Wikileaks affair. A scandal?

On this presentation, the first plan was to talk about christmas. Too bad for us, the world still has to face terrible things on Advent! So the presentation dealt with wikileaks and the last disclosure it made on Sunday. Indeed, it leaked 250 000 of classified documents, cables from US embassies, dealing with UN diplomats being spyed or what diplomats thinks of european politicians... All those informations were received through a 22 years-old US soldier called Bradley Manning. The founder and manager of wikileaks, Julian Assange has received threats from the CIA, and is now under an arrest warrant from Interpol. According to Alizée, the most shocking informations were that the US and Yemen agreed to hide American bombs used against Al-Quaida there, which is like a "secret war", or that American diplomacy is really worried on Pakistan's nuclear material whereas they're allied...
According to her, the most unacceptable thing is the massive espionnage of the UN diplomats, that would be a violation of the Human Rights right and and a betrayal of US allies.
The questions were on the lost (or not) credibility of US diplomacy, and if Hillary Clinton, State Secretary should resign, but also if we approved such spread of secret informations that can affect a country's "reputation"...

We didn't debate on the credibility of the US diplomacy that much, because it is known that they will apologize a bit and continue, like every diplomacies do.
The real question was "is this disclosures a real one? Are the informations spread really importants?" According to some pupils, this disclosure was more of a gossip than anything else. Wikileaks is likely to be very powerful with really burning informations, but those were not some. Our teacher was stressing the facts that those were just diplomats discussions, completely out of context, that needed to be analysed with the facts, and the facts are going to happen in the future... Such revelations were not on concrete policies, and are really lights arguments to weight on concrete policies. If it seemed to Alizée that some informations were really unknown, many told they weren't. First, UN diplomats must know that they're bound to be spyed, and as she was talking of Pakistan, everybody knows some affairs about possible spreading of its technology, like with Dr. Ali and friends.

I personnaly think that Wikileaks is a really interesting phenomenon. It has indeed spread some really important informations. Even if we should'nt surestimate its power, it brings a new hope in transparency. As Ms. Huda said, it's not a new age of transparency, but it still may bring a bit of fear to politicians. And on that affair, even we student of political science already know it, it remembers to the people that our world is still a mess, and that they are power relationships everywhere. And being realistic on that is really useful.