As The Wiki Documents Are Dumped, A Political Debate Ensues

November 29th, 2010 - by: danny

Participating in a Panel Debate/News Analysis about Korea crisis on Press TV

Listen: Podcast of Interview by Chris Cook on Radio Station in Canada Monday Night

The Wikileaks keep leaking.

The Daily Beast points to the most shocking stories so far.:

It seems to me that the reporting in London’s Guardian is far better than what we are getting in the New York Times whose first instinct was to share all the documents they received with the US government, to show how responsible and patriotic they are.

The Times has focused on selecting documents that bash Iran, a preoccupation in Washington. It was also revealed that Wikileaks did not provide documents to the NY Times. Julian Assange had been pissed at the paper for a putdownish profile they ran of him,

Reader Supported News reports:

- The New York Times has this to say: “The Times has taken care to exclude, in its articles and in supplementary material, in print and online, information that would endanger confidential informants or compromise national security. The Times’s redactions were shared with other news organizations and communicated to WikiLeaks, in the hope that they would similarly edit the documents they planned to post online.” The Times report tends to direct public attention to points it deems relevant.

- For the full, unredacted documents go to the source: WikiLeaks.org has set up their own archive. It’s easy to navigate but, there are a quarter of a million documents.

It seems that it was the Guardian who gave the Times the documents in part to make sure they got out if British authorities sought stop them from publishing. Strange.

There are plenty of criticisms of Wikileaks from the US government including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with some Republican Members of Congress urging action against the group and its leader. Some want to designate Wikleaks a terrorist organization.

The NY Times reports: Clinton Says U.S. Relations Will Survive Leak ‘Attack’

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that the leaks undermined the international community but that they wouldn’t damage America’s ties.

A blogger called Arms Control Wonk says the US comes off good in the expose.

DN: Noam Chomsky says purpose of secrecy is to protect the government from its own population.

There is also some on the right and the left who are suspicious of Wikileaks

Israel has cited documents revealing demands by Arab leaders for action against Iran as an evidence that its own policies are vindicated. This lead to this headline on Venezuela’s Telesur Tv: “Wikileaks revelations benefits Israelis.”

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports:

WIKISRAEL LEAKS: “Leaks don’t embarrass Israel one bit

An Israeli Blogger says the disclosures show Obama is Out Of It

Assasinations:

Iranians suspect Israel and the US in two bomb attacks against top nuclear scientists that killed one yesterday. This is one more act of war, no doubt designed to provoke an Iranian response and further escalate the conflict. One of the Wikileaks cables quotes the head of Iraeli intelligence as urging the recruiting of opposition groups: “Wikileaks: Mossad chief wanted to enlist opposition groups against Iranian government.”

WikiLeaks did not succeed in penetrating the most sensitive channels of U.S.-Israel relations.”

Again, they were not as far as I know targeting Israeli documents but publishing purloined US cables. The LA Times reports that Arab Media outlets, including Al Jazeera have played down the latest Wikileaks releases embarrassing Arab governments. Al Jazeera’s Arabic language Channel did interview me during the film Festival I helped judge in Tehran.

Anwaar Hussain, an Arab Blogger, does deal with the leaks and the US stance:

“The US says that Wikileaks disclosures are a crime. Since when has disclosure of a crime become a crime, wasn’t explained. Apart from the fact that the reaction of the United States’ Government borders on the ridiculous, it does remind one of that famous quote from the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, “Boy, I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals.”

China to US: Resolve the Issue

BEIJING (Reuters) – China called on the United States on Tuesday to
“appropriately resolve related issues” concerning reports on a series of
leaked U.S. State Department cables, a foreign ministry spokesman said.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a regular news briefing
that Beijing has noted the Wikileaks’ disclosure of a trove of State
Department cables, but declined further comment.

Another article blames Wikileaks or not exposing the true intentions of the US even though they are disseminating official cables, not offering their own analysis:

The Guardian reports on Iran’s response:

“Iran today lashed out at the WikiLeaks revelations, with the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dismissing the controversial leaks as a “worthless” psychological warfare campaign against his country. But Israel said it felt vindicated by the public exposure of Arab and international concern over Iran’s nuclear programme.

“We don’t think this information was leaked,” the Iranian president insisted during a televised press conference in Tehran. “We think it was organised to be released on a regular basis and they are pursuing political goals.”

Ahmadinejad told reporters that documents highlighting Arab hostility to Iran and its alleged nuclear ambitions would have no impact. “We are friends with the regional countries and mischievous acts will not affect relations,” he said

BBC reports an Iranian Nuclear scientist has been asssinated by parties unknown:, some claim it was Israel’s Mossad

What’s Missing

Professor Michael Brenner of the Univ of Pittsburgh draws an other lesson of the limits of the leaks and the way they are interpreted:

“The most striking feature of the dense cable traffic on Iran is the one item that isn’t there. My scanning of what’s available reveals no mention of possible comprehensive negotiations with Tehran on security arrangements for the Gulf region. Washington doesn’t raise it; neither do our friends, followers or allies. Only the Turks hint at it – and they are told to stop their ‘meddling’ by Assistant Secretary Phil Gordon. Yet the Iranians have made it clear since April 2003 that they are unwilling to decouple the nuclear question from their (and our) broader security concerns.

Th Obama administration (like its predecessor) has made a studied decision not to let the promised diplomatic avenue extend into those domains. Apparently, Obama personally laid down the rule that there was to be no mention of them. The consequence is that the only two options are to ratchet up economic and political pressure, i. e. non-military coercion, or military action. The Sunni Arab governments seem to favor the latter. The Europeans (like Washington) favor the former and avoid thinking about the implications of its failing – as it almost certainly will. Washington’s choice is a conscious one. Other governments seemingly do not have the self-confidence to even consider a strategy that the United States has rejected.

It very well may be that they all eschew the idea of comprehensive negotiations on substantive grounds. However, I suspect that there also is a powerful psychological factor at work. Both the Europeans and Arabs have for generations lived in a dependent relationship with the United States. Understandably, the enervating effects on their ability to think autonomously about criticial choices. much less to take initiative or to muster the courage to push for an unconventional course of action, have politically denatured them. A comparison with Israel is instructive. So, too, is a comparison with Turkey.

So it all rests on the probity and sound judgment of Washington. Our track record over the past decade offers no grounds for encouragement. Nor does the timidity and conventional mindset of Barack Obama.

Forbes Magazine is reporting that Wikileaks next targets are financial institions;

“Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.

Here is the Forbes interview with Assange;

Norman Solomon writes:

Compared to the kind of secret cables that WikiLeaks has just shared with the world, everyday public statements from government officials are exercises in make-believe. In a democracy, people have a right to know what their government is actually doing. In a pseudo-democracy, a bunch of fairy tales from high places will do the trick. Diplomatic facades routinely masquerade as realities. But sometimes the mask slips — for all the world to see — and that’s what just happened with the humongous leak of State Department cables.

Real News: Cables Show Business a Usual in US Policy

The Free Market Daily Bell is skeptical:

“Ã¢â‚¬Â¦But every time his WikiLeaks does another one of these data dumps, Assange takes another step backward in our view. Back in July after a massive WikiLeaks “dump” seemed to set a narrative that Pakistan was at fault for the Afghan war, we’d had enough and wrote a fictional narrative in which we imagined two CIA agents coming up with the idea for an Assange-like character. You can read our analysis here: Comes a Blond Stranger.

This latest effort by Assange raises even more doubts so far as we are concerned. First, there is the constant (annoying) advance dissemination of information to the likes of mainstream leftist publications such as the UK Guardian and Le Monde … and previously to the New York Times. Anyone who believes that the New York Times (or the Guardian for that matter) is not in cahoots with the powers-that-be, has got to be terminally naÃƒÂ¯ve in our opinion. That goes for Assange, too.

Does Assange, for all his apparent cynicism, not get it? He believes that the mainstream media is worth cultivating for his purposes? Apparently, he is fairly sure of their cooperation. Not that Assange puts it that way. There’s plenty of information on the Internet about the way the world works. But rather than focus on the mercantilist intrigues of the Anglosphere, which uses the levers of government to advance its own private interests, Assange focuses attention on the government itself with his endless leaks of hundreds of thousands of low-level documents that are somehow “classified.”

Financial Times A history of the present in 250,000 cables

By Philip Stephens

To trawl the vast cache of hitherto secret US state department cables dumped on to the web by WikiLeaks is to dip into the history of the present. Tales of diplomatic duplicity and unvarnished portraits of foreign leaders have grabbed the headlines. The big picture is one of the most powerful nations on the planet battling to hold on to its primacy…

Given his sabotage of US efforts to restart the Middle East peace process, Benjamin Netanyahu gets off lightly. Israel’s prime minister is said to be elegant and charming, but loath to keep his promises. Slights on David Cameron relayed from London have ruffled feathers in Downing Street, but Britain’s prime minister can hardly claim to have emerged since as a towering figure on the world stage. As for unbecoming behaviour by a member of Britain’s royal family, what’s new?

Much as the publication of this high-grade gossip will have bruised plenty of egos, in truth it is the stuff of routine diplomatic reporting. Nor should anyone be surprised that US diplomats at the United Nations might gather personal information about UN staff. Everyone who is anyone does something similar.

Amy Goodman’s Report/Roundtable on Democracy Now

Columbia Journalism Review: Coverage Round Up

ACLU SITE ON FACEBOOK

This is some of the reaction and speculation. More on Wikileaks to come.

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