There are to me several reasons MOST of the documents shouldn't have been leaked. First and foremost the assessments of foreign leaders need to be frank and straightforward. Yes we all suspect Putin is the real power in Russian and many Russia watchers would tell you it is obvious but that needs to be confirmed by someone interacting with the powers in Russia. Same with Merkel, she is risk averse? so any proposal that you want her support on make sure you either control risk as much as possible or allow for that change to be made in the future. Why should the be confidential? So that someone you are working with and require a good relationship with to do you job doesn't find the unflattering opinion of them.
Fair enough, but this is pretty trivial, unlike the overall goal of the leak. Never mind that (as far as I've seen) the actual damage to international relations has been practically nonexistent. If you can provide evidence to the contrary, I'd be happy to think about my stance some more.
The list of important sites should also not have been released, they could be compiled by terrorists on their own but at least we wouldn't be handing it to them.
Again, fair point, but I doubt this will actually really be endangering to these facilities and certainly not to U.S. security. If anything, making these pubic should inspire an increase in security around these areas, nevermind that (like you said) really critical places are probably already marked, which means the release was only really informative to people like us, anyway.
Accusations of Chinese involvement in computer intrusions need to be investigated before they are claimed in public, also giving China the chance to respond or make concessions.
They have been investigated, down to the very people who ordered it.
Yemenites should know who is attacking them in their home country.
We're in agreement here. I'm not sure what you were getting at with the rest of your paragraph, so I'll just let it be.
Unfortunately it has turned out to be little more than Assange's personal attack on the US, much of it uncalled for, unhelpful and recklessly endangering of other people's lives.
Can you back any of this up? First of all, how is this "Assange's personal attack on the US"? How is a view into the workings of international diplomacy for the last two years "unhelpful"? And maybe most importantly, how was the release "recklessly endangering of other people's lives", especially considering that Wikileaks went to the governments beforehand asking about names that shouldn't be published, and in fact did withhold some information?
"This isn't brain surgery; it's just television." - David Letterman
