The government has too many secrets. That's a given. I firmly support making society more open.
But when you come into possession of all the state department cables, you're participating in a theft. Now maybe its a theft for wondrously good reasons we can all agree to, but it's still a theft. You are a thief. Perhaps you are a thief for a good cause, but your role in this matter is not super-hero, its a thief for a good cause.
You can't go back and say that since wikileaks was willing to negotiate with the government they stole from and the government wasn't that somehow this makes a total dump more palatable. That sounds completely crazy in my book. Look at it this way: what's the state department going to do? Go through each doc and censor out things they don't like? Do you have any idea how long it would take the state department to do that, even if they were ordered to? Hell, they can't figure out what's classified or not right now, without a gun to their head. It's not like threatening to release all their communications is going to make the agency more functional.
And let's say through some magic they decided that yes, they would vet the papers and somehow managed to do that. Let's additionally assume that they perfectly and totally vetted them -- no detail is left in there that at any point in the future is going to jeopardize U.S. interests. That's an impossible thing in itself, but let's imagine they do. At this point you have an agency actively participating in disseminating information that it has previously and publicly said was non-distributable. What? Were they lying then? Or are they lying now? The entire purpose of the state department is to engender and promote trust among fellow nations. Even if it's a "correct" result in yours and my book, even if the state department itself wants to do it, you simply can't take the diplomatic branch of the government and completely change the way it works overnight. It would be total chaos.
Nope, the government is stuck not being able to vet those docs, and for about a dozen different good reasons. That doesn't mean that docs shouldn't be released, just that assuming that vetting could happen is too much.
I have immense sympathy for this cause, but continuing to defend Assange like this is going to go nowhere. You can't steal something from a crook and then complain that the crook isn't helping you organize the things you stole. Two wrongs don't make a right. To suggest that somehow wikileaks is off the hook for responsibility simply because they offered the U.S. a chance to vet the docs isn't to look into the matter in much detail. It's just throwing stuff out there in hopes that some of it will stick.
Like I said, I'm 99% with everybody in their complaints about secrecy. So I'll close this thead. No point in making much of it. If you've decided that wikileaks is good, you'll just keep throwing out things and I'll just keep showing you how they don't apply. No need to do that. I have no desire to get into a debate or argument. I just wanted to clarify that this idea that keeps getting peddled that somehow it's better because of the vetting offer just doesn't fly for me at all.