It depends what the meaning of source is

Start your week with a priceless example of intellectual incoherence with the Wall Street Journal's lead editorial (free, reg. req'd) today. With the frenzy about Newsweek's use of dodgy anonymous sources still fresh in everyone's mind, the editorial launches an attack on the International Committee of the Red Cross using ... anonymous sources!

The first concerns a story we heard first from a U.S. source that an ICRC representative visiting America's largest detention facility in Iraq last month had compared the U.S. to Nazi Germany. According to a Defense Department source citing internal Pentagon documents, .... A second, senior Defense Department source we asked about the episode confirmed that the quote above is accurate. And a third, very well-placed American source ... But after we started asking about the incident, we began to hear from other sources that someone was attempting damage control by alerting the ICRC's friends in the media and State Department about what we might report

It's apparently no easier to put a name on any of these sources than it is to trace which of these same sources might have guided the use of the "common peroneal strike" -- the US military's equivalent of kneecapping which was used to kill detainees in Afghanistan. A later section of the editorial criticises the ICRC's supposed selective use of confidentiality:

In other words, the ICRC hides behind the confidentiality rule when being candid might embarrass its own officials. But it drops the same rule when it is in a position to embarrass the United States, however unfairly. News of the ICRC Quran reports last week came just as the U.S. was scrambling to undo the damage in the Muslim world from the discredited Newsweek story. This behavior has unfortunately become an ICRC pattern.

But as we noted before, the real pattern is that the Pentagon uses ICRC confidentiality disenguously to claim that the Red Cross hasn't complained about facility X, because, publicly, they can't.

One final question for the WSJ editors. If, as they claim, an ICRC official managed to discredit the entire organisation in a dispute over access to an Iraqi detention facility, why didn't they put this item in the latest edition of Good News from Iraq, which, after all, they edit?

UPDATE 2 JUNE: The ICRC responds with a Letter to the WSJ Editor (subs req'd) in which they indicate -- following the evidence -- that the breach of ICRC confidentiality is coming from the Pentagon:

Insinuations that the ICRC is using its confidentiality policy in an "ideological" fashion are equally untrue and need to be rejected forcefully. Sources unknown to the ICRC have repeatedly leaked confidential ICRC information to the media, including to the Wall Street Journal.