To Take a WikiLeak

Sunday (11/28) WikiLeaks released some quarter-million classified documents for the world to see.  When I first heard the news I was immediately ensnared.  It's probably an understatement to say that many American politicians have been less then reputable and anything but honest, and it's probably safe to assume some sinister deals have gone down once or twice when no one was looking.  With the hype behind the coverage of the WikiLeaks'... well... leak... I was under the impression we were about to see Watergate 2010 unfold on a global level.

As it turns out, that wasn't the case.

These "Classified" documents turned out to be nothing more than candid emails between foreign ambassadors reporting back on the status and buzz around their respective nations.  Hardly Watergate.
This makes me ask two questions:

1. How is it you can't make it through an airport with a large tube of toothpaste, but some punk kid (Army Pfc. Bradley Manning to be exact) could walk out of a restricted government site with 250,000+ classified documents?

2.  What impact, other than severely damaging some extremely fragile international relationships, did Julian Assange (head jerkoff at WikiLeaks) expect to make on the world?  No great misdeed has been revealed, and most of the dirty laundry was already known amongst just about anyone that follows world politics.

I was extremely interested to hear about Saudi pressure on American government to attack Iran - it makes me wonder how much pressure was put on American government to attack Iraq.  I think information of that nature should be made public, mainly for the fact that it decriminalized my view on American occupation in the middle-east.  Are we there because we're greedy?  Or are we there because they begged us to?  This is something I had never considered before... a lot of us had never considered before.

All the same, as supportive as I am of transparent government, I think we have to draw the line somewhere.  Considering the boiling point relations between the Koreas and the U.S. has come to, letting the world know someone called Kim Jong-Il a "flabby old chap" was hardly wise at best.  Furthermore to let it be known that South Korea and the United States have discussed a "unified Korea"??  Kim Jong-Il acts in a hostile manner based on his paranoia that the United States is conspiring against him.  Mr. Assange has thrown a match into a room full of dynamite.  In this instance I believe he deserves to be tried for espionage and thrown in jail for a very long time... but that's just my opinion.