Posts by Simon Grigg
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Sacha,
rather than the content.
If anything the reaction to the leaks in the US establishment and the way they've assaulted and blocked the site seems to me to underline the need for an assault on the system that generated such. So far the planet hasn't collapsed under the weight of the releases but the attempt to erect The Great Wall Of America to stop their dissemination is telling.
From the Atlantic piece:
It is dispiriting and upsetting for anyone who cares about the American tradition of a free press to see Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton and Robert Gibbs turn into H.R. Haldeman, John Erlichman and John Dean. We can only pray that we won't soon be hit with secret White House tapes of Obama drinking scotch and slurring his words while calling Assange bad names.
This site, Public Address, is now blocked, tagged with an advisory or banned in US government offices, some tertiary institutions which train future diplomats, defence contractors, The Library of Congress and the US military because it mentions the word proscribed word Wikileaks.
Students are advised not to mention W*******ks on Twitter or Facebook as doing so may destroy their future career prospects.
What strikes me as truly odd is that the US government seems to think that blocking the site/s will somehow push the genie back in.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to rodgerd,
who are documented as funding al-Qaida
I think it's more a case of people in SA, albeit extraordinarily well connected people, funding whatever nebulous thing it is that al-Qaeda is.
A little like Pete King in NY and the IRA.
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The new site is http://wikileaks.ch/
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The Empire strikes back: the wikileaks DNS server has been terminated as has, it seems, the news blog.
Twitter and Facebook next as the tentacles of state spread, or am I being too paranoid?
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Neil Morrison,
And given that no one appears to believe this is anything more than high level gossip with no real news
I'd argue that the furore developing in the UK over the cluster bombs, the Spanish and German anger over attempts to pervert justice, the UN spying in breach of international law, the precise details of funds being extracted from Afghanistan by 'our guys' and quite a bit more are news.
Spain in particular seems to be reacting fairly strongly to some of the non-news.
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51% of Americans are (un)officially stupid:
Rasmussen polled Americans to see if they believed that Julian Assange and Wikileaks are guilty of "treason" and 51% of respondents said yes.
Of course, Assange is Australian. So he can't commit treason since he's not an American citizen. Not even if he's super-double evil.
Even if he's triple-double evil.
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And then it all takes another twist:
the phenomena of social networking through the internet and mobile phones constrains Swedish authorities from augmenting the evidence against Assange because it would look even less credible in the face of tweets by Anna Ardin and SMS texts by Sofia Wilén boasting of their respective conquests after the “crimes”.
In the case of Ardin it is clear that she has thrown a party in Assange’s honour at her flat after the “crime” and tweeted to her followers that she is with the “the world’s coolest smartest people, it’s amazing!”. Go on the internet and see for yourself. That Ardin has sought unsuccessfully to delete these exculpatory tweets from the public record should be a matter of grave concern. That she has published on the internet a guide on how to get revenge on cheating boyfriends ever graver. The exact content of Wilén’s mobile phone texts is not yet known but their bragging and exculpatory character has been confirmed by Swedish prosecutors. Niether Wilén’s nor Ardin’s texts complain of r-pe.
and a blogger at the New York Law School takes a fairly informed look at the Wikileaks releases and concludes there is no crime beyond the posturing of some government figures.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to HORansome,
and why its focus is primarily on US activity
Except that's not really correct. That focus has really been over the last three releases and you could argue that two of those are the major and defining international events of the past decade.
Prior to that WL had been fairly wide ranging in its focus.
As Assange says, too, they have little contact with Taliban whistleblowers.
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I'd recommend this, from Evan Osnos in Beijing
A US diplomat quoted Kyrgyz officials saying that China had offered $US3 billion dollars to close Manas air base, a key US conduit for the war in Afghanistan. US Ambassador Tatiana Gfoeller said she asked her Chinese counterpart, Zhang Yannian, about the allegations and that he became so flustered he briefly lost his ability to converse in Russian.”
If nothing else, this whole episode has bought out some rather wonderful writing and stories from around the globe.
But, yes I agree with Clint in that we have two substantial stories so far, the UN and the North Korean/Chinese relationships, neither of which are revelations in general terms but both are worthy in their detail, and I suspect there is much more to come on both.
And it's the detail that I find fascinating. Detail can move the path of history when the overall drift doesn't - witness the capture of the letters of Charles I by Parliament in the 1640s or the German telegram in 1917.
And Caribou Barbie asks why Assange isn't being hunted down like Al Quaeda.
Her facebook page provides endless diversion if you have the inclination (which I did very recently - although just the once). The response to her North Korean slip was an essay of tit for tat that most third formers would tag as immature. I think she saw it as decisive.
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Hard News: The Engagement, in reply to Martin Snell,
extremely bleak international economic landscape currently showing few signs of genuine recovery.
One assumes you are excluding the part the world we call Asia and its 4 billion odd souls from that sweeping generalisation. They are actually doing quite well at the ’mo. But since we are expected to romp back into a significant historical time when the Raj was the prevailing order perhaps that was intentional??
I’m genuinely curious: how precisely is this going to improve the Commonwealth’s economies?
C̶o̶m̶m̶o̶n̶w̶e̶a̶t̶h̶'̶s̶ ̶e̶c̶o̶n̶o̶m̶i̶e̶s̶ Empire’s economies shurely