No one should blame the inadequate and guilty whom Julian Assange embarrassed for being angry. But most of us are perfectly adequate and relatively un-guilty and have no reason to worry about him because he knows that the revelation of our secrets would not have a purifying effect on the way the world is run.
Of course we may regret that many people who behaved in an inadequate or guilty manner only because their job specifications required it – such as diplomats and their superiors – were unnecessarily hurt and we are truly sorry for them. But all diplomats know that it is occasionally their job to lie for their country. In this case, most of the embarrassment seems to have been caused by diplomats telling the truth for their country. In either case, they should not really be embarrassed.
This measured way of looking at the matter is somewhat different from Sarah Palin’s. She wants Julian Assange hunted down like a terrorist. She asks on Facebook:
“First and foremost, what steps were taken to stop Wikileaks director Julian Assange from distributing this highly sensitive classified material especially after he had already published material not once but twice in the previous months? Assange is not a ‘journalist,’ any more than the ‘editor’ of al Qaeda’s new English-language magazine, Inspire, is a ‘journalist.’ He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?”
Maxwell Strachan commented on Salon on November 29: “It’s first worth noting that there is no evidence that Assange has ‘blood on his hands.’ In a review of a previous round of leaks on Afghanistan, the Pentagon found no evidence that anyone had been endangered.”
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
I suspect Palin is a passing tantrum. But before she passes perhaps we should award her this year’s ‘I chased the Rosenbergs and won’ award.
So presidential hopeful Palin is championing state sanctioned assassination… for freedom of speech? I surmise the award should reflect a more Alice in Wonderland tone.
In the oversimplified distinction often made by commentators between diplomacy and spying is there a genuine belief that no part of an ambassador’s function involves spying?
There is no underestimating people’s incapacity to cope with ambiguity, complexity, paradox and nuance.
And you’re going to test that, David, with a sentence that contains at least a triple negative, if not a quadruple repeated (since it is arguably just as hard to understand ‘ambiguity’, ‘complexity’ etc as ‘no underestimating incapacity’.) Certainly we would not want to misunderestimate that incapacity.
Sketches might be interested in “Towards a taxonomy of secrets” http://cryptome.org/0003/secrets-taxonomy.htm. It has ‘embarrassment’ as the first kind of motivation for self-regulated secrecy; it goes on to externally-regulated secrecy. It was posted by John Young, who is himself an experienced poster of leaks. He helped found WikiLeaks but parted ways soon after for reasons of method and purpose: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20011106-281.html.
On 29 Nov, a blogger named Bady posted about Julian Assange’s goals for WikiLeaks. They lie less in exposing already-known misdeeds than in impeding the ability of authoritarian state and military actors to have reliable harmful communication amongst themselves: http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracy “to-destroy-this-invisible-government”. The blogpost rapidly became influential because it was thoughtful, and based on what Assange himself has written. The Atlantic’s account of its spread is scintillating: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/the-unknown-blogger-who-changed-wikileaks-coverage/67936/.
I secretly wish all an openly happy solstice, Christmas and new year.
And, in case it needs saying, John Young’s approach strikes me as older and wiser, and Assange’s approach both more penetrating and more problematic.