"Behind the Ostensible Government Sits Enthroned an Invisible Government"

[Joanne98]

Once again, the curtain of secrecy is drawn back and Olympus looks more like Oz. The machinations of empire turn out to be banal and ordinary.

In a time of endless war, when democracy is an orchestrated charade and citizen engagement is less welcome in the corridors of power than it has ever been, when the traditional checks and balances of government are in unchallenged collusion with one another, when the media act not as watchdogs of democracy but guard dogs of the interests and clichés of the status quo . . . we have WikiLeaks, disrupting the game of national security, ringing its bell, changing the rules.

"Never before in history," writes Der Spiegel, one of five international publications to get advance copies of more than 250,000 State Department cables dating back to 1966, "has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information - data that can help paint a picture of the foundation upon which US foreign policy is built."

The revelations so far seem less significant than the fact that the American government's bin of secrets has - once again - been raided, and that the raw data of diplomacy has been strewn across cyberspace, for the likes of you and me to ogle and, if we choose, draw our own conclusions. We get to have real-time looks at how geopolitics actually works.

While temporary secrecy, or at least privacy, is sometimes necessary in any endeavor, permanent secrecy - secrecy as entitlement - is nothing but dangerous. Over the last several decades, with an enormous push from the Bush administration, we have devolved toward a secrecy state, with more and more information hidden from American citizens in the spurious name of national security. Meanwhile, the government and the corporotocracy have pursued war and global dominance with impunity.

So Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's claim that WikiLeaks has put lives in danger - the lives of "human rights activists, religious leaders, the critics of governments who speak to members of our embassy about abuses in their own country" - is not only a red herring, in that there is no evidence that anyone has been harmed by any of the hundreds of thousands of classified items about the war on terror that WikiLeaks has liberated so far this year, but sanctimonious damage control, implying that under normal circumstances the U.S. government cares about such lives.

"If it's loss of life the U.S. government is concerned about, it should begin with paying more attention to the soldiers and civilians it's putting in harm's way every hour in Iraq and Afghanistan," Pierre Tristam writes at FlaglerLive.com.

The sort of data WikiLeaks has outed this time around seems less than shocking, but nonetheless revealing. We now know, for instance, that various tiny nations haggled with U.S. diplomats over the amount of money they would get if they took in a released Guantanamo prisoner; and that American diplomats' behind-the-scenes assessments of foreign leaders were sometimes blunt and unflattering, unlike the smiling niceties uttered for public consumption in front of the TV cameras.

This is no more than Truth 101, compelling in the way the sheer, raw detail of truth is always compelling.

http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12019

[Celtic Raven]

1. Remind anyone else

of all the invasions of OUR privacy that have been conducted under the banner of the War Against Terror - for years? IE. A third party, not the intended recipient of the messages, has collected, read, and shared those messages at their sole discretion.

Boo-fucking-hoo is the only response I can muster for Clinton's "concern".