re: #107 nhand42

Wikileaks is exposing corrupt government behaviour, not your private spoken conversations.

Glenn lays out 9 revelations from Wikileaks, showing systemic corruption by the US government.

Instead of another two-minutes of hate against Assange, why not talk about the clear cases of corruption by the US government?

The same point I was making about private life in the private sphere applies to diplomacy. Woodrow Wilson’s dream of open covenants, openly arrived at, was a foolish dream.

It’s not just corruption which has been exposed. It’s weaknesses of certain of our friends, and of certain other people who are not friends but with whom we have found some sort of common ground. Diplomacy requires getting along with all types in a very imperfect world.

Now, nobody can trust us to keep their dirty little secrets secret. There are worse actors on the world scene than the U.S., but they keep their dirty laundry indoors. By the fact that those who air a little of it end up messily dead, you can extrapolate that there’s a lot of it.

The silver lining on this cloud doesn’t begin to shine bright enough to compensate for the shadow it casts over all our dealings. Not a shadow of disrepute; the world knows that we are not Mr. Clean. A shadow of distrust.

Stalin was toying with an alliance with Britain and France, before concluding that those powers would never be able to get their act together. So he settled on a pact with the Nazis: they’d each take half of Poland. Real dangers, grave dangers, grow more real when our diplomacy is hamstrung.

These disclosures do real harm.