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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

It's classy responses like this that really contrast Assange et al as being a bunch of classless amateurs. They got lucky and ended up dumping a bunch of gossip and information that didn't serve any real political purpose than making the U.S. look bad. No widespread conspiracy blown open, no major corruption revealed, nothing but trashy gossip and a few questionable ethical violations, but nothing even worthy of being in the same sentence as the pentagon papers.

This will be, in the end, a net loss for the perception of Wikileaks in the public eye.

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This classy response by Gates is but a brief glimpse of honesty from an otherwise hysterical, paranoid, and secretive government. A statement like this would never have occurred if Assange had not released these documents.

The standard rhetoric from Washington is that it's important to keep secrets, and that's why so much is classified, and why it needs to remain classified. Assange AND Gates have demonstrated that this is not true, that release of these cables and the earlier military leak (which DoD found did NOT reveal any sensitive intelligence sources or methods) do not seriously threaten our safety.

Contrast that with statements from Sarah Palin, Congressperson Peter King, and others, who are basically calling for Wikileaks to be classified as a terrorist organization. King in particular noted that the requirement seems to be met -- that Wikileaks represents a "clear and present danger" -- which seems to be contradicted by Gates' statement. Also, in academic political science, terrorism is generally defined as -violence- against a non-military target to achieve a political end, so there's no terrorism involved here from an academic perspective. If King is correct and that's the requirement, it is too broad.

Cablegate has thus been valuable in demonstrating hypocrisy among politicians and political hacks. If there's a story here, it's that politicians are trying to whip Americans into a frenzy over some embarrassing but not critical leakage.

>This classy response by Gates is but a brief glimpse of honesty from an otherwise hysterical, paranoid, and secretive government.

I think you're making a really careless characterization here, and it's taking me some time to put a finger on why.

Maybe it's that the government has _not_ acted hysterical, paranoid, or secretive in any way throughout this hubbub. It was pretty much like "Yeah, we know what's coming, we're bracing ourselves," with an additional stated position of "It is wrong to release state secrets."

I think you're conflating the media coverage, which _is_ hysterical and paranoid, with the actual government's reaction.

I think in addition, you're conflating what the loudmouths of the political process call for action with the actual government's reaction.

The loudmouths are there for us to consider extreme courses of action.

The reason this took me long to force out was that this brief glimpse of honesty really is in contrast with the reactions of the irked and probably very harassed officials who have been quoted, so I didn't disagree with some part of the statement. However, I expect this is because the government is realizing how it came off pretty well--I would not be surprised to find US policy advanced in some ways, especially Iran. The US was a victim in public world opinion.

So maybe now the government is able to communicate with the media its composure.

The US actually came out of this looking pretty good. For example, everyone was convinced that the diplomatic office was strong-arming various allies in the middle east to take action against Iran, specifically their nuclear program. But the cables show that those allies were actually strongly in favor of action against Iran, sometimes even taking the initiative. In general, as Gates said, there is a "lack of any significant difference between what the U.S. government says publicly and what these things show privately", which as a US citizen, I am very relived to know :-)

Um, the leaks show the US government strongly pressuring european governments not to prosecute CIA officers who kidnapped and tortured completely innocent european citizens. We've suspected that all along, but now we have evidence that:

- The CIA kidnapped innocent people in Europe

- The CIA tortured those people

- The CIA abandoned them

- The US government will not tolerate even a symbolic condemnation of this behavior

And you think that looks pretty good? What?

there is a "lack of any significant difference between what the U.S. government says publicly and what these things show privately"

I must have missed the press conference where Sec Gates publicly announced that the US government kidnaps innocent people from our allies and tortures them and then refuses to even admit it let alone make restitution. In which press conference did the government publicly admit that? Because if you can't think of any, that suggests Sec Gates is a liar.

    european citizens...people...people...them...innocent people...them

Why are you using plurals? Where did the cables discuss anyone fitting this description other than Khaled el-Masri?

Good point. The cables only provide evidence that the US government captured and tortured this one particular innocent guy in Europe using their network of black sites, European prisons, and secret prisoner transportation networks. There's a ton of circumstantial evidence that they in fact used this infrastructure to kidnap and torture a whole bunch of other innocent people, but the current batch of cables doesn't prove that by itself.

I highly recommend Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side for putting together all the public information we have on the black sites and the prisoner transport network though: http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Inside-Terror-American/dp/03...

I completely agree... I don't understand politically why the US is making such a fuss about this whole situation. I can tell you that there are only three groups of entities hurt by this: 1) Despotic regimes who are coming off as bad via the US intelligence leaks, and who are now trying to circle the wagons because they are afraid their citizens will feel empowered since the 'world's greatest superpower' has a compromising leak. 2) American lawmakers and media who are overreacting about so very little. 3) Hillary Clinton, who can now forget about ever becoming president.

I'm guessing there are a million tiny problems which now have to be papered over. Example: there was a public insult to the President of France, which no doubt then obliges the US Ambassador to Paris to bend over backwards to make nice with Mr Sarkozy all over again.

Meanwhile, a similar scene will be played out in every embassy across the world as the State Department is forced into damage control mode across a hundred or so different fronts.

It is, however, not nearly as disastrous as it was made to sound prior to the actual leak.

"Meanwhile, a similar scene will be played out in every embassy across the world as the State Department is forced into damage control mode across a hundred or so different fronts."

Perhaps, but that's really just opportunism by the various governments. After all, they know that they often turn around and criticize/mock/denigrate the Americans they meet.

This sort of behavior by diplomatic staff has been going on since before the invention of "diplomatic staff". And they all know it.

information that didn't serve any real political purpose than making the U.S. look bad

Wow. Look, there are other countries in the world besides the US. And the citizens of those countries deserve to know the truth about their governments. So yes, this data dump doesn't make the US government look particularly bad. But it does make some other governments look quite bad, and the people that live under those governments have a right to learn that information.

Don't you agree?

Yeah, my phrasing there was a bit bad, what I meant was that they didn't serve any intended political purpose than making the U.S. look bad. I don't think Wikileaks was out to accomplish much else than sucker punch U.S. policy.

The effects on other nations, while likely the primary effect of these, probably were considered "collateral damage" towards the goal of the leak by the leakers.

Do you have any evidence to support that belief? Any evidence at all?

I think you underestimate the intentions of Assange/Wikileaks here.

The goal if Wikileaks is not to make the US Government look silly or appear to have lied. It's simply to make it harder for it to keep secrets ... any secrets.

Don't forget that with the Afghan/Iraq war logs we learned that much of what is being kept secret is simply for propaganda reasons, not for the security reasons claimed by the government.

With only 0.11% of the total archive released and proof of directives to US diplomats from the secretary of state to engage in espionage within the UN I do not think it is reasonable to jump to the conclusion that the US is coming off heroic in this particular debacle. Perhaps just not as bad as some people imagined.

It's funny, people attack Assange for only wanting to leak this information to attack the United States. Obviously, they've looked at it and they know what it says, thus, if they release the info even when it doesn't "shame" the United States, it seems to refute those claims.

In fact, I think the fact that these items were leaked despite, in some cases, the good light it places the United States in, goes to Wikileaks' credit.

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