The US Embassy in Tel Aviv has informed the Prime Minister's Office that the website WikiLeaks was planning on releasing US diplomatic cables, of which some may deal with Israel-America relations.
The reason the US gave for informing the Israeli government is that they wanted to make sure Israel was prepared for publicity that might cause diplomatic embarrassment, and would not be surprised by the findings.
And it gets even better:
"These revelations are harmful to the United States and our interests," State Department spokesman PJ Crowley said. "They are going to create tension in relationships between our diplomats and our friends around the world."
Crowley said the release of confidential communications about foreign governments probably will erode trust in the United States as a diplomatic partner and could cause embarrassment if the files should include derogatory or critical comments about friendly foreign leaders.
(For the record, the last paragraph above doesn't appear to be an accurate summary of Crowley's remarks.)
I suppose (and hope) this could cause lasting harm to US "interests", though the news that the US was spying on UN diplomats (including Kofi Annan) in the runup to the Iraq war basically sank like a stone, so let's not hold our collective breath on that one. If it's just some harsh words I'm sure countries around the world will be shocked, shocked at the contents, and the main result would just be that US officials would have to start denigrating foreign leaders in elaborate code.
I'm confident there'll be more than just a few choice insults in the millions of documents reported to be included in this release, though. Thanks as always to Wikileaks for putting confidential US government documents where they belong: on the Internet, publicly available to anyone in the world. And I only hope Julian Assange can weather the inevitable accusations that he's a cannibal who particularly enjoys sucking the still-warm marrow from the tibias of angelic infants.
DOUBLE OUR PLEASURE? There may soon be a second leak-publishing web site, which seems like it could be either very good or very bad. We'll see what happens.
The Distant Ocean 
These revelations are harmful to the United States and our interests […] the release of confidential communications about foreign governments probably will erode trust in the United States as a diplomatic partner
Damn, I certainly hope — but don’t seriously expect — so.
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In the Diplomats’ world, everybody knows that everybody says and does unsavory things behind closed doors. The problem with these Revelations is certainly not that the Diplomats themselves will be offended, but that the Governments will lose face with their respective Publics. N’est-ce pas?
I have no Point to make, though, excepting it crossed my mind that their Game would be made more perfectly immutable, and free of these sorts of annoyances, if the several Publics were eliminated entirely as actors in it — as in the board game Diplomacy. There is so much more purity, that way.
Then again, perhaps Assange is himself a card in some encompassing, more complex game. Wheels within wheels, feints within feints.
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According to the Jerusalem Post, it may be that one of the revelations in the new leak will be that the US has been secretly supporting the PKK. The US is, therefore, nervous about how Turkey will take the news.
Add to this the fact that Obama prosecuted some peace activitsts as “terrorists” for trying to convince the PKK to give up violence, and it all looks very interesting. I hope they get a retrial on the grounds that Obama is actually arming the very same “terrorists” they tried to disarm.
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I don’t want to threadjack, John, but I wanted to call your attention to this brutal review of Chris Hedges’ latest book, perhaps as fuel for a different post.
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Thanks, but meh–I’d say the author does a pretty effective job of self-putzification in his 750,000 words of sophistry.
Cloud: Then again, perhaps Assange is himself a card in some encompassing, more complex game.
I’ve seen those suggestions before but don’t find them convincing. I don’t buy the notion that some branch of the US government is playing 75-dimensional mahjong, and although I wouldn’t doubt that documents may start coming to Wikileaks from other actors (state or otherwise) who have a vested interest in the information getting out, I don’t think that’s been the case (largely) up to now–and I honestly don’t care as long as the information gets out there.
I consider the tendency I’ve seen from a few people on the left (I’m not including you in this, BTW) to dismiss Wikileaks as just another pillar of the mechanisms of control to be not only the worst kind of knee-jerk pessimism, but a serious failure to understand just how much they’ve dented the established order of things.
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Oh, you’re quite right — there are no grounds at all that I know of, other than knee-jerk pessimism, to believe Assange is owned.
Of course Wikileaks has no control over the media which, mediating between it and the average reader, will unsurprisingly focus on certain things.
(You know what? I’m finding it difficult to compose the above in a way that doesn’t read as quietly sarcastic. I blame the internet for this.)
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Actually, The Guardian is a pretty damn good newspaper, as newspapers go. I really have a problem with kneejerk pessimism.
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I consider the tendency I’ve seen from a few people on the left to dismiss Wikileaks as just another pillar of the mechanisms of control to be not only the worst kind of knee-jerk pessimism, but a serious failure to understand just how much they’ve dented the established order of things.
I have to say I am occasionally guilty of that, and I think it’s misplaced, but it’s not quite knee-jerk and I must cop to not understanding these dents you speak of. The system is very good at appropriating and defusing bad news. In the case of Wikileaks, it cherry-picks the parts that affirm the status quo. That has tendency to make Wikileaks look like its either collaborating or getting played. For instance, I have just looked at a few summaries of these latest ‘blockbuster’ revelations and have learned that they disclose the following:
1. North Korea is selling missiles to Iran
2. Iran used ambulances to smuggle weapons into Lebanon
3. Iran has a more extensive collection of missiles than previously thought
4. It is actually Arab leaders who are egging on a military confrontation with Iran while Israeli diplomats sweat collateral damage and favor using student groups to promote democracy
With revelations like this, who needs propaganda? Ok, so maybe it’s all true but is it leading to something other than more scapegoating of Iran?
The last time around, the thing that grabbed the headlines was that Pakistan is very deeply involved in the Taliban, a point that Obama actually cited to affirm his strategy of widening the war while at the same time repudiating the act of leaking itself.
And just about everyone who gets quoted seems to be acting in good faith, however fucked up their tactics are. Where are the profiteers? The liars? The cynics? Where is the really high-level deceit? The criminality? The profiteering? One horrible cynic? In all these documents, where is at least one really, jaw-droppingly bad official? Ok, so we learn a bit more about torture and dead civilians, but that really was only an elaboration on what was already known.
So far I love the idea of Wikileaks and Julian Assange. I really want to believe. But I haven’t seen these dents ‘in the established order of things’ that you refer to. It didn’t happen the last time and, at first glance, it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen this time either.
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How about parsing these for the skeptics:
Analysis: Wikileaks vindicate, don’t damage, Israel
WikiLeaks Reveals Iran’s Secret, Worldwide Arms Hunt
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I largely agree with what you’re saying (and I’ve been underwhelmed by what’s been reported about the current dump thus far as well), but it looks like you may have misread what I was saying. What I meant by “the established order of things” is that governments say what they want and classify what they want and we hear about it 25 years later, if we’re lucky. What Wikileaks has done is to provide a mechanism for us to get much more information, and far less “sanitized”, much faster. I didn’t mean that they’ve tilted the world on its axis or brought down governments (and anyone who applies standards along those lines is bound to be disappointed).
You’re right that the system’s response is going to be to cherry pick the information and point to the bits that vindicate the status quo, but that’s always the case no matter how inconvenient information manages to reach the public, so it’s nothing new or different. Nonetheless, there’s now a direct mechanism for classified information to make it directly to people around the world, and that’s a major shift in the way things work. To pessimists (knee-jerk or otherwise) I’d say that Wikileaks is young and has only gained notoriety in the last year–so give it time before you dismiss it as pointless and easily co-opted. I’m confident that the best leaks are ahead of us.
Also, to be clear, I don’t have a problem with well-informed pessimism (and you made good arguments for yours); believe me, I’m overflowing with it. But there’s a sizable and seemingly growing segment of the left that just scoops up a handful of shit and throws it all over anything that comes along. Some people have gotten there through despair, and others have gotten there because it strokes their egos to act as though they see so much more clearly than the gullible fools who put credence in anything positive. While I certainly have more sympathy for the former group, I don’t ultimately have much patience for either of them. Nothing’s either easier or more useless than cynicism (and I mean real cynicism, not “the power of accurate observation”, which I value highly).
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What Wikileaks has done is to provide a mechanism for us to get much more information, and far less “sanitized”, much faster.
The problem with that theory is that the result seems pretty sanitized just the same. So this mechanism is in place. Where are the really explosive leaks? Surely there are leftists out there cherry-picking also. But what do they come up with? Nothing that I can see, except an endorsement of the Wikileaks enterprise as good and disruptive in itself, predicated on the idea that Wikileaks really is providing unfiltered information. I see less knee-jerk pessimism about Wikileaks than knee-jerk optimism. The excuse, promoted by the likes of Arther Silber, that, of course the Empire will turn this to their advantage, that is what Empires do, just doesn’t explain it. It wasn’t able to turn the Pentagon Papers to its advantage, because the information was too damaging. I can’t believe how people discount what the information actually contains.
I have to say I find this latest dump extremely suspect. It seems to me that, regardless of its intentions, Wikileaks is objectively beating the Empire’s war drums, exonerating Israel, while at the same time discrediting leaking and whistleblowing, and setting the stage for more legal and technical restraints on the flow of information.
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Well, this is a leak of messages — if we say that the leak is trustworthy we mean that those things were really said (e.g. by the King of Saud), not that what was said is necessarily true.
Basically, we are being leaked part of the State Department’s view of the world, not an objective view of the world. And Saudi Arabia saying “Come on you guys, Iran is totally bent on world domination!” doesn’t make it so.
I admit, people can be made to miss this distinction. It is a problem.
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I’d have thought it was obvious, but by “far less sanitized” I meant not cleansed of information solely for the purpose of preventing embarrassment, protecting careers, obfuscating the underlying message, or other power-serving reasons (as in the case of documents released through the US government).
Also, this was a dump of relatively low-level documents which millions of people in government had access to; it’s not top secret information. Even so, I don’t understand why you or others would say that because this document dump (or any other) didn’t produce the specific results you want to see, it’s worthless or even harmful in general to have a simple mechanism for secret information to reach the public without government intervention or control. No offense, but I find that position absurd, and in my mind it’s people who make those kinds of arguments who’re doing the Empire’s work for it–not Wikileaks. We shouldn’t have to spend time debating whether or not it’s useful to have an easy way for whistleblowers to get their information to the public.
Since you mention the Pentagon Papers, I’ll point out that Daniel Ellsberg disagrees with you also: “[Assange should] keep doing what he is doing. It’s pretty valuable…. He is serving our democracy and serving our rule of law precisely by challenging the secrecy regulations, which are not laws in most cases, in this country. He is doing very good work for our democracy”.
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By the way, on “explosive leaks”, despite the low secrecy level of the communications this document dump does provide concrete evidence that 1) the US has been colluding with the Yemeni government to cover up its responsibility for air strikes in Yemen; 2) Hillary Clinton ordered US diplomats to spy on UN officials, collecting information like credit cards, frequent flier numbers, passwords, encryption keys, fingerprints, and more; and 3) the US knew immediately that what happened in Honduras in June of 2009 “constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup”, and yet it ignored its clear obligations in that situation and subsequently lied about it in order to allow it to effectively support the coup government. And I don’t doubt there’s more in there. Whether or not that’s “explosive” depends on how you define the term, but it’s clearly important and worthwhile.
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I’d have thought it was obvious, but by “far less sanitized” I meant not cleansed of information solely for the purpose of preventing embarrassment, protecting careers, obfuscating the underlying message, or other power-serving reasons (as in the case of documents released through the US government).
Your meaning WAS obvious and I disagreed with it. I simply said there seemed to be some sanitizing going on anyway. I’d have thought it was obvious that I didn’t mean at the same level as the mainstream media.
Folks like me aren’t unhappy that Wikileaks has yet to bring down the Empire. We are simply suspicious that these dumps don’t seem to pass the smell test. It is hard to imagine that unfiltered dumps of information would contain so little real dirt. I understand there is nothing fake about the actual communications. But what we don’t know is what communications didn’t make it into the collection.
I am also aware of how Daniel Ellsberg feels. It’s kind of hard to read about Assange and not also be aware of how Ellsberg feels. However, just saying something is important, doesn’t prove that is is, even if it’s Daniel Ellsberg saying it. Nevertheless, I agree that the three things you mention are important and as new information comes to light I am inclined toward a more positive and hopeful view.
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I misspoke in my last comment. I am not simply made incredulous by the lack of real dirt in the dumps. I am made incredulous by the lack of useful leaks generally. I find it odd that every newsworthy leak seems to have come from one leaker.
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I don’t understand why you or others would say that because this document dump (or any other) didn’t produce the specific results you want to see, it’s worthless or even harmful in general to have a simple mechanism for secret information to reach the public without government intervention or control.
That is not my position. My position is that Wikileaks may not be the mechanism that you describe. My fear is that it will be the catalyst for closing down such mechanisms without having produced anything to warrant that result.
I don’t think we disagree on anything other than the extent to which Wikileaks is actually doing what it purports to do.
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Your meaning WAS obvious and I disagreed with it. I simply said there seemed to be some sanitizing going on anyway. I’d have thought it was obvious that I didn’t mean at the same level as the mainstream media.
No, I think you’re still not getting what I meant–it didn’t have anything to do with the mainstream media. By “far less sanitized” I’m just saying that any given document X will have fewer redactions (i.e. fewer sections blacked out) if we get it from Wikileaks than it will if we get it through the US government.
I’m not sure how you went from agreeing that the three things I mentioned are important to saying there’s little real dirt there–those are major revelations of US lying, espionage, and related chicanery. If Wikileaks is covering up the most damning documents, why did they include those? It just doesn’t wash.
About leaks coming from one leaker: why does Daniel Ellsberg get mentioned so much in reporting about Wikileaks, even though he did what he did almost 40 years ago? Because he’s basically sui generis in recent history–or was, anyway, before Bradley Manning. There just aren’t many people who are willing to put their careers, freedom, and possibly lives on the line in order to get large volumes of classified information into the public domain. So I don’t find it odd that so much information has (purportedly) come from one person.
Anyway, I’m glad to hear you’re at least inclined to a more positive view in the future, though I’d say there’s more than enough to be positive about right now.
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There just aren’t many people who are willing to put their careers, freedom, and possibly lives on the line in order to get large volumes of classified information into the public domain.
The net has greatly mitigated the risk of leaking as well as facilitated the transfer of information. I would therefore expect more leaking than in Ellsberg’s time, and, as it turns out, Wikileaks does have a backlog of leaks they are intending to release. From what I understand, they are not taking more until they get caught up. As you probably know, a major bank is next on their hit list. Bradley Manning might be free now had he not felt the need to confess to some sociopath in an online chat.
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Yep, there’s a backlog, and there’ve been many other leakers already on the site. But leakers in Ellsberg’s (and presumably Manning’s) league are few and far between. Here’s hoping we’ll get a few more people with that rare combination of a functioning conscience and a high-level security clearance.
This news is interesting….
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“that rare combination of a functioning conscience and a high-level security clearance”
That type of person is a statistical anomaly. The people drinking the kool-aid really like the taste of the kool-aid. When you divide the number of people who do have access to sensitive info be it corporate or govmint and divide that number by those that choose to shine the torch into the darker recesses of human folly you’re still left with a depressingly large number. 1 in a million? 1 in ten million? People like Ellsberg and Manning are like blue eyed sheep – rare but very valuable. I’m pretty sure that’s the simile I wanted.
On a side note, the hate speech targeted at Assange is disgusting. I have in the past drawn a line between ‘the people’ and ‘the government’ but when we keep choosing shitty representatives and our representatives keep doing the same shitty things then you gotta make a judgement call and say that it is true, we are the enemy.
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Oh, and Wendell Potter is a blue eyed sheep.
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There may soon be a second leak-publishing web site, which seems like it could be either very good or very bad.
Considering that Wikileaks has more leaks than it can handle, I think it’s a good thing, assuming they know what they’re doing. They are ex-WLs, so hopefully the technical smarts are there.
I don’t think the identification of this practice with one repository and one charismatic individual is healthy in the long run, for transparency or for Assange.
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WikiLeaks agrees with you (as you can see in that article), and Assange does as well. In answer to an interview question about whether he’d consider this new organization as competition he said: “The supply of leaks is very large. It’s helpful for us to have more people in this industry. It’s protective to us.” But in answer to a followup question he says this about Wikileaks copycats and spinoffs: “It’s not something that’s easy to do right. That’s the problem. Recently we saw a Chinese WikiLeaks. We encouraged them to come to us to work with us. It would be nice to have more Chinese speakers working with us in a dedicated way. But what they’d set up had no meaningful security. They have no reputation you can trust. It’s very easy and very dangerous to do it wrong.” And elsewhere in the interview (in a different context): “[T]here’s a network effect for anything to do with trust. Once something starts going around and being considered trustworthy in a particular arena, and you meet someone and they say ‘I heard this is trustworthy,’ then all of a sudden it reconfirms your suspicion that the thing is trustworthy. So that’s why brand is so important, just as it is with anything you have to trust.”
Taken together, that addresses many of the things I had in mind when I said this could also be a very bad thing. If I were in US intelligence and tasked with taking down Wikileaks (as some group no doubt has been), one of the primary methods I’d be looking at would be ways to mitigate its effects or erode its trust. And one of the main ways I’d consider doing that would be to fund or otherwise control a competitor organization, to dilute the mindspace and indirectly attack Wikileaks’ trust basis–by allowing a high-visibility source to be exposed, say, or by publishing documents that turn out to be forged or otherwise erroneous or falsified. Given that, I’m going to be very skeptical of Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s new group (or any other). And the timing of this news, which is clearly intended to capitalize on media attention around Wikileaks’ publishing of the US diplomatic cables and which has the effect of shifting some measure of attention away from the cables themselves and onto secondary issues–something nobody in Domscheit-Berg’s group should ever want to do–only reinforces my concerns.
So we’ll see. If this new group publishes something that’s genuinely harmful to US interests I’ll be more inclined to view it positively, but if they in any way undermine Wikileaks in particular or the notion of leak publishing in general I’ll consider my concerns confirmed.
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By the way, number 1 on your list of reasons that Wikileaks is seemingly “either collaborating or getting played” was its supposed revelation that North Korea is selling missiles to Iran. But that turns out to be a media invention, and the cables Wikileaks actually published paint basically the opposite picture.
So your skepticism here would have been better aimed at the mainstream media’s reporting of the leaks–not at Wikileaks itself. And that statement generalizes.
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So your skepticism here would have been better aimed at the mainstream media’s reporting of the leaks–not at Wikileaks itself.
I don’t know why you keep beating this drum since I have more or less agreed with you. I have probably been reading about and considering these things as much as you and am therefore aware of how the North Korea story was spun. If you read my original comment you’ll see that I took account of how spin may create the artificial impression that Wikileaks is not what it seems.
While I am here: Your apparent presumption that you read (an understand) much more than I do, the unprovoked snottiness that attends too many of your remarks and that handful of straw you toss on everything are extremely unbecoming. Those traits are fine if tempered with a great deal of wit and originality. That does not seem to be the case here.
Enjoy the conversations you are having mostly with yourself. I have better things to do than listen in non-admiringly.
Ciao.
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I have probably been reading about and considering these things as much as you and am therefore aware of how the North Korea story was spun.
I don’t doubt that, but you hadn’t said anything about it, and it was worth mentioning given that that story was your main example of Wikileaks either collaborating or being used to vector propaganda.
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Hey miguel, you don’t need to demonstrate snottiness whilst you accuse.
On a side note, I’ve always wondered why when people’s arguments are proven wrong they lash out (instead of accepting they could be wrong or simply defending their position without becoming confrontational).
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Good Call on the baby-eating, John. The process seems to have been set in motion…
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Gfod, I have a little theory.
It’s simple animal behavior, IMO. Animals in general have nonlethal forms of conflict, meant to establish dominance without serious injury.
Rhinoceros beetles joust with their horns.
Humans joust with words. Why else does a zingy put-down earn so much more admiration than a zingy compliment? We’re genetically programmed to admire people who can execute successful dominance displays using words.
Frequently this means that humans joust with their arguments, and pretend that it’s reason.
That’s why all most of the anti-war protesters disappeared once Obama took office. All their arguments about “principle” were nothing more than attempts to flip the other rhinoceros beetle on its back.
If I’m right, then it’s easy to see why they don’t accept that they could be wrong. If you’re interested in the truth, then you get really, really interested when your arguments are disproven, because it could be extremely significant. (One of the things I learned as a scientist is that you constantly have to be trying to prove your own ideas wrong.) But if it’s a dominance display, then admitting you’re wrong is precisely equivalent to a rhinoceros beetle voluntarily rolling over. You can also see why they lash out. It’s like a person who is starting to lose a fistfight, and then just does nuts and starts flailing.
You can look at stuff like the Big Daddy Jack Chick comic. I’ve been on the receiving end of that kind of (attempted) dominance behavior several times. Back in school, at a particular time every year, the 7th grade “science” teacher would spend a lecture on creationism. Every year, year after year, there would be one day when my ride home on the bus would consist of sitting in the middle of a horde of creationist adolescents, all trying to humiliate me with the arguments that they had heard that morning and were so hot to try out.
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