Monday, November 29, 2010

The Real Casualty of Wikileaks - Barack Obama's Presidency


Most presidencies have a number of moments that define them, that reveal the essence of both the man and his administration.

Barack Hussein Obama has had a number of these moments already. But the current Wikileaks scandal has to be a true 'the emperor has no clothes' moment...a truly revealing portrait of a truly failed and impotent presidency.

Here we have the spectacle of a foreign organization not only openly publishing illegally obtained, highly classified documents that strain relations with our allies, compromise our diplomats and our intel and endanger our troops and operatives in the field but taunting us by giving us advance notice of their intent to do so.

Our response to what amounted to a threat to our national security? Did we get the CIA involved to take out the perpetrators? Did we even warn them that if they even thought about publishing this stuff and didn't return it immediately, there would be serious consequences?

No,we had our State Department's lawyer Howard Koh write a letter essentially saying 'this was really nasty of you, so please give us our stuff back, OK?'

And then President Obama went off to take care of some important things..play a little basketball and pardon a couple of turkeys.

The publishing of the Wikileaks documents does deep damage to American interests far beyond what was actually revealed. Our allies and US friendly assets among our enemies are going to think twice about cooperating with us, since the confidentiality of that cooperation is no longer guaranteed. Certainly no Arab government and possibly Israel are going to risk speaking openly and bluntly to us about security matters in the future. And our diplomats and agents abroad are also going to more constrained about what they tell Washington, since it could come back to compromise their missions or even get them killed.

In view of that, President Obama's public statement on the matter is highly illuminating:

"President Obama supports responsible, accountable, and open government at home and around the world, but this reckless and dangerous action runs counter to that goal. By releasing stolen and classified documents, Wikileaks has put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals. We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information. "


Well...that'll teach 'em, won't it? Although I have to chuckle a bit at the line about how the Obama Administration supports 'responsible, accountable, and open government'. The American people certainly haven't seen anything like that here.

Still, it's worth looking at how puerile and ineffectual the White House's response to this attack - and I can't really refer to it any other way. The two Wikileaks episodes have shown us to be a world power in name only, governed by an administration who won't even respond forcefully to our country's enemies.

That's evident not only from how we've handled the leaks themselves, but from the actual Wikileaks revelations, especially the ones dealing with our non-policy on Iran.

Are we to believe that the entire resources of the US government were unable to track down Julian Assange and the Wikileaks people, recover the data and arrest and prosecute them?

There are really only two possibilities, and neither of them is pleasant to contemplate. Either the Obama Administration really doesn't know quite how to handle this or deep down, the president actually approves of the US being taken down a peg and is making a kabuki protest. That certainly would jibe with a number of other things the Administration has done.

In either case, what we have is a sitting President of the United States of America who has allowed a major attack on US Security to go essentially unchallenged. And there will be consequences.

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4 comments:

louielouie said...

i somewhat disagree with ff.
i think hussein will regard this as one of the high points of his presidency.
can't you just imagine the stuff he's gonna take with him if he gets voted out of office?
over at some of the libtard sites that support manning's actions, they are doing so by justifying this as releasing war crimes information.

Freedom Fighter said...

Oh, I have no disagreement with you that Obama will not regard this as what it is...but his fellow Americans will.

After all Jimmy Carter never understood how his fellow citizens felt about his handling on the Iranian Hostage taking either.

Regards,
Rob

B.Poster said...

I don't think the CIA could find and take out these people even if they actually wanted to. The current CIA is completely incompetent and whatever competence it does have is heavily infiltrated by enemies.

This is devestating to our national security beyond measure. These people may have the blood of tens of millions of Americans on their hands as a result of their actions. America's survival mid to long range survival was problematic at best before these leaks. Now it is even more precarious. How can we recover from this?

Rosey said...

Then there's this headline that just popped up on FoxNews.com, "Russia Positions Warheads Near NATO Allies, Fueling U.S. Concern."

The only adjective that comes to mind is: weak. Jimmy Carter weak. The worlds despots sense weakness and are taking advantage of it. When this menace is replaced by a strong Republican leader, it will be another Jimmy Carter moment, like when Reagan took over. Meanwhile Israel and the rest of our allies, if we still have any, will just have to sit tight...Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaak!