WikiLeaks about to hit the fan

I have a general question about the usefulness of "diplomacy" in today's world. I admit to being naive about what they actually accomplish, but it all sounds like a bullshit game from start to finish. Everyone seems to know that everyone else is talking out of both sides of their mouths, but we have this pretense of believing someone to their face -- then turning around and writing a cable that says so-and-so is a lying sack of **** so we should only sell them enough arms to blow up a small number of adjoining nations, not the entire area.

I'm jumping from the fence to being on the side that these leaks are a good thing overall.

We all knew when the Internet came into being that it would over time completely transform our society and world; now we are seeing the effects of this start to unfold.

The case collapsed after a judge ruled that prosecutors had to prove that the lobbyists specifically intended to harm the United States or benefit a foreign country.

8.16am: Here's an interesting antidote to all those American calls to treat WikiLeaks as a terrorist organisation. Writing in the LA Times two frustrated US federal investigators write that if WikiLeaks had been around in 2001 it could have helped prevent 9/11. They argue that information their superiors wanted bottled up could have been leaked to the site alerting the world to the possibility of a terrorist attack.

Quote:
" The 9/11 Commission ultimately concluded that [would-be terrorist Zacarias] Moussaoui was most likely being primed as a September 11 replacement pilot and that the hijackers probably would have postponed their strike if information about his arrest had been announced.

WikiLeaks might have provided a pressure valve for those agents who were terribly worried about what might happen and frustrated by their superiors' seeming indifference. They were indeed stuck in a perplexing, no-win ethical dilemma as time ticked away. Their bosses issued continual warnings against "talking to the media" and frowned on whistle-blowing, yet the agents felt a strong need to protect the public."

Swedish supreme court rejects WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's appeal of detention order
(Associated Press, December 2, 2010)

STOCKHOLM (AP) - Sweden's Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a court order to detain WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for questioning over allegations of rape and sexual molestation.

The 39-year-old Australian, who denies the accusations made by two Swedish women after his visit to the country in August, had appealed two lower court rulings allowing investigators to bring him into custody and issue an international arrest warrant.

He has not been formally charged.

WikiLeaks has angered the U.S. and other governments by publishing almost half a million secret documents about U.S. diplomatic relations and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The search for Assange, whose whereabouts are unknown, was stepped up Wednesday as Sweden confirmed it had issued a European arrest warrant for him. Since leaving Sweden, the computer hacker has appeared in Britain and Switzerland but disappeared from public view after a Nov. 5 press conference in Geneva. He has spoken publicly only through online interviews.

Did you miss Sibel Edmonds interview, MsO, a couple of pages back?

8.49pm: Never mind Julian Assange, where in the world is WikiLeaks, after Amazon kicked it off its servers by bending in the mildest of political breezes?

According to the Los Angeles Times, the WikiLeaks' online archives are safely stored in a bomb shelter inside a Swedish mountain, which looks remarkably like a Dr Evil-style lair:

Truly the stuff of spy films, the site features solid steel doors and high-powered computers and is resilient against a nuclear attack.

Have a look at the pictures: deep inside the bunker someone is stroking a white cat and wearing a monocle.

View Wikileaks: Where is Julian Assange? in a larger map (you'll have to go to the guardian site, for the link to see this. Link at bottom of this post.)

8.19pm: While MSNBC runs its "Hunt for Julian Assange" logo, the Washington Post goes one better with its "hilarious" Google map devoted to the latest sightings of the WikiLeaks co-founder:[/b] ( go to Guardian site to view)

8.07pm: The Guardian's Ewen MacAskill and Robert Booth report that the US state department's wishlist of information to be gathered on senior members of UN was drawn up by the CIA, not the State Department.

Quote:

A senior US intelligence official said: "It shouldn't surprise anyone that US officials at the United Nations seek information on how other nations view topics of mutual concern. If you look at the list of topics of interest in this routine cable, the priorities represent not only what Americans view as critical issues, but our allies as well.

"No one should think of American diplomats as spies. But our diplomats do, in fact, help add to our country's body of knowledge on a wide range of important issues. That's logical and entirely appropriate, and they do so in strict accord with American law."

7.44pm: Joe Biden: funny guy. Justin Elliott at Salon passes on the vice president's dead-pan summary of the US's position in Afghanistan:

Vice President Biden described the complex nature of the security problem in Afghanistan, commenting that besides the demography, geography and history of the region, we have a lot going for us.

Cables Describe Scale of Afghan Corruption as Overwhelming
This article is by Scott Shane, Mark Mazzetti and Dexter Filkins.
State's Secrets

President Hamid Karzai, center, and one of his vice presidents, Ahmed Zia Masoud, right, who was later accused of taking millions out of Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON — From hundreds of diplomatic cables, Afghanistan emerges as a looking-glass land where bribery, extortion and embezzlement are the norm and the honest man is a distinct outlier.

Describing the likely lineup of Afghanistan’s new cabinet last January, the American Embassy noted that the agriculture minister, Asif Rahimi, “appears to be the only minister that was confirmed about whom no allegations of bribery exist.”

One Afghan official helpfully explained to diplomats the “four stages” at which his colleagues skimmed money from American development projects: “When contractors bid on a project, at application for building permits, during construction, and at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.” In a seeming victory against corruption, Abdul Ahad Sahibi, the mayor of Kabul, received a four-year prison sentence last year for “massive embezzlement.” But a cable from the embassy told a very different story: Mr. Sahibi was a victim of “kangaroo court justice,” it said, in what appeared to be retribution for his attempt to halt a corrupt land-distribution scheme.

It is hardly news that predatory corruption, fueled by a booming illicit narcotics industry, is rampant at every level of Afghan society. Transparency International, an advocacy organization that tracks government corruption around the globe, ranks Afghanistan as the world’s third most corrupt country, behind Somalia and Myanmar.

But the collection of confidential diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to a number of publications, offers a fresh sense of its pervasive nature, its overwhelming scale, and the dispiriting challenge it poses to American officials who have made shoring up support for the Afghan government a cornerstone of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

The cables make it clear that American officials see the problem as beginning at the top. An August 2009 report from Kabul complains that President Hamid Karzai and his attorney general “allowed dangerous individuals to go free or re-enter the battlefield without ever facing an Afghan court.” The embassy was particularly concerned that Mr. Karzai pardoned five border police officers caught with 124 kilograms (about 273 pounds) of heroin and intervened in a drug case involving the son of a wealthy supporter.

The American dilemma is perhaps best summed up in an October 2009 cable sent by Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry, written after he met with Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half brother, the most powerful man in Kandahar and someone many American officials believe prospers from the drug trade.

“The meeting with AWK highlights one of our major challenges in Afghanistan: how to fight corruption and connect the people to their government, when the key government officials are themselves corrupt,” Ambassador Eikenberry wrote. ...<cont>

...WikiLeaks receives about thirty submissions a day, and typically posts the ones it deems credible in their raw, unedited state, with commentary alongside. Assange told me, “I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.”...

9.19pm: Joe Lieberman strikes again, putting pressure on another US tech provider to WikiLeaks, reports Nancy Scola of techPresident:

Tableau, the Seattle-based data visualization company that had been hosting Wikileaks charts showing different visualizations of the State Department cables, is saying this afternoon that it took down the charts at Senator Joe Lieberman's request.


9.08pm: A lot of new US embassy cables in the pipeline on Afghanistan. Stay tuned.

12:03 P.M. |Pakistan Digests WikiLeaks Revelations

The disclosures by WikiLeaks that top Pakistani army and civil officials had been extensively meeting with American diplomats - to discuss domestic politics, offer explanations and seek help and approval - shook Pakistan on Wednesday.

Major newspapers on Thursday also carried screaming headlines about Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the powerful head of the country's military, who is said to have confided to American officials that he had considered deposing President Asif Ali Zardari and dislikes opposition leader Nawaz Sharif.

Gen. Kayani has, until now, earned credit for his support of democracy in Pakistan and the cables have clouded his image. It is no secret in Pakistan that the country's military maintains great influence over domestic and foreign policy, but the leaked cables have made that even more plain.

Pakistan's political leaders have also been tainted by their apparent subservience to the American officials.

Quote:

The front page of Dawn, the country's leading English daily, carried the headline: "WikiLeaks Bombs Rock Islamabad." Baqir Sajjad Syed's article began:

There has always been widespread dismay in Pakistan about unabashed US interference in the country's internal matters. But the latest cache of American embassy cables leaked by WikiLeaks has laid bare the extent of the interference and involvement. But more shocking are revelations about how much leverage the Americans were being given by the country's civilian and military leadership to micro-manage domestic politics.

Another major newspaper, The News, featured articles headlined, "WikiLeaks Throws Tons of Dirt, Shame on Pak Players" and "U.S Envoy Reveals Kayani Dislikes Nawaz More Than Zardari."

Quote:

Ansar Abbasi, a conservative journalist and an outspoken critic of United States, writing in The News joined the conspiracy theorists of Iran, Russia and Turkey in describing the leaks as an American plot. In his words:

Is our fate in safe hands? This is the fundamental questionthat boggles almost every mind in Pakistan as the WikiLeaks bombshell, believed to be deliberately leaked by Washington to attain its designs including chaos in Pakistan, leaves hardly anyone among the leaders here to be trusted.
Each and every word of WikiLeaks would be taken as true if Pakistani authorities and leaders, blamed and shamed by these leaks, do not come out with a clear answer. They need to reply, more importantly through their actions, that Pakistan is no more American domain.
Otherwise, WikiLeaks precisely proves what was earlier said i.e. Pakistan has been practically reduced from a sovereign state to an American colony as the president, prime minister, top political leaders and even Army chief all have been shown pleasing or taking into confidence the US ambassador - the de facto viceroy of Pakistan - to continue ruling the roost with the blessings of Washington.

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10.17pm: A new poll out today shows that Americans aren't too happy about the leaked US embassy cables, and think they hurt national security, but only a bare majority class such leaking as an act of treason:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 72% of likely voters say that when media outlets release secret government documents, they are hurting national security rather than providing a public service. Only 14% believe the opposite is true and that the media is serving the public. Just as many (14%) are not sure.

Rasmussen found that 51% of US voters consider the leaking of secret documents an "act of treason", while 28% disagree and do not think leaking such information is treasonous, and the remaining 21% are undecided.