It seems to me that Wikileaks is disruptive to Governments in the way that Napster was disruptive to the Music Industry.
While Wikileaks may not survive in the mid term, I believe what it represents may have far reaching, long term consequences. The internet has democratised information to the point that an unhappy individual with mid level trust in an organisation can expose the organisation's "sensitive" information globally with very little effort and thought.
Before the internet an individual could expose this information, but the barriers were much higher. To be a whistle blower you could only influence people immediately near you socially. To reach higher you had to filter your information through news organisations. While there are cases of this happening, the information was still continually at risk of being censored. Would this cable information have been released if a whistle blower took it directly to the NYT, or even a collection of newspapers?
With our current online structure of Twitter, Blogs and peer file sharing it makes sensitive information immediately accessible to millions with no chance of it being censored. To me Wikileaks represents the start of something hugely disruptive to our way of life. It's not possible to scale an organisation beyond several people while maintaining complete trust in each of them. When every piece of information is at risk of being exposed, what position does this place governments in? Is it possible for the current structure of the us government with its extensive lobby groups, international secrets and security through obscurity to continue?
I think its still too hard to see how the bits will fall here, but I do think we're in for an interesting decade :)
> but I do think we're in for an interesting decade
Very much agree with this. Every time I see what Assange and Wikileaks are doing, I cannot help but think: "Hey, looks like this decade just got a whole hell lot more interesting".
The biggest challenge right now is how the sheer amount of information and the responsibility of having access to it will change our society. Many of those in the "there is a reason for all this secrecy" camp border on blissful ignorance and while I disagree with them, there is something to be said for the human desire for just that.
So, to me, the most interesting thing is not that all this information sharing is happening, but whether or not the people will be up to the challenge.
Systems are going to have to change. The advent of Google damaged the concept of personal privacy; and the subsequent popularity of services like Facebook and Twitter accelerated the effect.
The fluidity and freedom that information now possesses is obviously changing our lives on a personal level, but the effects of this change in privacy operate on a spectrum; with personal privacy at one end, organisational and governmental privacy at the other.
It's only logical that organisations and nation states will feel the effect of this change, just as we're all affected on a personal level. Even if Wikileaks was prevented from releasing this information - a similar breach would have been inevitable sooner or later.
The US (and nation states in general) have been operating according to a paradigm that's no longer compatible with the way the world currently functions. They've obviously continued to operate in the same way that they were operating in the 50s and 60s - even though the technological constraints of communication have almost entirely changed. We've arrived at social and technological cusp - and it's pretty much impossible to turn back now.
Any transition is difficult - but the perhaps (optimistically), the effect of this change might be a new era of openness. Perhaps the something good might come out of this?
It's also a function of the transition from paper based storage to primarily electronic storage of documents - something which has only occurred in most organisations within the last 10-15 years.
Probably governments will try to tighten up their security in response to the Wikileaks, and I'm anticipating more internet authoritarianism such as government sanctioned permits for bloggers or people running web servers.
I don't think so. WikiLeaks is mainly targetting US because their infrastructure and their culture enables the society to uncover this kind of activities.
I am waiting WikiLeaks for the other hundreds of countries around the globe.
Wikileaks has leaked all sorts of interesting documents like scandals related to the economic collapse of Iceland etc. It's just that this current affair is of such a magnitude that it overshadows all other leaks.
It's also a matter of global interest. If these where cables leaked by Belgians written in German they wouldn't have received the same attention because no one really cares about Belgium, and Belgium certainly has little to offer on the matter of global politics that could be of interest and have implications for all other western nations.
When you comment that these cables are mundane in nature, you are assuming that you yourself are indicative of the audience as a whole. If you do not believe that millions upon millions of people will read this, you are mistaken. And many, if not the vast majority, of these readers will have previously been in the dark as to the information contained therein. So to them, this is not mundane; it's extraordinary.
Furthermore, all that we are reading right now are redacted and cherry picked summaries and analyses. Please wait for more data to be released before passing a quick, premature, unframed sigh against what is happening here.
> When you comment that these cables are mundane in nature, you are assuming that you yourself are indicative of the audience as a whole.
I don't think they're mundane -- some are quite amusing, such as the Afghan vice president trousering $52 million.
> If you do not believe that millions upon millions of people will read this, you are mistaken.
I'm sure millions will read them.
> And many, if not the vast majority, of these readers will have previously been in the dark as to the information contained therein.
It's not so much that they're in the dark about the information, it's that they have an unrealistic view of how world affairs are conducted. This might be because they're naive, or because their nationalist sentiments cause them to believe their own country acts more virtuously on the world stage than countries actually do, or whatever. Or it may just be because most people don't pay much attention to world affairs.
But for whatever reason, if someone's bubble is pricked and they later understand world affairs better, that person is more rational. And improving rationality worldwide is likely to be in the long term interest of the human species.
> So to them, this is not mundane; it's extraordinary.
Then hopefully it will cause them to update their worldview.
I don't think these are mundane at all, but I also don't think the US comes out looking very bad. There are surely going to be some relationships that are slightly damaged especially with some allies, but so far, it's nothing too bad.
Other countries on the other hand... I know this isn't hugely surprising, but it's now public that essentially everyone in the middle east is lobbying the US to attack Iran. That's got to mess up some relations there.
Also, some of the back room disses within foreign countries are probably going to screw up their domestic politics.
How many (sober) politicians will now have an open heart discussion with an US diplomatic official, which really couldn't reach his own voters/subjects?
Without being that knowledgeable about diplomacy internals, that should be worse than most any scandal.
If politicians no longer feel comfortable stating opinions or plans which would be unacceptable to the electorate and/or their own voters, I for one don't feel that's entirely bad. I'm pretty much in favour of politicians being open about their plans and principles.
It's not only about their own populations, it will also have a detrimental effect on world leaders' willingness to discuss other countries, especially their neighbours, with US diplomats.
The end result of the Wikileaks cable dump is that it's going to make it much more difficult for American diplomats to engage in calm, rational diplomacy behind closed doors with most of the world's countries. That may bring immeasurable harm to America's foreign policy and make it harder to maintain a peaceful and stable international system.
I don't believe this leak was necessary or in the best interest of most of the world's people.
Very true. Only a tiny fraction of the leaks are published as of writing this and yet the information leaked so far is enough to put my country - Turkey - in political turmoil for months.
I agree, especially as these summaries are written by the NYT, which has (so far) had the least interesting and most pro-American reporting on every Wikileaks leak.
The reason why you don't shoot the messenger is precisely because he has diplomatic credentials. Why did you think "diplomats" get expelled from foreign embassies as fall out from espionage scandals?
Agreed. These revelations are not so scandalous by US standards but may well lead to the collapse of governments in some other countries, for which the US will be blamed.
A global computer hacking effort: China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said.
Nothing new per-se for those that followed aurora or watch infosec, but interesting to see it all itemized together in a state cable instead of a bunch of assumptions & rumors. Look forward to seeing the details on that one.
There are _so_many_ rumors out there, no matter what was leaked in these cables, someone would have come out saying, "No news here, I knew it all along!"
So in so far as they let me know what rumors to choose to believe, they are useful.
I don't think so, other than me posting links on HN threads for articles that need it (such as this NYT article). But thanks! It's mostly based on readability, not 100% though. I ported Readbility (JavaScript) to C#.
Yup! That's really the intended use, for others to provide links to articles from within their apps. That's what I did for http://ihackernews.com (HN for iPhone/Android).
Fantastic, thank you. I used Google Mobilizer before, but it didn't format the site nicely, so I wasn't convinced that it was useful at all (most mobile devices can display full-blown webpages and the Kindle has an "article mode" that's basically readability).
Your tool joins pages as well, which is fantastically useful, and formats the page nicely, which is, again, very handy. I'm not sure this feature belongs in historious (rather than having people do it themselves), but I've linked to you for now, thank you for providing this service!
"WikiLeaks has put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals."
This is ironic since one of the biggest contributing factors behind Manning allegedly leaking the documents was probably the fact that the government was kicking him out of the military for being gay. The fact that Obama literally can't even stop lying during his one sentence soundbite condemning the leak is pretty symbolic of why we need WikiLeaks in the first place.
the fact that the government was kicking him out of the military for being gay
If that is a fact, is there a source?
"An Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Eric Bloom, said Manning, who entered the Army as a private in October 2007, was demoted last month for an assault. He said he was not facing early discharge."
We know that the military knew he was LGBT and he was waiting to be discharged, although the timeline and causation isn't entirely clear. That is, it's possible that he already leaked the documents first and then it was Lamo who outed him after the fact. My bad, I should have qualified my original comment further, though flyt's quote shows that it's a complex issue.
"What does, then?" Correlation surely gives you a place to look. I believe the correct quote is "Correlation is not by itself causation." Furthermore, this isn't even a counterargument, and beyond that this is a testable prediction: someone can ask the guy.
Causation does. In terms of "giving us a place to look" it might as well swing in the opposite direction: He stands to spend quite a few years in jail. If his motive was getting back at the military for sacking him for his sexuality sounds a lot better (and gives him access to support from a wider range of people) than him just feeling that it's his prerogative to publish the confidential material that was entrusted to him.
I had no idea that the wikileaks and don't ask, don't tell stuff were connected. How deep does the rabbit-hole go? Im glad they're not focusing on Manning's sexuality in the coverage, but it seems to me that the policies about sexuality in the military have some bearing on Manning's motivations for wikileaking. Interesting!
The basic problem is that Obama is a cheerleader in support of bigotry and discrimination against minorities. And when the vast majority of Americans are a member of some discriminated-against class, it shouldn't really be that big of a surprise when Americans start attacking America.
Until we have equal rights for LGBT, drug users, the chronically ill, the mentally ill, children, students, fetishists, men, women, religions that don't look or act like Christianity, gun owners, parents, travelers, the poor, etc., then America will never be safe. What we need isn't some free for all where everyone can do anything, but rather rules and punishments based on reason and science rather than bigotry, fear, and corporate greed.
"Until we have equal rights for {x} then America will never be safe."
I'm quite certain you can't argue that "the terrorists" would stop attacking us if only we had equal rights for LGBT in this country.
And the fact that 1 guy may or may not have have leaked the documents because he may or may not have felt discriminated against isn't much of a reason to argue FOR equal rights.
I'd prefer to argue FOR equal rights on the basis of the that being the morally right position, rather than do what you did and threaten those that are against equal rights with consequences. THat is just fear mongering.
"I'd prefer to argue FOR equal rights on the basis of the that being the morally right position"
This sounds like something that is true, but I'm not sure it actually is. The basic problem is that saying something is morally right is a statement, not an argument. If you read Jon Stewart Mill's essay On Liberty, he doesn't just say that free speech is morally right, but rather he proves it using practical examples.
For example, here is a good quote I found the other day about the political cost of bigotry:
"As important as the issue of bigotry is that this incessant vilification of gun owners precludes reasonable compromise over gun laws. The gun lobby press faithfully reports the philippics, and reprints the most vituperative anti-gun cartoons, to inflame its readers. Why would the gun lobby actually pay royalties to Herblock, Oliphant etc. for their anti-gun cartoons? Because the gun lobby's purposes are best served by convincing gun owners they are a hated minority. There can be no greater incentive for monetary contributions to the gun lobby and fanatic hatred of gun law proposals, no matter how apparently reasonable.
Gun owners are convinced (in part, by bitter experience) that gun laws will be invidiously administered and unfairly enforced; and, just as important, that gun owners are anathema to persons and groups like the ACLU to whom other American can look for help against mistreatment at the hands of the state. So gun owners hysterically oppose controls substantially similar to ones they readily accept for cars and prescription medicines. This is only natural, given the rancor with which controls are advocated and the purposes avowed by their more extreme advocates. Would driver licensing and automobile registration have been adopted if they had been advocated on the basis that having a car is evidence of moral, intellectual or sexual incapacity -- or that the desired end is to progressively increase regulation until cars are unavailable to all but the military and the police? Would not diabetics and others with chronic illness hysterically oppose the prescription system if doctors were under constant pressure from church groups and editorialists denouncing medication as immoral? Do not gay rights activists vehemently oppose policies (however apparently reasonable), they see as motivated by enmity to gays and likely to be administered in that spirit of enmity?
Two clarifications are in order here: 1) I recognize that cars, guns and medicines are different commodities that may require very different policy responses. My point is only that no policy, however rational in the abstract, can succeed if those it regulates see it as motivated by hatred, contempt and denial that they have any legitimate interests to be considered. 2) I also recognize that gun owners respond to anti-gun attacks no less hatefully. But there is a crucial difference: gun owners are not seeking to make their enemies own guns. In contrast, what control advocates do by heaping contempt on gun owners is forever alienate those whose compliance is indispensable if gun laws are to work. However satisfying it may be to anti-gun crusaders to portray gun owners as 'demented and blood-thirsty psychopaths whose concept of fun is to rain death upon innocent creatures both human and otherwise', the result is catastrophically counter-productive to the cause of gun control." -Don Kates
This makes sense. For the record I didn't mean my comment as a threat, but rather as something I think will increasingly drive future behavior. It sounds like I'm probably not as well read as you on philosophy; most of my thinking is based on psychology and sociology.
What surprises me most is that Julian Assange has lasted this long. This isn't OBL, where he's living in a cave somewhere -- this guy is known to travel between first world countries. I can understand those countries may not be willing to hand him over, but the US has lots of experience with rendition and I'm surprised some three-letter agency hasn't snatched him up yet.
And this actually proves an important point about the various three-letter agencies: they're not really the nefarious organizations that exist in the imaginations of people who have seen too many movies.
Jason Bourne's CIA would has assassinated Julian Assange a long time ago. The real one just grumbles.
What good would assassinating him do? He's not the only one who runs Wikileaks or has access to the information.
They'd need to "snatch" everyone who has access to it, which might be a very difficult proposition, not to mention a complete public relations disaster, considering Wikileaks is in the public spotlight right now.
I very much doubt the CIA is holding back out of the goodness of their hearts. No. What we are witnessing is simply cold, calculated realpolitik in action.
He is clearly the leader though. While assassinating him will do nothing about the information WikiLeaks already possesses, it may well throw the organization into disarray and thus irrelevance.
Assange is only a viable target if there is no other leader waiting at the wings if he dies. Our impression of WikiLeaks' organization structure is that no such "Assange" exists yet.
Or it might cause a political shit-storm and undermine American credibility, while giving a moral imprimatur to future leaks.
Wikileaks is more powerful as an idea than an organization. They've legitimized the idea of web-based distribution of leaks, much like Napster legitimized file-sharing services. That genie isn't going back into the bottle. Shutting down Napster only gave rise to a host of unaccountable, decentralized services. Shutting down Wikileaks would likewise only lead to the creation of new decentralized services that facilitate leaks without any of the human editorial control that Wikileaks currently provides.
How much "leadership" does it take to put stuff up on a website?
Really, I think you overestimate Assange's importance to the operation of Wikileaks, and the amount of "disarray" the "organization" will be put in if something happens to him.
And, honestly, if someone chooses to leak info in the future and Wikileaks doesn't publish it for some reason, then some other website or news organization will.
The really critical people in this whole scheme are the leakers and whistleblowers themselves, and silencing Assange will do nothing to stop them. It's just shooting the messenger.
I'm not suggesting they assassinate him. He's broken numerous laws and they have a pretty compelling case against him.
I can't imagine that the public relations fallout from his arrest would be any worse than the public relations disaster they have with the release of these cables.
"He's broken numerous laws and they have a pretty compelling case against him."
Are we still talking about the CIA? Has it become a law-enforcement agency and I didn't notice?
If your point is regarding the possibility of the US government going after Assange by legal means (not via some extralegal, shadowy CIA antics), I'm certain they would if they could.
The fact that they haven't leads me to believe their case against him isn't quite as airtight as you believe.
But regardless of what they do or try to do to Assange, it won't stop Wikileaks. The best that the US government could manage is to extract some sort of retribution or send out a warning to future leakers and whistleblowers.
The fact that they haven't leads me to believe their case against him isn't quite as airtight as you believe.
I'm not sure whether he's broken any US laws or not. He did not, after all, leak the information, he merely publicised it after someone else (Bradley Manning, apparently) leaked it. Wikipedia mentions no warrants out for his arrest apart from the rape one, for which he's apparently right now "under arrest in absentia" in Sweden.
Bradley Manning, of course, remains in solitary at Quantico pending court martial -- he most certainly broke some laws.
And your argument is not based on the laws of the US at all.
If the US government (more specifically Obama's justice department) wanted to prosecute, surely they could, would, and would win.
There are political ramifications of that move. I would bet the negative (inflaming a lot of people against the Obama administration) outweigh the positive (not really sure what the positive is, the papers would still find their way out).
Thus, they are aiming their legal guns squarely at the guy who actually leaked this stuff in the first place.
they're not really the nefarious organizations that exist in the imaginations of people who have seen too many movies.
You're assuming that they're not nefarious when another explanation explains the facts just as well: they might be nefarious but very incompetent. I mean, we know that CIA officers routinely sign into hotels and airlines using their real names so that they can collect frequent flier points. Any clandestine organization whose staff does that is...really stupid. It is an organization with an institutionalized culture of incompetence.
Jason Bourne's CIA would has assassinated Julian Assange a long time ago. The real one just grumbles.
Jason Bourne's CIA officers would not give their real names to everyone and their brother in order to collect a few measly reward points, so their relevance to the actual CIA is precisely zero.
Hmmyeah... they're not exactly angels though... see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_transnational_human_rights_.... Maybe they are doing more than grumbling, we just don't know it yet. Or they realize that sudden "accidents" would be mighty suspicious and/or ineffective.
I think you're right with regards to US agencies. I'll be more interested to see what happens if he releases damaging information against less tolerant governments, i.e. the Russians.
There is little reason to believe that the contents of these cables aren't already known to other governments, given that many soldiers from the rank of private on up had access to them; and that the UK, France, Israel, Germany, etc. also do extensive signals intelligence, crypto, and even good old fashioned human based spying.
Very true. I can't believe this point hasn't been raised elsewhere. The information has probably not been secret since it was made available to the wider audience after 9/11.
While I don't think it's the case, I do think it would be a brilliant strategy. The NYT article on the Iran negotiations seems rather helpful to the US, but nothing that could ever be said officially (especially the positions of other nations).
And the realization of this really undermines the assumption that these leaks threaten the US national security. These could have been leaked privately to an enemy just as easily - how worse would that be?
Why is it surprising? America can't go against every one who doesn't agree with them. It needs to weigh its options carefully and intelligently. The mere reason that Hugo Chavez is still in power testifies to this fact.
The world is not black and white where we might send CIA or Special Forces to neutralize someone who we don't like. It's definitely more complicated than it seems.
There are other, more indirect ways to neutralize what he's doing. A good one is using the media to sway public opinion, etc. Another one is to discredit the guy by linking him to some "terrorist group/government" and say they're funding him, etc.
>The mere reason that Hugo Chavez is still in power testifies to this fact.
That and the fact that the last time they tried, he turned out the be more resilient than expected -- and the coupe leaders far more incompetent; the coupe failed at least in part because they left Chavez's own people guarding the presidential palace after they took it over. Oops -- and the whole thing ended up being a huge embarrassment and likely gave Hugo an extra push over the old crazy ledge.
"Why is it surprising? America can't go against every one who doesn't agree with them. It needs to weigh its options carefully and intelligently. The mere reason that Hugo Chavez is still in power testifies to this fact."
In this post-cold war world, he might be less important, so I would expect there would be less of an effort to oust him. The US does have, shall we say, a bit of a track record of unseating governments they don't like.
Could we call it something more descriptive than "cablegate?" Its also not a scandal in the same way as Watergate - much more in line with the likes of the "Pentagon Papers". Perhaps a similarly descriptive hashtag, like #wikileakscables or #wikileaksdiplomaticcables if you're not bound by 140 characters.
But please - let's raise the level of discourse from sensationalist "Action News" by refusing to use pidgeonhole phrases and instead call things accurately.
True - Watergate maybe is a scandal of a larger scale, and true - a more descriptive tag could've been used, but the tag #cablegate was proposed by Wikileaks via their Twitter profile ( http://twitter.com/#!/wikileaks/status/8942910410072064 ), and everyone followed along.
I think that they did it so everyone would't use the tag #wikileaks when they are referring to the US Embassy cables release but a separate one.
Earlier WikiLeaks releases seemed to expose atrocities and human rights abuses by the US military and government, which represents at least a partial justification. What end does this release serve?
Exposure of corruption within our allies. I found things like Afghanistan’s vice president being caught (and released) in the UAE carrying $52 million in cash to be quite interesting. Also the part about Saudi donors are still the driving force in financing terrorism.
the US and Britian have turned a blind eye to the opium trade and the associated corruption in Afghanistan in order to appease the local anti-Taliban population.
I watched footage last week of British soldiers fighting to free large opium fields from Taliban control so that the real owners can get back to farming. All par for the course.
The war on drugs takes a back seat to the war on terrorism
Definition: Terrorism is the creation of fear in a population intended to achieve a political end.
What does it take to create fear? Certainly not successful terrorist attacks. Failed ones would work perfectly well too, as evidenced by the underwear bomber, shoe bomber, etc.
Things as minor as prank phone calls, etc., will still strike fear into the hearts of the target population.
So unless you can tell me that it's possible to stop failed attacks and prank phone calls, you must agree that terrorism cannot ever be stopped.
Only if the rate of killing actual terrorists is greater than the rate of motivating people to become terrorists, usually by killing their innocent loved ones.
It's not necessarily hypocritical to say that it's okay to grow opium in Afghanistan where it's legal but stop people from importing it into the US or UK.
It's one of the interesting side notes of the war on terror in general. The Taliban had massively reduced Afghan opium production during their time in power[1]. Opium has always been such an important part of the Afghan economy, however, that production almost immediately picked back up after the US invasion in 2001.
I'm a WikiLeaks skeptic so I can't say I really support this. But I am also a diplomacy skeptic. I'm very suspicious of the effectiveness of our foreign policy and the honesty of our leaders in engaging in it. I'd even go so far as to say that the diplomatic aspect of our foreign policy is equally or more damaging and deserving of criticism than the military aspect. So I'll be interested to see what the more frank, non-public side, as opposed to the endless bullshitty platitudes we get officially.
These were crimes of governments which are supposed to be trusted and which should work for the people. What end does not releasing every single one of them serve? Why would anyone want to keep them secret?
Are we reading the same article? From the samples: corruption, extortion, unlawful arrests, etc. on international scale. I'm not sure why are you asking - this is what the reports are about.
> Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from diplomats recounted.
It's a little hard to tell from the wording, but that might be explicit evidence that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush administration's practice of extraordinary rendition. That or it's just banal, and the Obama administration is trying to find places to take our prisoners we can't release because of bureaucracy and fearmongering.
They're talking about Gitmo detainees who they'd like to release; but can't due to problems in their home countries.
For example: there are (were?) a dozen Chinese Uighur muslims who were languishing in Gitmo, having been caught in the dragnet by mistake. They are Chinese citizens, so if they were to be released, they'd go back to China where the authorities would most likely execute them (or lock them away for life). So we'd like to release them to a third country; but everyone's afraid of China's clout and China was applying a lot of pressure to anyone who was even thinking of taking them. So we bribed countries into taking them: some went to Bermuda, some to Kiribati, etc.
I think the issue with the Chinese is not that the Chinese would lock them away for life (big deal) but that the Chinese were refusing to take them at all.
The point is that _we_ are using a loophole to lock up people without a trial. Gitmo is that loophole and that's why we can't bring the prisoners to the united states.
That's not true. We can hold prisoners of war without trial in the US. It's just hard to find a state that wants them. It's a "not in my backyard" problem.
besides prisoners of war have other rights (such as not being interrogated) under the Geneva Conventions - this all gets in the way of what we wanted from our prisoners at Gitmo
As far as I can tell, primarily because of right-wing hysteria about what the terrorist mischief they would notionally perpetrate if set up for a quiet life in Podunk, USA.
Because congress is afraid that they will break out of prison and kill people.
The ones that are getting released probably don't want to come to the States anyway on account of lynch mobs.
On a side note, I was clearly mistaken and this includes the one we tried to get Slovenia to take. After the full-body scanners and COICA I'm getting a little on edge about my support of Obama.
I have no doubt that anyone released from Guantanamo into the United States would be subject to harassment, if not actual danger. The people in congress arguing vociferously against their release must have reasons, and as far as I can see that's either the belief that everyone in Guantanamo deserves to be there, or the belief that it will result in violence if they come to the US.
And simply put, in this case the expectation of violence is as good as violence itself. That's the goal of terrorism, and it's worked extremely well.
This. After what the US executive branch has done, they don't want these guys to be able to seek justice before an impartial judge (i.e., non-military).
No, it's pretty clear from the context that they're talking about releasing prisoners from Guantanamo Bay.
Though it wouldn't be surprising that the Clinton administration's practice of extraordinary rendition (which expanded under the Bush administration) has continued within the Obama administration.
It's the latter -- the quoted passage is referring to relocating the existing long-term prisoners already housed at Guantanamo. ("Bargaining to empty the Guantánamo Bay prison")
My understanding is that new prisoners are no longer being brought to Guantanamo, but instead to other sites outside of the United States.
It's not a matter of faith; one generally wouldn't leak mundane information, only proof of misdeeds. And yet much of this leak is pretty mundane, with barely a scandal to be found in the whole thing.
Perhaps that's what makes it rather hard to judge. It's almost a higher-order leak (more words and potential relationships, than actions). So sidestepping all the philosophical dualities at work here (Stewart Brand's free/expensive information, the competing 'dishonesties' of releasing diplomacy at work / diplomats keeping secrets), the fact that we don't have a clear idea about what the resulting actions will be -- makes it even harder to judge. A whistleblower exposing something with a clear resultant action (some guy immediately going to jail, e.g.) is much easier to judge. Given the exponential potential routes all this information could go, it seems almost impossible to make sense of whether releasing it is right or wrong.
I'm under the impression that a cable is something of a formalized document format - like when an enterprise has a formal template for a memo. Link wise, I'm pretty sure embassies use a combination of leased lines and satellites, with link layer hardware encryption and one time pads for messages deemed sufficiently sensitive. They may well get delivered using smtp but every email wouldn't get called a cable, and definitely not over public networks. The name cable obviously just stuck from historical use.
Dates back to when messages were transmitted by telegraph - transmission via cable was for really urgent stuff that couldn't wait for the diplomatic bag.
In short: cables are the official record and communication tool of the diplomatic corps. As several other replies have pointed out, cables are a form of electronic communication, but they aren't emails. That may sound like a meaningless distinction, but in the everyday business of the department it is real. If you work at DOS, you usually have two email addresses--one on the unclassified and one on the classified network. Additionally, you can have access to a system to read, review and send cables. Think of them as official inter-office memos, or something like that. They're formatted in a specific way, and they do not, under any circumstances, travel on any communications systems not completed operated by the US Government. You get the sense of what I mean by format if you look at some of the documents on the NYT site (or sit down, as I have, and read a few thousand cables in a row). If you're the Ambassador to Country X, and you have a meeting with the President of X, you write a memo, in a particular format, with each paragraph classified U/SBU/C/S/TS, and in a pretty particular tone. That memo (cable) then gets sent to, who knows, the Assistant Secretary for the Region X is in, an Undersecretary or two, the OPs center, the Deputy, etc.
even more OT, but an interesting story about decryption and leaking of cables is the Zimmerman telegram - the cable that was decrypted and leaked and caused the USA to enter the first world war - from a time when cables literaly went over the cable. This is from the days before computers, when intelligence and human decryption were used.
So the decryption and leaking of cables is nothing new, but this is a whole new scale. Sometimes I wonder if Wikileaks is now doing the bidding of governments without realising it. It's unlikely now but maybe in the future will be so.
As I understood by reading the articles, they have their own "Internet" through which they communicate via cables, and every cable has it's own strict structure.
As someone who grew in the Mideast and spent some time in the US/EU/Aus, I was often amazed how completely detached Westerners are from the way the rest of the world works.
Left wingers or conservatives, so many guns & money have been sheltering the past 2-3 generations from reality that they genuinely believe most people share their values and goals, and that the world operates similarly to their own surroundings.
If these documents will cause people to start questioning the utter bullshit they are fed by Fox News or Reddit, Glenn Beck or Jon Stewart, then Assange is the most important person alive today. I doubt that would happen, though.
Sure (btw, reworded it a bit, hope it's less inflammatory).
A good example is the Iraq war: the pro-war side just assumed that, given the option, Iraqis will be happy to adopt the Western liberal democracy model. On the other hand, the anti-war side uses the "illegal war" argument, as if it has any meaning - the world isn't a modern nation with the UN as supreme court, determining the legality of various wars.
Another example: Afghanistan. First we go in. Then we realize Taliban not only has a completely different notion of values, but of time itself - they are perfectly happy to continue fighting for 20 more years if need be. Now we're thinking, "let's just pull out and forget about it" - as if it's possible to just start off of a clean slate, no consequence.
Another example, Iran in the Middle East. The documents "reveal" what anyone should have known - Arab regimes are horrified of the option of a nuclear Iran. This is because the deepest rivalry in the Middle East, that shed the most blood, is the Sunni-Shiite (and Arab-Farsi) - see the >1m dead in the Iraq-Iran war - rather then the Israeli-Arab obsessively covered by Fox/CNN/Reddit/Beck/Stewart.
Finally, a personal favorite of mine: my wife often tells me how her (expensive Ivy League) university professors bring up various UN treaties nearly all nations but the US have signed. They seem to actually believe the various dictatorships that signed these documents will not ignore them completely the second they become inconvenient.
I'm not claiming to have a good idea on what to do with Iraq/Afghanistan/Iran/etc. Just that I think the level of discussion is ridiculous.
I'm not claiming to have a good idea on what to do with Iraq/Afghanistan/Iran/etc.
It's a shame that airing extreme views produces more ad dollars than airing centrist views, because apparently, it also tars how entire populations are percieved. My impression is that your questions are shared by many (most?) in the west.
> On the other side, the anti-war side uses the "illegal war" argument, as if it has any meaning - the world isn't a modern nation with the UN as supreme court, determining the legality of various wars.
The left used this argument because it was the handiest they had. I think your criticism of it is absurd. It's like you're saying the left was right for the wrong reason, as if there is one reason all on the left opposed the war in Iraq.
How about this: Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and therefore there was NO reason to attack them??
They tried to assassinate an American President, for one. They also gassed their own people and had a history of developing WMDs- that economic sanctions had slowed that development didn't materially change the intent.
And don't forget that Saddam wasn't abiding by the conditions of the 1991 ceasefire, which ought to be an immediate justification for resuming fire, since that's how ceasefire agreements work.
Lack of legalistic justification was never lacking for the Iraq war. Whether it was morally the right thing to do, or whether it was a worthwhile thing to do from a US-interests standpoint, are genuine questions. (Which I don't feel like discussing today.)
And don't forget that the US' allies were all saying "Just wait a few months until the weapons inspections agenda is complete, then we'll all go in as planned and sanctioned by the UN". No, the US had to accelerate the timetable, replacing "worthless weapons inspections" with Powell's equally worthless poster project showing "structures".
I definitely don't single out Americans. In my experience it's just the same in Western Europe and other places.
People who live in places where they are forced to exist "closer to the metal", eg Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa tend to be less naive. Not smarter or better in any way - just more aware of the forces that shape the world.
The morning of 9/11/01 I was in a hostel in Adelaide, Australia. An American girl was in the TV room in tears, crying, "why would anyone do such a thing?". I don't mean to belittle her sorrow one bit, but I remember how the way she perceived this as illogical seemed so otherworldly to me. I mean, we grew up thinking it's obvious someone would attack our homes, if they could (and sometimes they did).
That said, I agree with you that the naive 19 year old in the US is more naive than her counterpart elsewhere. That doesn't say anything about Americans perception of Iraqi/Afgahni values. I don't think Americans are more naive about these than other people about similar things. Probably less.
It's not the tears. I could tear up as well. It's the disbelief that anyone would want to harm you, even though they never met you, just because you belong to a group (eg nation) they're opposed to.
It was strange to me, since I grew up knowing there are people who never met me who'd harm me given the chance. It was actually happening pretty close by, from time to time. I didn't realize, until then, that there are people who don't grow up with the same notion.
Again, I'm not singling out Americans at all. I actually seem to have a higher opinion of America & Americans than most of my fellow New Yorkers..
If you read the rest of his comment, you will see his explanation for the opening (and inflammatory) sentence.
A basic grounding in recent world history would also likely be useful. The point, if I may be allowed to interpret his intention, was to point out that having spent a couple hundred years marauding around the world toppling governments that didn't suit its ideology the USA has lost sight of other cultures, their values and just assumes their way is the way. Democracy, capitalism etc are not the only political and economic models that have any value. In fact, an argument could be made against both of these, but currently it seems that they work well enough - especially when you back them with sufficient number of nuclear warheads.
I am not making any kind of political point, I live here in the US and love it, but having traveled the world, I have seen first hand that there is actually a disconnect between how this country, in aggregate, thinks and how much of it actually works.
Pure capitalism is a rent-seeking company-town dystopian nightmare. It encourages exclusive ownership of strategic resources, even when they're openly used to destroy the competitive free market by preventing rivals from existing. Similarly, lack of access to capital is a self-perpetuating social stratification problem which has led to violent revolution.
IMHO these are reasons to regulate it carefully, not to eliminate it.
I don't think so, I think that most incarnations of capitalism haven't existed in a non-corrupt environment... In fact, I'd say that capitalism helps weed out corruption since the more corrupt states are less effective.
Also, it depends on the timeframe perspective - pure capitalism may allow someone to corner a market for a short time, but over a long period is more stable. Whereas a lot of solutions may in the short term prevent bad situations in the long term the system becomes corrupt and injustice will increase.
Neither of the above. Replace capitalism with geoism. Capitalism could not survive in a freed market, a market free of counterproductive taxes, addictive subsidies, and nigh unlimited license (the corporate charter) to wreak havoc. People need to feel enough self-esteem to demand a share of the commonwealth, of all the money we all spend on all the nature we use. Then we could lock the hood on the economy.
Capitalism is an entire scheme for running an economy, because it answers questions like:
* How do we decide how many factories to operate? (A capitalist might bet that we need one more.)
* How do we motivate the people who are needed to build and run them? (The capitalist hires them.)
* Where do the raw materials come from? (The capitalist buys them.)
* Who is entitled to have the end products? (The capitalist, and whoever he sells them to.)
Geoism is merely a way to fund government; it doesn't make any of these other things happen. It also seems to make the burden fall disproportionately on organizations that use a lot of land, rather than using a lot of energy or people or any other asset. If we're going to ration something (which is all a property tax is) as a tactic, it should be energy, because we're more likely to run low on that than square feet of dirt.
I would guess that the OP means realpolitik. Where there is power, there is corruption. Smuggling currency is a very (very) common hobby. Horse-trading (influence for money, trade deals for extradition, taking in inconvenient "no longer enemy combatants" in exchange for influence or money), etc, is a daily thing. To survive and thrive you need to think about practical considerations more than ideals or principles.
Take this point about Pakistan's nuclear fuel. First, it's a bit odd that we countenance a nuclear program in Pakistan, a muslim country that has been involved in several border wars, but a nuclear program in Iran or Iraq is grounds for invasion. The reasons for that, what looks like gross hypocrisy, are many.
The Pakistani diplomat wasn't objecting to the removal of the fuel per se, but how it will play in the local media and politics. That may or may not be bullshit, and perhaps beside the point. Or maybe its not. No one, not even the diplomats know everything. There are always plans within plans and forces at cross-purposes and idiots who value expedience over long-term planning.
Western folk tend not to have internalized this point of view. Taken too far it leads to paranoia, but I wouldn't mind a slightly larger dose of "reality" in the thinking of the average US voter.
Isn't the realpolitik behind US tolerance of Pakistan simply that the US is not powerful enough to make war with Pakistan?
Such a war would draw in lots of other powers and would be a massive drain on the US. All we're left able to do is make nice with the military strongman in charge in exchange for Pakistan looking the other way while we invade its border country.
I think it's a bit more deep, especially given our prior history with Afghanistan and General Zia, and the complicated role of AQ Khan in nuclear proliferation. stratfor is a good place to dig into those kinds of questions.
Left wingers or conservatives, so many guns & money have been sheltering the past 2-3 generations from reality that they genuinely believe most people share their values and goals, and that the world operates similarly to their own surroundings.
Not quite, but, its an easy mistake to make. There's a saying over here, "Politics stops at the water's edge." It means that with domestic politics, politicians can be as bipartisan as they like. But when it comes to international politics, politicians are united and present a similar set of ideals[1].
This idea goes back to America's founding, not just the end of WW2 and the rise of America as a superpower in the 20th century. Daniel Webster said it way back in 1814 and Arthur Vandenberg in the 1950's, when he was a Senator.
Anyway. My point is that if you (viewing from the outside in) look at American politics and use it to judge an entire nation, you're getting the wrong viewpoint. If you think that Americans are ignorant of other cultures because they are more occupied with what goes on in the states surrounding them than in countries an ocean away, you've got the wrong idea of America.
1. This is why it was such a big deal for Nancy Pelosi to meet with Bashar Assad from Syria a few years back. She said something different than what George Bush (the President at the time) was saying.
I don't really have a particular beef with Americans. My statement is about people I know in Europe and other Western nations as well as the US - it's less about politics than people's (politicians included) basic premises.
If someone's failing to question Jon Stewart, who outright announces that he's not a serious journalist, they're going to need something a lot less subtle than wikileaks.
What is interesting about this is not the damage it does, which will likely be minimal as it's really just embarrassing.
What's interesting is the look into the hidden minds of countries. I didn't know, for instance, that so many Arab countries urged US intervention in Iran, or that Israel has been monitoring Iran's nuclear program so closely--as indicated by their pressing warning that 2010 specifically is a key year.
Of course, everyone here knew or suspected China's dirty hands, but it's nice that this calls them out for it.
And it's funny to know exactly how little most countries seem to think of Europe's importance.
>I didn't know, for instance, that so many Arab countries urged US intervention in Iran
This type of information is what's likely to end up being actually damaging. There's a good chance nations that may have offered private support while maintaining public face will be less cooperative in the future.
> or that Israel has been monitoring Iran's nuclear program so closely--as indicated by their pressing warning that 2010 specifically is a key year.
This part isn't that surprising, to be honest. The Israelis keep very close tabs on their neighbors, ad the Mossad has earned their reputation as being one of the most effective intelligence agencies in the world.
Remember a few years ago when Israeli jets seemingly randomly bombed Syria with almost no public reaction from Syria? In fact, everyone involved was strangely quiet about it, with the Syrians claiming the Israelis had just bombed empty desert. Turns out the Israelis had gotten wind of a clandestine nuclear reactor supplied by North Korea and taken it down.[1]
"What is interesting about this is not the damage it does, which will likely be minimal as it's really just embarrassing."
I believe that you underestimate the insanity of some of the individuals that have been insulted. I'm certain that many of these megalomaniacs put their ego at such high regard that they go to war and kill people for less then a personal insult.
Still, I'd rather see a war fought over humanitarian values like freedom of speech and the rights of wikileaks then for money and oil.
Is there a torrent anywhere with the actual text of the cables? Wikileaks itself is being DDOSed, and none of the news sites are reprinting anything but summaries.
"Assange made them available to the Guardian and four other newspapers: the New York Times, Der Spiegel in Germany, Le Monde in France and El País in Spain. All five plan to publish extracts from the most significant cables, but have decided neither to "dump" the entire dataset into the public domain, nor to publish names that would endanger innocent individuals. WikiLeaks says that, contrary to the state department's fears, it also initially intends to post only limited cable extracts, and to redact identities."
I wish Wikileaks would just dump the contents, and leave the analysis to the rest of the world. By doing selective "analysis" and redaction, they're basically doing exactly what they claim to be fighting.
Either release all the information, or withhold it. Don't play sides.
Oh, and while you're at it, Wikileaks? I'd love to see leaks from Russia, China, UK, Japan etc. You've been picking on the US for far too long; these other countries are no angels either.
I would have almost immeasurably more respect for them if they did this.
I'm not saying I love the corruption in the US which clearly exists, but giving away only one piece of the puzzle is Opinion Manipulation 101, which I think is the core reason there's rather a lot of us who don't really trust them. I won't even claim the US is nebulously "better" then others, I'll simply claim that I think if you could see everything clearly you wouldn't be able to credibly argue that the US is clearly "worse", and I would certainly bet the "uniquely evil" position a lot of people hold is completely unfounded.
Oh, and while you're at it, Wikileaks? I'd love to see leaks from Russia, China, UK, Japan etc. You've been picking on the US for far too long; these other countries are no angels either.
Are you offering to leak this information? Remember, they do not break into US systems to get this information. They need someone to leak it to them.
Plus, a couple of those countries will wipe Assange and his organization off the face of the earth. Assange is only picking on the US because we're more civil. It's like how the anti-religioun crowd tends to pick on Christianity, instead of one of the actually vicious religions that will kill them.
Really, Assange is merely perpetrating a sophisticated form of bullying.
> It's like how the anti-religioun crowd tends to pick on Christianity, instead of one of the actually vicious religions that will kill them.
This would perhaps be a reasonable argument if they _never_ picked on Islam (I assume that's what you were referring to). This would indicate some actual fear of reprisals. However, this isn't actually the case. Dawkins, Hitchens, Myers, and most other figures have all 'picked on' Islam at one time or another.
The first comment on the Hitchen's link shows some of the issues inherent when you criticize a minority religion (with respect to audience), however. Namely, you get the nasty anti-(legal)-immigrant crowd thinking you support them, or at least provide ammunition for them (conveniently ignoring arguments against their own beliefs).
Granted, they haven't picked on the Aztecs to my knowledge. They might be afraid of them.
Yeah, that's good they sometimes point out the flaws in Islam. But, still most venom is focused on the least harmful religions because there is the least reprisal.
And insofar as the atheists' goals are humanitarian they should join forces with the most humanitarian ideologies, which tend to be certain religions. The least humanitarian took root in atheistic thought (whether atheism is a direct cause or merely an enabler is a different debate).
Compared to the Nazis and Communists the radical Islamists are a bunch of puppy dogs.
>But, still most venom is focused on the least harmful religions because there is the least reprisal.
You have no evidence that's why they post more about Christianity. I have already presented several other explanations. To be explicit it could be because they don't want to feed biases against minority groups, they might want to target something which is a visible problem (evolution denial in the states), they might want to target the beliefs of people who have power to abuse (local officials), they might want to clean up their own house before they figure out how to deal with other countries and religions which they are less familiar with, etc.
Furthermore PZ Myers _has_ received death threats from Christians, so the idea that all Christians are just a bunch of friendly folks who would never hurt a fly, is absurd (though a lot of Christians do commonly make this argument). If you're making yourself a target, you expose yourself to every nutcase in the country.
> Compared to the Nazis and Communists the radical Islamists are a bunch of puppy dogs.
What do the Nazi's and Communists have to do with this?
This sentence:
"The least humanitarian took root in atheistic thought (whether atheism is a direct cause or merely an enabler is a different debate)."
Also, Christianity is the least problematic of all major religions, and most in line with the agenda of humanist atheists, per its explicit laws about the best way of living. Those who don't follow the laws are hard pressed to claim the title "Christian." So, it is disingenuous and ineffective to target Christians.
Target ideologies that explicitly make anti-humanitarian claims. That is most in line with the atheists' claim that religion is anti-humanitarian.
True. Remember Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB officer and Putin critic who somehow wound up with a lethal dose of polonium 210 while in Britain? Just you try leaking documents embarrassing to the Russian government, Mr Assange.
Speaking of which, why haven't I heard anything about Russia in this leak? Surely there must be some interesting diplomatic cables into and out of Russia?
Releasing the raw contents without any redactions would probably be a disaster. Remember that a lot of these documents name spies/confidential informants. This is also at the level where people are actually killed.
I guess what I'm saying is a complete, unedited release would almost certainly put some blood on wikileaks "hands".
Well, hopefully Wikileaks has better document security than the US, otherwise whoever really wants to know the identity of the spies/informants probably already does.
Assange has claimed he is about to release information that targets the Russian government and Russian businessmen (reported 10/26).
The thing is, even if he does release it, most Russian citizens won't hear about it or won't care. Anything even remotely incriminating published about Russian businessmen and I can tell you he will probably want to find a good hiding place.
Russian society is thoroughly corrupt, no one there will even blink if more incriminating material is published on businessmen or government. It's just the default assumption really.
I wish Wikileaks would just dump the contents, and leave the analysis to the rest of the world. By doing selective "analysis" and redaction, they're basically doing exactly what they claim to be fighting.
Either release all the information, or withhold it. Don't play sides.
Now that's just illogical, plain and simple. You don't expect Wikileaks to do some verification and sanity checks? You object to the fact that they take a quick look over the documents to make sure they don't leak anything that will get massive amounts of people killed? Wikileaks doesn't edit to play sides, they edit so they can maintain some form of legitimacy as a journalistic entity. From what I've read, two things happen during the editing phase: (1) fact checking and (2) checks to make sure lives aren't put in danger by the leak. No sides are being played; it's simply common sense practices that journalistis have been doing for several centuries.
Complete docs are not up yet ... The full schedule is as follows:
The first batch of documents that will be in part released Sunday night and the rest Monday will include "lively commentaries" by American diplomats on, among others, Nelson Mandela, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Af...ghan President Hamid Karzai, and Libya's Col. Muammar Gaddafi.
On Tuesday, documents will be released relating to Guantanamo and North and South Korea.
Wednesday will be Pakistan's turn.
Thursday will be dedicated to Canadians and their "inferiority complex".
Claims of corruption in Afghanistan will be aired Friday.
Saturday will be about Yemen, and Sunday, China.
It's all secret or noforn. If he was working as an analyst, he'd likely be badged for it. It also depends on his particular job responsibilities. My guess is that he was cleared to access a document archive for his day-to-day operations and started grabbing random stuff when he figured out a way to transport the data. There's no rhyme or reason to what was leaked, it's looks like wholesale whatever could be retrieved so it was likely a fire-sale type data grabbing.
Which really begs the question why they don't have some automatic monitoring on who starts accessing a hundred thousand documents not related to their day to day job.
"There have been suggestions that an alarm system to detect suspicious use of the network was suspended for US military personnel in Iraq after they complained it was inconvenient."
It would be rather inconvenient if one full-text search on the name of this old possible insurgent you captured suddenly disabled your computer and led to your arrest by MPs, I agree.
The excerpts the NYT is reporting in this story are pretty ho-hum. We'll have to wait and see what else is in there but it looks like another Wikileaks hype job to me. No doubt there's going to be some embarrassing sausage making details in here but it just confirms things we already knew. Pakistan is a complex situation, Karzai's government is corrupt, etc. Wikileaks would be better off releasing this material without the hype and grandstanding.
I think it will put in context the silly, local squabbles that are behind all this. Iran is a western-style Democracy that has a radical faction thanks to decades of US meddling.
Ahmadinejad came to power after several years of George W. Bush's anti-Iran rhetoric had galvanized a conservative coalition in Iran.
Look at Orkut and Twitter: Iran is a pluralistic, wonderful country. Things like the US dropping bombs next door will tend to radicalize a country's extremists. Iran had been working to topple Saddam for decades and would have made a natural ally for the US. But the US goal was not to remove Saddam, it was to take power in the region, and so Iran (the natural power in the region) had to be an adversary.
Since then, we've seen more and more power in Iran go to the conservative faction which was on its way out before George W. Bush.
Well just as a counterpoint, perhaps you knew these things, but maybe most of the Times readers did not, or perhaps they suspected it but wanted more evidence.
I find this interesting, but we would also need such leaks from other countries embassies, not just U.S. ones.
This will probably create embarrassment for U.S., but on the other hand, isn't it a job of a diplomat to truthfully describe the situation in the country where he is dispatched? In most cases, they probably just did their job, assuming that the documents will stay secret. I don't think that's immoral.
I'm a little confused as to why people think dumping cables from American embassies would show the US in a negative light or contain some sort of revelation that the US is engaged in anything illegal.
These are cables from the American point of view of the rest of the world. If anything, it is going to show foreign leaders/countries far more negatively than the Americans.
The most interesting thing about reading these cables is how the US comes out well - reasonable, rational, and analytical - not the nefarious evil satan that it is portrayed by our enemies and domestic extremists. This snapshot of the inner workings of American diplomacy actually make me feel much better about how things are being managed, and should undermine efforts to portray some nasty plot to dominate the world. I don't expect our government to act in international affairs with complete transparency or without ulterior motives, but I do expect that they try to act ultimately for good and that there be minimal self-enrichment. I so far see little evidence of serious breaches here.
I don't think telling German officials to "consider the implications" of enforcing an arrest warrant against C.I.A. officers implicated in the kidnapping of a German citizen makes the U.S. look good.
It was an honest mistake and arresting CIA officers for making a mistake in their job, one which they corrected and admitted to, would hardly be without implications.
Being kidnapped, flown to a prison for five months and possibly tortured, possibly sodomized is more than a "mistake."
And merely admitting to having committed a human rights violation is not a substitute for following due process of law. Threatening a country with "implications" for wanting to bring the people to justice who wrongfully detained one of their citizens does not make the United States look good.
Plus there are other examples, like Hilary Clinton ordering diplomats to collect private information on the U.N. Secretary General, which was likely a violation of international law. This does not make the U.S. look good.
> Plus there are other examples, like Hilary Clinton ordering diplomats to collect private information on the U.N. Secretary General, which was likely a violation of international law. This does not make the U.S. look good.
Actually, collecting such information makes HC look "not stupid".
The UN represents govts, most of which are corrupt bastards killing their citizens. The UN aids and abets such activities.
As helium said, my point is not that there is a perfect record. What is not there - a sinister plot to monopolize the world's oil, destroy Muslim society, or assassinate world leaders - is more important.
That said, a broader point is in order - I don't think anyone expects perfect adherence to "international law" by the USA. Despite the weight of the phrase "international law," the actual concept is deeply ambiguous. There is no fully baked world government, so "international law" is not a direct moral parallel to domestic law in a sovereign state. As much as the UN can do for the world, it is not a proper law making body, it's not accountable to it's constituents or fairly representative of the world, and some of its most powerful members don't even represent their own constituents. It's a rough hack at providing a venue for diplomacy and world order - not a supremely powerful entity as many people would wish it to be. The phrase "violation of international law" tastes meaty, but it's just tofu.
> I don't think anyone expects perfect adherence to "international law" by the USA.
> The phrase "violation of international law" tastes meaty, but it's just tofu.
Good and valid points, but mildly tongue-in-cheek my response to your first assertion is "I do!"
I'm not an American, but I deeply appreciate what America has done to move the whole world towards a system that values innate human rights, the rule of law, and representative democracy [1], so when America behaves in a way that contravenes its own publicly stated values I am genuinely disappointed -- even though America owes me nothing. I agree that "international law" can't be easily defined (and therefore can't be adhered to), and it is not always easy to judge the moral value of an act, particularly without the benefit of hindsight (one of the best known examples being the decision to use nuclear weapons on Japan), but there are other cases where it is clear. If America clearly acts against its values, it weakens its credibility when it tries to promote them to the rest of the world.
We can of course distinguish between America and Americans -- admitting mistakes and punishing those who commit them is the way that America can deal with them and keep its credibility with respect to its values in tact.
The case of the abduction of the German citizen seems on the surface to be a fairly clear case where America should allow due process in a friendly democracy to take its course. But perhaps there are other considerations that I don't know about... either way I'm grateful to wikileaks.
[1] However imperfect our democracies are, the current alternatives are a lot worse, and I'd prefer to be optimistic that we'll discover even better methods to govern people in future.
Christopher Reeve delivering the line "Truth, Justice and the American Way" as Super Man is one of the defining memories of my childhood.
I worry that once Americans become cynical and scared enough to stop aspiring to that line, it will then be a short trip to a fascist or pseudo-fascist state.
Naive? Perhaps, but if you don't have high and lofty ideals, then what is to be the counter weight to doing everything and anything in the name of safety?
> I worry that once Americans become cynical and scared enough to stop aspiring to that line, it will then be a short trip to a fascist or pseudo-fascist state.
Ah yes, "fascism is falling on America"
> Naive? Perhaps, but if you don't have high and lofty ideals, then what is to be the counter weight to doing everything and anything in the name of safety?
but it always seems to land somewhere else (typically Europe).
Fascism lands where it is like what has been before and the US hasn't been govt-authoritarian (yet).
I was struck by a pretty similar sentiment (and was somewhat surprised by it). Maybe more negative pieces will subsequently come out, but I was surprised to find myself thinking that some of the leaks may actually be helpful in producing a unified, multi-state agreement on how to approach the situation in Iran. I couldn't believe that it was actually other countries asking the US to bomb Iran.
And the fact that some of our most secret communications support that we are not out to destroy Ahmadinejad could be the most powerful weapon we have to actually undermine him.
I expect in the future, there will be calculated "secret leaks" to Wikileaks - who knows - these may be just that.
...in Peter Ustinov’s 1956 play, “Romanoff and Juliet.”... a crafty general is the head of a tiny European country being squabbled over by the United States and the Soviet Union, and is determined to play one off against the other. He tells the U.S. Ambassador that the Soviets have broken the Americans’ secret code. “We know they know our code,” the Ambassador, Moulsworth, replies, beaming. “We only give them things we want them to know.” The general pauses, during which, the play’s stage directions say, “he tries to make head or tail of this intelligence.” Then he crosses the street to the Russian Embassy, where he tells the Soviet Ambassador, Romanoff, “They know you know their code.” Romanoff is unfazed: “We have known for some time that they knew we knew their code. We have acted accordingly—by pretending to be duped.” The general returns to the American Embassy and confronts Moulsworth: “They know you know they know you know.” Moulsworth (genuinely alarmed): “What? Are you sure?”
...
At one point, the British discovered that a French officer in Algiers was spying for the Germans. They “turned” him, keeping him in place but feeding him a steady diet of false and misleading information. Then, before D Day—when the Allies were desperate to convince Germany that they would be invading the Calais sector in July—they used the French officer to tell the Germans that the real invasion would be in Normandy on June 5th, 6th, or 7th. The British theory was that using someone the Germans strongly suspected was a double agent to tell the truth was preferable to using someone the Germans didn’t realize was a double agent to tell a lie. Or perhaps there wasn’t any theory at all. Perhaps the spy game has such an inherent opacity that it doesn’t really matter what you tell your enemy so long as your enemy is aware that you are trying to tell him something.
I'm german, and that was my impression too, the rational style is great. I'm looking forward to read analysis on differences between those reports and official statements (in particular Bush era).
It feels like reading a history book almost in real time - This is the kind of stuff i would expect journalism to deliver as their daily work. If it was a newspaper, I would subscribe for that.
If you think the United States "try to act ultimately for good and that there be minimal self-enrichment", then I am just going to have to frown.
American foreign policy has a very rich history of being very abusive to other countries when their agenda is at odds with ours. The irony of us going after Saddam Hussein recently was thick enough to cut with a knife, after all, we did in fact forcefully put him into power.
I welcome the release of the diplomatic wires personally, because right now all we get is a facade of fake transparency. We only know what they want us to know after all.
What is really the saddest thing, is that wikileaks is absolutely the only oversight/resistance that we have towards abusive American foreign policy, or abusive policy in general around the globe.
The average citizen has absolutely no say in anything.
The best part about reading these cables is seeing that the USG uses Google to search for information before anything else and references searches in Classified cables....
"(S) Note: A quick google check revealed several companies
with the name INSULTEC in the title - these may or not be
affiliated. Based on the information provided by source
(currently in Iran, where he frequently travels), one
possible candidate could be "INSULTEC Chitral Ltd." "
For a moment, I thought you were going to say that someone was using Google trends to see if there were any interesting trends in people searching for information about how the leaks had spread and which of them were interesting to whom.
While Wikileaks may not survive in the mid term, I believe what it represents may have far reaching, long term consequences. The internet has democratised information to the point that an unhappy individual with mid level trust in an organisation can expose the organisation's "sensitive" information globally with very little effort and thought.
Before the internet an individual could expose this information, but the barriers were much higher. To be a whistle blower you could only influence people immediately near you socially. To reach higher you had to filter your information through news organisations. While there are cases of this happening, the information was still continually at risk of being censored. Would this cable information have been released if a whistle blower took it directly to the NYT, or even a collection of newspapers?
With our current online structure of Twitter, Blogs and peer file sharing it makes sensitive information immediately accessible to millions with no chance of it being censored. To me Wikileaks represents the start of something hugely disruptive to our way of life. It's not possible to scale an organisation beyond several people while maintaining complete trust in each of them. When every piece of information is at risk of being exposed, what position does this place governments in? Is it possible for the current structure of the us government with its extensive lobby groups, international secrets and security through obscurity to continue?
I think its still too hard to see how the bits will fall here, but I do think we're in for an interesting decade :)