TBH, the whole thing seems kind of pointless to me. There is no real reason to release these documents, but there is also no reason why he shouldn't release them.
It's no secret that diplomatic documents are going to contain information that is A) about the country that the embassy is in,
might be negative about said country, and C) is written in a rather frank style. If you "know" that these documents are completely confidential, then you are going to write what you think.
On the other hand, it is not the job of Wikileaks, or the media to stop the government from being embarrassed by these documents.
I imagine every diplomatic pouch from every country contains similar despatches, and every embassy has at least one diplomat whose job is to spy on the government and people of whichever country they are working in. It will be fun to see which countries feign umbrage at these leaked documents.
Also, whilst Assange is a bit of a ****, it really seems like the US is putting loads of pressure on foreign countries to have him locked up and discredited. It seems like the wrong move to me.
I've just remembered one last thing. Do you remember how the US and UK governments declared that the release of the Iraq docs a few months ago was going to cause the death of hundreds of millions of people (that may be a slight exaggeration). There was a lot of media coverage. What you may not have seen was the press release a month of so back, that said the leak has caused precisely zero deaths. It's hard to believe that this one will be much worse, especially as it's not really blowing the whistle on anything.
That was a long and rather boring post - sorry guys
Pseud
