Many examples make up the lesson, and the trail of murder and suffering crosses the globe, from the Philippines, to Southeast Asia, to Africa, to Central and South America, to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan today, to Iran tomorrow. The United States seeks global hegemony. To justify its quest, the United States invents a series of terrifying threats, all of which, in one way or another, are alleged to be "existential" threats to our very survival. With almost no exceptions at all, the leaders of the American Empire concoct these threats out of nothing.
Nothing.
Consider the fact with great care. With this momentous and endlessly horrifying fact in the forefront of your consciousness, ask yourself: What does it signify that those who seek still further war and conquest will use the Wikileaks material to provide more supposed justification for their murderous actions? To ask the question, to ask it with the nature and history of American Empire in mind, is to see how completely irrelevant it is when evaluating Wikileaks and its work.
Of course they'll use the Wikileaks material to justify their policies. That's what they do. They do it with everything -- and they do it with absolutely nothing. I repeat: That is what they do.
If you want to avoid their using the Wikileaks material, or anything else, to justify their policies, there is one course you can follow, and only one. Henceforth, you can say nothing whatsoever. But if you choose to resist the profound evil committed by the U.S. government, evil which it continues to commit today and will commit again tomorrow, you must reject that course.
To drive the point home, let me express it another way. As demonstrated repeatedly by the historical record and by events today, the leaders of American Empire use everything and even nothing to justify their actions and policies. In this sense, the leaders of American Empire are profoundly irrational and endlessly, murderously destructive. Their arguments are self-contradictory, massively inconsistent, and frequently incoherent. Yet today's leaders of American Empire also possess the most frighteningly powerful weaponry and military in all of history. From this perspective, the Empire has all the power.
In comparative terms (and even in absolute terms), Wikileaks has no capabilities or powers at all -- except for one. And that is the ability to make information available to everyone, information which the otherwise all-powerful leaders of Empire seek to keep secret from those they rule, and from those they seek to subjugate in the future. In this context, and especially when we keep in mind the gaping abyss between the powers of Empire and the single power of Wikileaks, to blame Wikileaks (or anyone similarly situated) for the improper use of the material they release is to blame Wikileaks for someone else's irrationality and immense destructiveness. It is to blame Wikileaks for actions over which Wikileaks has no control whatsoever.
Does that make any sense at all? No, it doesn't.
