Everyone seems to have a post on Wikileaks, so there is mine.
I am not impressed. But I am impressed by a lot of idiotic reactions to the "revelations". I think that Assange is a creep and that Wikileaks is not doing a service at all to the world with these revelations. As for the asshole that dumped all on wiki people, may he rot in jail until the end.
What people seem to forget is that there is a significant difference between a whistle blower and someone seeking notoriety, a prima donna like Assange. A whistle blower does its job properly. He selects among the documents those that are truly relevant, builds a case to his best knowledge and then exposes this or that, focusing on what is important, protecting the innocent or at least the unwillingly involved. What Assange did was to dump it all, to select a few newspapers (why not the WaPo? why Le Monde instead of Liberation?), put their editors on the spot, and make sure his name appeared in every political blog. The ultimate ego trip for a nerd with personality problems and a deep hatred of the USA (where are the Iran wikileaks? Would wikileaks publish with such a fanfare the Cuba-Venezuela cables?)
What is also quite impressive is that those cables revealed so far only are only ridiculing many public officials but are not giving stuff good enough to bring down governments. I am not surprised, and if the mountain is giving birth to a mice it is because most people have no idea how diplomacy is run, beginning with the Assange of the world. All embassies in the world, from any country, are legal moderate spying agencies. Period. Thus, their bureaucrats are under the need to provide intelligence over the country they are posted at and since you need to send stuff regularly to justify your paycheck, eventually you start checking out gossip, and if such gossip has a kernel of truth it also becomes part of the daily cable to the Home office. One must trust the Home office to pick what really matters. The real spying takes place somewhere else.
But the worst damage that wikileaks did is that whistle blowers, the real ones, will have a much harder time in the future. Not only the US but all foreign services will become more careful about their data and malfeasance will be much harder to expose. What wikileaks has done is to turn diplomacy into glorified gossip and as such the real stuff will shift away from what are after all nice diplomats to more shady characters that do not feel obliged to respond for their actions. A dangerous proposition in the best of times.
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A Chavez foot note. He is at it, hysterically demanding Hillary to resign and accusing the US of immorality, forgetting to check his own immoral foreign service. In fact, what is probably upsetting Chavez is that he is not at the center of US concerns. Not at all in fact. And someone with the ego of Chavez cannot stand to be a mere irritant at best.