A few remarks on Wikileaks

[struggle4progress]

First, some generalities:

When I first heard about Wikileaks, I thought it was a good idea. And after all the dust settles, I still might think that: we'll see

I generally want government transparency. Daniel Ellsberg is one of the great heroes of my youth, for his brave work exposing to Americans official lies about Vietnam. I now live in North Carolina, where almost anything a state employee does on state time or using state equipment is automatically a public record: I think that's usually a good approach, and so I wish the federal Freedom of Information Act were rather stronger

I think anyone with two or more neurons bumping together between his/her ears recognizes both (1) there are circumstances where information is reasonably kept from the public for a period and (2) quite a few documents are kept from the public to prevent official embarrassment or sometimes even to cover crimes committed under the color of authority. Ongoing criminal investigation files and information relevant to current military operations will often fall under category (1); and since identifying a document as not-for-public-distribution pretty much ensures that anyone who has a chance will read the document, there's sometimes an advantage in over-classifying in order to bury sensitive information in a truckload of irrelevancies so it's harder to find. The interest served by public airing of documents in category (2) is recognized by many people, and so (for as long as anybody can remember) Washington has leaked like a sieve --and we naturally want to preserve such an ability to leak

Now let us turn to the quarter of a million pages of diplomatic traffic that Wikileaks says it has and will release:

This is a huge volume of material. There are a number of questions to ask concerning it. The most natural questions are, who allegedly leaked it and how and why. When Washington leaks, it is often for political or policy reasons, and so it is natural to suspect (though not necessarily true) that there is some definite policy or political objective behind the leak. Leaking information can be somewhat of an art form, so there may be some material leaked in pursuit of concrete political or policy objectives -- and other material leaked to disguise the source or intent of the leak. So one can imagine a disgruntled conservative leaking material to embarrass the administration but covering motives by including some material unfavorable to the previous administration; or one could imagine someone angry about Bush policy leaking Bush-era materials and covering tracks by also releasing some material unfavorable to the current administration. It is also not immediately clear how one verifies whether all material is accurate: it seems unlikely than anyone would forge a quarter of a million pages of diplomatic traffic; it may, however, be that most of the traffic is unforged but that some documents have been forged in pursuit of particular aims. It is also possible that the release is a red herring of some sort: that is, if someone wanted to hide a small but damaging intrusion into State Department files, a sudden huge breach elsewhere might provide a useful cover; a variant of this scenario is that someone figured out how to transmit a really important document in a snow-storm of other documents, using a previously unrecognized security gap. Of course, it is possible, too, that the story now floating around -- that a PFC was able to do this casually -- might also be true; that seems unlikely to me, but I'm not necessarily a good judge of such matters -- and there is the unfortunate fact that some of the other scenarios, if true, might never see daylight

In short, I think there are more interesting and important questions here than "Do you support Wikileaks," though I don't know that the questions will be answered

[xchrom]

1. if 'informed consent' is still a bedrock idea in open democracies that the west purports to support

then one must be on the side of wikileaks.

however -- it's also possible an informed citizenry and informed consent is a thing of the past.

but if that's the case -- then people need to start building the case for with holding the kind of information that is necessary
for a citizen to go in a voting booth and cast a ballot.

so far i haven't seen -- aside from neocons -- a liberal case made.

some whining about personality -- but really -- that's weak.

[EFerrari]

2. Your questions circle around the content of the cables

which revealed that yes, we did enable a military coup in Honduras, yes, we did spy on the Bolivian government while funding a white supremacist opposition, yes, we did move to protect torturers, the Pentagon killing journalists and extraordinary rendition, yes, we did have Special Forces in Pakistan, yes, the independent media was threatened when they tried to report these stories.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

But let's not talk about the content. Let's talk in the most abstracted way about what imputed motive we can attribute to the dastardly leakers of these sickening truths.

No thanks.

[struggle4progress]

3. Well, let us speak of Honduras for a minute, if you insist. If you go back

and read my old posts in the Latin America forum, you will see that I advanced the view that the coup was an off-the-shelf operation probably set up in advance by Negroponte's boys, and you'll see that I dug up and read the Honduran constitution and pointed out clearly that the deportation of Zelaya violated the constitution. So you and I agreed long ago that the facts indicated a coup and one with US involvement. Where we differ, of course, is on the interpretation and about what happened in US policy after that.

... The cable, dated July 24, 2009, and signed by the U.S. ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens, is directed to the White House and senior State Department officials. It says the Honduran legislative and judicial branches "conspired" with the military to remove Zelaya from power. Zelaya was yanked from bed on the night of June 28 and put on a plane to Costa Rica. His foes alleged he was planning an illegal referendum to help him keep in power, a goal the cable labeled a "supposition." From the cable: The analysis of the Constitution sheds some interesting light on the events of June 28. The Honduran establishment confronted a dilemma: near unanimity among the institutions of the state and the political class that Zelaya had abused his powers in violation of the Constitution, but with some ambiguity what to do about it. Faced with that lack of clarity, the military and/or whoever ordered the coup fell back on what they knew -- the way Honduran presidents were removed in the past: a bogus resignation letter and a one-way ticket to a neighboring country. No matter what the merits of the case against Zelaya, his forced removal by the military was clearly illegal, and Micheletti's ascendance as "interim president" was totally illegitimate. The United States temporarily blocked aid to Honduras after Zelaya's coup, and President Obama called it "not legal" in the days that followed Zelaya's ouster. Yet Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton eventually agreed to recognize the results of elections in November won by Porfirio Lobo, who assumed office in January ...
WikiLeaks on Latin America: Honduras coup 'illegal'
November 29, 2010 | 1:11 pm
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2010/11/wikileaks-latin-america-venezuela-honduras-paraguay-argentina.html

My view is that the facts indicate the coup caught the Obama administration by surprise, and that the administration reacted properly at first -- but thereafter heard only organized pressure from to play the election game, there being inadequate organized counter-pressure, and so the administration agreed to that strategy, which is now quite evidently seen as a blunder. But that cable doesn't tell us anything we didn't know in the Latin American forum a year and a half ago. I myself regret making the mistake of supporting the administration policy on Honduras then; I thought they knew better what they were doing than they actually did. I do not think the cable supports the view you seem determined to take, that the current administration supports the policy of the previous one

Similarly everyone, who was reading the Latin America forum in the Bush years, knows that the Bush administration was supporting racists and separatists in Bolivia, with the usual conservative aim of destabilizing the country, as being too democratic and insufficiently sympathetic to elites. The Wikileaks cables may or may not shed further light on that, but some of the material seems likely to me to be pure propaganda:

Iranian engineers have been actively searching for uranium deposits in Venezuela and Bolivia, among other Latin American countries, since 2006, Mexican media reported citing WikiLeaks. Secret U.S. diplomatic cables ... alleged that at least 57 Iranian specialists visited Venezuela in the past five years to prospect for uranium, needed for Tehran's controversial nuclear program ...
WikiLeaks cables claim Iran procures uranium in Latin America
03:25 03/12/2010© REUTERS/ Fars News
http://en.rian.ru/world/20101203/161602944.html

Bolivia meanwhile denies the report:

Bolivia denies WikiLeaks on uranium deal with Iran
... The cable from the US embassy in Peru to the State Department in Washington dates from August 2009, preceding Morales' visit mentioned by Canelas. The cable mentions US concern over Iran seeking uranium from Bolivia and Venezuela ...
http://www.thenews.com.pk/latest-news/6106.htm

Our current Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary in Peru was appointed by Bush in 2007; Obama's nominee has not yet been confirmed

I am sorry you dislike the question about who leaked the documents and why, or the related question about how we can assess their reliability, but it seems to me a mistake to assume we can understand all the issues immediately by pure intuition, without knowing more

[bhikkhu]

13. I think you make a valid point there

That if "we the public" are to be trusted with the unedited "truth" that is in the diplomatic communications (rather than the usual simplified pre-digested narratives we are customarily fed), then we can expect to have to apply some gray matter to the material before coming to conclusions. Things need very much to be put into context and worked through, which is more often the job of historians than regular people, or even journalists.

In any case, bring it on, I would say. Its about time somebody trusted "we the public" to exercise their mental capacities. The alternative is repugnant - to be regarded as children without capacity by those in power.

[Vinnie From Indy]

4. Brilliant and spot on!

I appreciate your spelling out EXACTLY what is going on here with this OP. The strategy could not be clearer.
Cheers!

[struggle4progress]

5. Don't be coy. If you think I have a "strategy" why not tell me to my face?

[bemildred]

6. I have no trouble at all believing one guy did it with a thumb drive.

I worked in defense for 18 years or so. That doesn't mean that's what happened, but it seems entirely feasible to me. In my experience, "security" was largely a by-the-book dog-and-pony show, "security theater"; underneath all the threats and drama, somebody has to be trusted, and if they decide to disobey, they can.

It is true that there are places within the national security state where security is taken very seriously, and for good reason, but the vast majority of it is bullshit and is treated in a perfunctory manner. And that has a lot to do with the way classification of information is abused.

Also, the government response seems a bit "over the top" for the intentional spreading of bullshit, and there has been no denial that I am aware of that the leaked documents are authentic. (Dang, now I've done it, denials of authenticity coming right up.)

[struggle4progress]

7. I did a quick calculation: you're right that the pages would fit on a thumbdrive

[bemildred]

8. I have a 32 Gig thumb drive that I bought a year ago.

First thing I did of course is remove all the dangerous and useless malware that comes with it.

But anyway, the cables run say 10K bytes apiece, just to pick a number. That drive would hold around 3.2 million cables of that size. Wiki claims to have only 250K.

[struggle4progress]

10. Actually, I think it's probably much less than that: maybe a gig or two

[bemildred]

9. Incidentally, making yourself a bootable thumb drive is a great way to surf anonymously, BTW.

You take it to a cybercafe, plug it in, boot it, and off you go. Back in the day I would have done it for fun, now I have other interests, and with WiFi and netbooks it is not so interesting, cause that does the same thing and is much easier.

[struggle4progress]

11. They're easy to make today: unetbootin will craft one from an iso in a few minutes

[bemildred]

12. Yeah, that's how I do Ubuntu.

Back when I was studying it, it still required hacking. In 2600 I think it was.