Saturday, December 4, 2010

What a Wiki game to play, to make me feel this way...

Like many others, I have been following the WikiLeaks saga. I was going to hold off on writing about it until all the material was released, but can no longer hold off due to recent developments.

The WikiLeaks site has already released 842 of the 251,287 US diplomatic cables that it has in its possession. The cables released to date, while not altogether surprising, have highlighted the hypocrisy of governments around the world, particuarly the US. Hillary Clinton, who is looking more like the Secretary of Apology than the Secretary of State, is phoning world leaders like a one woman call center to do damage control and apologize after the US has embarassed itself and them.

Under the guise of national security, the US and its allies seem to be working quite aggressively to shutdown the WikiLeaks site. The site is now hosted in Switzerland [http://wikileaks.ch/cablegate.html] after two US site hosting service providers shut it down under pressure from Uncle Sam. In addition, PayPal announced that it will no longer accept donations for WikiLeaks. To top it off, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks is now wanted for two sexual assaults and has been put on the Interpol list. Quite a concerted effort to stop Assange, WikiLeaks and these disclosures...hmmmm....wonder why.

Assange said in an online chat that WikiLeaks had taken steps to make sure it was not silenced, sending the diplomatic cables and other secret documents in encrypted form "to over 100,000 people" and if something happens to him or WikiLeaks, the key parts will be released automatically.

We cannot be lied to (anyone remember all the WMDs Saddam/Iraq supposedly had?) and treated like fools by our own government. Let us review the cables and make an informed decision on how honest our government and others around the world have been with us. From the looks of it thus far, not very honest.

I know there are those who say WikiLeaks is endangering us by compromising national security. The cables that have been released to date don't even come close to doing that. While I understand why there is great governmental/political interest in making sure they are not disclosed because the releases are politically embarassing and show governments around the world to be hypocritical, so far what the releases have clearly demonstrated is that our governments lie to us without any thought or fear of repercussion. Until now....

2 comments:

  1. Last night at dinner for the Kennedy Center honorees Hilary Clinton joked about the wikileaks controversy and I quote,"I am writing a cable about it, which I'm sure you'll find soon on your closest website." That is saying much.

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  2. See, Wikileaks aren’t so bad after all. They are “alternative news”–i.e., real news. They show us the men behind the curtains.

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