Oh, please. Spare me this bullshit. Every govt. in the world has privileged information and private communications. So do you.
Wikileaks is not about just harassing the US government. They will take leaks from anywhere. Wikileaks is not the friend of America's enemies. Wikileaks is the enemy of secrecy wherever it exists in the world.
The difference between the US government and the rest of the world's governments, corporations and NGOs is that the US government affects everything and therefore is of global interest.
Fuck privileged information. If you get somebody's name you can get their social security number and a whole lot more information from Lexis Nexis. Privacy for the people is becoming more a thing of the past every year.
What is privacy for? It is to protect you from having anything that you do or say used against you. I think I like Governments, corporations and NGOs being subject to having anything they do or say potentially used against them.
The only reason that it is more important to deny the US government privacy than to deny the other institutions privacy is that the US government is so huge that it throws it's weight around without fear of retribution and is involved in everything.
As a primitive cave person you are unusually vulnerable while shitting or fucking so it is good to do those things in private. Governments give us a little protection from bad people using our lack of privacy against us but who protects from governments? It is our job to protect ourselves from governments.
An example: The junk food industry organized the "salt institute" to protect themselves from the potential government crack downs against salt as a cause of high blood pressure. The Salt institute sues the government to get private government information to discredit the government's campaign against salt. The junk food industry thoroughly researched all the weak spots in the campaign against salt so that they can fight back.
What do the people who think US foreign policy hurts them have comparable to the "salt institute" to fight back against the direction of US foreign policy? We opponents of US foreign policy are so disorganized. Chavez does not give us money and the US would try harder to overthrow Chavez if he did give us money. We have Wikileaks. I presume it is the US government or more likely unofficial intelligence networks like those that conducted the illegal by US law Contra wars with money coming indirectly from US taxpayers and from US sanctioned drug trafficking that are sending Wikileaks a message by subjecting it to cyber attack. Of course anybody like you CountZero who is loyal to the US national apparatus could be doing the cyber attacks on your own.
So our basic disagreement Countzero is that you think the US government plays a positive role in the world and should be supported in functioning as it has since WW1 while I think that the US government while perhaps playing a net positive role is also holding the world back from becoming something better by reinforcing Machiavellian politics and instead of embracing democratic idealism.
Freedom in the USA even while slavery persisted inspired people around the world to seek freedom for themselves. As the US became a power it emulated the ugly roles played by England and France and externalized the ugliness of it's own policy towards it's native Americans. New people in US foreign policy don't repudiate past US foreign policy they just tweak it. Past US foreign policy needs to be seen for it's failures as well as it's successes so that the successes can be repeated and the failures can be avoided.
Us habitual failures:
1 Allying with any shitbag that wants to be our ally like Bin Laden or Hissène Habré of Chad or the oligarchs of Haiti, or the Vietnamese catholics who collaborated with France against Vietnamese independence, or Freeport-McMoRan as they screw the people of Papua or the Indonesian government as it attacked the people of East Timor, every rich antidemocratic elitist creep anywhere in the world who has contempt for the majority of the people in his nation and who opposes left leaning democracy movements, Israel, and anybody who for whatever reason sucks up to US foreign policy makers and tells them how necessary and good they are.
You go go in depth into the history of 75% or more nations in the world and find bad US government behavior that the US people never would have approved of if they had to know about it. Now just because Wikileaks exists does not make the US people (including people like you who like being informed but don't want to think negatively of US foreign policy) know when the US government is behaving badly.
I did not want to be hostile to my government's foreign policy. I would rather be a happy patriot. The problem is that some early events opened me to the possibility that the government might behave stupidly or cruelly and once I was neutral the evidence that US foreign policy is not what it publicly pretends to be became overwhelming. I still believe that what the US government pretends to be could work though even what the US government pretends to be is more intrusive globally than I think would be most effective and most affordable. Let the foreign people screw up by themselves and only help them when a clear majority in an area want help or when something horrific is happening. These foreigners despite their poverty and backwardness are not children and will resent being treated like children. The US should not take lightly the resentment that meddling in other nations internal affairs as if they were lessor people would create.
These foreigners are not children and we Americans are not the adults. When we intervene we better be absolutely sure that we are overwhelmingly correct and they are overwhelmingly incorrect. The US government and many of it's people share the belief that we know best. We condemn Muslim modesty as oppression of women yet we fail to see that our leg shaving high heel and make up wearing culture with sexy women being used to sell everything and exploit the male weakness of natural male sexual obsession is also an oppression of women. Until the US can do better than promoting out of the frying pan and into the fire the US should refrain from trying to impose it's will and ideas.
2 The US thinking it knows what it is doing when it does not know what it is doing. This ties into what I said above. It is sort of an issue of vanity and stupid pride. When you are as dominant as the USA you have the luxury of believing whatever you want to believe and this inevitably leads to problems as whoever has this luxury will be prone to believing whatever they want to believe rather than believing the truth because believing what we want to believe is more fun. On a personal level this phenomena can lead to things like Kobe Bryant raping a girl without ever fully understanding that he was raping a girl. On an organization level this can lead to Microsoft engaging in an unethical attack on Netscape without understanding they were doing anything wrong. Wall Street by flattering itself blinded itself to the housing bubble that it created and before long will blind itself to the fact that it was Wall Street more than anybody else that created the housing bubble. The US government as the most powerful force in the world is deeply susceptible to blinding itself and I believe the government has blinded itself repeatedly and Wikileaks is a partial treatment for this blindness.
3 Being overly influenced by the voices they hear mainly campaign contributers and foreign governments and organizations capable of mounting public relations attacks against the government. These groups that have the government's attention have an agenda to warp the government's policies for their own selfish interests and they are successful at warping the government's agenda to serve their selfish interests. Once they have warped the government the government then normally partially blinds itself to the fact that it has been warped and pretends to itself that the public interest is aligned with the selfish interests of the powerful so that the government does not need to feel shame for what they have done. It is the Job of us people to make it difficult for the government to delude itself and Wikileaks helps. If you want to know how badly the government can delude itself understand that many kings and government forces actually believed in the divine right of kings and actually believed that the wealth of the "Nobility" was justified even when it was derived from very coercive enforced serfdom bordering on slavery.
4 Erring on the side of action rather than inaction. This again comes from self flattery in which the people in any job exaggerate the importance of their job. Dentists may attempt root canals that they know will probably fail because they exaggerate the importance of saving the tooth. Teeth may move after an extraction or they may stay still. Whether to do the root canal rather than a cheaper extraction should depend on what the patient can afford and on the likeness of the root canal to be successful. Nobody is more qualified than dentists at assessing whether the root canal will succeed but because they don't care about the patients financial health, and because they overvalue saving the teeth they often make the wrong decision. US foreign policy usually errs on the side of being excessively active because the people who work and teach in the field like their own feeling of the importance of their field and therefore delude themselves in favor of thinking that action is needed or advisable.
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Hillary Clinton says that leaks endanger lives and harm US foreign policy which harms US national security.
First Freeport-McMoRan's security is not the same as the security of the American people and until people like Hilary Clinton can get that straight they are not qualified to speak on the subject of what does or does not endanger US National security. Al Qaeda is a threat to the national security of the American people because the US government's foreign policy put it in opposition to the self determination and therefore Al Qaeda's aspirations. Even in the Muslim world I have doubts that organizations like Al Qaeda would have 1/10th the power that they have had the West not attempted to usurp their self determination and corrupt their governments in the context of either fighting the cold war which was sort of justified or helping western corporations which was just criminal. When one nation's government aids in the corrupting of another nation's government to help a few corporations that should be considered an international crime and should be punished. It does not matter that the corrupted nation was going to be corrupt anyway, you should not participate in the corrupting. A dope dealer can't defend himself by saying if I did not supply the dope somebody else would have.
Any damage that Wikileaks does to US national security will be more than offset in the long run by Wikileaks helping to align US foreign policy with the true long term national security of the American people, which will enhance the long term national security of the American people. By inserting itself in the internal politics of all nations the US government makes enemies for the American people. If the public exposure deters US government questionable behavior that will enhance the national security of the American people. The people around the world already believe the US is messing around in their nations and often think the US is worse and more sinister than it really is. Giving these people hard evidence of what the US is doing does not concern me. Having these people know how the US actually behaves may help a few of these people realize that the US is not quite as sinister as they thought it was.
Our Enemies have their intelligence sources. Our enemies don't have as much need for Wikileaks to learn what the US government is doing as the American people have a need for Wikileaks to learn what the American government is doing.
Hilary says Wikileaks will cost the lives of some Americans or America's allies or assets. This is true, but in the long run Wikileaks will save more lives than it will cost by deterring US government involvement in questionable behavior and the resulting backlash. The government position may be that the government will not be deterred but rather just less effective and with a higher casualty rate. I have seen evidence that openness is a deterrence. I am willing to let the government's assets pay the price for openness because I am unwilling for the American and World's people to pay the price for secrecy.