Wikileaks - The Death of Spin

The greatest truth about Wikileaks is that there is no way of blocking it. Not while governments rely on the internet. So all the quibbling is totally irrelevant.
As for the idiots who believe the lie that the files are all about how the Pope wears a hat, it isn't interesting enough to hear exactly how Washington sabotaged the Copenhagen talks. And hear that China is prepared to pull the plug on North Korea, and hear that Burma is building an atom bomb.  Or what the Americans really think of Pakistan and the Yemen.
 'If our troops’ presence in Pakistan was going to be visible, Pakistan might not let them into the country. And the Yemeni government might veto transparently American drone strikes.

This would mean killing fewer terrorists in the short run, but it would probably mean creating way fewer of them in the long run. '

Ali Abdulah Saleh, the Yemeni dictator, brags to a US diplomat: “We’ll continue to say the bombs are ours, not yours.” 

Meanwhile, critics who would have happily hanged Daniel Ellsberg for the Pentagon Papers are blustering that Assange is not even a pale imitation. But the man himself is quite certain.

 “EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”

We have discovered an America that was under our noses, in both the literal and metaphorical senses. After Hilarious's tender Epistle to the Brits yesterday, the Special Relationship seems to have got Specialer, if anything. But the only real question is "What do documents released by the Wikileaks website tell us.." And the answer is that everything is now very, very different. Turned inside out like the Lloyds of London building.

The other accusation of Wikileaks is that it doesn't understand the entire scope of how world affairs work behind closed doors and thus is unable to use proper discretion in what it releases, which assumes that the ruling classes do understand, which is patent nonsense.
They haven't shown much evidence of understanding yet, or we wouldn't be in a state of perpetual, industrially essential war.
The fact that the entire Wiki-Witchhunt cannot cite a single case where operatives or contacts have been placed at risk, and now have had to resort to a Fatwha on Assange and stealing the assets of Wikileaks, is testimony to the level of scrutiny exercised by Wikileaks and its partners in the conventional media.
If Joe Lieberman wants Assange's head on a pole today, how long before he wants to haul the editor of the New York Times onto the scaffold, and even poor old Alan Rusbridger? Wiki-Terror? The neologisms fly to all the 9/11 jargon like pins to a magnet. The state terrorists are being outed by their own actions. It's like watching monkeys with a mirror.
 The reason reactionaries and other corporate poodles are trying to sneer Wikileaks onto the back pages is because they know that the next tranche of files are just as likely to reveal the murky dealings of their beloved banks and oil corporations. They get that much, at least.
The cardboard house is collapsing in a rain of Kings and Queens and Jakes of Spades and Diamonds and Clubs. There isn't any precedent for this, I don't think. Though I'd like to hear some nominations.
If it's done nothing else, Wikileaks has flushed all the crazies out of the woods.  Screams like:
'YOU ARE CRAZY IF YOU ATTACK OUR GOVERNMENT!' are now common from the reactionary right, especially the American right, who have spent the last two years trying to destroy their own government themselves..
What they mean of course is:
'THE PARTY IS ALWAYS RIGHT!'
Did Orwell ever get a Nobel Prize? Of course not. Now that is crazy. 
As a side effect, the so-called 'Liberationists' will have to decide how much Liberty they really want, since they seem to be the ones demanding Assange's head on a spike. They will have to choose between Mother state and the truth. Between the Ku Klux Klan as supported by the banks, and Wikileaks, robbed of its assets and deprived of its donors by the banks. 
Progressives should welcome Wikileaks.  By scrutinising bureaucracy and the managerial world it makes a progressive society possible.  When it's done that, and there is a progressive country to blow the whistle on, the leaks can still be judged in the same way that they are now. But with Wikileaks and its clones in place, constantly monitoring the state from the inside, there may not be much to blow the whistle on.
 Meanwhile, don't worry about being able to donate to the toxic Ku Klux Klan, their website, bank accounts and PayPal streams are safe. Isn't that reassuring for you? Doesn't that ease your paranoia a bit?
For turning this into a moral issue, with Wikileaks on one side and the Klan on the other, America has been incredibly stupid. Again. Just as they were after 9/11, and after the fall of the Warsaw Pact, to name but a few. If they'd stuck to the mind-numbing trivialities of authenticity and ownership, the story would have shrunk down to the level of a Congestion Charge quibble. A battle of the bureacrats. But instead, by tomorrow, some smart Alec somewhere will have redrafted the I Have A Dream speech, and they won't be far wrong. Not only have Paypal Amazon and major banks been implicated in the Fatwha, now Twitter and possibly the rest of the 1st generation social network giants are under suspicion.  It could be All Change soon if they don't follow their users, rather than government and corporate convenience. 'Facebook - The Decline and Fall'? If Mastercard is not safe from attack, who is? Who's the Daddy now? The true power-structure of the internet is becoming clear, and it isn't good news for those who thought they controlled it. What we now have is a territorial war between billions of modern free-minded individuals and the dinosaur states and corporations who keep them afloat. And the dinosaurs have more to lose by a Scorched-Earth policy than we do. So turning off the internet is not on the cards.
But the likelihood is that for the dinosaurs, the meteor has already struck, and the shockwave is just over the horizon. Only the mammals will survive.

Along with the Guardian and the New York Times, the BBC has been one of the few organisations willing to co-operate with Wikileaks. And will be one of the few major organisations left relatively un-scarred by the new internet power-structure. In fact, they have everything to gain, whereas the commercial jackals have everything to lose, if they haven't already lost it.

But this isn't simply a matter of right and left. There will be some very strange bedfellows brokered by Wikileaks. Even The American Civil Liberties Union have joined in the debate on the side of Assange.

 "We’re deeply skeptical that prosecuting WikiLeaks would be constitutional, or a good idea. The courts have made clear that the First Amendment protects independent third parties who publish classified information. Prosecuting WikiLeaks would be no different from prosecuting the media outlets that also published classified documents. "

If the corporate world wants to get even more paranoid in its bunker, fine. But it won't do it any good. It will make its job more difficult and we will all see it happening live in cinemascope. There isn't anywhere for it to run anymore. The Sword of Damocles is always going to be over its head. Governments have a clear choice: come clean or become Chinese.