WikiLeaks: Not Many Secrets, But Plenty of Weakness

American security officials are over-sharing, Washington has no more puppet power, and Ezra Levant can't tell villains from vaudevillians.

Many people have wondered how a low-level American soldier, the apparent source of the past three WikiLeaks bombshells, could have gained access to so much secret information. The Halifax Chronicle Herald’s Paul Schneidereit has the answer: “[A] lot of people in the U.S. government — as many as 600,000, according to one report — gained access to vast quantities of sensitive files after the lack of information-sharing among various U.S. agencies was blamed … for the failure to prevent 9-11.”

The Toronto Star editors say that while many of the leaked documents are little more than gossip, the tone of the cables has exposed Washington’s declining influence in global affairs. “Despite its image in much of the world as a brazenly confident hyperpower, the U.S. comes across as struggling to keep tabs on the UN, to contain nuclear pariahs North Korea and Iran, to stiffen shaky allies such as Pakistan,” says today’s editorial.

While the Star seems to be merely pointing out this fact, the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson (reprinted in the Star) is clearly distressed by it. “For me, the revelation is how difficult and involved it is to do what ought to be a superpower’s right: push people around,” he writes, longing for “the days when puppet regimes behaved, you know, like puppets.” Ah yes, the golden years of Augusto Pinochet and Ngo Dinh Diem. Those were the days (for Americans, obviously, not Chileans or the Vietnamese).

Sun Media’s Ezra Levant says that the fact that WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange is still alive is evidence of U.S. weakness. “If someone had published the intimate details of the D-Day plans during the Second World War, he would never have been seen again,” Levant says, all but volunteering to hunt down Assange himself. Levant continues to exhibit a disturbing tendency to bring up irrelevant personal details about people he disagrees with. He finds it necessary to write, among other things, that Assange’s “parents were travelling entertainers in Australia” as though that were part of legitimate case for assassinating him. He clearly hasn’t learned any lessons since that whole George Soros thing.