Jordan's comments on Wikileaks

Folks, Jordan's wicked busy right this moment but asked me to post his brief comments on l'affaire J-Ass...

As an FSO, these leaks are of more than academic interest to me. While I am too busy to share my full thoughts on the matter just at the moment, I wanted to update all on two of the major points:

1) This is a serious blow to the Department and to our ability to do our day to day jobs. If people won't speak to us candidly, not only do we lose here out at post, but we are unable to feed straight information to Washington, which is where policy is made. To illustrate the state we're in, imagine a magical world where ALL of the NY Times and WaPo's sources and quotes for the past 10 years were on a website. How would their reporters do their jobs? That's what we are; political officers like me are basically official reporters as well as negotiators. Whatever you think of current policy, or of State, the United States was and is severely damaged by these leaks.

2) One positive side effect, however, that I've already noticed is that people are picking up what I've been saying for years: the USG is a remarkably straight-shooter for a nation-state. What we say in public and what we say in private, as well as what we report in public about private meetings, is pretty much the same thing. I happen to beleive that we play it too straight, and get our asses handed to us from time to time as a result, but any fair reading of these documents could lead one to conclude only, whatever your view of substantive policy, that the USG is honest and straight-forward.