If the latest revelations are to impact the campaign it will be all Laurie Oakes’ fault. That’s the thing about a leaker — they’re pretty powerless without a good leakee.

Somebody has to join the dots. To ask the questions. To provide the context.

The latest WikiLeaks project is partly remarkable for the fact that this time Assange and co have teamed up with The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel in releasing the Afghanistan war logs. This is a marked departure from Wikileaks’ release of the footage of an Apache helicopter firing on Iraqi civilians earlier this year.

As The Guardian‘s Dan Kennedy writes today:

“In effect, Assange chose to act as Daniel Ellsberg, the insider who leaked the Pentagon Papers — the US government’s own secret history of the Vietnam war — to the Washington Post and the New York Times. But it was just a few months ago that Assange tried out the role of Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post executive editor who published those papers.”

You need both the Ellsbergs and the Bradlees to bring information to light. Dumping some 92,000 documents online does not necessarily serve the public interest in itself — somebody has to make sense of it all. This time, WikiLeaks asked for some help. From journalists, no less.

Oakes and co will never go out of style.