Anyone who favors self-government should support the efforts by WikiLeaks to expose official lies. Their latest release of hundreds of thousands of State Department diplomatic cables will hopefully undermine the piety and pretentiousness of U.S. foreign policy for years.

The Obama administration is rolling out the same old “people will die!” hobgoblin in response to the latest disclosures. But as Nancy Yousef notes today in an article distributed by McClatchy newspapers, “Despite similar warnings before the previous two releases of classified U.S. intelligence reports by the website, U.S. officials concede that they have no evidence to date that the documents led to anyone’s death.”

WikiLeaks provides a great litmus test for American politics. The vast majority of congressmen who rush forward to denounce WikiLeaks’ disclosures have themselves done little or nothing to expose or challenge the official lies that have long permeated U.S. foreign and military policy.

It would be wrong to assume that WikiLeaks is disclosing the whole truth and nothing but the truth about U.S. government policy. The leaks routinely show facts and policies that profoundly contradict official pronouncements. But simply because a government document is classified as “top secret” doesn’t mean that it is not full of crap.

This riff by Arthur Silber deftly captures the higher philosophical issues involved in this latest WikiLeaks controversy.