It's Too Early to Assess The Impact of Wikileaks' Release

It's the top story around the world. A few of the cables and communications from the huge mass of information have been made public, and everyone with a keyboard and an interest is making pronouncements about the latest Wikileaks release of information. Some are praising this as a way of revealing the "truth." Others are saying that it will have "little effect" on anything. Some are celebrating the embarrassment the release is causing for the U.S. government. Others are claiming that heads will roll and people will die.

The reality is that nobody knows what the effect of the release of these documents will be. It's impossible to know, since we don't even know what's in the vast majority of the documents. We have a very limited subset to examine. It's far too early to assess the situation, but that doesn't stop people from making broad statements about what it all means.

On DU and on many other websites, the discussion is frantic. It will fade in a few weeks, at most - long before most of the documents are made public. We'll talk about a few of them and say, "This is awful" or "This is a great thing," and then we'll move on to other topics. We have very short attention spans and usually precious little expertise. Even in the major media outlets, we're seeing people writing and saying things based on almost no information whatsoever. What they're saying is largely based on the individual biases of the person writing or speaking. Not much information has been released, but that doesn't stop every media pundit from making broad pronouncements.

The real effects of the release of these cables and other documents will not be known for months or even years. The real effects will be caused by how the documents affect diplomatic negotiations now going on and in the future. Loss of trust caused by the public release of what is tacitly understood in diplomatic channels may well cost people jobs, derail delicate negotiations, and cause the breakdown of diplomatic progress all over the world. It doesn't just affect the United States. It affects most of the world. The results could affect many things, from military matter and political power in many countries to human rights issues and trade policies. For some, the loss of face caused by these revelations could mean that people in the middle of negotiations are suddenly removed, causing delays or failures of those negotiations.

Will it cost people's lives? I don't know, but if it does, it will probably be people's lives who have nothing to do with diplomacy at all. There are many ways these documents may affect people whose names are unknown to any of us, and whose lives may be altered due to fallout from other effects.

We'll see what happens - maybe. Some effects will just be invisible, since we'll never find out what they were. Some effects will be visible, but we probably will have forgotten about the whole business before they occur. It's far too early to tell. We haven't seen the documents, and we will only discuss a tiny fraction of them, even after they're all public. But, you can be assured that the people affected, in nations all over the world, will be studying the documents that relate to them. There will be repercussions from this, but we'll mostly be unaware of them, since we focus primarily on how things affect our country and our individual beliefs and political viewpoints.

We'll be moving on to some other topic soon, and the eventual effects of these leaked documents will go unnoticed or unrecognized by most of us. For many of us, we already know what we think about this. What actually occurs is irrelevant to many of us. I'm not in that group. It's not irrelevant to me, and I'll be following this for a long time, even when it's out of the news and out of most of our minds.

I hope the effects aren't too negative or too severe. We'll see.

Please see my disclaimer in the signature line below:

edit: I should follow my own policy.

Thanks for the post. :hi:

I'm not sure this is a good development or not. My inclination is the believe that it is, and that having this information made public will shed light on things. But I can also see where it may be a problem, in that certain things are probably best left unknown. But right now I just want to see it play out.

out. If we're paying attention, that is. Some of us, certainly, will see what happens.

So far, I can't. Thank you for a reasonable post and I too hope the effects aren't too negative or severe. Time will tell...if we have time.

The head of Wikileaks clearly has no affection for this country. I don't know if that will succeed, but there will be damage, probably in ways that we don't expect, and to countries we didn't consider.

Plus dribbling out the info, categorizing it for maximum impact. This is premeditated exposure.

other countries, since Wikileaks does release documents they receive about other countries, is to expose lies and crimes committed by governments that they would like to hide from their citizens, is to expose lies and wrong-doing by governments who would prefer to hide their actions.

If the U.S. had a free press it is they who should be doing this job. That is the job of the press. But the Bush administration went after any journalist who attempted to tell the truth and expose the deadly lies they told to the American people to get us into two wrong wars, neither of which was necessary. Decent reporters and TV anchors were fired. That never should have been acceptable in this country.

As the FFs said, you cannot have a democracy without a free press. The U.S. media was rated #54 in the world on the scale of countries who had a free press, under Bush.

Protection of corruption in government hurts the American people as we can plainly see if we are not being willfully blind. Anyone who totally trusts government to do what is right without any oversight, which is what has happened here over the past decade, is equally guilty of the killings of innocents, the theft of this country's treasury and the weakening of this country to the point of no return.

Sunlight is the best way to keep governments honest. And these leaks have already exhonerated some very decent people who did try to stop these criminals in the British and U.S. governments and were denigrated and smeared for their efforts. Seems they were right after all. Although at least two of them have not lived to appreciate it.

Either that or it's part of some sort of psyops against Iran considering all the big stuff revealed so far.

I just don't know what they'll be yet. I don't think anyone does.

I just don't think they will be all that earth shattering. Unless there's something else in there that hasn't come out yet, what's been released is not all that incredible. I agree that there may be some systemic trust issues, but really everyone in the game already knows that everyone else is watching them.

The larger impact I think will be in the realm of the relevance of new media/communications and it's ability to disseminate information so widely and quickly and how it's handled/incoporated by the already existing structure. It's obvious that Wikilieaks is now a player that will have to be contended with. It's another angle/dimension in the game.

There is much in there that has not been made public yet. So far, we have almost nothing, but more will soon be appearing. You're correct, of course, in saying that Wikileaks has certainly become a player. What the results of that may be is also something we don't know. The results may end up being even more secrecy and attempts to prevent third parties from releasing such material in the future. That process has already begun.

Perhaps we will never see such things happen again, due to this wholesale release of sensitive information. I anticipate that plans to squash future such incidents are underway in many places right now. Perhaps the process is self-defeating. Certainly Wikileaks is going to become a household word, though. I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing.

Sometimes, a more cautious release of materials makes more sense, perhaps.

via the fact of their behavior, that's fine with me. I have no interest in forwarding their sacking of the planet.

You are very focused on what you impute to others, a "focus primarily on how things affect our country and our individual beliefs and political viewpoints."

Some of us are not focused on ourselves or our own country but on how these cables reflect the manipulation of entire nations by a very few rich people who have been more and more above the law.

Nor what you are focused on. This OP is suggesting that it is too soon to determine what effects this release will have. I'm only suggesting that people from all colors of the political spectrum are speaking far too quickly on what this means and how we should feel about it.

You're making it about what I think. That's something you don't know. You have no idea, especially from the contents of this OP. You may also want to consider your own particular political biases and how they affect how you see this event. I have no idea what the eventual effects of this action by Wikileaks will be. Nor do you.

Thanks for responding to my post.

None of us are.

And of course, the people making the most outlandish claims about this release work at the five sided building and have been actively fearmongering for the last week. Amy Goodman has a great clip of Admiral this morning, for example.

In my opinion, of course. Too many people making too many pronouncements with too little information. That, and that alone, is the topic of my OP. You can attempt to make it something else, but the OP is right there at the top of the thread.

The effects of this release will not be known for a long time. Two days is not a long time. By the time the effects are in evidence, we'll have moved on to other things.

I wrote this OP. I thought that was obvious.

It's too soon to know what's in these documents and what impact releasing this information will have. One thing we can be sure about is that the Republicans will make every effort to exploit this to their advantage. I'll bet they will be looking for something, anything in these documents they can use to "justify" impeachment proceedings against Obama. If that happens, will DUers be praising Wikileaks then?

not simply about the harm done to this country and others starting with the lies that led this country into Iraq? If Bush was president now, we know that no one would be worried about Republicans.

Exposing the truth, which should have been done by our own media, about the past then years, years that have caused so much harm to this country, how is that a bad thing? I remember when we democrats used to dream about such exposure.

No one is or should be above the law in this country. Elected officials should be working for the American people, not to enrich themselves and their buddies and they should fear the wrath of the people if they do. Otherwise we may as well live in a monarchy, which we are very close to doing right now.

:thumbsup: