive that entire banks may collapse as a result. This is my type of sport. Or, as Seumas Milne, in an excellent piece in The Guardian 2/12/10 These leakers are holding US global power to account, concluded, ‘bring it on’.