Thursday, December 2, 2010

Wikileaks

The documents wikileaks recently released by wikileaks are interesting in that they show how politicians and diplomats across the world understand each other or at least how they want themselves to be understood by American diplomats. Similarly, they could make AMerican diplomacy more difficult as politicians and diplomats learn more and more about how American diplomats understand them. At the same time, I do not believe these particular documents are a serious threat to the security of nations like other kinds of espionage may be (including that which is routinely done by American diplomats, often merely to improve understanding of situations and occasionally to harm specific people,). These documents are widely available and much of the information could easily be inferred by people who regularly read the newspaper.
Many American politicians and bureaucrats understand that it would be difficult to prosecute Julian Assange of wikileaks for espionage for sharing these documents, and this whole scandal should and probably will diminish and become less important.

But despite this good sense in public, I find it very suspicious that the Swedish government is moving forward so aggressively in its prosecution of Julian Assange for sexual assault at just this time and would not be surprised if in the future wikileaks or somebody else publishes documents showing that the U.S. government did put pressure on Sweden to do something about his history of sexual assault.

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