WikiLeaks: This Is Going to Keep Getting Uglier

WILL DEATHS OCCUR? Are lives being put into jeopardy? Are soldiers being put in harm’s way? Really? That’s the concern?

It seems fairly obvious that the last five decades worth of Commanders-In-Chief and their supporters are the ones culpable for placing soldiers in harm’s way. WikiLeaks hasn’t flung the hundreds of thousands of US troops currently across the globe embroiled in multiple conflicts both declared and covert.

The official response to WikiLeaks along with the response of the technical and financial corporations that it had been relying on, has been disturbingly extreme. Watching it all unfold with an awareness of the incredible scope and depravity of American power is just as terrifying as anything Bin Laden could come up with. But why?

These cables: they lay bare the corruption, political chicanery and bribery that is international diplomacy, maybe embarrass some bureaucrats whose names might pop up. But the revelations thus far have been kind of blase. Affirmation of things already suspected. Which would seem to be a minor annoyance to the whirling mechanisms of power, really. So what gives with the blood lust? Is it spectacle? An example to be made for those who would challenge power: one of them ‘thus far but no further’ deals?

This machine don’t run on diplomacy! It runs on the threat of violence, actual violence, and financial power.

Financial power. Christian Caryl’s horrible post at NYRBlog mentions in passing a possible “why”:

And now we hear that Assange has been uploading a huge file of other confidential documents to various supporters around the world as “insurance,” to be published in the event that hostile governments succeeded in silencing him. (Meanwhile, in yet another twist, Assange was arrested in London this morning on charges of rape and faces possible extradition to Sweden.) The targets of that megaleak appear to include Bank of America and BP. [Caryl, (via IOZ)]

I daresay WikiLeaks provides the most interesting moment in my political/historical memory. Not for what it exposes about our rulers as recorded in secret correspondence, but for what our rulers expose about themselves in their reaction to it. Unsurprising but chilling. And I’m afraid things are going to keep getting uglier.