The reason people in Tunisia, Egypt, and other parts of the world have been influenced to some extent by the work of Wikileaks is that they have read or heard about the material that Wikileaks has helped to make public. The CBS program "60 Minutes" has just published video of an interview with Wikileaks' Julian Assange -- with the video focused, of course, on Assange himself, with almost no substantive content related to the massive crimes and abuses that have made news around the globe.
I'm following this on twitter, and since I have access to a slightly louder megaphone than some, let's take a second at least to remember that the fate of a nation hangs in the balance right now. At least we can pay attention if nothing else.
Lots of stories flying:
- It appears the government has taken down the Internet in Egypt. This is a country of 80M, a $500B economy, #26 in the world. That's a pretty big deal.
- claims that the government is spreading flammable liquids in potential protest areas of Cairo. If true that would be a new low in gruesome counter-protest violence.
- claims that the regular Police have left Cairo and fears that this means the Army will move in
Also, as I noted in Quick hits, Joe Biden put himself on the wrong side of history with a quote I truly hope haunts him for a long time. Really wasn't expecting that Stephen Harper would prove a better democrat than the Obama admin.
Are you following this? What are you hearing? What do you believe?
Update: Something of a Tiananmen square moment in this video about 1:30 in. Such amazing courage.
Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip was meant to push the area's economy "to the brink of collapse," according to a U.S. diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks on Wednesday, signaling that Israel was well aware that the policy was taking a heavy toll on the area's civilian population.
Israeli leaders have long maintained that the blockade was necessary to weaken the ruling Hamas militant group. The newly released document, published in Norway's Aftenposten newspaper, indicates that Israel hoped to accomplish that goal by targeting Gaza's 1.5 million people.
According to the March 3, 2008, cable 9Reuters dates it Nov 3, 2008) written by an American official, Israeli officials told American diplomats "on multiple occasions that they intend to keep Gaza's economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge."
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev refused to comment.
Israel imposed the blockade after Hamas militants routed forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and seized control of Gaza in June 2007. Its official policy was that it would never allow a humanitarian crisis to develop in Gaza.
The blockade failed to oust Hamas, though it brought Gaza's economy to a virtual standstill. Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, exports have been largely halted, and for three years, Israel carefully monitored which types of consumer goods were allowed into the territory, while allowing all basic humanitarian goods in.
In fact, the cable reveals that Israeli intelligence was directly involved in micro-managing Gaza's economy, shouldering aside the banking sector, in order to have as much control as possible:
While the GOI [government of Israel] believes that maintaining the shekel as the currency of the Palestinian Territories is in Israel,s interests, it treats decisions regarding the amount of shekels in circulation in Gaza as a security matter. Requests by Palestinian banks to transfer shekels into Gaza are ultimately approved, partially approved, or denied by the National Security Council (NSC), an organ of the Israeli security establishment, not by the Bank of Israel (BOI). As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed to econoffs on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge (see reftel &D8;).
Of course, this is really not much of a secret. Just the sort of thing that eveyrone in the world knows, but that Israel vehement denies anyway--and everyone in the US has to deny as well, or else be branded an "enemy of Israel" if not an outright "anti-Semite".
Conservative politics aims to support and preserve the status quo. Reactionary politics aims to restore a bygone status quo. Ever since the early days of the New Deal, leading so-called "conservative" politicians have actually been reactionaries, wanting to take us backwards. The only question is: How far? With the emergence of torture and the repeal of habeas corpus under the Bush Administration, the answer seemed fairly clear: at least as far back as the late medieval period, when no one would even think of challenging such actions. But American conservatives aren't the only medievalists around. They have plenty of company on the international stage. At least that's what one must conclude from a careful reading of El País's explanation of why it is publishing the WikiLeaks dump of State Department cables, which digby quoted at some length on Sunday.
Reading the original, what jumped out at me in particular was this passage:
Political classes on both sides of the Atlantic convey a simple message that is tailored to their advantage: trust us, don't try to reveal our secrets; in exchange, we offer you security.
But just how much security do they really offer in exchange for this moral blackmail? Little or none, since we face the sad paradox that this is the same political elite that was incapable of properly supervising the international financial system, whose implosion triggered the biggest crisis since 1929, ruining entire countries and condemning millions of workers to unemployment and poverty. These are the same people responsible for the deteriorating quality of life of their populations, the uncertain future of the euro, the lack of a viable European project and the global governance crisis that has gripped the world in recent years, and which elites in Washington and Brussels are not oblivious to. I doubt that keeping embassy secrets under wraps is any kind of guarantee of better diplomacy or that such an approach offers us better answers to the problems we face.
The incompetence of Western governments, and their inability to deal with the economic crisis, climate change, corruption, or the illegal war in Iraq and other countries has been eloquently exposed in recent years. Now, thanks to WikiLeaks, we also know that our leaders are all too aware of their shameful fallibility....
In the medieval era, all that mattered was elite power: the Church and the feudal order, tightly intertwined with one another. The poor had no power at all, and the tiny middle classes were but a handful of retainers serving specific elite needs. Gradually, the growth of cities and the urban bourgeoisie began to change this, and the industrial revolution and the rise of an organized working class changed things further still. The 20th Century welfare state, in which all citizens had basic social, economic and political rights, represented a culmination of a millenium of progress, whereby the power of extremely tiny elites had been increasingly restricted by the growing power of society as a whole.
And yet, it should now be clear how fragile that millenium of progress actually was. A mere 70 years ago, the German Nazis sought to wipe all that away, and replace it with their own 1000-year vision: The 1000-year Reich. They came remarkably close to succeeding. Then followed the Cold War, which in the West was portrayed as a struggle of freedom against an "evil empire". But once that war was ended, something very different emerged: without the threat of "actually existing socialism", however bogus it may have been, the Western elites felt increasingly free to begin walking away from their commitments to the broad common good. The old medieval yearnings to shape the world with only their own petty needs in mind began to reassert themselves in increasingly naked forms--although, even before the Cold War ended, the cyberpunk authors foresaw this development in their neo-feudal near-future social landscapes. This is the background against which we should see El País's description of the failure of Western elites. So long as there is no credible alternative, there is no limit to how badly they can fail, and yet still hold power. For as long as they hold power, there is no failure, so far as they are concerned.
Such is the logic of medievalism. And this is the logic that their retainers now trumpet, not least when they condemn the exposure of elite folly, dishonesty and misrule, as seen in the WikiLeaks documents. When members of the press itself attack the press for printing these revalations, they show themselves to be part of the reactionary medievalist camp. They are court reporters, taking elite dictation, not popular reporters, seeking out the truth on behalf of the people. They are not journalists in any modern sense. They are, in fact, propagandists for a return to the medieval world.
That is the battle that is now joined, not just in America, but across the globe. WikiLeaks and its revelations are a flashpoint, bringing things into focus, but the deeper story is the underlying structures of unaccountable elite power, which do not even concern themselves with the wanton destruction they sow, which see the Great Recession as a feature, not a bug: a great opportunity to roll back welfare states across the globe, and further plunge the vast majority of people into a much more precarious state of existence, much less able to challenge or check their own reckless misrule.
p.s. I don't write about stuff overtly from this long-term perspective very often. But it is where I live, it's a background influence on what I write, and is also responsible, I believe, for a good deal of disagreement with others, say about interpreting Obama's behavior. Things look different through a telephoto lens. And you tend to remember that, even when you move in for a close-up.
To paraphrase H.L Mencken, no one ever went broke underestimating how low a politician will go to gain an advantage.
Exhibit A: Vice President Joseph Biden, who likens Wikileaks honcho Julian Assange to a "high-tech terrorist."
What a nice marriage of images. Especially for those of us old enough to recall poor Clarence Thomas who, when charged with sexual harassment in his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, so deftly turned defense into offense by calling the accusations a "high-tech lynching for uppity blacks."
Now that terrorism is the new communism, why shouldn't everyone the government wants to vilify be labeled a terrorist?
(With so much else going on, I'm afraid I've dropped the ball in writing about the Cancun summit. Fortunately, this diary does a good job of filling in. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
This year's round of the United Nations-led climate change negotiations, ongoing in Cancun, Mexico, for the past two weeks, end today. No matter what the official outcome, the progress made on dealing with global climate change and carbon emissions will be incremental.
The problem, at base, lies with the incentives, or lack thereof, for the most powerful negotiators at the table. Morally, there are plenty of reasons for every country in the world to commit to drawing down carbon pollution. But economically? Politically? It's easier to take small steps, make half-hearted commitments.
Going all-in
What would a brave policy stance look like? Something like the position the Maldives-an island archipelago-has taken: "We do not have to wait for everyone else to do this," as the country's environment minister, Mohamed Aslam said at the conference this week. As Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard reports:
Right now the country relies heavily on diesel fuel for much of its energy needs. The government has already conducted an audit of their emissions, much of which comes from the shipping sector, a fact of life in island nations. But Aslam envisions solar, wind, tidal power, and renewable transportation fuels driving the nation in the near future-even if islanders don't have all the solutions now.
Aslam notes, Sheppard writes, that it's in the country's economic favor to take up these policies. So for the Maldives, at least, it's not a tough sell.
Bribery?
The real dilemma for island countries like the Maldives, though, is how much wiggle room they should give larger countries, who are bigger emitters, in international agreements. Larger countries have more to lose, economically, so they're less willing to commit to, say, legally binding goals for reduced carbon emissions.
But these larger countries also tend to have more money. And that's where the problem for countries like the Maldives comes in: they're going to need financial support to deal with creeping sea level rise and other consequences of climate change. Some of the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables, as The Guardian reported, revealed how countries like the United States use those needs to their diplomatic advantage. Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman asked U.S. Climate Envoy Todd Stern to respond to these revelations, but didn't get much of a response.
I've got the power
Ultimately, though, a country like the Maldives is always going to have a weaker negotiating position than bigger countries. Take, for instance, this account from Inter Press Service's Darryl D'Monte on how to identify an important player at Cancun:
A rough yardstick for identifying which Asian countries make the biggest ripples in Cancun is the number of journalists who crowd around the spokesperson immediately after a press conference. ... Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has certainly come into his own on this score. As the spokesperson for the BASIC group of countries, which includes Brazil, South Africa and China, he is articulate, well-informed and witty. Journalists swarm around him after a press conference, eager to get him make a scathing remark about another country or group of countries.
This profile of Ramesh is a fascinating window into how one negotiator manages to navigate these complicated talks. But, as D'Monte points out, even for India, financing is a key question: one of the "non-negotiables" for India, Brazil, South Africa and China is speedier delivery of promised mitigation monies.
Moral Highground
There's one group at Cancun whose incentives line up impeccably with a faultless moral position: young people. They're the ones most likely to suffer the consequences of a warming world, and they're advocating for a draw-down of carbon-heavy industries. At Change.org, Jess Leber reports that about 1,000 young people are participating in some way in the conference this year. (Official attendance tallies, for participants inside and outside the building, estimate 22,000 people in total.)
Leber reports that young people did make some progress this year: "The negotiators agreed to ramp up support for climate education and training programs worldwide, but especially in developing countries, and agreed to give the youth delegation are larger official voice in the negotiating process," she writes.
That's good news for adults, as well. As the UN's chief negotiator, Christiana Figueres, demonstrates in this video at Care2, it's tough to face down the people who are actually going to suffer from your generation's waffling. "Figueres tears up when speaking of why the talks are important; she also describes the inspiration that keeps her working toward a global agreement," writes Nancy Roberts.
Figueres' inspiration? "It's you," she tells young activists. "It's not our planet. It's yours...You will all take it over very soon...Nothing is going to be perfect...Everything here is going to be one step. But it is the best that this group of people under these circumstances...can do for the time being."
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The pander-to-fear-du-jour for members of congress is a >provision that would prevent the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the US for any purpose, including for prosecution. Passage of this ill-founded measure could effectively put the nail in the coffin of efforts to end the failed Guantanamo experiment, perpetuating its legacy of arbitrary detention and detainee abuse. It would also leave little alternative but to either release people who should not be released, or detain them indefinitely without charge or trial, or try them in the universally discredited kangaroo courts known as military commissions, which have conclusively demonstrated their inability to try their own way out of a paper bag.
An organization publishes information on the Internet that's embarrassing and arguably harmful to the government. Citing an alleged threat to national security, the government pressures companies to deny access to the information and to choke off the organization's funding. The companies acquiesce.
On Saturday, Benjamin Barber wrote a piece at Salon, "WikiLeaks and the sham of 'public diplomacy'". Barber's 1995 book, Jihad vs. McWorld still stands as arguably the deepest and most prescient about 9/11--and perhaps the mounting corporate/oligrarchic attack on the welfare state as well. Barber argued that ethno-religious tribalism and corporate globalization were mutually reinforcing enemies, sharing a common enemy in the democratic state, particularly in its mature regulatory and welfare state form.
In his Salon commentary, Barber pointed out the degraded state of American relations with the world revealed by the gossipy, ill-informed--shall we say undiplomatic?--character of many of the cables. It was more than personally embarrassing, Barber argued: it was reflective of a profound attitudinal and institutional problem, which he traced in part to the 1999 demise of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA--once headed by Edward R. Murrow) at the hands of Jesse Helms. Although Barber doesn't come right out and say it, the loss of the USIA as an independent agency represented a terrible self-inflicted wound on America's soft power in the world, that ought to have been immediately reversed after 9/11, and if not, then surely when Obama took office.
Today's State Department--as these cables remind us--is far too much a handmaiden to America's military/intelligence apparatus. Yes, the diplomatic corps used to be used as cover for intelligence agents, but that's a far cry from having diplomats themselves doing the spying. But USIA was even farther removed from that sort of mission and mentality. Although not without a grounding in American self-interest, it was a genuine service to global civil society, an affirmation of our self-confidence in the value of our values as a democratic republic, and its loss has had a devastating ripple effect, as Barber's piece points out. It begins thus:
As the latest WikiLeaks revelations have shown, when diplomatic cables are made public they are often far from diplomatic. In fact, they aren't even good journalism.
It is shocking that in the hundreds of cables released in recent days, U.S. diplomats often repeat unverified rumors. If I tried to base a story on such information, my editors would routinely send it back to me with an admonition: "Get some better sources. Find someone to speak on the record. Verify some of this stuff."
So now the State Department is rushing to mollify foreign leaders in Italy, France, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. This idle and unsubstantiated rumor-mongering by U.S. diplomats has shattered the brittle façade of official smiles we have dubbed "Public Diplomacy" -- a euphemism for public affairs that some also call "propaganda."
Scott Horton has been hot on the trail of the WikiLeaks revelations about US interference with Spanish justice system, in service of protecting American war criminals in three different major cases. Yesterday, he went into detail on his own "No Comment" blog at Harpers, "The Madrid Cables" and in an interview on Democracy Now!, "WikiLeaks Cables Reveal U.S. Tried to Thwart Spanish Probes of Gitmo Torture and CIA Rendition". Meanwhile, David Corn at Mother Jones ("Obama and GOPers Worked Together to Kill Bush Torture Probe") picks up specifically on a "confidential" April 17, 2009, cable and the light it throws on the Obama Admihnistration's role in protecting Bush's torture architects, undermining the "official story" that Corn was handed when he originally reported on what was publicly known at the time. (More on this below.)
What this shows is a clear and continued pattern of international lawlessness by the US, with no change from the Bush Administration to Obama. There was a profound and sustained effort to obstruct justice in the Spanish legal system--an effort so extensive that it essentially worked to corrupt the Spanish legal system as a whole.
Horton's blog post provides a general overview feel for what happened and how it's playing in Spain today:
In Spain, the WikiLeaks disclosures have dominated the news for three days now. The reporting has been led by the level-headed El País, with its nationwide competitor, Público, lagging only a bit behind. Attention has focused on three separate matters, each pending in the Spanish national security court, the Audiencia Nacional: the investigation into the 2003 death of a Spanish cameraman, José Cuoso, as a result of the mistaken shelling of Baghdad's Palestine Hotel by a U.S. tank; an investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; and a probe into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for extraordinary renditions flights, including the one which took Khaled El-Masri to Baghdad and then on to Afghanistan in 2003.
These cables reveal a large-scale, closely coordinated effort by the State Department to obstruct these criminal investigations. High-ranking U.S. visitors such as former Republican Party Chair Mel Martinez, Senator Greg Judd, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano were corralled into this effort, warning Spanish political leaders that the criminal investigations would "be misunderstood" and would harm bilateral relations. The U.S. diplomats also sought out and communicated directly with judges and prosecutors, attempting to steer the cases into the hands of judges of their choosing. The cables also reflect an absolutely extraordinary rapport between the Madrid embassy and Spanish prosecutors, who repeatedly appear to be doing the embassy's bidding. Here's how El País summarizes the situation (my translation):
Over the last several years, the Embassy of the United States in Madrid wielded powerful resources in an extraordinary effort to impede or terminate pending criminal investigations in Spain which involved American political and military figures assumed to have been involved in incidents of torture in Guantánamo, violations of the laws of war in Iraq or kidnappings in connection with the CIA's extraordinary renditions program. The American diplomatic legation documented these activities in a number of its thousands of secret documents, both formally classified or marked as confidential, to which El País had access. The American ambassador between 2005 and 2009, Eduardo Aguirre, an appointee of the Bush Administration, personally directed most of these efforts targeting the Spanish Government or the Spanish judicial authorities, and the secret cables note that he reckoned with and secured the support of powerful figures in Spain in the process. Prominent among these is the Spanish attorney general, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, together with several prosecutors attached to the Audiencia Nacional, in particular the chief prosecutor, Javier Zaragoza.
The cables show that the embassy was briefed in detail about the pending cases, receiving information that was not publicly accessible and would have been known only to the prosecutors and the magistrates handling the cases. The embassy engaged Spanish authorities in detailed discussions about the specific judges handling these cases and on at least one occasion extracted a promise from prosecutors to seek to have one sensitive case-in which former U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales, former vice presidential chief of staff David Addington, John Yoo, Jay Baybee, Douglas Feith, and William J. Haynes figured as potential defendants-reassigned to a judge they considered friendlier to the United States. In fact, around the time of the cables in question the prosecutors acted just as the cable suggests they would.
After going through the story of how Spanish authorities acceded to US pressure to subvert their own justice system, and derail the prosecution of Bush's torture architects, David Corn's piece concludes:
Back when it seemed that this case could become a major international issue, during an April 14, 2009, White House briefing, I asked press secretary Robert Gibbs if the Obama administration would cooperate with any request from the Spaniards for information and documents related to the Bush Six. He , "I don't want to get involved in hypotheticals." What he didn't disclose was that the Obama administration, working with Republicans, was actively pressuring the Spaniards to drop the investigation. Those efforts apparently paid off, and, as this WikiLeaks-released cable shows, Gonzales, Haynes, Feith, Bybee, Addington, and Yoo owed Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thank-you notes.
Amidst growing hysteria in the US ruling class, and a transparent witch-hunt launched through Interpol, it's perfectly obvious who the international criminals are. Obama could have put an end to Bush Administration lawlessness. Instead, he has clearly committed to defending and continuing it. And the WikiLeaks documents help to prove this beyond any reasonable doubt.
Since there is no defense against the truths that WikiLeaks has exposed, the only resort that is left is to try to destroy WikiLeaks. This is gangsterism, pure and simple. Welcome to the gangster state.
We've been told--even by people like Kieth Olbermann, who should know better--that theWikiLeaks document dump of State Department cables contains very little serious information. But, of course, that perception is generated by the same press corps that was totally clueless about its own role in fraudulently leading our nation to war against an ideological enemy of those who attacked us on 9/11. Such a press corps has already proven itself professrionally incapable of recognizing what is significant, and what is not--much less what is simply an outright lie. To understand the value and significance of the WikiLeaks document dump, you must turn to those who have a reasonable recor of understanding US foreign policy and international relations in the first place. This is why Tuesday's program of Democracy Now! was so important. First off, Amy Goodman interviewed Investigations Executive Editor David Leigh at the Guardian, who told her that much more was to come:
DAVID LEIGH: These revelations aren't over yet. In fact, they've barely started. We at the Guardian and the other international news organizations will be making revelations, disclosures from now, day-by-day, for probably the next week or more. So, we haven't seen anything yet, really.... In the coming days, we're going to see some quite startling disclosures about Russia, the nature of the Russian state and about bribery and corruption in other countries, particularly in Central Asia. We're going to see a wrath of disclosures about pretty terrible things going on around the world.
AMY GOODMAN: What are your thoughts today? For example, we just played this clip of New York republican congress member Peter King who says WikiLeaks should be declared a foreign terrorist organization.
NOAM CHOMSKY: I think that is outlandish. We should understand--and the Pentagon Papers is another case in point--that one of the major reasons for government secrecy is to protect the government from its own population.... If you look at the papers themselves, there are things Americans should have known that others did not want them to know. And as far as I can tell, from what I've seen here, pretty much the same is true.
Goodman went on to play a clip of Hilary Clinton, trying to spin the cables to US propaganda advantage:
In the early Summer of 2004, I was visiting my late mother in San Jose, and we went to see Farenheit 911 on opening day. We weren't in the dark about what was happening with the Iraq War. My mother had been a campaign volunteer for Helen Gahagan Douglass in her senate race against Richard Nixon in 1950, when I was one year old. She was still plugged into a network of activist friends, even though she wasn't able to be as active as she'd once been. And, of course, I'd been on the Internet continuously for a decade. But we were in a distinct minority, possibly even amongst the crowd assembled there that day. There was certainly no tv news source one could turn to for anything remotely reliable. Indeed, the whole reason that F 911 existed was because the daily news media had left such a gaping hole in the most important story of the day for almost three solid years. And so Michael Moore stepped up to fill the gap.
More than six years later, many others have joined him. Countless lies have been exposed, a Democrat is in the White House. And yet, the same basic policies remain in place, as do the same fundamental lies about why we fight, who our enemies are and why. Our former President and war-criminal-in-chief is all over the place on the tv machine, hawking books and telling lies. It's like Kafka in Wonderland. Nothing has changed, even though everything has. That's why WikiLeaks is so necessary. As before with Michael Moore and Farenheit 911, all the "normal" means of communication have failed. All the "normal" means of truth-telling have been corrupted. All the "normal" means of acting and thinking sanely have been ridiculed and despised. And a lawless government stands unchallenged, lying through its teeth every day--without even having a clear sense of why it is doing so.
Can there be any doubt at all why WikiLeaks is so necessary? Will any of those who are supposed to hold our government accountable do anything remotely related to that job?
Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower.
Carne Ross, a British diplomat for 15 years who resigned before the Iraq war. He is the founder and head of a non-profit diplomatic advisory group, Independent Diplomat
Greg Mitchell, writes the Media Fix blog for The Nation. He was the longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine and is the author of 10 books including The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics.
As'ad Abu Khalil, professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley. He's the author of "The Battle for Saudi Arabia" and runs the Angry Arab News Service blog.
Above all, what Goodman and crew demonstrated today is that it's not enough just to have previously hiddent information, you also have to have informed and truly independent observers to help make sense of the hidden informaition, explain its significance, along with the significance of its being hidden in the first place.
Of course the US government is freaking out, warning of blood on the streets. News flash: There's already blood on the streets. As Daniel Ellsberg has explained countless times, this is what they always say. And it's virtually always a false alarm. Besides, blood in the streets, that's pretty much what wars, espionage and such are all about, in'it?
We're supposed to worry that this massive leak will impede the ability of the US government to connive in secret behind everyone's back? Well, after the past 10 years in particular, who in the world honestly thinks that would be a bad thing?
Maybe if Barack Obama had changed that policy one iota, as his entire campaign was implicitly and explicitly based upon doing, folks might feel a little differently. But as things stand today? Not so much.
US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomacy crisis
• More than 250,000 dispatches reveal US foreign strategies
• Diplomats ordered to spy on allies as well as enemies
• Hillary Clinton leads frantic 'damage limitation' David Leigh
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 28 November 2010 17.50 GMT
The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year.
At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables - many of which are designated "secret" - the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN's leadership.
These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistlebowers' website, also reveal Washington's evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.
These include a major shift in relations between China and North Korea, Pakistan's growing instability and details of clandestine US efforts to combat al-Qaida in Yemen.
Among scores of other disclosures that are likely to cause uproar, the cables detail:
• Grave fears in Washington and London over the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme
• Alleged links between the Russian government and organised crime.
• Devastating criticism of the UK's military operations in Afghanistan.
• Claims of inappropriate behaviour by a member of the British royal family.
OMG! "Inappropriate behaviour by a member of the British royal family"! It must be Tuesday. Or Sunday. Whatever. One of those days ending in "y".
Equally shocking/surprising was the revelation that US diplomats spy on people (!!!):
(We haven't had enough time/space in the last week to give this the attention it deserves - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
One of the biggest stories of the year is being virtually ignored by one of the most influential media outlets in America. Meanwhile, Iran's government news outlet engages in journalism.
The latest document dump from WikiLeaks would seem to be one of those massive, stop the presses, drop everything and throw all available resources at it stories that dominates news cycles for weeks on end. One of the first revelations was of Frago 242 (a Guardian story describes a frago as "a 'fragmentary order' which summarises a complex requirement"), which directed soldiers not to investigate war crimes that did not directly involve members of the coalition. There are reports that US soldiers may have engaged in war crimes themselves. There are hundreds of thousands of documents and they will take a long time to digest.
The New York Times featured it Saturday. On Sunday it did so again; this time with an accompanying character assassination of Julian Assange, which Glenn Greenwald promptly took apart. While Greenwald focuses on the author of the smear - London Bureau Chief John Burns - in a sense it is a somewhat narrow critique.
It seems similar to how some activists focused their ire on Rahm Emanuel when initiatives appeared to get frustrated by the White House. After all, the hard charging, abrasive chief of staff who draws fire (conveniently) away from the president is a stock character in Washington. Emanuel was hardly novel. More importantly, he was not calling the shots. Anyone put off by him should focus at least as much on his employer.
The same goes for Burns. Whatever journalistic sins and malfeasance can be hung on him (and Greenwald catalogs them brilliantly) the fact is, his employers give him the platform. We should spare some scrutiny for them. For instance, look at the front pages of the Times on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. There is nothing about the new documents at all.
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