wikileaks iii

Honestly, it is stupid for Gingrich, Kristol and Palin and to a lesser extent for Lieberman to believe that the DANGER (which is a better word than threat for this situation) posed by these wikileaks is enough to justify the kind of legal penalties, non-legal penalties, or even illegal penalties, that they have proposed.

wikileaks ii

There are worse things one can do than cut off a server; for example, cut off a head. That seems to be where other WikiLeaks critics are headed. Sarah Palin said that Assange should be hunted down like Osama bin Laden; Newt Gingrich said that he should be treated as an enemy combatant; and Bill Kristol wants the Obama Administration to think about kidnapping or killing Assange “and his collaborators.” (Kristol doesn’t use the word “kill,” but rather “whack” and “neutralize,” as if some combination of slang and clinical talk made everything all right.)

I though that the right-wing of American politics since January 2009 was all about the rediscovery of America's anti-imperialist heritage. I thought the right wanted a government that was limited in scope. Instead, there are strong attacks against wikileaks from the right. Maybe the basic goal of the right, the desire to advance yourself and to punish people who are not like you, is simply too strong (this is often better than the alternative of approving equally of everything, but that is another issue).

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.