Not everyone is so taken with what Wikileaks has wrought. I’d be curious to hear what some of you think of this take of Wikileaks and Assange, by a reader, an American leftist:

… I’m refusing to get caught up in the Wikileaks tempest. I have no problem with what Wikileaks did (I should care about “endangering troops in the field” or “exposing informers’ identities”?); I agree that [Julian] Assange is being persecuted and think it would certainly be appropriate for his family, friends and lawyers to stand by him. I think the blather about “transparency” is naïve bullshit — yet another mis-specification of the problem (how about an imperialist foreign policy and a predatory neoliberal economic program on both domestic and international fronts, including the accelerated destruction of public institutions and social protection all over the US and EU?), and that — no matter what they understand themselves to be standing for — a bunch of computer hackers doing what they do is not and never will be a political movement and is moreover destined to produce, if anything, just the opposite of what we keep hearing (and from whom, by the way?) they want to produce, as they’re only likely to piss off everyone with an Amazon or online MasterCard account and reinforce arguments for greater control of the internet to prevent freelance people with attitudes from doing precisely what they’re doing. I really just want this shit to go away, but the silly, opportunistic, incoherent lefties just latch onto anything that can be presented as challenging the state from below and they are so vulnerable to that empty, least common denominator rhetoric of transparency or openness as a political issue that they won’t let it go away any more than the bourgeois media will.