Should Wikileaks Be All That Bad?
by James Glaser
November 29, 2010

I have to wonder about how Washington is all agog about the 250,000 diplomatic cables exposed by Wikileaks. After all, we are supposed to be the good guys. Also, we claim we are a Christian Country. What the heck are the Christian good guys doing that they shouldn't be?

First off, I have to ask why we are sending cables around the world we don't want any one to see. Isn't that kind of foolish? We should know by now that things you want to keep secret have a way of getting out. Do you remember the Pentagon papers from the Vietnam War? Well, I guess Washington didn't remember them.

I think this leak of things Washington does not want out is a good thing. It might just wake up the American people to the fact that we are not the good guys, and we do the same things that the bad guys do, because the corporations who run America are no better than any one else on this globe.

Take some time and read about how Washington really works. Passages from these documents will be coming out for weeks. Here is how the Brits are talking about this document leak.

The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year.

At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables—many designated "secret"—the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN leadership. These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers' website, also reveal Washington's evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.

Here is how the German newspaper Der Speigel put it:

Such surprises from the annals of US diplomacy will dominate the headlines in the coming days when the New York Times, London's Guardian, Paris' Le Monde, Madrid's El Pais and SPIEGEL begin shedding light on the treasure trove of secret documents from the State Department. Included are 243,270 diplomatic cables filed by US embassies to the State Department and 8,017 directives that the State Department sent to its diplomatic outposts around the world. In the coming days, the participating media will show in a series of investigative stories how America seeks to steer the world. The development is no less than a political meltdown for American foreign policy.

Never before in history has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information—data that can help paint a picture of the foundation upon which US foreign policy is built. Never before has the trust America's partners have in the country been as badly shaken. Now, their own personal views and policy recommendations have been made public—as have America's true views of them.

You have to know the rest of the world is gong to eat this story up. They love it. After all, this is egg on the face of the Empire, and every country in the world is going to see just how Washington really runs.

To me, this is the best thing that could happen. Washington needs to come down a peg or two. Washington thinks it rules the world, and a leak like this says that there are Americans willing to risk their lives to get the truth out about how we do things. Wikileaks is not an American web page or an American organization, but some American got them this information.

Not every American is marching in lock-step with the war mongers in Washington, and I sure hope that never happens. We need people to question what is going on. We need people willing to set the record straight and open up the secrets Washington holds so close. The more open our government is forced to become, the more our freedom is protected.

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