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December 1, 2010
The full diplomatic archive of a quarter of a million documents known as the WikiLeaks embassy cablesfrom the Siprnet database will be released in dribs and drabs over the coming months. The Americans are none too happy about the diplomatic cable dump judging from their assertions that national security will be compromised, that lives will be lost and that the cause of human rights will be set back.
Then again after the last dump, the White House claimed that Julian Assange had blood on his hands.There was no evidence that was the case. Much of the "harm" is embarrassment and the highlighting of inconvenient truths. As Heather Brooke points out in The Guardian much of the outrage about WikiLeaks is not over the content of the leaks but from the audacity of breaching previously inviolable strongholds of authority.
This dump has resulted in Interpol issuing a wanted notice for Julian Assange. The Republicans want Assange hunted down and possibly killed (ie., executed while resisting arrest. Wikileaks itself must be destroyed as it is a terrorist organization. They're furiously waving the flag of treason.
Unfortunately, Assange, who is an Australian national not living in the U.S. The Republicans and the comedy show at Fox News (Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck) are using Wikileaks to attack the Obama administration.
The Australian Government, however, is doing its bit: they've placed Assange under investigation by the federal police; whilst the Wikileaks dump is now subject to a whole of government investigation. This suggests that the Gillard Government does not accept that transparency and accountability in government and international institutions are a good thing; or that there is a genuine public interest in knowing the things the cables mention.
What is interesting about the Wikileaks' dumps (the Afghanistan and Iraq war reports plus the diplomatic cable dump) is that the elite news organizations in the Internet age — in this case, The Guardian, NYT and Der Spiege etc ---are conduits of material originally obtained not by their own investigative journalists but by others, such as WikiLeaks. The big papers wouldn’t have the material without WikiLeaks.
What we have is collaboration by major media organizations across international borders both in agreeing to work together in publishing the material and in agreeing what material should be kept out. It is a new kind of global investigative journalism.
Jay Rosen observes:
In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new.
Today, we find that the state, which holds the secrets but is powerless to prevent their release; the stateless news organization, deciding how to release them; and the national newspaper in the middle, negotiating the terms of legitimacy between these two actors.
Update
We can infer from this shift in power that these leaks indicate that we should be politicians speak of a threat to "national security", as this can be a fig leaf to cover up dirty deeds. We haven't learnt much re the content so far. Saudi Arabia urges US to attack Iran to stop its nuclear programme; Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like al-Qaida; China is willing to accept Korean reunification; Pakistan is under the American hammer; that US military forces are indeed secretly operating on Pakistan's territory.
We learn that Pakistan takes billions of dollars in American aid, most of it military, and it arms and supports the Taliban and other violently anti-American groups. So both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are American allies who actively support America's enemies.
Update 2
We learn on day 5 of the leaks that Afghanistan is a looking-glass land where bribery, extortion and embezzlement are the norm. Well, that confirms the common view that predatory corruption, fueled by a booming illicit narcotics industry, is rampant at every level of Afghan society. This corrupt government has made into a cornerstone of the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan by the US. Australia goes along as usual in covering up the stench of the corruption.
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I wouldn't call what Wikileaks does 'reporting'. They simply publish lots of raw documents that have been provided by third parties, after deleting any bits they think might endanger innocent individuals. Strictly speaking the MSM's involvement is not required; it just cherry-picks the data to write stories it believes are important but anyone is free to go to the Wikileaks site and read the originals.
The hysterical reaction from some wingnuts in the USA is quite troubling; lots of them have no hesitation in recommending extra-judicial killings and other tools normally associated with authoritarian governments. It's notable that one of the first stories is how everyone in the Middle East hates Iran and wants the US to attack it ... at least the pro-Israel lobby knows how to make good use of Wikileaks).