Former Obama Advisor Says Wikileaks Is Wonderful For The US Government

from the if-only-he-would-tell-Obama-that dept

While the White House seems to be doing whatever it possibly can to try to file charges against folks involved in Wikileaks, a former Obama adviser is talking up how wonderful Wikileaks has been for the US government, in that it's helped people understand the "challenges" the US faces. Mike Nelson who at one point was White House director for technology policy on IT says that the US government shouldn't hate Wikileaks for the release of all those State Department documents:

“The US diplomats actually came out looking pretty good because the same thing they were saying in private was the same thing they were saying in public," he said.

"The data that was divulged provided a lot of the justification for policies that the US government had been undertaking for years."

Nelson said that the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, held a press conference to denounce WikiLeaks as a fraud because of leaked cables describing meetings between US ambassadors and heads of state in Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

"Memo after memo said, 'The head of state reports that the guy across the [Persian] Gulf is crazy and they want the US government to do something about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad'," Nelson said.

"In public the heads of state would never say that, which was why Ahmadinejad concluded the memos were fake because he thought he was well-loved by his Arab brothers.

"Releasing this information is giving people a better understanding of the challenges that [US] foreign policy makers face."

Later, he said that he hoped such revelations from Wikileaks would lead to more open discussions by governments, rather than trying to keep everything secret.

"If there is a corrupt official taking million dollar bribes from the Russians, maybe that should be public knowledge rather than hidden in a WikiLeaks cable?" he said.

I assume he meant a State Department cable, but the point makes a lot of sense. Too bad so few people in government seem to agree.

Filed Under: mike nelson, us government, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks