Whatever one thinks of Julian Assange and the Wikileaks phenomenon, it is hard to swallow some of the material that is turning up before us. Today’s Guardian reports on their digest of the Guantanamo files outlines how an 89 year old with senile dementia and a 14 year old kidnap victim conscripted at gunpoint by the taliban were both held as terrorist suspects. If these people really are, as Dick Cheney put it, ‘the worst of a very bad lot’ then perhaps we have less to fear from the taliban and more to fear of others. There is a mess unfolding before our eyes that will require some explaining in the days ahead. Or maybe it won’t ever be explained properly. That we are reliant on a loose coalition of newspapers using purloined material to give us basic facts that run counter to multiple official accounts of what is happening is a matter that we should all consider important in the “information age”. We hear lots about the death of privacy, but what about the death of truth?