As the Boeing 777 from London arrived at the gate of Guarulhos International Airport in S o Paulo on December 2, 2010, its passengers queued up to deplane, many with the local newspaper under their arm. "Brazil fears terrorism at the 2016 Olympics, says US Embassy" blared the headline of the daily Folha de S. Paulo - a front-page story generated from the first of tens of thousands of classified US diplomatic cables obtained and released by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. Unnoticed among those passengers was a young woman with a backpack slung over her shoulder. Concealed within a bundle of messy clothing inside her bag was a pen drive containing nearly 3,000 sensitive cables to and from the US Embassy and consulates in Brazil between 2003 and 2010 - a cache of documents provided by WikiLeaks

US administrations may change, but US interests don't. A recent leak of 1,918 WikiLeaks cables related to Haiti reveals the known - but rarely acknowledged - corrupt US dealings with Haiti. Despite a distracting veneer of red cross assistance and earthquake relief volunteers, it seems that a new cold war is developing, this time between the north and south of the western hemisphere.

The Bradley Manning case returned to the public eye this week, with the appearance of his friend David House before the federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va. probing possible prosecution of WikiLeaks and leader Julian Assange.

Washington deployed 22,000 troops to Haiti after the January 12, 2010, earthquake despite reports from the Haitian leadership, the US Embassy and the UN that no serious security threat existed, according to secret US diplomatic cables.

So far, WikiLeaks has released less than 3,000 cables from the 251,000-document cache, but already the media, politicians and the public are questioning the value of the leak. It's important, Mitchell writes, to review a small sample of what we have learned thanks to WikiLeaks since April and the release of the 'Collateral Murder' US helicopter video, which showed the killing of two Reuters journalists, among others. It's necessary to do this because most in the US media, after brief coverage, provided little follow-up.