Deeply Personal

Muttering Behind the Hardline has one of his best posts ever (in my opinion) with a dead-on description of what it feels like to have your cables leaked through Wikileaks.

He compares it with the abused woman you tried to help only to have her abusor find out because you tried to help and have you be powerless to assist with the fallout.

NDS writes:

"You have the sickest of feelings in the pit of your stomach. It wasn’t your fault, but the weight of the responsibility you feel is crushing. You want to make it right, but how? You feel helpless, ashamed, regretful, frustrated. You’re terrified that something awful is about to happen. You hope Sarah and her kids somehow make it through, and that you find some way, any way to help in time.

You feel, well, you feel like a political officer who, with the news of the Wikileaks dump, saw flash through his mind at lightning speed every confidential interview he ever did with every human rights or social activist he ever quietly met with working in a country governed by a totalitarian regime. And with 250,000+ documents out there, it’s not just possible but likely that those brave men and women he considered friends may be facing a very rough time ahead. And chances are now that he’s long gone, he will likely never know whatever became of them.

Julian Assange and Bradley Manning apparently don’t have to worry about walking around with that sense of guilt. They don’t personally know the people who trusted us with their inner thoughts and secrets, hoping we might be able to help bring light to their very dark place.

This is more than treason. It’s more than a leak or an information dump.

For many of us, this is deeply personal."

Amen.