This is a two-part story. First, according to the Guardian, the State Department is claiming privately that WikiLeaks has done little real harm:
The damage caused by the WikiLeaks controversy has caused little real and lasting damage to American diplomacy, senior state department officials have concluded.It's a little more nuanced than that, but this is the gist. The article itself has the details.
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.
Now the second part, from the same article:
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.In other words, the world has been lied to by the administration so they could publicly paint WikiLeaks as a terrorist organization and run an ops campaign to make it disappear by any means necessary (death for the org, and Bagram for Julian Assange, or the cell next to Bradley Manning).
So is the Swedish prosecution of Julian Assange part of the op? We'd need a Wiki-leak to find out. We do know that Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Amazon were on board. (MasterCard: Running government ops against their customers—the cost of doing business. Getting caught doing it—priceless.)
Glenn Greenwald's take is here. This story not over by a long shot.
(By the way, if WikiLeaks is a terrorist, I think we need a new definition. How about, "Anything that threatens the elites"?)
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