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The focus of a large portion of media coverage here in the United States since the cables were released has been on the political response to Wikileaks' action,

The focus of a large portion of media coverage here in the United States since the cables were released has been on the political response to Wikileaks' action, on the allegations of Wikileaks' criminality, on the severing of ties with the organization by major corporations in response to Lieberman et al., and on Assange and his legal woes. All of that is newsworthy, but it has come at the cost of focusing on the stories told by the cables themselves. The things said and done by US agents, in the name of the American people, have been, to judge by the cables I've read, sometimes good, sometimes innocuous, and sometimes unconscionably unethical and criminal. I'm all in favor of any action that brings the focus back where it belongs, and tries to defeat what I suspect has been a deliberate, massive US campaign of noise and distraction, albeit a campaign that increasingly seems of a rather dated style. I'll be massively impressed if Anon can achieve anything close to those stated ends. I understand people's skepticism, and even the occasional condescension, but I'm not ready to dismiss a phenomenon I don't really understand just because the participants are unseasoned and untutored in the art of studied apathy.

dkarl 16y ago
I've read the "best of" coverage of the leaked cables, and honestly, speaking as somebody who usually doesn't have a problem getting interested in world affairs, it didn't seem like there were any big revelations. The coverage was all along the lines of, "Everybody knew this, but it's humorous/scandalous/juicy that somebody got caught saying it." If Anonymous finds anything shocking in the cables, they will make the MSM look lazy and incompetent.
- jackvalentine 16y ago
  This is a comment I see a lot of American forums, for those of us elsewhere though the things that our diplomats and politicans have been saying to you guys have been large revelations. Like how one of our mining companies sunk Chinese investment in one of our other mining companies, or how our government really feels about the prospects for Afghanistan. How one of our federal political powerbrokers has been feeding information to the USA about the inside tussles of his party. The revelations won't have any kind of mind-blowing effect, but the cumulative picture they paint is VERY important.
- ezyang 16y ago
  This can still have an important effect. > Most of the cables that have come to light so far have not provided new information. It was no great secret that Libya had probably put pressure on the UK over the Megrahi release, that the US was doing strikes in Yemen etc, even if no one was prepared to confirm this in public. But if this was reported by the US government - and then pushed into the mainstream of public debate by journalists for highly respected news organizations, it became common knowledge that could not easily be ignored. Not only did everyone know it - everyone knew that everyone else knew it too. This explains Rachman's paradox - why apparently banal revelations can have very important political consequences. http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/12/wikileaks_and_the_difference_b.html http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/12/wikileaks_and_the_diffe...
  - ryanwaggoner 16y ago
    I think you're really being optimistic if you expect any kind of insightful geopolitical analysis or even recognition from the Anon army. I doubt 99% of them even know what they're looking for in these cables.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  For now the fraction of the cables that has been released is actually pretty small.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    Except to the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and the NYT. They got them all.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      That's true. I don't think they're going to pass them all on except on a much longer timescale (decades, likely). If the whole cache is ever going to hit the streets in plaintext it will likely be through wikileaks.
    - goatforce5 16y ago
      So at what point at those organisations going to start getting heat for being in possession of classified documents? Why is Assange taking so much heat (yes, I know he wanted to be the lightning rod)? Is it merely that it would look bad to go after 'name-brand' news sources?
      - steveklabnik 16y ago
        Yep.
      - blasdel 16y ago
        Assange is getting the heat because he's purposefully seeking it out — even with the case in Sweden he fanned the flames earlier this year so that it could blow up now
        borism 16y ago
        any reference on how he "fanned the flames"?
- ThomPete 16y ago
  As I understand it the point of the leaks or not the documents per se but the actual leak of them. As stated elsewhere According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary. http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracy-%E2%80%9Cto-destroy-this-invisible-government%E2%80%9D/ http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-an...
  - zachrose 16y ago
    There's a similarly interesting line of thought going through the Rubberhose encrypted file system, an earlier Assange project. In both cases, the moral victory is not an immediate part of the action or product. It's about the secondary effects of living in a world where coercive force is no longer rational.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    This seems naive to me in at least two ways. That revealing past secrets will somehow make governments more transparent - they'll use encryption and off-record remarks, watch what they say, ensure records are destroyed, tighten security protocols. But IMO, and it is just that, they will still keep the same secrets and have the same covert conversations and exchange the same messages.
    - ThomPete 16y ago
- shykes 16y ago
  I think you're mistaken. As an example, here's coverage of how "the Embassy of the United States in Madrid wielded powerful resources in an extraordinary effort to impede or terminate pending criminal investigations in Spain". http://harpers.org/archive/2010/12/hbc-90007836 http://harpers.org/archive/2010/12/hbc-90007836
  - dkarl 16y ago
    Attention has focused on three separate matters, each pending in the Spanish national security court, the Audiencia Nacional: the investigation into the 2003 death of a Spanish cameraman, José Cuoso, as a result of the mistaken shelling of Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel by a U.S. tank; an investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; and a probe into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for extraordinary renditions flights, including the one which took Khaled El-Masri to Baghdad and then on to Afghanistan in 2003. I didn't know about any of these cases in particular, but as an American I see nothing surprising (sadly) in the fact that the U.S. tried to obstruct these investigations. In two cases American acts are the target of the investigation. In the other case it is the acts of people helping the U.S. government, whom the U.S. has even more powerful incentive to protect. So I guess it was a surprise to Spaniards how much the U.S. was able to affect the investigations? I don't know enough about the Spanish justice system to know what standards to expect, but criminal investigations into another nation's actions in other countries (the first two cases) seem explicitly political to me anyway, hence naturally amenable to diplomatic "pressure."
  - auxbuss 16y ago
    More than that, the editor of El País said [0]: All in all, it's been the biggest story I've had in my five years as editor of El País, without any doubt. And measured by its international impact, it's probably the biggest story this newspaper has ever been involved with. He also mentions the impact in Latin America. [0] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/09/wikileaks-cables-huge-impact-spain http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/09/wikileaks-cables...
- smokinn 16y ago
  No big revelations? What about DynCorp? US-based private security contractor DynCorp, who was hired by the US to train Afghani police, was apparently supplying drugs and young boys for a sort of sex party. The details are horrifying. The Afghani interior minister apparently went to US officials to warn them that reporters were sniffing around this story, and urged them to try to kill the story. He specifically warned that this would look bad if the connection to DynCorp was made clear (he called them "foreign mentors"). Apparently, US diplomats told him not to worry, and the eventual story was in fact watered down greatly (until now, of course) calling the whole thing a "tribal dance," rather than a party where young boys wear "scanty women's clothes" and "dance seductively" before being "auctioned off to the highest bidder" for sex. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101208/00221812176/so-wikileaks-is-evil-releasing-documents-dyncorp-gets-pass-pimping-young-boys-to-afghan-cops.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101208/00221812176/so-wik... There's also the fact that everyone knows the Afghani election was rigged but while the Canadian ambassador wanted to do something about it the US didn't. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/250218 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/...
gojomo 16y ago
And yet, note that this comment continues the discussion-about-the-discussion, rather than focusing on the specific 'unconscionably unethical and criminal' details. Nothing wrong with that in this context, but it highlights how hard it is to do anything else. It's easier to talk about the reactions and dissemination and censorship and rhetoric. Those are actually more universal topics, and they're unfolding now. The nitty-gritty of the cable revelations is subject to a interpretation and even more acrimonious rehearsed-roles debate, so (as here) it often just gets mentioned in passing, with a hand-wave and nod to its importance. Of the cables' revelations, many that people are 'shocked, shocked' to hear are what was already assumed to be true or partially reported -- covert military strikes in other countries, attempts to downplay fatalities or wartime actions in error, frank assessments of shady regimes. And it seems to me many people are just seeing what they wanted to see. If they already bought into a Chomskyite view of the US as the scheming amoral fount of all evil in the world, there's enough in the cables to feed that view. If they think the US is just another powerful but bumbling country pursuing its interests, fighting several wars, striking balances with sordid situations not entirely under its control, there's enough in the cables to feed that view, too. What's the one or two things in the cables you found most surprising?
- nitrogen 16y ago
  I personally was surprised to read that Shell has a significant foothold within the Nigerian government. It caused me to wonder how true the claim is, and whether similar situations exist in other countries with other corporations, perhaps even the US. http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2008/09/08LAGOS368.html http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2008/09/08LAGOS368.html
  - notahacker 16y ago
    One of the great benefits of the publicity surrounding Wikileaks is that it's encouraging people to look into issues they previously might not have considered. That said, the role of the oil companies in the Niger Delta unrest isn't exactly unknown, not many people labour under the delusion the Nigerian government isn't to some extent corrupt, and the page you linked to isn't even a particularly damning one, as governments do have a legitimate interest in monitoring activities of rebel groups and the effects on multinationals they target. The smoking gun would be finding documents suggesting that events like the Odi massacre were planned (and possible oil company collusion) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odi_massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odi_massacre What's been released recently seems to be the sort of thing that might cause discomfort to a few diplomats who've made rather unflattering and speculative (but in many cases justified) comments about their host countries but it's less than earth-shattering. The half-hearted attempts to discredit Assange feels like an attempt to appease the leaders they've privately insulted; perhpas they have more reason to be concerned about what hasn't been released. Governments have willingly released far more inadvertently damaging material... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodgy_Dossier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodgy_Dossier
nodata 16y ago
It's distraction journalism. The response to the response. (I watched CNN America once. Once was enough.)
maryrosecook 16y ago
Rather unusually, the issues covered by the media have actually been the most important ones. The battle over the privacy of information is far more important than the facts revealed by a small number of actual information leaks.
eli 16y ago
NYTimes.com had content from the cables as the top story on the homepage for at least a full week.
kmfrk 16y ago
It's a really interesting litmus test of what the media have - or have not - learnt after what felt like an acquiescence during the Bush rhetoric after 9/11 regarding Iraq in particular.

dkarl 16y ago

I've read the "best of" coverage of the leaked cables, and honestly, speaking as somebody who usually doesn't have a problem getting interested in world affairs, it didn't seem like there were any big revelations. The coverage was all along the lines of, "Everybody knew this, but it's humorous/scandalous/juicy that somebody got caught saying it." If Anonymous finds anything shocking in the cables, they will make the MSM look lazy and incompetent.

jackvalentine 16y ago
This is a comment I see a lot of American forums, for those of us elsewhere though the things that our diplomats and politicans have been saying to you guys have been large revelations. Like how one of our mining companies sunk Chinese investment in one of our other mining companies, or how our government really feels about the prospects for Afghanistan. How one of our federal political powerbrokers has been feeding information to the USA about the inside tussles of his party. The revelations won't have any kind of mind-blowing effect, but the cumulative picture they paint is VERY important.
ezyang 16y ago
This can still have an important effect. > Most of the cables that have come to light so far have not provided new information. It was no great secret that Libya had probably put pressure on the UK over the Megrahi release, that the US was doing strikes in Yemen etc, even if no one was prepared to confirm this in public. But if this was reported by the US government - and then pushed into the mainstream of public debate by journalists for highly respected news organizations, it became common knowledge that could not easily be ignored. Not only did everyone know it - everyone knew that everyone else knew it too. This explains Rachman's paradox - why apparently banal revelations can have very important political consequences. http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/12/wikileaks_and_the_difference_b.html http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/12/wikileaks_and_the_diffe...
- ryanwaggoner 16y ago
  I think you're really being optimistic if you expect any kind of insightful geopolitical analysis or even recognition from the Anon army. I doubt 99% of them even know what they're looking for in these cables.
jacquesm 16y ago
For now the fraction of the cables that has been released is actually pretty small.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  Except to the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and the NYT. They got them all.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    That's true. I don't think they're going to pass them all on except on a much longer timescale (decades, likely). If the whole cache is ever going to hit the streets in plaintext it will likely be through wikileaks.
  - goatforce5 16y ago
    So at what point at those organisations going to start getting heat for being in possession of classified documents? Why is Assange taking so much heat (yes, I know he wanted to be the lightning rod)? Is it merely that it would look bad to go after 'name-brand' news sources?
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      Yep.
    - blasdel 16y ago
      Assange is getting the heat because he's purposefully seeking it out — even with the case in Sweden he fanned the flames earlier this year so that it could blow up now
      - borism 16y ago
        any reference on how he "fanned the flames"?
ThomPete 16y ago
As I understand it the point of the leaks or not the documents per se but the actual leak of them. As stated elsewhere According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary. http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracy-%E2%80%9Cto-destroy-this-invisible-government%E2%80%9D/ http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-an...
- zachrose 16y ago
  There's a similarly interesting line of thought going through the Rubberhose encrypted file system, an earlier Assange project. In both cases, the moral victory is not an immediate part of the action or product. It's about the secondary effects of living in a world where coercive force is no longer rational.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  This seems naive to me in at least two ways. That revealing past secrets will somehow make governments more transparent - they'll use encryption and off-record remarks, watch what they say, ensure records are destroyed, tighten security protocols. But IMO, and it is just that, they will still keep the same secrets and have the same covert conversations and exchange the same messages.
  - ThomPete 16y ago
shykes 16y ago
I think you're mistaken. As an example, here's coverage of how "the Embassy of the United States in Madrid wielded powerful resources in an extraordinary effort to impede or terminate pending criminal investigations in Spain". http://harpers.org/archive/2010/12/hbc-90007836 http://harpers.org/archive/2010/12/hbc-90007836
- dkarl 16y ago
  Attention has focused on three separate matters, each pending in the Spanish national security court, the Audiencia Nacional: the investigation into the 2003 death of a Spanish cameraman, José Cuoso, as a result of the mistaken shelling of Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel by a U.S. tank; an investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; and a probe into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for extraordinary renditions flights, including the one which took Khaled El-Masri to Baghdad and then on to Afghanistan in 2003. I didn't know about any of these cases in particular, but as an American I see nothing surprising (sadly) in the fact that the U.S. tried to obstruct these investigations. In two cases American acts are the target of the investigation. In the other case it is the acts of people helping the U.S. government, whom the U.S. has even more powerful incentive to protect. So I guess it was a surprise to Spaniards how much the U.S. was able to affect the investigations? I don't know enough about the Spanish justice system to know what standards to expect, but criminal investigations into another nation's actions in other countries (the first two cases) seem explicitly political to me anyway, hence naturally amenable to diplomatic "pressure."
- auxbuss 16y ago
  More than that, the editor of El País said [0]: All in all, it's been the biggest story I've had in my five years as editor of El País, without any doubt. And measured by its international impact, it's probably the biggest story this newspaper has ever been involved with. He also mentions the impact in Latin America. [0] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/09/wikileaks-cables-huge-impact-spain http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/09/wikileaks-cables...
smokinn 16y ago
No big revelations? What about DynCorp? US-based private security contractor DynCorp, who was hired by the US to train Afghani police, was apparently supplying drugs and young boys for a sort of sex party. The details are horrifying. The Afghani interior minister apparently went to US officials to warn them that reporters were sniffing around this story, and urged them to try to kill the story. He specifically warned that this would look bad if the connection to DynCorp was made clear (he called them "foreign mentors"). Apparently, US diplomats told him not to worry, and the eventual story was in fact watered down greatly (until now, of course) calling the whole thing a "tribal dance," rather than a party where young boys wear "scanty women's clothes" and "dance seductively" before being "auctioned off to the highest bidder" for sex. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101208/00221812176/so-wikileaks-is-evil-releasing-documents-dyncorp-gets-pass-pimping-young-boys-to-afghan-cops.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101208/00221812176/so-wik... There's also the fact that everyone knows the Afghani election was rigged but while the Canadian ambassador wanted to do something about it the US didn't. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/250218 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/...

gojomo 16y ago

And yet, note that this comment continues the discussion-about-the-discussion, rather than focusing on the specific 'unconscionably unethical and criminal' details. Nothing wrong with that in this context, but it highlights how hard it is to do anything else. It's easier to talk about the reactions and dissemination and censorship and rhetoric. Those are actually more universal topics, and they're unfolding now. The nitty-gritty of the cable revelations is subject to a interpretation and even more acrimonious rehearsed-roles debate, so (as here) it often just gets mentioned in passing, with a hand-wave and nod to its importance. Of the cables' revelations, many that people are 'shocked, shocked' to hear are what was already assumed to be true or partially reported -- covert military strikes in other countries, attempts to downplay fatalities or wartime actions in error, frank assessments of shady regimes. And it seems to me many people are just seeing what they wanted to see. If they already bought into a Chomskyite view of the US as the scheming amoral fount of all evil in the world, there's enough in the cables to feed that view. If they think the US is just another powerful but bumbling country pursuing its interests, fighting several wars, striking balances with sordid situations not entirely under its control, there's enough in the cables to feed that view, too. What's the one or two things in the cables you found most surprising?

nitrogen 16y ago
I personally was surprised to read that Shell has a significant foothold within the Nigerian government. It caused me to wonder how true the claim is, and whether similar situations exist in other countries with other corporations, perhaps even the US. http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2008/09/08LAGOS368.html http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2008/09/08LAGOS368.html
- notahacker 16y ago
  One of the great benefits of the publicity surrounding Wikileaks is that it's encouraging people to look into issues they previously might not have considered. That said, the role of the oil companies in the Niger Delta unrest isn't exactly unknown, not many people labour under the delusion the Nigerian government isn't to some extent corrupt, and the page you linked to isn't even a particularly damning one, as governments do have a legitimate interest in monitoring activities of rebel groups and the effects on multinationals they target. The smoking gun would be finding documents suggesting that events like the Odi massacre were planned (and possible oil company collusion) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odi_massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odi_massacre What's been released recently seems to be the sort of thing that might cause discomfort to a few diplomats who've made rather unflattering and speculative (but in many cases justified) comments about their host countries but it's less than earth-shattering. The half-hearted attempts to discredit Assange feels like an attempt to appease the leaders they've privately insulted; perhpas they have more reason to be concerned about what hasn't been released. Governments have willingly released far more inadvertently damaging material... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodgy_Dossier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodgy_Dossier

nodata 16y ago

It's distraction journalism. The response to the response. (I watched CNN America once. Once was enough.)

maryrosecook 16y ago

Rather unusually, the issues covered by the media have actually been the most important ones. The battle over the privacy of information is far more important than the facts revealed by a small number of actual information leaks.

eli 16y ago

NYTimes.com had content from the cables as the top story on the homepage for at least a full week.

kmfrk 16y ago

It's a really interesting litmus test of what the media have - or have not - learnt after what felt like an acquiescence during the Bush rhetoric after 9/11 regarding Iraq in particular.