What strikes me about all three major leaks is that nothing was really embarrassing to the United States.
The Afghan logs did not contain any significant new information about the war.
The Iraq logs’ most important revelation, I think, was the brutal, torture-happy state of Iraqi-run prisons. Americans could perhaps be blamed for “turning a blind eye,” but I’m not sure how much power or resources we actually had to deal with the problem.
The diplomatic cables are far more embarrassing to foreign leaders than the diplomats writing about them.
My main problem with Wikileaks is that Assange seems to be a fanatic who doesn’t care if he endangers people’s lives. Leaking the names of Afghan and Iraqi informants will very likely get some people killed, and their blood will be on Assange’s hands. Now, it’s good that Wikileaks has actively censored a lot of the material to try to prevent this from happening, but every newspaper has said that the published documents still contain a lot of names. This strikes me as similar to someone leaking the rosters of the witness protection program in an attempt to bring down a corrupt police department. It’s just fundamentally misguided and immoral.
Aside from that, I’m actually glad that a lot of these documents are seeing the light of day, because they provide valuable perspective and fodder for historians. But I don’t think “transparency” is some unalloyed good. Everyone who is the subject of these leaks is a professional doing their jobs. I would not want my every communication at my job viewable by anyone on the Internet; it’s creepy enough that IT can view what I write on my computer.
Transparency can be used to hold people accountable and to expose cover-ups or other criminal activities, but Wikileaks has simply not done that, at least not yet. I am looking forward to the leaked e-mails from the US bank that Assange is talking about, though.