The Obama Administration Benefits From WikiLeaks

The Huffington Post is running an interesting article today entitled “The WikiLeaks Release: Blame the State Department, Not the World’s Media,” by a writer for the Guardian and the London Sunday Times, Simon Jenkins. He pointed out that the material leaked by WikiLeaks, and published by the New York Times and other newspapers, not only lacked top-secret classification. The State Department itself had made them available to some 2-3 million authorized users of the State Department’s own worldwide intranet.

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Jenkins observed that the material went out uncensored, with names and sources disclosed, on the State Department’s intranet with an unsophisticated coding system. The material was downloadable and presumably capable of being forwarded on to anyone. In short, Jenkins concluded,

The recklessness of such a casual approach to secrecy beggars belief… If I were an American source, I would be far more afraid of the State Department than the world’s media.

I think that there is even more to the story about the WikiLeaks releases than Jenkins does. I believe that the leaks serve the Obama administration‘s purposes to get certain so-called confidential materials out in the public arena, knowing that the media outlets most likely to publish the materials would spin them in a way that would help buff Obama’s image of himself as a strong leader even if it meant embarrassing foreign leaders and diplomats in the process. More...