Today is the day of the long awaited and massively hyped second major Wikileaks public release. With the sheer embarrassment of the leaks proving that the US, right up the accountability chain to the White House, knew acts of torture to Iraqi POWs were being committed under their supervision. Under International Law, it is the responsibility of the occupying force to ensure human rights are upheld in the area that they are occupying. Given that the US Chain of command chose to ignore such incident hung a heavy cloud on the US throughout the world and with their own citizens.
Naturally, the US would hope that such occasions would be a rarity, or at least the next one would be many years apart. This appears not to be the case. The Wikileaks is expected to have a much bigger impact. They are about to publish official documents of US Embassies and other diplomatic outposts all over the world. This is indeed a heavy dose of international gossip for the world to see. Personal assessment of leaders of numerous nations and states; of how the US spied against the then General Secetary of the UN Ban Ki-Moon (needless to say against UN conventions); and of how the Saudis have pushed the US to attack Iran.
In an ever increasing well informed global public the role of Wikileaks is a very central one. The very deceptions and myth that make up the nature of international of diplomacy is threatened. Many agents who advocate for human justice and political accountability of their leaders will find this as a treat to call for more transparency to hold their leaders to account for the lies they have told their public. The leaders themselves however, want to eliminate this “threat to national security” and have made steps to by attacking Wikileaks in cyberspace and branding the actions of the organisation as terrorism.
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