At one level, the United States has responded to the Wikileaks release of State Department cables by tightening their internal operations, basically looking at their own insufficiencies in protecting information. I think they have an unrealistic expectation of the inherent insecurity of information in a technological age, but at least they’re pointing the finger in the proper direction.

At the other level, the US is straining to find a suitable law with which to charge Julian Assange, who is not an American citizen and who did not engage in this particular practice on American soil.

When the votes were tallied on the night of November 2, 2008, I was at a bar in Moab, Utah – the one rabid Democratic stronghold in a rabidly Republican state – to enjoy the hysteria as Barack Obama was summoned to lead the country out of the disaster of eight years of George W. Bush. People shook hands, hooted, clinked glasses, got drunk, raised fists, wept. The good liberals had elected a visionary Democrat to the presidency, who, blessed with a Democratic majority in Congress, would fashion “hope” and “change” into a palpable policy. I was told that in parts of Brooklyn, my hometown, voters ran through the streets banging pots and pans. The feeling was of religious jubilee – the new dispensation was upon us, and 2009 would mark the emancipation from the old rottenness. Corruption and fraud and deceit and war and oligarchy would be washed from the body politic. It was the beginning of the restoration of the republic.

It’s been almost three weeks now since I wrote about the U.S. decision to revoke the visa of prominent Irish anti-renditions activist Edward Horgan, and not much has changed. The revocation came only a month before Dr. Horgan was slated to visit the United States to attend a major conference at Duke University on the battle against the government’s use of extraordinary rendition. What does the Obama administration fear from the presence of Dr. Horgan? If there is fear, it is on the side of those who politically oppose U.S. policies, and see the revocation of Horgan’s visa as political retribution against policy critics.

Edward Horgan, a well-known Irish activist and former Irish Defense Force officer, has had his 10-year, multiple-entry U.S. visa revoked without explanation. Horgan and others believe it is because of his principled stand against the U.S. use of renditions, and in particular, the use of Shannon Airport in western Ireland as a stopover for U.S. rendition flights. The Obama administration should be ashamed for its behavior in keeping Mr. Horgan from entering this country.

Responding to an Italian court’s conviction in absentia of 23 US officials for kidnapping a cleric in Italy, the Obama Administration further disgraced itself and America’s image by calling the results “disappointing.” They should have applied the word to themselves.