2010-11-30 Cablegate: Journalists in defence of WikiLeaks, part 3 [Update 1]

(Parts 1 and 2 of this coverage series are available here and here.)

Jack Shafer, Slate: Why I Love WikiLeaks

"The idea of WikiLeaks is scarier than anything the organization has leaked or anything Assange has done because it restores our distrust in the institutions that control our lives. It reminds people that at any given time, a criminal dossier worth exposing is squirreled away in a database someplace in the Pentagon or at Foggy Bottom.[...]

Assange and WikiLeaks, while not perfect, have punctured the prerogative of secrecy with their recent revelations. The untold story is that while doing the United States' allies, adversaries, and enemies a favor with his leaks, he's doing the United States the biggest favor by holding it accountable. As I.F. Stone put it, 'All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.'"
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Glenn Greenwald, Salon: WikiLeaks reveals more than just government secrets

"The WikiLeaks disclosure has revealed not only numerous government secrets, but also the driving mentality of major factions in our political and media class. Simply put, there are few countries in the world with citizenries and especially media outlets more devoted to serving, protecting and venerating government authorities than the U.S. Indeed, I don't quite recall any entity producing as much bipartisan contempt across the American political spectrum as WikiLeaks has: as usual, for authoritarian minds, those who expose secrets are far more hated than those in power who commit heinous acts using secrecy as their principal weapon.[...]

The central goal of WikiLeaks is to prevent the world's most powerful factions -- including the sprawling, imperial U.S. Government -- from continuing to operate in the dark and without restraints. Most of the institutions which are supposed to perform that function -- beginning with the U.S. Congress and the American media -- not only fail to do so, but are active participants in maintaining the veil of secrecy. WikiLeaks, whatever its flaws, is one of the very few entities shining a vitally needed light on all of this. It's hardly surprising, then, that those factions -- and their hordes of spokespeople, followers and enablers -- see WikiLeaks as a force for evil. That's evidence of how much good they are doing."
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Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive: Wikileaks and the Reactionary Impulse to Repress

"The single biggest Wikileaks revelation is not that the Saudis are still funding Al Qaeda, or that Hillary Clinton ordered the State Department to spy on foreign diplomats and the U.N., or that many Arab countries favor an attack on Iran.

No, the real eye-opener is the reactionary impulse of people in power to repress those who disseminate information.[...] Lieberman, Clinton, and King are trying to convict Wikileaks with guilt by hyperbole. King wants Wikileaks to be listed as a foreign terrorist organization. And everyone from Hillary Clinton to Liz Cheney wants the folks behind Wikileaks prosecuted.[...]

Fundamentally, in a democracy, we, as citizens, deserve to know what our government is up to. The State Department is not the preserve of the Mandarins, and we are not peasants to be kept in the dark."
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Digby: WikiLeaks fallout

"There's a lot of chatter, for obvious reasons, about the Wikileaks document dump and whether or not it's a dangerous and despicable act. My personal feeling is that any allegedly democratic government that is so hubristic that it will lie blatantly to the entire world in order to invade a country it has long wanted to invade probably needs a self-correcting mechanism. There are times when it's necessary that the powerful be shown that there are checks on its behavior, particularly when the systems normally designed to do that are breaking down. Now is one of those times."
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Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post: The WikiLeaks Cables: Small Revelations That May Cause a Big Idea to Take Hold

"Let's start with what the U.S. embassy cables released by WikiLeaks this weekend are not.

They are not, as Hillary Clinton claimed, "an attack on America's foreign policy interests" that have endangered "innocent people." And they are not, as Robert Gibbs put it, a "reckless and dangerous action" that puts at risk "the cause of human rights."

And they do not amount to what the Italian foreign minister, in one of the sorrier moments in the history of hyperbole (or is it hysteria?), deemed the "September 11 of world diplomacy."[...]

But here is what makes the leaked cables so important: they provide another opportunity to turn the spotlight on the war in Afghanistan, which, despite the fact that it's costing us $2.8 billion a week keeps getting pushed into the shadows -- even in this deficit-obsessed time. The cables are a powerful reminder of what this unwinnable war is costing us in terms of lives, in terms of money, and in terms of our long-term national security.[...]

If any of these revelations tip the scales, reminding people why bringing our troops home quickly needs to be more -- much more -- than "aspirational" (as the Pentagon recently termed the goal of being out by 2014), then this round of WikiLeaks will have been a very good thing, indeed."
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