There are digital reams of pages about how we should feel about WikiLeaks but nearly no one is talking about the actual content inside the US; which is the pattern for the prior leaks but is getting worse.

I’m beginning to wonder how many Americans actually read the articles written about the leaked contents (I try to), let alone the primary documents (I have not nor would I have the time and patience…perhaps to my detriment). For those that are interested I would check out the New York Times section on it, as well as Der Spiegel and The Guardian.

The sites follow the tone that occurs more generally when talking about the US. The NYT focuses almost exclusively on “bad countries” being bad while being suspicious of potential rivals and implied US criticism is largely that we aren’t doing enough to be victorious or have areas of incompetence. By contrast European sources are always mixed with a combination of righteous anger at our clumsiness (bordering on sociopathy) mixed with a strong dose of envy and fawning about what we think of them.

Reading these summaries I have a Wilde sense of cosmic despair, but first I think it’s important to note some basic facts:

As the Washington post says: “MANY OF the State Department documents released so far by WikiLeaks are embarrassing to their authors or subjects, but otherwise harmless…There is apparently no top-secret material in the WikiLeaks documents”

The Guardian states: “The state department knew of the leak several months ago and had ample time to alert staff in sensitive locations. Its pre-emptive scaremongering over the weekend stupidly contrived to hint at material not in fact being published. Nor is the material classified top secret, being at a level that more than 3 million US government employees are cleared to see, and available on the defence department’s internal Siprnet.”

Der Speigel gets specific and writes: “Around half of the cables that have been obtained aren’t classified and slightly less, 40.5 percent, as classified as “confidential.” Six percent of the reports, or 16,652 cables, are labelled as “secret” and of those, 4,330 are so explosive that they are labelled “NOFORN,” meaning access should not be made available to non-US nationals.”

I agree with Ron Beasley who wrote on a post that, “When I worked for the DIA long before PCs and the Internet we used to joke that Confidential meant the information was in Time Magazine last week – Secret meant it would be in Time Magazine next week.” So only a small subset were even deemed to be “truly” secret by the government itself. I would like to see a breakdown of the NOFORN documents. From what I’ve read most of them are about meetings with Middle East leaders that are concerned about Iran. I skimmed the WikiLeaks site and also saw some time sensitive information that is otherwise trivial with passage.

In summary, with the exception of a very few cables, there was little de facto secret information that was leaked going by the government’s own informal standards. [With the caveat that I am looking at this from how the DoD would classify information. If State is different and someone knows first hand then correct me.] In my view the hyperventilating about this is entirely political…

Which is apparent from the information itself. I have looked at dozens of media posted summaries from across the globe and have yet to find a single bit of information that I didn’t know from casually reading politics and foreign policy blogs or that could be obviously inferred. President Sarkozy is thin skinned! PM Berlusconi is vain! The US is worried about Islamism rising in Turkey! Pakistan has a poor handling on its nuclear technology! Iran has been working with North Korea on missile technology! The US actually pressured Canada not to make a fuss about kidnapping and torturing one of its citizens that wasn’t actually a terrorist, and tried to get its CIA agents in another case to be let go! Did you know that the Queen is more respected than Prince Charles?

Wow this is truly mind blowing stuff if you haven’t been following anything the last 10 years but hit your head yesterday and suddenly give a Schröder (although you’d be five years too late for those particular tidbits to mean anything).

Greenwald and the Independent rightfully pillory the press for not doing its job at a time when it would actually mean anything. The truth of the matter is that governments have perfected the art of propagandistic spin. When they are caught doing something that goes against the fantasy narratives they have created they deny deny deny. After all, you’d have to be anti-American to actually believe the US could torture or that there was little evidence for WMD. How do I know? Because no trusted sources have said so! Sure there are many officials near the top of their branches that said so at the time but they are only covered by radical organizations and/or were recently fired so they have an agenda or are just bitter. As long as you can draw it out long enough by demonizing those that object, then by the time the evidence is so overwhelming it has to be stated it is “old news” and we should just move on. Or even better, since the world hasn’t ended that proves that the government was right, so really we should codify that behavior and be grateful that they lied to us. In either case, this process devalues the information both intellectually and emotionally until it loses all power.

That is ultimately what WikiLeaks is about. These leaks aren’t the new Pentagon Papers or Watergate as there is no mind blowing conspiracy that has been uncovered with the immediacy to do anything about it. No, Assange is much more of a Loki character whether he would agree or not. His power is not in releasing knowledge, but in being a jester. In contrast to a power struggle oriented agenda in which knowledge is used as leverage, he is using an anarchist perspective that merely seeks to show the idiocy and infantilism of the power structures by using their own words against them. What is written in the documents is trivial, who it’s written by is what matters because it shows that the Kings and Queens have no clothes. This is precisely why governments around the world are stammering and throwing hissy fits while swearing grave repercussions in the same way that schoolyard bullies react when initially confronted. But just like bullies, most of the leaders have immense personality defects that can easily be laughed out, robbing them of power. We have the documents to prove it.

This is why anti-establishment progressives and conservatives should praise WikiLeaks. What they are releasing fits in very strongly with their narrative that the powers that be are bumbling prima donnas towering on a stack of expendable foot soldiers made to act in a monstrously absurd play. WikiLeaks just releases the scripts.

Footnote: The people that I have genuine concern for are the small players on the ground that provide the information, especially in totalitarian regimes. If there really are crackdowns because of this then that would be on Assange’s shoulders. However there was concern about this when the Afghanistan/Iraq documents were released and to date there have been no reports of that occurring. Therefore, unless there are specific reports of people in danger I will not evaluate the leaks on that premise. Moreover, while I strongly condemn the release of information that harms innocents, it pales in comparison to how foreign policy operates. For decades the US and other powers have rationalized indirect collateral damage as being part of the greater good. Whether it is selling out informants for political reasons, overlooking repression based on dictators professed ideology or encouraging whole scale rebellion that ends in slaughter (such as at the end of Gulf War I) the United States in particular has the blood of countless victims that were killed by their murderous tyrants in part due to our policies.

These decisions are post hoc rationalized as being “good” if they actually do benefit a lot of people or “bad” if they do not. [Or cynically, they are good if it allows Americans to buy more stuff and feel safe.] In the same vein, WikiLeaks is sure to cause collateral damage at some point but it will be difficult to assess whether they are “right” until the full consequences are known; at least using the same standards that everyone else is held up to. Any opinion at this point is just ideologically driven, as we’re all grasping at straws. Based on my ideology and the diligence that WikiLeaks does apply, I see it as being for the greater good. Of course that will change if the content changes in the future.