"WikiLeaks has caused little lasting damage"

[Ace]

The damage caused by the WikiLeaks controversy has caused little real and lasting damage to American diplomacy, senior state department officials have concluded.

It emerged in private briefings to Congress by top diplomats that the fallout from the release of thousands of private diplomatic cables from all over the globe has not been especially bad.

This is in direct opposition to the official stance of the White House and the US government which has been vocal in condemning the whistle-blowing organisation and seeking to bring its founder, Julian Assange, to trial in the US.

A congressional official briefed on the reviews told Reuters news agency that the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers. "I think they want to present the toughest front they can muster," the official said.

The official implied that the WikiLeaks fiasco was bad public relations but had little concrete impact on policy.

"We were told [it] was embarrassing, not damaging," the official added.

It appears that damage was localised in terms of a few specific cables, for example about Yemen, and thus expected to be containable in the long-run.

US officials say the continued media attention on revelations has made it difficult for Washington to repair relations with governments critical to its counter-terrorism operations, such as Pakistan and Yemen. Last November Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, strongly condemned the leak of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables, claiming: "It puts people's lives in danger, threatens our national security and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems."

She added: "We are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information."

So far WikiLeaks has released just a fraction of a cache of diplomatic messages which came into its possession. It has done so with the co-operation of several global news organisations like the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel.

The US government is currently checking to see if criminal charges can be brought against Assange who is in London fighting extradition to Sweden for questioning over allegations of sexual misconduct.

Damage assessments by the state department, Pentagon and US intelligence community are meanwhile still continuing to focus on the leaks. The assessments also cover the leaking of tens of thousands of military field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan.[/p]

Source

I cannot decide whether this means that the United States are beginning to fold to what the (bright?) future Wikileaks holds, or that it means that they are just getting more and more pissed off. I'm hoping the former...

 

[Celice]

Common sense would say people who bluff after being threatened (and feeling threatened)... reveals way, way too much, and at the very least, a lack of security.

 

[Sterling]

Bullshit. WikiLeaks caused enough damage to tarnish the government in my eyes.

 

[ProtoKun7]

So...everything's alright now and they'll stop complaining?

Either that or they're pretending they're ok with it but still seething.

 

[MelodieOctavia]

I can sum this up in one picture.

 

[awssk8er]

I've been hearing about this WikiLeaks bullshit for over a month now.

I really don't know what happened at all, but it sounds stupid as hell.

 

[Guild McCommunist]

Feels kinda like the US is your best friend and you're WikiLeaks. Your best friend is cheating on his wife, you tell his wife that he's cheating, and your best friend blames you for "causing lasting damage to his relationship".

 

[injected11]

Well then it certainly is a good thing they formed the WTF to specifically deal with the lasting damage, and had dozens of government officials calling for Assange's murder. It all seems even more justified now than it did then.

Bunch of asshats. All of them.

 

[Oveneise]

Putting all this aside... Wikileaks still doesn't know the most important thing about our Government:

Obama's preferred soap of choice.

In all seriousness, though, It'll be nice when all this Wikileaks stuff is over.

 

[GundamXXX]

Meh

I think politically nothing will have changed except with a few extreme countries like said in the example, Yemen.
Politicians are good at doing this

but thinking this

What it did change is the public views of the world as we know it, there is no denying that. Alot of people have confirmation of their disbelief in several key government *looks at the US* and even more people had the seed of doubt planted in them with these leaks.
That is the only important thing. Politicians are elected by the people and when you get enough people wanting change the politicians HAVE to obey or otherwise revolution will rise.

 

[FluffyLunamoth]

Okay. Now tell us what you REALLY think.

 

[FAST6191]

In all seriousness, though, It'll be nice when all this Wikileaks stuff is over.

I admit this present iteration of the wikileaks saga as it were could be considered somewhat tedious but leaks, whistleblowing and muckraking have long been parts of journalism and even if this is "over" the same stuff will happen again shortly after it.