Monday, November 29, 2010

It's in the public interest to understand America's true values

Once again, the US are doing themselves few favours with their hysterical and hypocritical response to the WikiLeaks revelations. If they genuinely fear that lives are being put at risk, they'd be better advised to focus their fire on the disclosure of specific documents, and explain the cause for concern in each case. The blanket condemnation just looks like sophistry - few are going to seriously believe that it isn't in the public interest to know, for instance, that the US have been spying on UN officials (presumably in contravention of international law), or that they've been indulging in petty intelligence-gathering on the private life of a government minister in a country that is supposedly their closest ally. As with the previous leaks, the fascination lies in discovering the distance between the values the US publicly espouses, and the true values betrayed by the actions and words they imagined would be kept secret.

And the US "national interest"? Why on earth should it be the primary concern of foreign or international media to protect that?

3 comments:

  1. I agree. Amerika is becoming more and more of an open fascist-imperialist state governed by the Amerikan Empire complex. If Amerika does not want this ugliness to come out then its warlords, diplomats and spies should not engage in wrong doing and evil acts. Common sense wisdom.
    ~ http://twitter.com/Peta_de_Aztlan ~ @Peta_de_Aztlan

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  2. If they are so desperately concerned about lives at risk, would they like to explain how they justified the Shock and Awe bombardment of Baghdad and the attendant death toll of totally innocent people?

    And if it's only American lives that they value, can they explain why they went into a war in Afghanistan surely knowing that it was unlikely that their enemies would stay put, while America and its friends bombed them to paradise, when there was Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Chad, Mauritania, Mali, etc, etc, who would either give them succour or tolerate them. And that the history, recent and long dated, of wars in Afghanistan between that day's greatest military power and the natives, militated against there being any doubt of the outcome... that of an ignominious withdrawal and damage limitation spin, after a long period of American, and other, deaths.

    Sorry, the righteous indignation from Washington, echoed as you might expect by Obama’s junior partner poodle in England (despite being called weak and shallow), is pathetically insincere.

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  3. Tris, I gather that WikiLeaks approached the US government with an offer to redact names if they were told who was most at risk. If the preservation of life really was the Anericans' main concern, they would have swallowed their pride and explored that option, instead of sending back a Canute-like letter demanding that the tide should refrain from coming in.

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