WikiLeaks spewed out a bunch of classified American diplomatic documents this week, and it was disheartening to learn that what passes for statecraft these days could easily be mistaken for a worldly version of Us Weekly.
That the documents were all stolen and given to WikiLeaks by a young gay dude lip-synching Lady Gaga only ups the ante on the farcical nature of our spy networks.
Bradley Manning, giving plenty of ammunition to those in favor of keeping Lady Gaga fans out of the U.S. military, is quoted in London’s Guardian newspaper telling a fellow hacker that he “would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’ … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing ... [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.”
It is of vital importance to the future of our country to immediately outlaw the access of critical national security documents to military or non-military personnel while they are listening to music featuring Lady Gaga, with additional punishment written into the law for any sort of fist-pumping or air drums.
The latest document dump by WikiLeaks mainly involves transmissions by our various ambassadors and diplomats that amount to snarky and inane musings about world leaders — most of which are patently obvious to even the most casual observer of geopolitics.
Back in the day, the fight against communism honed our spies in the cutthroat, zero-sum game of international espionage.
Now, in the mushy age of global materialism, we have spies like us.
Exactly what is gained in the intelligence community when one spy sends an e-mail to his boss about how Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is a creepy old guy who parties too hard?
Berlusconi looks like a rapey version of Count Chocula, and modern Italy is only globally relevant if you are into soccer or making aggressive hand gestures.
One congressman actually wants WikiLeaks to be classified as an international terrorist organization.
If spreading gossipy personal observations and judgmental pop psychology constitute a terroristic threat, Twitter and Facebook are an Axis of Evil far worse than anything conjured up by a willful misreading of the Quran.
This WikiLeaks document dump is the ultimate dick move as far as world diplomacy is concerned.
America may not be able to get any favors from any other countries for a hot minute, but even President Barack Obama can tell you that we aren’t exactly the most popular kid on the block right now.
Our spy networks were exposed as uncommunicative and largely ineffective after the Sept. 11 attacks, so our government forced them to start sharing information between themselves more freely in order to hopefully prevent future assaults on our way of life.
But how vigorously can we defend “our way of life” when the brains behind our global political machine are gathering information that wouldn’t be out of place in a supermarket checkout line?
Tommy Maple is an international communications graduate student. His column appears on Tuesdays.
