Usually when a government or other institution (such as the Catholic Church) is found with its pants down, its recourse is to deny any wrongdoing and go on about its business as if nothing happened.
But we clearly see, in the present case of WikiLeaks, that that is far from what is happening here. An article on Gawker.com details quite thoroughly the steps taken by government organizations to prevent their employees and military personnel not only from reading the cables themselves, but also reading news articles about them1.
This is actually the worst way to handle the situation, as such paranoid behaviors immediately arouse suspicion and preemptively implicate the paranoid parties in wrongdoing. That is to say that even though we do not fully know of the contents of the 250,000 cables (as only about 1400 of them have been put up online or published by various news organizations2), we can tell merely by the behavior of our government, that something is very wrong.
Furthermore, given what has been disclosed thus far, the behavior of our government is an overreaction and, again, its actions alone should arouse suspicion. But not everyone in our government is participating in this guilty conniption. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said, as shown on Meet the Press yesterday (12/5/10), that the leaks are thus far not as bad as everyone else thinks they are.
As I said yesterday, thus far nothing we did not know already, and nothing truly groundbreaking has been contained in these cables. The reaction of our government to the releases, and the contents within the cables themselves are wildly disproportionate, which could only mean that WikiLeaks does have something of tremendous value.
The interesting thing to note in this conflict is that our government not only has no leverage in the argument, but by embracing censorship among its employees and going after Assange in such a public way only makes it more critical for Assange to act again. In fact, it's as if our government is begging him to further humiliate it.
I am willing to bet that further on down the line in this conflict we are going to learn one or two things we didn't know before.
1) http://gawker.com/5705639/us-military-in-iraq-tries-to-intimidate-soldiers-into-not-reading-wikileaks
2) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/world/europe/07assange.html?hp
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