Why Wikileaks and Its Founder Must Be Hounded to the Ends of the Universe and Utterly Destroyed
This is why Wikileaks is destructive to the point of threatening people's lives. When I was serving in a communist country, the idiot who was our deputy chief of mission sent as an attachment in a regular email to a friend an official report of his conversation with a senior official who was critical of his own regime. We knew the host government monitored our commercial emails and were being constantly reminded by our security office to exercise caution in what we put into such emails. But our fool of a DCM ignored this warning. Almost immediately, the host government let on that they had intercepted the incriminating email and proceeded to put heat on the concerned senior official. He feared imminent arrest and imprisonment. Instead, his name was mud in his own government and the man was sidelined and held under indefinite suspicion. But he came within a millimeter's breadth of being thrown into prison due to a "leak."
Here's another example. When I worked on a top secret White House program involving the safety of the president and his senior staff, someone leaked parts of the program to the Washington Post, which dutifully published it. Few, if any, outside of government knew the turmoil this threw us into. An inexplicable "leak" by some irresponsible self-serving dolt had the potential of endangering the president of the United States. We worked in overdrive to re-adjust elements of the program.
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Diplomacy has as much need to be conducted totally in the open as does your business, law office, doctor's practice or your own personal affairs. Diplomacy requires confidentiality and trust in order to be effective. The media pundits who argue in favor of all official government communications being held in the open "in the light of day" are either terminally ignorant, galactically stupid or merely disingenuous. Having known and worked professionally with many of them, I prefer to believe it's the latter attribute at play. They're simply too smart to believe what they say in public.
Julian Assange is not a journalist nor a whistleblower. He is a hacker and self-described anarchist whose mission in life is to bring down government as an institution, and particularly the U.S government, which he detests. Wikileaks' unloading of over a million classified military documents and now a quarter of a million diplomatic cables is nothing less than a mega-document dump -- indiscriminate and malicious in intent. Not a leak, but a flood.
It's common sense. If governments can't exchange views with each other confidentially, or diplomats can't report frankly, we might as well close down our foreign policy establishment, which is exactly what a fringe actor like Assange would like to see happen.
The media find reading and publishing these messages titillating, much like reading someone's secret love letters. The voracious media maw craves this kind of information. But the effect is incredibly damaging, to U.S. foreign policy and probably to some people's lives. There is an established and responsible way for public access to official secrets and that is through the Freedom of Information Act. I would like to see more responsible comportment and less disingenuousness among our mainstream media. After all, it's their country too.