Five Questions Sparked by the WikiLeaks Documents
There’s simply too much information in the latest deluge of secret State Department documents made public by WikiLeaks to get a real handle on exactly how the 250,000 classified cables will change the diplomatic landscape in the long term. There are, however, five key questions that we should be asking now.
Julian Assange, the Australian former computer hacker who founded WikiLeaks in 2006, says the group’s mission is to “bring important news and information to the public.” The site has released two other large batches of material this year, including the 90,000 U.S. documents it published about the war in Afghanistan and 400,000 classified reports on Iraq. Also: a video of a U.S. Apache helicopter firing on civilians in Baghdad. And now this.
But while the earlier cases revealed previously unknown estimates of civilian death tolls in Iraq and documented outright murder, this time, the aim is far less clear. In many cases, the info is more embarrassing than clarifying. If the point was to create turbulence for the U.S. foreign service, then consider that mission (a dubious one) accomplished. But if the aim was increased transparency, Assange and WikiLeaks may get the opposite.
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