WikiLeaks’ repeated release of secret documents has produced considerable collateral damage. No, I am not talking about the harm done to innocent people. While the government and its lackeys in the media have been howling that WikiLeaks’ has ‘blood on its hands’ (how they love that phrase!) because of its ‘irresponsibility’ in releasing could result in the deaths of those people who have helped the western occupying forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have been forced to concede that none of their fears have been realized. Actually, those ‘fears’ are better called ‘hopes’ because I think they wanted someone named in the documents to be killed so that it could be used to discredit WikiLeaks.

Of course, even the most cursory survey of recent history shows that the US government doesn’t give two cents about the lives of innocent people in the countries that it invades, killing hundreds of thousands of them in the pursuit of its geostrategic goals. All this squealing is because the documents have revealed the systemic lying and hypocrisy of the government. Barack Obama, who came to power promising to bring a new transparency and openness to government and to stop the abuses of his predecessor, is revealed (along with Hillary Clinton) to be one of the biggest hypocrites of them all because the distance between his words and actions is even greater than those of the appalling Bush-Cheney regime whose contempt for democracy and the rule of law was out in the open.

But the collateral damage in this case is the exposure of the ineffectual and servile nature of the media. What WikiLeaks is doing is revealing important stories that the media did not uncover, did not seek to uncover, or knew about and did not reveal to the public because of its desire to be in the good graces of the government. It is because the media have been stripped naked by WikiLeaks that they are the ones who are almost apoplectic in demanding that the government protect its secrets better. They know that if this continues, sooner-or-later even the most dim-witted observer of the national scene is going to start to wonder why it is that it is WikiLeaks that is breaking these major stories while the mainstream media is obsessed with Sarah Palin’s tweets.

Even former George W. Bush speechwriter Matthew Dowd is appalled at the government and media response to the WikiLeaks release.

In Washington’s polarized political environment, Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on a few things: That the government, in the name of fighting terrorism, has the right to listen in on all of our phone conversations and read our e-mails, even if it has no compelling reason for doing so. That the government can use machines at the airport that basically conduct the equivalent of strip searches of every passenger. That the government, for as long as it wants, can withhold any information from the public that it decides is in the national interest and is classified. And that when someone reveals this information, they are reviled on all sides, with the press corps staying silent.
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When did we decide that we trust the government more than its citizens? And that revealing the truth about the government is wrong? And why is the media complicit in this? Did we not learn anything from the run-up to the Iraq war when no one asked hard questions about the justifications for the war and when we accepted statements from government officials without proper pushback?
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And shouldn’t news organizations be defending WikiLeaks and doing some soul-searching of their own about why they aren’t devoting more resources to the search for the truth? Why is it that the National Enquirer and Internet blogs sometimes seem better than they are at finding out what’s really going on?

Glenn Greenwald provides an example of the bipartisanship that Dowd refers to.

[T]he loathsome Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) — the National-Security-State-venerating Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who lives off her defense contractor-husband’s vast wealth — announced that she supports re-writing and expanding the Espionage Act of 1917 to make it easier to prosecute WikiLeaks and those like them; as always, Feinstein abuses her role as Chair of the “oversight” Committee not to scrutinize and limit the abuses of the intelligence community but to protect them at all costs, as that’s where her source of wealth and power lie. She was responding to yesterday’s announcement that Joe Lieberman — joined by GOP Senators Scott Brown and John Ensign — introduced a bill intended to make it easier to prosecute Assange. Exactly as Dowd says, when it comes to authoritarian punishments for those who dare to expose what the U.S. Government does, the mindset is entirely bipartisan.

Lieberman’s bill has the cute acronym that now seems to be obligatory for any draconian anti-democratic legislation (Remember the odious USA PATRIOT act?) and is called the SHIELD law (for Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination), “which would make it a crime to publish information that might harm U.S. agents or informants, or would otherwise be contrary to the national interest.” Such broad language seeks to totally gut the First Amendment.

The real target of such moves is, of course, not WikiLeaks alone but the media in general. It is a long-established practice of governments to use moments of intense crisis (9/11 and the Gulf of Tonkin are good examples) to ram through measures to increase their powers that they can then use against everyone. You can be sure that the US mainstream media, rather than fight such censorship efforts tooth and nail because it can so easily be turned against them in the future, will be cheering on this example of ‘responsible bipartisanship’, a great example of the ‘two parties working together for the nation’s good’, providing a welcome respite from the ‘partisan acrimony’ that they constantly bemoan.

Censorship and a free press are natural enemies. So why does the establishment media go against what should be their own interests? Because that is how the corporate media serves the interests of the oligarchic one-party state. Because they cannot openly say that they exist to serve the interests of the oligarchy, they have to instead say that they are ‘responsible’ and ‘law abiding’ and as such their hands are tied. So they willingly extend their hands to be tied, rather than accepting the gift that WikiLeaks has provided them with in the form of a treasure trove of information for use in their own reporting.

This is what WikiLeaks has exposed in releasing the documents and why the corporate media (apart from a few notable exceptions such as David Samuels who has a wonderful article in The Atlantic) hate WikiLeaks so much.

This is also why I support WikiLeaks with both words and money. It is easy to donate. The link on the right hand side navigation bar will take you to their home page.