Posts by Simon Grigg
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If you have a spare hour Dan Carlin's podcast is rather good on why we need Wikileaks
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to FletcherB,
it's what the diplomats are confirming about their host location's governments that's having a bigger affect (especially in those host nations).
snap
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to BenWilson,
There's not much to it, but it is something that's happening now, unlike the stuff in the cables, which is mostly actually quite old, and have had alternate sources that mean they're hardly surprising.
I think the real significance to these cables is as much micro as macro - regional with a potential global impact. What is often missed in the commentary is how every country has or is jumping on the parts of the cables that affect them and some fairly ugly stuff that isn't getting global reporting is jumping out - much of it hasn't even begun to play out.
Thus you get sites like this popping up all over the world. The big news here has been the way the Russian government allegedly (unsuccessfully) tried to bribe Thai judges over Victor Bout. There are 1600 cables relating to Thailand on their way, many of which, it is assumed, concern the US involvement in and commentary on the domestic political dramas of the past decade. The nation is nervous.
The big news in Spain has been the attempts by the US to influence their judiciary and (yes no surprise but confirmation) their copyright laws. Almost every country in South America has been rocked by revelations. And so on....
These stories have a life far beyond the Guardian front page and are being played out all over the world, mostly undocumented by the global media. It could be years before we can look at each one and work out how they impacted the country in question and the US's place as a superpower.
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From what I've read the current releases have been redacted twice - once by Wikileaks staff, and once by the newspapers.
And of course the USSD was offered the same opportunity but declined rather firmly, assuming I guess that any such reaction would imply cooperation in their release.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
There seems to be criticism of the leaks coming from Human Rights Groups as well.
That story is from August and relates to the Afghan releases. I believe the Pentagon itself has said there has been no evidence of anyone being physically harmed as a result of either that or the Iraq releases
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to tussock,
but what has Obama actually done to make it better?
You missed a couple: the removal of sanctions on the Indonesian special forces who just this year have been documented torturing separatists in Papua (the video is online but it's too harrowing to post here), and the extension of the policy of executing without trial (mostly just confined before to terror suspects, bad guys in Iraq and Afghanistan - and their families and anyone else who happens to get in the way of the missile) to include US citizens.
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There seems to be a slow rousing of the intellectual right in defence of WL. This from a former Bush advisor in Texas:
Everyone in Washington claims to support transparency and government openness during campaign season and when it’s popular to do so. They castigate the other side when it does things in secret and suggest that its intentions must be nefarious if it is unwilling to make its deliberations public. But when an organization discloses how our foreign policy is conducted, some of these same people claim that the release will endanger lives or threaten national security, or that the founder of WikiLeaks is a criminal.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Sacha,
It was a bizarre one - especially the way he wrote all 250,000 cables off after the first 200 or so were released.
I'm out of touch with Herald journalists (intentionally) but is he always so fucking hopeless?
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Russell Brown,
One the other, I don’t believe every diplomatic confidence is a conspiracy, especially given that in the majority of cases, the deeds of the US foreign service professionals seem basically in line with the words of their government.
I don't think that there was an expectation, at least by most, that some grand conspiracy was about to be exposed, however the cables do seem to provide prima facie evidence of a conflict between the words and actions of some non-US governments, in particular that of the UK, who have been documented telling public porkies, if the cables are accurate, about a litany of things, not least the storage of cluster bombs and Diego Garcia.