Some thoughts on the latest Wikileaks release of documents.
First, you can pretty much count on this being in the top 5 news items the rest of this week, I think, given what so far has been learned in the documents and the fact that there were so many released this time.
Second, it seems difficult to see either what was gained by this release or, in the bigger picture, just what Wikileaks is/was trying to accomplish.
In the recent past, since their inception, Wikileaks has done some good, it seems:
WikiLeaks has won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award.[5] In June 2009, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange won Amnesty International's UK Media Award (in the category "New Media") for the 2008 publication of "Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances",[6] a report by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights about police killings in Kenya.[7] In May 2010, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first in a ranking of "websites that could totally change the news".[8]
In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. forces, on a website called Collateral Murder. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available for public review.[9] In October the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations.
In the previous release of documents, I applauded them because I thought it could--possibly, hopefully--contribute to the ending of our war in Afghanistan. I likened them and their work to Daniel Ellsberg and his "Pentagon Papers." I think Senator John Kerry (D-MA) may be correct when he said "This is not an academic exercise about freedom of information and it is not akin to the release of the Pentagon Papers, which involved an analysis aimed at saving American lives and exposing government deception."
Also, if you go to the Wikipedia link below, you can see they've exposed a good deal of corruption and polluting, etc., that wouldn't have been exposed otherwise, it seems.
But this latest release seems to be a "release for release sake" or just because they can and because they are Wikileaks. It's difficult, so far, to see or hear anything good for the country or world that was achieved by releasing these documents. Some of the information released deals with seemingly trivial but negative descriptions of world leaders.
You know what? While trivial and even negative, they may be accurate and important in efforts to understand a "bigger picture" and where another, foreign country and its leaders are headed.
These latest documents show that the US urged spying on the UN and that, supposedly, our diplomats in foreign countries have, in fact, been directed to spy on their host country. They tell, reputedly of Saudi Arabia urging us--the US--to attack Iran. And that's just a small bit of the information that has come out so far. A great deal more will be learned and released in days to come.
It just seems, so far, at this early stage, that Julian Assange and his Wikileaks group may have gone either a big step too far or a big step in a wrong direction. It's difficult to see how this release can or will help the US or the world to negotiate and work with one another to overcome our many and large problems.
Stay tuned.
While fascinating, I think this release is already unfortunate, at least, and maybe very damaging, at worst.
Let's hope not. Let's hope some great good can come out of this because, the truth is, they're already out and there's no going back now.
Links:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/11/28/wikileaks.documents.published/index.html?eref=rss_topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+Top+Stories%29
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/11/28-3
http://www.alternet.org/world/149000/wikileaks_docs_released:_us_urged_spying_on_un,_arab_leaders_secretly_called_for_strike_against_iran?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=alternet
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-28/wikileaks-documents-chinas-google-hack-un-spying-more-secrets/
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