What's a "Diplomatic Cable"? And why is the State Department
still using them? The backroom chatter of American diplomats was
put on display Sunday, as WikiLeaks began to release 251,287
diplomatic cables allegedly disclosed by a dissident U.S.
soldier. What, exactly, is a "cable," and why is the State
Department still using them? It's kind of like a group e-mail.
For many years the term cable referred to the formal telegrams
that consular staffers would send across the oceans and around
the world in Morse code. Employees on the other end would
decipher the pulses coming through their headphones or decode
printed sheets of dots and dashes. (As recently as the Cuban
Missile Crisis, American and Soviet diplomats were sending
urgent messages via Western Union.) But in more recent times,
the cable started to function almost exactly like an e-mail, and
as of 2008, the State Department handles both modes of
communication with the same Microsoft Outlook-based computer
system. So what's the difference between a moder