[fleitz]

Those that threaten transparency will threaten it whether wikileaks exists or not. The point of wikileaks is to expose these people and have them removed so they can be replaced by people who are for transparency at which point wikileaks will become irrelevant.

The just powers of government derive from the consent of the governed, wikileaks provides information on what the government is doing so the people may judge whether it is just.

[eli]

I was struck by this line in the June profile in the New Yorker of Julian Assange:

Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.

(http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_...)

[mytype]

This leak doesn't really provide information on what the government is doing. They are low level reports written from the field, largely recognized by people working in this space to be unreliable. The government should certainly be more open about our activities in Afghanistan and the information that drives those actions, but reports like these without context are not the way.

Let's also think about this leak from the perspective of the Afghans and Pakistanis who risk their lives to work with the United States. If we cannot be trusted to protect their identities, then we will end up with far fewer local partners.

[GrandMasterBirt]

There will always be leaks if someone feels that the government is doing something immoral and they have access to the information, even if caught.

I find it insane that it is criminal to share some of this information. Secret information that the government has should be very very little, especially in war efforts. Sure the CURRENT strategy being applied in the battlefield should be secret since that will save our soldiers' lives, but after the battle that should all be revealed.

Hiding information makes the american public hated for certain actions, and the american public does not know what the actions were to begin with, so in the end the american public loses.

[Ardit20]

There was no leak about the blatant lies that Bush ant Blair were telling about Iraq.

[GrandMasterBirt]

Damn. Then we haven't leaked enough.